The Marsh King's Daughter, page 16
I knew my mother was never going to be the kind of mother I desperately needed the day I found a man in her bed. I don’t know how long she’d been seeing him. This could have been the first night he spent with her or the hundredth. Maybe he loved her. Maybe she loved him back. Maybe she was ready to put her past behind her at last. If so, I guess I put an end to that.
I’d gotten dressed and gone upstairs to use the bathroom. There were two twin beds in my mother’s room, but after weeks of sharing her childhood bedroom, I’d had all the togetherness I could stand and moved to the couch in the basement.
The bathroom door was closed. I figured my mother was using it, so I went to her bedroom to get something to read while I waited for her to come out. My mother used to spend a lot of time in the outhouse when I was growing up, so I expected her to be a while. I used to think it was because she was so often sick, but in hindsight I think it was because the outhouse was the only place on our ridge where she was guaranteed to be left alone.
I stopped in the doorway when I saw a man lying on his side in my mother’s bed. The covers were thrown back to expose his nakedness and his head was propped on his elbow. I knew what they’d been doing. Most fourteen-year-olds would. When you live with your mother and father in a tiny cabin and regularly hang out with them in a sweat lodge without any clothes on and have scores of National Geographic pictures of naked primitive people to peruse, you’d have to be pretty stupid not to figure out eventually what those squeaking bedspring noises meant.
The man stopped grinning when he saw it was me and not my mother. He sat up quickly and pulled the covers over his lap. I put a finger to my lips and pulled my knife and sat down on the bed opposite him with my knife pointing at his privates. The man bolted upright and threw his hands over his head so fast, I almost laughed. I waved my knife at the pile of clothes on the floor. He sorted through them, put on his shirt and undershorts and socks and pants, picked up his boots, and tiptoed out without either of us saying a word. The whole thing took less than a minute. My mother started crying when she saw that he was gone. As far as I know, he never came back.
After that, I started making plans to run away. I’d been staying in the woods overnight whenever I felt like it since I’d left the marsh, but this time was different. More calculated. Permanent. I filled a gunnysack with everything I’d need to spend the summer at the cabin and maybe longer and snuck down to the Tahquamenon and stole a canoe. I figured I’d do a little fishing and hunting, maybe look for my father, and just generally enjoy being by myself for a change. The sheriff’s deputy caught up to me the next day in a patrol boat. I should have realized that a missing canoe and a missing wilderness girl would lead straight to our cabin.
That was the first of many times I ran away. And in a way, you could say I’ve never stopped since.
—
A FLASH OF LIGHTNING, a crack of thunder, and the drizzle turns to rain. I drop my phone in my pocket and run up the driveway for the truck. Rambo is uncharacteristically silent. Normally he’d be barking to let me know he wants to get inside—never mind that I told him to lie down in the back and stay quiet. Rambo is as well-trained as it’s possible for a Plott hound to be, but every breed has its limits.
I step off the driveway and take cover behind the biggest jack pine I can find, which isn’t saying much. The tree is maybe ten inches in diameter, tops. I stand absolutely still. A hunter wearing camouflage with her back to a tree to break up her outline is all but invisible as long as she stays quiet. I’m not wearing camo, but when it comes to blending in and becoming one with the forest, I’ve had more practice than most. I also have excellent hearing—far better than anyone I’ve hunted with, with the possible exception of my father—which used to surprise me until I realized that this, too, was a consequence of the way I grew up. Without radio and television and traffic and the thousand other noises people are subjected to every day, I learned to discern the slightest of sounds. A mouse foraging through pine needles. A single leaf falling in the forest. The nearly inaudible wing beats of a snowy owl.
I wait. There’s no whining coming from the back of the truck, no scrabble of claws against metal. I whistle one long note followed by three short ones. The first low-pitched, the next three slightly higher. The whistle I’ve trained my dog to answer won’t fool a chickadee, but if my father is within hearing distance, the fact that it’s been thirteen years since he’s heard a chickadee whistle should work in my favor.
Still nothing. I take the Magnum from the back of my jeans and belly-crawl through the underbrush. The truck seems to be sitting low. I move in closer. Both tires on the driver’s side have been slashed.
I stand up and steel myself and go over and look in the back. The truck bed is empty. Rambo is gone.
I let out my breath. Rambo’s leash has been cut—no doubt with the same knife my father took from the cabin to slash my tires. I curse my lack of foresight. I should have known my father wouldn’t lead me to this cabin simply because he wanted to see me again. This is a test. He wants to play our old tracking game one last time to prove once and for all that he is better at hunting and tracking than I am. I taught you everything you know. Now let’s see how well you learned.
He took Rambo so I’d have no choice but to follow. Again, he’s done this before. Back when I was around nine or ten and had gotten very good at tracking, my father came up with a way to make the game more challenging by raising the stakes. If I found him before the allotted time was up, usually before the sun went down but not always, I got to shoot him. If I didn’t, my father would take away something that was important to me: my collection of cattail spikes, my spare shirt, the third set of bow and arrows I made from willow saplings that actually worked. The last three times we played—not coincidentally, the last three times I won—we played for my fawnskin mittens, my knife, and my dog.
I go around to check the other side of the truck. Both tires on the passenger side are also flat. Two sets of prints angle away from the truck across the road and into the trees, man and dog. The prints are so easy to see, they may as well have been painted in neon colors and given direction arrows. If a person were to look down from above and draw a line through the prints from where I’m standing to extrapolate where the man and the dog are traveling, the line would end at my house.
Which means we’re not playing for my dog. We’re playing for my family.
18
THE CABIN
It was sometimes as if Helga acted from sheer wickedness; for often when her mother stood on the threshold of the door, or stepped into the yard, she would seat herself on the brink of the well, wave her arms and legs in the air, and suddenly fall right in.
Here she was able, from her frog nature, to dip and dive about in the water of the deep well, until at last she would climb forth like a cat, and come back into the hall dripping with water, so that the green leaves that were strewed on the floor were whirled round, and carried away by the streams that flowed from her.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
For weeks after my father took me to see the falls, I couldn’t stop thinking about that family. The way the children ran up and down the stairs. How their parents stood with their arms around each other and smiled as the boy and the girl threw snowballs and wrestled and laughed. I didn’t know for sure if they were a boy and a girl because they were wearing scarves and hats and coats, so in my mind I made them one of each. I named the boy Cousteau because he wore a red hat like Jacques-Yves Cousteau did in the National Geographic pictures, and I named his sister Calypso after Cousteau’s ship. Before I discovered the article about Cousteau, Erik the Red and his son Leif Eriksson were my favorite explorers. But they only sailed on top of the water, while Cousteau explored what was beneath. Whenever I tried to tell my father about Cousteau’s discoveries, my father said the gods were going to punish Cousteau one day because he dared to go to a part of the Earth that man was never meant to see. I couldn’t see why the gods would care. I would have liked to have known what was at the bottom of our marsh.
Cousteau, Calypso, and I did everything together. I made them older than the children on the platform so they would be better company for me and so they could help me with my chores. Sometimes I made up stories: “Cousteau and Calypso and Helena Swim in the Beaver Pond.” “Cousteau and Calypso Go Ice Fishing with Helena.” “Cousteau and Calypso Help Helena Catch a Snapping Turtle.” I couldn’t write the stories down because we didn’t have pencils or paper, so I repeated the best ones over and over in my head so I wouldn’t forget. I knew the real Cousteau and Calypso lived with their mother and father in a house with a kitchen like the ones in the Geographics. I could have made up stories that happened there: “Cousteau and Calypso and Helena Eat Jiffy Pop Popcorn While They Watch Television on Their Brand-New RCA Color Television Set,” but it was easier to bring them into my world than it was to picture myself in theirs.
My mother called Cousteau and Calypso my imaginary friends. She wondered why I didn’t play with the doll she made for me the way I played with them. But it was too late for that even if I’d wanted to, which I did not. The doll still hung from the handcuffs in the woodshed, but there wasn’t much left. Mice had made off with most of the stuffing and the sleeper was shot full of arrow holes.
My father never said one word about that family—not on the way home from the falls, and not in the weeks that followed. At first his silence bothered me. I had many questions. Where did the family come from? How did they get to the falls? Did they drive a car, or did they walk? If they walked, they must have lived close by because the children were too small to hike very far and they weren’t wearing snowshoes. What were the children’s names—not the ones I gave them, but their real names? How old were they? What did they like to eat? Did they go to school? Did they have a television set? And did they see my father and me watching from the other side of the falls? Were they now wondering the same things about me?
I would have liked to have known at least some of the answers. I thought about packing the rucksack with enough supplies for two or three days and heading for the tree line while the marsh was frozen to see if I could find their house. Or if I couldn’t find that family, perhaps I would find another that was just as interesting. I had always known the world was full of people. Now I knew that some of them were not so very far away.
One thing was certain: I couldn’t stay in the marsh forever. It wasn’t only that we were running out of things. My father was much older than my mother. One day, he would die. My mother and I could manage by ourselves as long as we had bullets for the rifle, but one day, my mother would die, too, and then what would I do? I didn’t want to live in the marsh by myself. I wanted to take a mate. There was a boy in the article about the Yanomami who looked good to me. He wore a dead monkey around his shoulders like a cape and nothing else. I knew he lived in another part of the world and we would likely never meet. But there had to be other boys like him who lived closer who I could pair up with. I thought if I could find one, I could bring him back to the marsh with me and make my own family. A boy and a girl would be nice.
Until I saw that family, I wasn’t sure how this could all work out. But now I had ideas.
—
MY FATHER WENT OUT three times during those weeks to shoot our spring deer, and each time, he came back empty-handed. My father said the reason he wasn’t able to shoot a deer was that the land was cursed. He said the gods were punishing us. He didn’t say for what.
The fourth time he brought me with him. My father thought that if I took the shot, this would lift the curse. I didn’t know if this was true, but if this meant I got to shoot another deer at last, I was happy to go along with it. Every year since I’d shot my first deer I asked my father if I could go deer hunting again, and every year my father said no. I didn’t understand why he went to all of the trouble of teaching me how to shoot if he wasn’t going to let me share the job of putting venison on our table.
Cousteau and Calypso stayed at home. My father didn’t like it when I said their names or played with them. Sometimes I did this on purpose to annoy him, but not today. My father was so angry all of the time because of the curse, I was thinking of sending them away. (“Cousteau and Calypso Visit the Yanomami in the Rain Forest Without Helena.”) Rambo was tied in the woodshed. Rambo was fine for flushing a bear from its den or treeing a coon, my father said, but not when it came to deer hunting because deer were too easily spooked. I couldn’t see why this would be a problem. Even if Rambo scared the deer, he could chase them down easily, since he could run on top of the snow crust while the deer’s thin legs would break through. Then all we would have to do was walk up and shoot one. Sometimes I wondered if the only reason my father made so many rules and restrictions was because he could.
I was in the lead because I was carrying the rifle. I liked that this meant my father had to follow where I wanted to go. I thought about the pet name he gave me, Bangii-Agawaateyaa, and smiled. I was no longer his Little Shadow.
I was heading for the ridge where I shot my first deer because that ridge brought me luck. And I was still hoping to shoot a doe that was pregnant with twins.
When we came to the abandoned beaver lodge where my father used to set his traps, I signaled my father to get down, then pulled off my mittens and crouched beside him. I wet my finger to test the wind and counted to one hundred to give any deer who heard us time to settle down. Slowly I raised my head.
On the other side of the beaver lodge, halfway between us and the cedar swamp where the deer were supposed to be, standing out in the open as bold and as fearless as you please, was a wolf. It was a male, twice as big as a coyote and three times as big as my dog, with a massive head and a wide forehead and a heavy chest and a thick dark ruff. I’d never seen a wolf except for the skin in our utility shed, but there was no mistaking this was what it was. Now I understood why my father hadn’t been able to shoot a deer. The land wasn’t cursed—it was just home to a new hunter.
My father tugged on my sleeve and pointed to the rifle. Take the shot, he mouthed. He tapped his chest to show where I should shoot so I didn’t ruin the skin. I brought up the rifle as carefully as I knew how and sighted through the scope. The wolf looked back calmly, intelligently, like he knew we were there and didn’t care. I slipped my finger through the trigger. The wolf didn’t move. I thought about my father’s stories. How Gitche Manitou sent the wolf to keep Original Man company while he walked the Earth naming the plants and the animals. How when they finished, Gitche Manitou decreed that Mai’iigan and Man should travel separate paths, but by then they’d spent so much time together they were as close as brothers. How to the Anishinaabe, killing a wolf was the same as killing a person.
My father squeezed my arm. I could feel his excitement, his anger, his impatience. Take the shot, he would have hissed if he could. My stomach got tight. I thought about the piles of furs in the utility shed. How because of my father’s trapping, the beaver that used to live in the lodge we were crouching behind were all gone. How the wolf was so trusting, shooting Mai’iigan would be no different from shooting my dog.
I lowered the rifle. Stood up and clapped my hands and shouted. The wolf looked back a moment longer. Then, with two great, beautiful bounds, it ran off.
—
I KNEW WHEN I DECIDED not to shoot the wolf that I would end up in the well. I didn’t know that my father would grab the rifle away from me and slam me across the face with the butt end so hard, I landed on my backside in the snow. I also didn’t expect him to march me home to the cabin with the gun at my back like I was his prisoner. I wish I could say I didn’t care. Still, I couldn’t see where I could have done anything differently. I didn’t like going against my father. I knew how much he wanted that wolf’s skin. But so did the wolf.
I thought about these things as I squatted on my heels in the darkness. I couldn’t sit because my father had filled the bottom of the well with deer antlers and rib bones and broken glass and shattered dishes—anything that would hurt or cut me if I tried to sit down. When I was little, I used to be able to curl up on my side and lie down in the leaf litter on the bottom. Sometimes I’d fall asleep. I think this was why my father started filling the well with debris. Contemplation time wasn’t supposed to be comfortable.
The shaft was deep and narrow. The only way I could fully stretch out my arms was if I put them over my head. I did this whenever my hands started to tingle. I would have had to grow another six feet to reach the cover.
I didn’t know what time of day it was or how long I’d been in the well because the lid didn’t let in any light. My father said the people who built the cabin made the lid this way so that children wouldn’t fall in. All I knew was that my father would keep me in the well as long as he wanted to and let me out when he was ready. Sometimes I thought about what would happen if he didn’t. If the Soviet Union dropped a bomb on the United States like the Geographics said Nikita Khrushchev wanted to do and the bomb killed my father and mother, what would happen to me? I tried not to think about things like that too often. When I did, it got hard to breathe.
I was very tired. My hands and feet were numb and my teeth chattered, but I’d stopped shivering, so that was good. My father let me keep my clothes on this time, and that helped. My front teeth were loose and the side of my face ached, but what I was really worried about was my leg. I cut it on something sharp when my father threw me in. I wiped up the blood with my shirttail and tied my scarf around my leg up high like a tourniquet, but I couldn’t tell if it was working. I tried not to think about the time I shared the well with a rat.
