The Marsh King's Daughter, page 13
My father tossed her to the side and strode off. After a while my mother pushed herself to her knees and crawled across the porch boards into the cabin. I sat on the big rock in the yard and stared at the trail of water she’d left behind until it dried. I had always been afraid of my father, but until that moment it had been more of a respectful awe. A fear of displeasing him, not because I was afraid of being punished, but because I didn’t want to disappoint him. But watching my father almost drown my mother terrified me—especially since I didn’t understand why he wanted to kill her or what she’d done wrong. I didn’t know then that my mother was his prisoner, or that she might indeed have been trying to run away. If I had been her, that near-drowning would have made me more determined than ever to escape my captor. But one thing I’ve learned since I left the marsh is that everybody’s different. What one person must do another one can’t.
Anyway, that’s why I have a problem with drowning.
—
BEFORE MY FATHER TRIED to drown my mother, I used to enjoy trapping beaver. There was a beaver pond about a half mile up the Tahquamenon River from our cabin. My father trapped beaver in December and January when the pelts were prime. He’d walk the edges of the pond looking for places where the beaver had come out for fresh air and sunlight, and set both leg traps and snares. I assume the pond is still there, but who knows? Sometimes the Department of Natural Resources will blow up a beaver dam if they think it’s interfering with the way a river ought to run, or if the dam is somehow making problems for people. Property damage caused by beavers runs into the millions of dollars every year, and the DNR takes its management responsibilities seriously. Timber loss, crop loss, damage to roads and septic systems from flooding, even the destruction of ornamental landscape plantings in suburban gardens are all considered legitimate reasons for taking out a beaver dam. Never mind the needs of the beavers.
Our pond was made when beavers dammed one of the Tahquamenon’s smaller unnamed tributaries. The largest beaver dam on record is more than half a mile long. That’s twice the length of the Hoover Dam, in case you were trying to picture it, which is pretty impressive when you consider that an adult male beaver is roughly the size and weight of a two-year-old child. Our dam was nowhere near that long. I used to walk along the top throwing rocks and sticks into the pond, or fishing largemouth bass, or sitting with my legs dangling over the dry side munching an apple. I liked the idea that the habitat I was exploring had been created by the animals that lived in it. Sometimes I’d tear apart a section of the dam to see how long it would take the beavers to fix it.
In addition to beavers, our pond was home to many species of fish, water insects, and birds, including ducks, blue herons, kingfishers, mergansers, and bald eagles. If you’ve never seen a bald eagle drop like a rock out of the sky and splash down into the still pond water and fly away with a pike or a walleye in its talons, you’re missing out.
After my father tried to drown my mother, I had to quit beaver trapping. I didn’t have a problem killing animals as long as it was done out of necessity and with respect, but leg traps kill by dragging the beavers under the water and holding them there, and death by drowning made my stomach turn.
What bothered me more than drowning beavers was that I didn’t understand why my father continued to trap them at all. Our utility shed was piled high with furs. Mink, beaver, otter, fox, coyote, wolf, muskrat, ermine. My father always taught that it was important to show respect for the animals we killed. That we should think before we pulled the trigger, and we shouldn’t be wasteful. That we shouldn’t shoot the first animal we see because it might be the only one of its kind we see all day, and that would mean the population was small and needed to be left alone for a while. Yet every year he added more furs to the piles. When I was very small I used to think that one day he would load the furs into his canoe and paddle up the river and trade them like the French and Indians used to do. I used to hope he’d take me with him. But after my father tried to drown my mother, I started to question the whole endeavor. I knew what he did to my mother was wrong. Maybe his excessive trapping was also wrong. If the end result of all that trapping was nothing but stacks of furs piled higher than my head, what was the point?
I thought about things like this as I sat on our back porch after supper as summer turned to fall, paging through the Geographics until it was too dark to see, hoping to find an article I hadn’t read. I used to like watching the evening wind blow across the grasses as the shadows spread over the marsh and the stars gradually came out, but lately the movement only made me restless. Sometimes Rambo would lift his head and scent the air and whine as he lay on the porch boards beside me, like he felt it, too. A sense of wanting, but not having; a feeling that there was something outside the boundaries of the marsh that was bigger, better, more. I’d stare at the dark band of trees along the horizon and try to imagine what lay beyond. When airplanes flew over our cabin, I’d shade my eyes and keep looking at the sky long after the planes were gone. I wondered about the people inside. Did they wish they were down in the marsh with me as much as I wished I was up in the air with them?
My father was worried about me, I could tell. He didn’t understand the changes that were coming over me any more than I did. Sometimes I’d catch him studying me when he thought I wasn’t watching, stroking his thin beard in the way he had that told me he was thinking long and hard. Usually this was the prelude to a story. A Native American legend, or a hunting or fishing story, or a story about something strange or funny or dramatic or scary or wonderful that had happened to him. I’d sit cross-legged with my hands folded respectfully in my lap the way he taught me and pretend to listen while my thoughts roamed. It wasn’t that I was no longer interested in my father’s stories. My father is one of the best storytellers I’ve ever known. But now I wanted to make my own.
—
ONE DREARY, rainy morning that fall, my father decided it was time for me to learn how to make jelly. I couldn’t see why I needed to know. I wanted to take my father’s canoe to check my trapline. There was a family of red fox living on the other side of the ridge where the deer liked to gather, and I was hoping to snare one so my mother could make me a foxtail hat with ear flaps like the one my father wore. I didn’t care that it was raining. I wasn’t going to melt, and whatever got wet would dry out again eventually. When my mother announced at breakfast that because it was raining she was going to make jelly and said she wanted me to help, I put on my coat anyway, because my mother couldn’t tell me what to do. But my father could. So when he decreed that today was the day I was going to learn how to make jelly, I was stuck.
I would rather have helped my father. He was sitting at the kitchen table using a whetstone and a polishing cloth to sharpen and polish his knife collection, though the knives were already shiny and sharp. Our oil lamp was in the middle of the table. Normally we didn’t light the lamp during the day because we were running out of bear grease, but it was extra dark in the cabin that morning because of the rain.
My mother was stirring a pot of hot apple mash on the counter with a wooden spoon to cool it while another pot boiled and foamed on the stove. The empty jars she’d washed and dried waited on folded kitchen towels on the table. A tin can of melted paraffin sat on the back of the stove. My mother poured a layer of hot paraffin on top of the jelly after it set to seal the jars so the jelly wouldn’t get moldy, though mold grew anyway. She said the mold wouldn’t hurt us, but I’d noticed she scraped it off before she ate her jelly and threw the moldy parts away. The washtub on the floor was heaped with apple peelings. As soon as it stopped raining, my mother would carry the tub outside and dump the peelings on her compost pile.
My hands were red from squeezing the hot apple mash through a piece of folded cheesecloth to separate the juice from the pulp. The kitchen was stuffy and hot. I felt like a miner chipping away at a coal seam deep underground. I peeled my T-shirt over my head and used it to wipe my face.
“Put your shirt on,” my mother said.
“I don’t want to. It’s too hot.”
My mother shot my father a look. My father shrugged. I wadded up my shirt and threw it into a corner and stomped up the stairs to my room and flopped onto my bed with my arms behind my head and stared at the ceiling and thought bad thoughts about my father and mother.
“Helena! Get down here!” my mother called up the stairs.
I didn’t move. I could hear my parents argue.
“Jacob, do something.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Make her come down. Make her help. I can’t do everything myself.”
I rolled off the bed and dug through the piles of clothes on the floor for a dry T-shirt, buttoned a flannel shirt over it, and stomped back down the stairs.
“You’re not going out,” my mother said when I crossed the kitchen and grabbed my coat from the hook by the door. “We’re not finished.”
“You’re not finished. I’m done.”
“Jacob.”
“Listen to your mother, Helena,” my father said without looking up from the knife he was sharpening. I could see his reflection in the blade. My father was smiling.
I threw my coat on the floor and ran into the living room and threw myself on my bearskin rug and buried my face in its fur. I didn’t want to learn how to make jelly. I didn’t understand why my father wouldn’t take my side against my mother, what was happening to me and to my family. Why I felt like crying though I didn’t want to.
I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees and sank my teeth into my arm until I tasted blood. If I couldn’t stop myself from crying, I’d give myself a reason to.
My father followed me into the living room and stood over me with his arms crossed. The knife he’d been sharpening was in his hand.
“Get up.”
I got up. Tried not to look at the knife as I stood as straight and tall as I was able. I crossed my arms over my chest and stuck out my chin and stared back. I wasn’t challenging him. Not yet. I was only letting him know that whatever he was planning to do to me in punishment for my defiance was going to come at a cost. If I could go back in time and ask the eleven-year-old me what I was planning to do to my father in retaliation, I couldn’t have said. All I knew was that there was nothing my father could say or do that would make me agree to help my mother make jelly.
My father looked back just as steadily. He hefted the knife and smiled. A sly, crooked smile that said I would have been a whole lot smarter if I’d done as he said, because now he was going to have a little fun. He took my wrist and held it tightly so I couldn’t pull away. Studied the bite mark I’d left on my forearm, then touched the tip of the knife to my skin. I flinched. I didn’t want to. I knew that whatever my father was planning to do would be worse if he knew I was afraid. And I wasn’t afraid—not really, not of pain, anyway. I’d had plenty of experience enduring pain because of my tattoos. In hindsight, I think the reason I flinched was that I didn’t know what he was going to do. There’s a psychological component to controlling a person that can be just as powerful as the physical pain you inflict on them, and I think this incident is a good example.
My father drew the knife along my forearm. The cuts he made weren’t deep. Just enough to make the blood well up. Slowly he connected the teeth marks until they formed a crude O.
He paused, studied his handiwork, then drew three short contiguous lines on one side of the O and four more on the other.
When he finished, he held up my arm so I could see. Blood ran down the inside of my arm and dripped off my elbow.
“Go help your mother.” He tapped the tip of the knife against the word he’d cut into my arm and smiled again, like he’d be happy to keep this up for as long as he had to if I didn’t do as he said, and so I did.
The scars have grown faint over time, but if you know where to look, you can still read the word NOW on the inside of my right forearm.
The scars my father left on my mother, of course, went much deeper.
15
I stare at the agate my father left on the stump. I don’t want to touch it. This is exactly the sort of trick he used to pull when he was teaching me to track. Just when I thought I was at the top of my game, merrily anticipating the moment when I could shoot a bullet between his feet, he’d do something to throw me off: brush out his tracks with a leafy branch, or use a long stick to bend the grass where he wanted me to think that he had walked, or walk backward, or walk on the sides of his feet so he wouldn’t leave heel or toe marks at all. Every time I thought I had mastered everything there was to know about tracking a person through the wilderness, my father would come up with something new.
Now it’s an agate. That my father was watching for who knows how long, that he could sneak up while I was occupied and leave the agate for me to find proves my father is a better woodsman after thirteen years in a five-by-nine jail cell than I will ever be. Not only can he escape from a maximum security prison, he can make the people who are looking for him think he’s in an area where he’s not, then lure me here knowing that our shared history will lead me to this spot. I knew when I went looking for my father this morning that I would find him.
What I didn’t anticipate was that he would first find me.
Rambo is barking like he thinks the rock is going to sprout legs and take off. I’ll give it to him to sniff eventually, but first, I want to know how my father knew that the person who’d gone into the underbrush to relieve herself was me. I don’t look at all like I used to. The black hair I wore in pigtails or braids is shoulder-length now, and shot through with so many highlights, it’s almost blonde. After two kids my figure has filled out and rounded. I’ll never be fat because I don’t have the body type or the metabolism, but I’m not as skinny as I was the last time he saw me. I’ve also grown an inch, possibly two. Rambo could have been a clue, since he’s the same breed as the dog that showed up on our ridge, but a brindled bear hound running around the Upper Peninsula woods during bear season isn’t exactly a rarity. Unless I spoke his name out loud, I don’t see how my father could have made the connection. And where and how did he get the agate? The whole thing stinks worse than the meat scraps we used to throw in our garbage pit. If my father thinks he’s going to draw me into an adult version of our old tracking game, he should remember that the last three times we played this game, I won.
Only maybe my father didn’t put the rock on the stump to gloat about how much better he is than I am at hunting and tracking. Maybe it isn’t a taunt. Maybe it’s an invitation. I haven’t forgotten you. I care about you. I want to see you one last time before I disappear.
I pull out my shirttail and pick up the agate and hold it out for Rambo to smell. Rambo sniffs his way over the sticks and the brush to a spot on the road twenty feet in front of my truck. A set of treaded footprints points west. Prints like the kind that could have been made by the shoes of a dead prison guard. I go back to the truck, half expecting my father to jump out of the bushes and grab me like he used to when I’d walk back to the cabin after one of his scary sweat lodge stories.
I toss the rock on the front seat, then tie Rambo in the back and signal him to lie down and stay quiet. I haven’t forgotten how my father feels about dogs. I slide the ignition key from the ring and put it in my pocket, then make sure my phone is on mute and stick it in the other. Normally I leave my keys in my truck when I’m hunting—the U.P. isn’t exactly crawling with car thieves, and you don’t want your keys making noise in your pocket—but I’m not about to follow the trail my father laid down for me only to come to the end of it and discover he’s stolen my truck. I lock the cab for extra insurance and check my knife and gun. The police say my father is armed and dangerous. So am I.
A quarter mile up the road, the prints turn in at the driveway of one of the cabins I wanted to check. I bypass the drive and cut a wide circle so I can approach at an angle from the back. There’s less cover than I’d like. These woods are mostly tamarack and jack pine, thin and scraggly and dry as tinder, impossible to navigate without making noise. On the other hand, if my father is waiting for me inside the cabin, he already knows I’m here.
The cabin is old and small and set so far back into the clearing, it almost disappears into the forest. Moss and pine needles blanket the roof. Tall yellow flowers and rangy vines cover the sides. It looks like a fairy-tale cottage from one of my girls’ picture books. Not the kind of cottage that belongs to an innocent childless couple or a poor woodsman; more the kind of cottage that’s meant to entice unwary children inside. I keep a particular eye on the utility shed at the end of the drive where an old pickup is parked. I check under the truck carriage and up in the rafters. The shed is empty.
I skirt the edges of the clearing and go around the cabin to the back. The only window opens into a bedroom barely bigger than the bed, dresser, and chair someone managed to squeeze inside. The bed sags in the middle and doesn’t look slept in.
I go to the side to check the next window. The bathroom fixtures are rust-stained, the towels old. A single toothbrush hangs above the sink in a holder on the wall. The water in the toilet is brown. A dark ring above the water level indicates it’s been a while since the toilet was flushed.
The next window opens to a living room that could have been a twin to the living room at my grandparents’: faded flowered sofa, matching armchairs, wooden coffee table with a bowl full of pinecones and driftwood and agates in the middle, glass-fronted corner cabinet crammed with knickknacks and salt and pepper shakers and Depression glass. Yellowed crocheted doilies on the arms and backs of the chairs. An old recliner badly in need of reupholstering. A coffee cup and a folded newspaper on the table beside it. The room looks undisturbed. If my father is waiting inside the cabin, he’s not waiting here.
