The Marsh King's Daughter, page 14
I go around to the front and step silently onto the porch. Stand still, listen, smell the air. When you’re hunting humans, slow is the way to go.
After long minutes of nothing, I try the door. The knob turns freely, and I go inside.
—
I WAS FIFTEEN the first time I broke into a cabin. By then I’d dropped out of school, and the tutors the state sent over didn’t know what to do with me any more than my grandparents did, so I had a lot of free time.
I wish I could say I broke into the cabin out of necessity—because I got caught in a rain shower or a snowstorm, something—but it was just a lark, an idea I got for something to do one day when I was bored. The cabin belonged to the parents of one of the boys I went to school with who liked to make trouble for me, and I thought it would be fun to turn things around and make trouble for him. I wasn’t planning to do any damage; I just wanted to leave enough evidence behind that I’d broken in so he’d know I could. The cabin had one of those “This property is protected by” stickers on the door, but my grandparents’ house had the same sticker, so I knew the warning wasn’t real. My grandfather said that fake stickers worked just as well as real ones and were a lot cheaper than installing a security system.
My plan was simple:
Put on the pair of yellow rubber gloves I took from under my grandmother’s sink.
Use my knife to pry the hinge pins off the front door.
Open a can of something from the kitchen and build a fire in the woodstove to cook it because I liked hot canned food better than cold.
Leave the can in the middle of the living room with the dead mouse I brought from my grandparents’ woodpile inside it.
Put the door back on its hinges and leave.
The mouse was fresh, so I was counting on it stinking up the place enough that the next time anybody came in, the smell would be the first thing that would hit them. They’d find the can with the dead mouse inside and know that someone had broken in, but they wouldn’t know who because of the gloves. After I came up with the mouse-in-a-can idea, I figured I’d break into all of the cabins belonging to all of the families of all of the kids who were giving me trouble, and it would be my calling card. The police would think the break-ins were random, but eventually my tormentors would figure out the connection and realize it was me. They wouldn’t be able to say anything without pointing the finger at themselves, however, which I thought was the best part of my plan.
But it turned out not everyone is as cheap as my grandfather was: the security stickers were real. I was sitting in a chair by the woodstove, looking through a stack of National Geographics to see if they had the one with the article about the Vikings while I waited for my beans to boil, when a sheriff’s car pulled up out front with its lights flashing. I could have ducked out the back—there wasn’t a sheriff on Earth who could catch me after I disappeared into the woods if I didn’t want to be caught—but the deputy who got out of the car was the same one who’d brought me back the last two times I’d run away, and we’d kind of developed a relationship.
“Don’t shoot!” I called as I came out the front door with my hands up, and we both laughed. The deputy made me put everything back the way I found it, then opened the car door like I was a movie star and he was my chauffeur. We traded hunting and fishing stories on the way home, and it was a lot of fun. I told him my father’s story about falling into the bear den like it had happened to me, and he was impressed. When I asked if he would be my boyfriend because we seemed to be getting along so well, he told me he was married and had two kids. I couldn’t see where that mattered, but he promised that it did.
The deputy took me to the police station. Apparently, breaking and entering was a more serious crime than running away. I was hoping he’d put me in the jail cell where my father was held so I could see what it was like, but he made me sit on a wooden bench in the hall while he called my grandparents. When my grandparents came, the deputy launched into a long lecture about how I was lucky the people who owned the cabin weren’t going to press charges, but they could have, and then I would have been in real trouble, and I needed to obey the law and respect people’s possessions so nothing like this ever happened again. I didn’t mind. He was only doing his job. But when he started going on about how I should think about what would happen to me if I didn’t stop behaving so recklessly, and asked if I wanted to end up in prison like my father, I was glad he wasn’t my boyfriend. I decided the first chance I got, I’d break into another cabin to spite him. Maybe his.
After that, my grandfather made me work in his store full-time. Till then, I’d been working three days a week. My grandparents ran a combination bait and bicycle shop in an old wooden building on Main Street sandwiched between a real estate office and the drugstore. The bicycles were lined up in the front of the store so you could see them if you were walking by, and the bait tanks and refrigerators full of worms and night crawlers were in the back. I used to think the reason my grandfather chose to sell bait and bicycles was that they both started with the letter B. Now I know a lot of businesses in the U.P. sell a combination of things you wouldn’t normally think would go together because it’s so hard to make a living selling only one. I do all right with jelly and jam, but that’s because a lot of my sales are made online.
My grandfather also said that because I was working full-time, I had to pay room and board. After that, if I wanted, I could save up the money that was left and buy a bicycle from him at cost. My grandfather had sold all the bikes and other things people sent me long before this, so I was glad to have the chance to get another one. He drew three columns on a piece of paper labeled Wholesale, Retail, and Net Profit and put numbers in them as examples to show how the retail business worked, which came in handy later when I started my own.
The bike I picked out was a Schwinn Frontier mountain bike in mirror blue. I liked that I could ride the bicycle both on the road and off. I know now there were better and more expensive bicycles my grandfather could have stocked, but nobody was going to make a living selling high-end bikes in the Upper Peninsula, even if they sold bait on the side.
Every time a customer came into the shop looking to buy a bike, I steered them away from mine. I didn’t know my grandfather could order another one like it if that one sold. I realize that after three years, most people would think I should have understood more about how the commercial system worked, but I’d like to see them try starting from zero and see how well they do. Even now I occasionally run up against things I don’t know. So when one of the boys from school bought the bike I’d been saving for, I figured it was over. I wheeled the bike out to his parents’ pickup, dropped the bike on the sidewalk without helping them load it like I was supposed to, and kept right on walking. I didn’t have any particular destination in mind; I only knew my grandfather had cheated me out of the bike I was saving to buy and I wasn’t going back.
My grandfather caught up to me after a few hours. By then it was well after dark. If my grandmother hadn’t been in the passenger seat, I probably wouldn’t have gotten in. Naturally I felt pretty stupid after we got everything sorted out and my grandfather promised to order another bike like the one that sold. Back then I felt stupid a lot.
I’m not telling these stories to make people feel sorry for me. God knows I’ve had enough of that. I just want people to understand why, after a few years, I felt like I needed to start over. Sometimes a person thinks she wants something, but then after she gets it, she finds out it wasn’t what she wanted at all. That’s what happened to me when I left the marsh. I thought I could make a new life for myself, be happy. I was smart, young, ready to embrace the outside world, eager to learn. The problem was that people weren’t so eager to embrace me. There’s a stigma to being the offspring of a kidnapper, rapist, and murderer that’s hard to shake. If people think I’m exaggerating, they should think about this: Would they have welcomed me into their home knowing who my father was and what he did to my mother? Let me be friends with their sons and daughters? Trusted me to babysit their children? Even if someone says yes to any of these, I’ll bet they hesitated before they did.
Luckily my father’s parents died within a few months of each other not long after I turned eighteen and left to me the house where my father grew up. Because I was of age, their lawyer was willing to transfer the property without telling my mother or grandparents. As soon as the paperwork was ready, I packed a suitcase, told them I was moving but not where to find me, changed my last name to Eriksson because I had always loved the Vikings and figured this was my chance to be one, and cut my hair short and dyed it blonde. And just like that, The Marsh King’s daughter was gone.
—
THE CABIN DOOR OPENS directly into the living room. The room is small, maybe ten by twelve, and the ceiling is so low, I could touch it if I stood on my tiptoes. I leave the front door open behind me. I have a problem with closed-in places that smell of damp and mold.
The television is on with the sound off. On the screen an announcer is mouthing the latest about the search for my father. Video footage plays in a box above the man’s left shoulder: a helicopter stirring the surface of a pocket lake while patrol boats circle. At the bottom of the screen, a ticker tape scrolls: Search continues and FBI brings in more manpower and Prisoner’s body found?
I stand as still as possible, trying to sense the sway of a curtain, a small intake of breath, a molecular displacement that would indicate I’m not alone. Beneath the mold and mildew I can smell bacon, eggs, coffee, the smoky residue of a gun that’s been recently fired, and the sharp, metallic tang of fresh blood.
I wait. No sound. No movement. Whatever happened was over long before I arrived. I wait some more, then cross the living room and stop in the doorway to the kitchen.
A naked man is lying on his side between the table and the stove. Blood and brains spatter the floor.
Stephen.
16
THE CABIN
The skald spoke of the golden treasure the Viking’s wife had brought to her wealthy husband, and of his delight at the beautiful child which he had seen only under its charming daylight guise. He rather admired her passionate nature, and said she would grow into a doughty shield maiden or Valkyrie, able to hold her own in battle. She would be of the kind who would not blink if a practiced hand cut off her eyebrows in jest with a sharp sword.
Every month this temper showed itself in sharper outlines; and in the course of years, the child grew to be almost a woman, and before anyone seemed aware of it, she was a wonderfully beautiful maiden of sixteen. The casket was splendid, but the contents were worthless.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
Get your coat,” my father said early one morning the winter I was eleven. This would be my last winter in the marsh, though I didn’t yet know it. “I want to show you something.”
My mother looked up from the hide she was working. As soon as she realized my father wasn’t talking to her, she quickly put her head back down. The tension between my parents was as thick as fog. It had been like this since my father tried to drown my mother. “He’s going to kill me,” my mother whispered not long after, when she was sure my father wasn’t around. I thought this might be true. My mother didn’t ask for my help or expect me to side with her against my father, and I appreciated that. If my father truly wanted to kill my mother, there wasn’t anything I could do.
My mother was working the deer hide my father tanned into buckskin. Aside from cooking and cleaning, this was her main winter job. Last winter she made a beautiful fringed buckskin overshirt for my father. This winter, as soon as she had enough buckskin, she was going to make one for me. My father promised to decorate my shirt with porcupine quills according to the design I drew for him with charcoal on a piece of birch bark because we were out of pencils and paper. My father was a talented artist. The shirt was going to look a lot better than my picture.
I put on my winter gear and followed my father outside. My spotted fawnskin mittens were too small for me now, but I was trying to get as much use out of them as I could before I had to add them to the discard pile. I wished my mother had made them bigger, but she said my fawn was so tiny that this was the best she could do. When my father shot his deer that spring, I was hoping for a doe that was pregnant with twins.
The day was sunny and cold. The sun reflecting off the snow was so bright, I had to squint. My father called this kind of weather a January thaw, but nothing was melting today. We sat on the edge of the porch and strapped on our snowshoes. We’d had a lot of snow that winter, and nobody was going anywhere without them. My father made my snowshoes from alder branches and rawhide the winter I was nine. He used a pair of Iversons that belonged to his father. When he got too old to go snowshoeing, my father promised he would give them to me.
We set off at a brisk pace. Now that I was almost as tall as my father, it was no problem keeping up. I didn’t ask where we were going. My father used to surprise me with mystery outings like this, mostly in connection with teaching me how to track, but it had been a while. As I followed him toward the low end of our ridge, I tried to guess our destination. It wasn’t hard. In the rucksack my father carried was a small lidded coffeepot in which to melt snow for tea, six biscuits that were hard as rocks but would soften after we soaked them, four strips of the dried venison and blueberry mixture my father called pemmican, and a jar of blueberry jam, so I knew we wouldn’t be back in time for lunch. My father’s rifle was locked in the storage room and Rambo was tied in the woodshed, so we weren’t going hunting. We were carrying snowshoe poles, which meant we’d be walking a considerable distance. There was nothing between our ridge and the river except a few small ridges I’d already explored, and there was nothing on them that was worth hiking out to see anyway, so these couldn’t be our destination. Taken all together, it was obvious we were heading for the river. I still didn’t know why. I’d seen the river many times and in every season. All I could think was that my father had found some interesting ice formations he wanted to show me. If this was correct, the effort hardly seemed worth it.
When we came to the river at last, I expected my father to turn upstream or down and walk alongside it until we came to whatever it was I was supposed to see. Instead, he walked straight out onto the ice without breaking stride. This was a surprise. The Tahquamenon was swift and at least a hundred feet wide, and while most of the river was frozen, great sections of it were not. Yet my father walked purposefully toward the other side without so much as a backward glance, as if he was walking on solid ground. All I could do was stand on the shore and watch. Normally I’d follow my father wherever he led, but how could he possibly think the river was safe to cross? Ever since I was old enough to roam the marsh by myself, my father had warned me over and over that I must never venture onto the river during winter no matter how solid the ice looked. River ice was nothing like lake ice because of the currents. It could be thick in some places and thin in others—and, unless you were using an ice pole to test the thickness, which my father was not, there was no way to tell. If I fell through the ice into a lake or a pond, I’d be cold and wet but I wouldn’t be in serious danger because marsh lakes and ponds were generally shallow. Even if I had to swim to get to a section where the ice was strong enough to stand on, I would manage. But if I fell into the river, the current would sweep me under the ice faster than I could draw a breath to yell for help, and no one would ever see or hear from me again.
This was what my father had taught me. Yet now he was doing the opposite. I’d always thought of my father as so powerful that he was nearly indestructible. Something like a god. I knew he was human, mortal, but if only half the stories he told were true, my father had gotten himself into and out of many dangerous situations. But not even my father could survive a fall into the river. And death by drowning was not the way I’d choose.
Only maybe . . . maybe this was the point. My father never did anything without a purpose. Maybe this was what he brought me to the river to see. He knew I was afraid of drowning. He also knew I was desperate to explore the other side of the river; I’d asked him to take me across in his canoe many times. I hadn’t figured he knew how claustrophobic the marsh had become for me, or how much I longed to see or do something new, but maybe he did. Either way, he put the two together, the thing I wanted most and the thing I was most afraid of, and brought me to the river so I could face my fear instead of keeping it inside and letting it fester.
Quickly I climbed over the ice blocks along the shore and stepped onto the river before I could change my mind. My heart thudded. Inside my mittens, my hands were damp with sweat. I placed my feet carefully, trying to remember the path my father took so I could follow his footsteps exactly. The ice moved up and down as I walked, like the river was breathing, like it was a living thing and it was offended by this arrogant human girl-child who dared to walk across its frozen surface. I imagined the River Spirit reaching an icy hand up out of the water from one of the many gaps in the ice, grabbing my ankle, and pulling me in. I saw myself looking back from beneath the ice, my hair streaming and my lungs straining as the River Spirit pulled me down and down and down, my face as wide-eyed and terrified as my mother’s.
I kept walking. The brown water rushing past in the open places made me dizzy. My mouth was sour with fear. I looked back to see how far I’d come, then looked at my father to see how far I had to go, and realized it was now just as far to run to safety in one direction as it was in the other. I wanted to stop, wave cheerily at my father to show him how brave and fearless I was. Instead I ran, flying over the ice as fast as a person wearing homemade snowshoes could run. My father stretched out his hand and helped me climb up the riverbank and into the trees. I bent over with my hands on my knees until my breathing slowed. The significance of what I had accomplished was almost overwhelming. I was afraid, but fear didn’t stop me from doing what I wanted to do. This was the lesson my father wanted me to learn. The knowledge filled me with power. I spread my arms wide and looked up into the sky and thanked the Great Spirit for the wisdom he gave my father.
