The Marsh King's Daughter, page 15
We turned east and walked downstream along the river. I was Erik the Red or his son, Leif Eriksson, setting foot on the shores of Greenland or North America for the very first time. Every tree, every bush, every rock, was a rock or a bush or a tree that I had never seen. Even the air felt different. On our side of the river, the marsh was mostly flat grasslands covered in standing water with only the occasional ridge. This side was all solid ground, with towering white pines so big that two people couldn’t have wrapped their arms around them. There was enough wood in this forest to build a thousand cabins like ours, enough firewood to keep the families who lived in them warm for dozens of years. I wondered why the people who built our cabin didn’t build it here.
As I snowshoed behind my father, I felt like I could walk for miles. Then I realized I could. There was nothing stopping me from walking wherever I wanted because I was no longer bounded by water. No wonder the marsh felt small.
Of course I also realized that however far we walked, at some point we were going to have to turn around and walk the same distance back. We were also going to have to cross the river again, and if we didn’t time our return trip right, it could be dark by the time we did. I had no idea how we’d manage if that happened, but I wouldn’t think about that now. My father had gotten me across the river once; he could do it again. All that mattered was that at last—at last—I was seeing and experiencing something entirely new.
The river got wider. In the distance I heard a low rumbling. At first the sound was so faint, I wasn’t sure if it was real. But gradually the noise got louder. It sounded like the noise the river made when the ice broke up in the spring, only it wasn’t spring, and the river was frozen solid. I wanted to ask what the rumbling meant, why it was getting louder, why the current was running stronger, but my father was walking so quickly, I could barely keep up.
We came to a place where a thick cable made of strands of wire twisted together was strung across the river. On our side the cable wrapped around a tree. The bark had grown over the cable, so I knew the cable had been there a long time. I imagined the cable was similarly anchored on the other side. Hanging from the cable in the middle of the river was a sign. Except for the word DANGER at the top in big red letters, the writing was too small to read. I didn’t understand why someone would go to all of the trouble of hanging a sign in a place where the only people who could read it would have to be in a boat. And what was the danger?
We kept walking. The snow got slippery and wet. The trees were coated with what looked like frost, but when I tugged on a branch, the coating didn’t fall off like frost should.
And then the river disappeared. That’s the only way I can think to describe it. Beside us, the river flowed swift and wide. A hundred yards ahead was nothing but sky. The river simply stopped, like it had been cut off with a knife. The disappearing river, the frost that wasn’t frost, the roaring that sounded like thunder but never stopped—I felt like I’d stepped out of the real world and into one of my father’s stories.
My father led me through a break in the trees toward the edge of an icy cliff. For one terrifying moment I thought he expected me to link hands and jump off like in the legends about Indian warriors and maidens forbidden to marry. Instead he put his hands on my shoulders and gently turned me around.
I gasped. Not fifty feet from where we were standing, the river exploded over the side of the cliff in a great wall of brown and gold water, crashing down endlessly onto the rocks below. Chunks of ice as big as our cabin clogged the river at the bottom. Thick ice coated the trees and the rocks. The sides of the waterfall were frozen into massive ice columns like the pillars of a medieval cathedral. Directly across from us a wooden platform extended over the top of the waterfall. Stairs led from the platform up a steep hill and into the trees. I’d seen pictures of Niagara Falls in the Geographics, but this was beyond anything I could have imagined. I had no idea that such a thing existed in our marsh—never mind that our falls were less than a day’s walk away.
We stood and watched for a long time. Mist coated my hair, my face, my eyelashes. At last my father tapped my arm. I didn’t want to leave, but I followed him into the trees and sat down beside him on a fallen log. Like everything else in this magical forest, the log was huge—at least three times the size of the biggest fallen log that I had ever seen.
My father smiled and waved his hand expansively. “What do you think?”
“It’s wonderful,” was all I could say. I hoped it was enough. The noise, the spray, the endlessly pounding water—I had no words to describe the magnitude of what I was thinking and feeling.
“This is ours, Bangii-Agawaateyaa. The river, the land, this waterfall, all belong to us. Long before the white man came, our people fished these waters and hunted these shores.”
“And the wooden platform? Did we build that, too?”
My father’s face darkened. Instantly I wished I hadn’t asked the question, but it was too late to take it back.
“On the other side of the falls is a place the white men call a park. The white men built the stairs and the platform so people would give them money to look at our waterfall.”
“I thought perhaps the platform was for fishing.”
My father clapped his hands together and laughed loud and long. Normally I would have been pleased with his reaction, but I wasn’t trying to be funny. As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized there were no fish in these waters. My father had told me our river emptied into a big lake called Gitche Gumee at a place the Ojibwa call Ne-adikamegwaning and the white people call Whitefish Bay. I also knew from the Geographics that salmon swim upstream through rapids to spawn in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest, but no fish could swim through this.
My father’s laughter echoed back from the other side, high-pitched, like a woman’s or a child’s. My father fell silent, but the echo of his laughter continued. My heart pounded. Nanabozho, the trickster, it had to be, hiding on the other side of the river, magnifying my father’s laughter at my foolishness and throwing it across the water to mock me. I jumped to my feet. I wanted to see what form that old shape-shifter had taken today. My father grabbed my hand and pulled me down. I raised my head anyway. If Nanabozho was visiting this forest, I had to see.
A new sound, like clanging metal, and two people ran down the stairs. This was not what I was expecting. Normally, Nanabozho appeared as a rabbit or a fox. But Nanabozho was the son of a spirit father and a human mother, so I supposed it was possible that he could take on human form. However, unless he could also split himself in two, the humans on the platform had to be real.
People. The first people other than my mother and my father that I had ever seen. They were wearing hats and scarves and coats, so I couldn’t be sure, but if I’d had to guess, I would have said I was looking at a boy and a girl.
A boy and a girl.
Children.
More voices, deeper-pitched, and two more people came down the stairs. Grown-ups. A man and a woman. The children’s mother and father.
A family.
I held my breath. I was afraid if I let it out, the sound would carry across the water and frighten them off. My father squeezed my arm, warning me to stay quiet, but he didn’t have to. I didn’t want to draw their attention. I only wanted to look. I wished we’d brought the rifle so I could watch them through the scope.
The family talked, laughed, played. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I could tell they were having fun. When the father picked up the smaller child at last and sat it on his shoulders and carried it up the stairs, my legs were stiff with cold and my stomach was growling. The mother followed more slowly with the other child. I could hear them laughing long after the family disappeared.
My father and I crouched behind the log for a long time. At last he got up, stretched, opened the rucksack, and set out our lunch on the log. Normally my father would have built a fire to make tea, but he didn’t, so I ate snow to wash down my mother’s biscuits.
When we finished eating, my father put everything back in the rucksack and turned to leave without speaking. As we hiked back to our cabin, all I could think about was that family. We were so close, it felt like I could have thrown a rock at them and hit them. Certainly I could have gotten their attention if I had put a bullet above their heads into the trees. I wondered what would have happened if I had.
—
I’VE BEEN TO TAHQUAMENON FALLS many times since. The falls are always impressive: two hundred feet across, with a vertical drop of almost fifty feet. Fifty thousand gallons of water pour over the lip every second during the spring runoff, making Tahquamenon the third most voluminous waterfall east of the Mississippi. Over five hundred thousand people from all over the world visit the falls every year. For some reason, the falls are especially popular with tourists from Japan. The park has a visitors’ center, a restaurant/microbrewery, public bathrooms with flush toilets, and a gift shop where I sell my jams and jellies. The path to the falls is paved for easy walking, and the park service built cedar fences along the edges of the cliff so people won’t fall off. People have died at the falls, like the man who jumped into the whirlpool at the bottom to retrieve his girlfriend’s tennis shoe, but that’s not the park service’s fault.
Stephen and I brought the girls last March. This was the first time I’d been back during the winter. In hindsight, I should have anticipated what was going to happen. But at the time, I was thinking only about how much the girls were going to enjoy their first look at the falls. Stephen had been pushing for the outing for a while, but I wanted to wait until Mari was old enough to appreciate what she was seeing. Plus, it’s ninety-four steps down to the viewing platform and ninety-four back up, so you don’t want to bring along a child you have to carry.
I was standing at the railing on the viewing platform, watching Stephen and the girls laughing and throwing snowballs and just generally enjoying the day, when I turned to look across to the place where my father and I stood all those years ago. Instantly I was eleven years old again, crouching behind the log with my father, looking back across the falls to the platform where I now stood with Stephen and my girls. It was then I realized.
We were that family.
I was overwhelmed with sorrow for the eleven-year-old me. Most of the time when I look back at the way I was raised, I’m able to view things fairly objectively. Yes, I was the daughter of a kidnapped girl and her captor. For twelve years, I lived without seeing or speaking to another human being other than my parents. Put like that, it sounds pretty grim. But that was the hand I was dealt, and I needed to call a spade a spade if I was ever going to move forward, as my court-appointed therapist used to say. As if the analogy would mean anything to a twelve-year-old who had never seen a deck of cards.
But as I stood at the railing looking across the falls at the ghost of my past, my heart broke for the poor little wild child I used to be. So clueless about the outside world despite her precious National Geographics. A child who didn’t know a ball bounced, or that when people greeted each other with their hands outstretched it was called shaking hands because their hands actually moved. Who didn’t realize people’s voices sounded different because she had never heard anyone speak other than her mother and father. Who knew nothing of modern culture or popular music or technology. Who hid from her first opportunity for contact with the outside world because her father told her to.
I also felt sorry for my father. He knew I was restless. I’m sure he hoped that by showing me what he considered the marsh’s greatest treasure, he could convince me to stay. But after I saw that family, all I wanted was to leave.
I turned away from the railing with no explanation for my tears except to say I wasn’t feeling well and we needed to go home right away. Naturally the girls were disappointed. Stephen swung Mari onto his shoulders and started up the stairs without question. But as I followed more slowly with Iris, I could tell she didn’t believe me.
17
The naked dead man lying on the cabin’s kitchen floor is not my husband. The idea that this might be Stephen was only a momentary thought, one of those illogical emotional reactions that pop into your head during the first few seconds after you’ve had a surprise or a shock that are just as quickly dismissed.
That the man is naked is disturbing. Easy to assume that when my father walked in on him, the man wasn’t cooking his breakfast without any clothes on. Just as easy to figure the dead man isn’t wearing clothes because my father made him take them off before he shot him. This means that not only did the man know he was about to die, but my father humiliated him during his final moments. But of course my father always had a sadistic side. I doubt that thirteen years in a maximum security prison have improved his disposition.
What bothers me more than the way my father killed the man is that my father didn’t have to kill him at all. He could have tied him to a chair, gagged him if he didn’t want to listen to the man’s objections, fixed himself something to eat, changed clothes, taken a nap, played cards, listened to music, and otherwise hung around the cabin while the searchers beat the bushes for him down in the marsh, then gone on his way again after it got dark. Someone would have found the man eventually, most likely within the next couple of days once the searchers realized they’d been tricked and turned their attention north. If the man was even moderately resourceful, there are any number of ways he could have gotten free on his own. Instead, my father made him take off his clothes and get down on his knees and beg for his life, then shot him in the back of the head.
I pull out my cell. No service. I punch in 9-1-1 anyway. Sometimes a call or a text will go through. But this one doesn’t. Instead another text alert appears on the screen. Four messages from Stephen:
Where r u?
r u ok?
Call me
Come home. Pls. We need to talk
I read the first text again, then look down at the man’s body. Where am I? Stephen definitely wouldn’t want to know.
I cross the kitchen to try the landline. No dial tone. Whether the man didn’t pay his bill or my father cut the line doesn’t matter. I go outside and walk up the driveway with my phone in hand to see if I can catch a signal. I don’t care about looking for footprints or other signs that my father was here. Whatever game he’s playing, I’m done. I’ll drive until I get a signal—go all the way to state police headquarters and report the murder in person if I have to—then it’s straight home to my husband. The police won’t be happy I went looking for my father, and neither will Stephen, but that’s the least of my problems. Stephen might think that going forward will be as simple as both of us saying “I’m sorry, I love you,” but I know better. Always in the back of his mind will be the knowledge that the father of the woman he married is a very bad man. Stephen can pretend that nothing has changed. He might even fool himself into believing this is true. But in reality he’ll never be able to forget that half of my genetic makeup comes from my father. He’s probably at the computer right now, reading everything he can find about The Marsh King and his daughter.
And this time when the media vultures swoop down to rip me apart, it’s going to be worse because of my girls. Stephen and I can try to shield them from the attention, but we may as well try to hold back a waterfall. Mari will probably be able to handle the notoriety. Iris not so much. Regardless, one day, Iris and Mari will know everything about me, about their grandparents, and about the despicable thing their grandfather did to their grandmother. Everything is online, including the People magazine article with that ridiculous cover. All they have to do is Google.
I hope when that time comes my girls realize I’ve tried to be a better mother to them than my mother was to me. I understand it was hard for her after we left the marsh. She came back to a world that had moved on without her. The kids she’d gone to school with had grown up, gotten married, had kids of their own, moved away. Without the notoriety her kidnapping brought her, it’s hard to say how my mother’s life would have turned out. I picture her marrying as soon as she graduated high school, having a couple of kids in quick succession, living in a trailer on the back of her parents’ property or someone’s empty cabin, washing dishes and cleaning house and cooking dinner and doing laundry while her husband delivered pizzas or cut pulp. Not that much different from her life in the marsh, when you think about it. If that sounds harsh, you need to remember that my mother was only twenty-eight when she left the marsh. She could have finished her education, made something of herself. I understand my father kidnapped her when she was at a vulnerable age; I know there’s a terrible toll on children who grow up in a state of captivity. Confinement stunts them at the very point in their lives when they’re supposed to be maturing emotionally and intellectually. I’ve often wondered if the doll my mother made for me on my fifth birthday was, really, for her.
But I was struggling, too. I had no friends. I’d dropped out of school. My grandparents hated me, or at least they acted like they did, and I definitely hated them for how they treated me. I hated the way my mother stayed in her bedroom all day, and I hated my father for whatever he did to her that made her afraid to come out. I thought about my father every day. Missed him. Loved him. Wanted more than anything for things to go back to the way they were before we left the marsh. Not the chaotic days immediately preceding our escape, but back to when I was little, to the only time in my life when I was truly happy.
