The Marsh King's Daughter, page 17
“Are you okay?”
I opened my eyes. Calypso was sitting on the front seat of my father’s canoe. The canoe rocked gently in the current. The day was sunny and warm. Cattail heads bent and nodded in the breeze. Overhead a hawk swooped and dived. In the distance, a red-winged blackbird called. The canoe was nosed into the reeds. Cousteau sat in the back.
“Come with us,” Calypso said. “We’re going exploring.” She smiled and held out her hand.
When I stood my legs felt shaky, like they wouldn’t hold me up. I took her hand and stepped carefully into the canoe. My father’s canoe was a two-seater, so I sat down in the middle between them on the bottom. The canoe was made of metal. The bottom was cold.
Cousteau shoved his paddle into the riverbank and pushed off. The current was very strong. All Cousteau and Calypso needed to do was steer. As we floated downstream, I thought about the day we met. I was glad Cousteau and Calypso and I were friends.
“Do you have anything to eat?” I was very hungry.
“Of course.” Calypso turned around and smiled. Her teeth were white and straight. Her eyes were blue like my mother’s. Her hair was thick and dark and braided like mine. She reached into the rucksack between her feet and handed me an apple. It was as big as both my fists put together, a Wolf River, my father called it, one of three kinds of apples that grew near our cabin. I took a bite and juice ran down my chin.
I ate the apple, seeds and all. Calypso smiled and gave me another. This time I ate the apple down to the core. I tossed the core into the river for the fish to nibble and trailed my fingers in the water to wash the stickiness away. The water was very cold. So were the drips that splashed my head when Cousteau switched his paddle. We passed marsh marigolds and blue flag iris, Indian paintbrush and wood lily, St.-John’s-wort and yellow flag iris and pondweed and jewelweed. I’d never seen so much color. Flowers that didn’t normally bloom together were all blooming at the same time, like the marsh was putting on a show for me.
The current got stronger. When we came to the wooden sign that hung from the cable that spanned the river, I could read the whole thing: DANGER. RAPIDS AHEAD. NO ROWBOATS PAST THIS POINT. I ducked my head as we passed beneath.
The roar got louder. I knew we were going over the falls. I saw the canoe tipping forward when we reached the edge, plunging through the foam and the mist to disappear into the whirlpool at the bottom. I knew I was going to drown. I was not afraid.
“Your father doesn’t love you,” Cousteau said suddenly from behind me. I could hear him clearly, though the last time I was this close to the falls, my father and I had to shout. “He only loves himself.”
“It’s true,” Calypso said. “Our father loves us. He would never put us in the well.”
I thought about the day we met. How their father played with them. The way he smiled when he picked up little Calypso and carried her on his shoulders, laughing all the way up the stairs. I knew she spoke the truth.
I wiped my jacket sleeve across my eyes. I didn’t know why my eyes were wet. I never cried.
“It’s okay.” Calypso leaned forward and took my hands. “Don’t be afraid. We love you.”
“I’m so tired.”
“We know,” Cousteau said. “It’s all right. Lie down. Close your eyes. We’ll take care of you.”
I knew that this was also true. And so I did.
—
MY MOTHER TOLD ME I was in the well for three days. I wouldn’t have thought a person could last that long without food and water, but apparently you can. She said when my father finally pulled the lid aside and lowered the ladder I was too weak to climb it, so he had to sling me over his shoulder like a dead deer and carry me out. She said she wanted to slide the lid to the side and lower food and water to me many times, but my father made her sit on a chair in the kitchen with the rifle pointed at her the whole time I was in the well, so she couldn’t.
My mother said that after my father carried me into the cabin, he dropped me on the floor beside the woodstove like I was a sack of flour and walked away. She thought I was dead. She pulled the mattress off their bed and dragged it into the kitchen and rolled me onto it and covered me with blankets and took off all her clothes and crawled under the covers and held me until I got warm again. If she did all of this, I don’t remember. All I remember is waking up shivering on the mattress though my face and hands and feet felt like they were on fire. I rolled off the mattress and put on my clothes and staggered to the outhouse. When I tried to pee, hardly anything came out.
The next day my father asked if I had learned my lesson. I told him I had. I don’t think the lesson I learned was the one he wanted to teach me.
19
The prints in the road spell out a message that’s impossible to miss: I’m going to your house. Catch me—stop me—save them—if you can.
I unlock the truck. Fill my pockets with as many rounds of ammunition as they will hold and take the Ruger from the rack over the window. Check the Magnum, adjust the knife at my belt. My father has two handguns and the knife he took from the old man’s cabin. I have my handgun, my rifle, and the Bowie I’ve carried since I was a child. I’m calling us even.
I can’t be sure if my father knows I have a family, just as I can’t prove he knows I’m living on the property where he grew up. But I have to assume that he does. I can think of any number of ways he could have found out. Prisoners can’t access the Internet, but my father has a lawyer. Lawyers have access to tax records, property records, marriage and birth and death certificates. My father could have pumped his lawyer for information about the people living on his parents’ property without the lawyer even realizing my father was manipulating him. Maybe the lawyer staked out my house on some innocuous pretext at my father’s request. If the lawyer saw me and happened to mention my tattoos when he reported back, my father would have known right away that this was me. I wonder—not for the first time—if I should have had the tattoos removed entirely, no matter how long and expensive the process. I can see now that I also should have changed my first name as well as my last. But how could I have known that nine years in the future these things would put my family in danger? I wasn’t running from the law, or from organized crime, or hiding out like in a witness protection program. I was just an eighteen-year-old looking to make a fresh start.
There’s another possibility as to how my father knows where I’m living, much more sinister and devious than the first. It’s possible I’m living on his parents’ property because my father put me there. Maybe his parents originally named him in their will, but he let the inheritance go to me so he could track me. I suppose it’s possible I’m giving my father too much credit. But if my father plotted his escape in such a way that I would be forced to come looking for him on his terms, then I’m willing to admit I underestimated him. I won’t do it again.
I check my phone. Still no signal. I send Stephen a text warning him to clear out, praying the text will go through, and turn west. Away from the trail my father expects me to follow. There’s no question I could track my father if I wanted to. A person moving through the woods always leaves evidence behind, no matter how expertly they hide their trail. Twigs get broken. Dirt gets displaced. Grass bruises when it’s stepped on. Moss crushes underfoot. Gravel gets pressed into the ground. Boots pick up material from the ground, which then gets transferred to other surfaces: grains of sand on a fallen log, bits of moss on an otherwise bare rock. What’s more, my father is traveling with my dog. Unless he’s carrying Rambo in his arms or on his shoulders, my three-legged canine is going to leave a trail that’s impossible to miss.
But even if the rain weren’t rapidly washing away all evidence of my father’s trail, I’m not going to track him. If all I do is follow where he leads, I’ve already lost. I have to get out ahead of him. My father doesn’t know my girls aren’t home, but I know my husband is. We’re less than five miles from my house. I’ve hunted this area often and know it well. Between this road and my house are two small creeks, a beaver pond, and a steep gully with a fair-sized stream at the bottom that my father will have to cross. The high ground is mostly second-growth aspen and scrub pine without a lot of cover, which means he’ll have to stick to the low ground as much as possible. At the rate the rain is coming down, the creeks are quickly turning into torrents. If my father is going to make it across the stream at the bottom of the gully before it becomes a raging river, he’s going to have to move fast.
My father knows all of this as well as I do from when he roamed these woods as a boy. What he doesn’t know—what he can’t possibly know unless he’s somehow seen a recent satellite image of the area, which I have to doubt—is that between here and my house is a section of forest that was clear-cut three or four years ago. He also doesn’t know about the rough road the loggers left behind that leads almost all the way to the wetland behind my house.
This is his first mistake.
I set off at a light jog. My father has at most a fifteen-minute head start. If I average five miles an hour to his three, I can get out ahead of him and cut him off. I picture him making his way through the underbrush, hiking up and down hills and wading through creeks while I’m barely breaking a sweat. Working so hard to hide his trail and I’m not even following it. He has no idea I’m about to get the better of him again. He can’t imagine any outcome other than the one he’s planned because in his universe, in which he’s the sun and the rest of us orbit around him, things can only happen in the way that he decrees.
But I’m no longer the adoring child he used to manipulate and control. Thinking so is his second mistake.
I will find him, and I will stop him. I put him in prison once; I can do it again.
—
I PULL MY PHONE from my jacket pocket without breaking stride and check the time. Half an hour. It feels a lot longer. I estimate I’m halfway to my house. It could be more, but it’s possibly less. It’s hard to tell where I am exactly because the trees I normally would have used as landmarks are gone. The jack pines on the ridge to my right are nothing remarkable, certainly nothing I can use to gauge my progress, just the scrub the loggers couldn’t be bothered to cut.
To my left, the land is so barren, the trees to my right look lush by comparison. There’s nothing uglier than a forest that’s been clear-cut. Acre after acre of scattered brush piles, deep skidder ruts, and stumps. Tourists imagine the U.P. is all beautiful and pristine wilderness, but what they don’t know is that often just a few hundred feet from the main highways, great swaths of forest have been reduced to pulp.
The entire state used to be covered with magnificent stands of red and white pine until the late 1800s, when lumber barons claimed the climax forests as their own and rafted the logs down Lake Michigan to build Chicago. The trees the loggers cut today are all second-growth: birch, aspen, oak, jack pine. Once these are gone, the soil is so abused that nothing grows but moss and blueberries.
When my father and I cut firewood, we cut only the biggest trees, and then only what we needed. This actually helped the forest, because it gave the smaller trees room to grow. “Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will the white man realize he cannot eat money” was one of my father’s favorite sayings. “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children” was another. I used to think he made them up himself. Now I know they’re famous Native American proverbs. Regardless, Native Americans understood the concept of sustainable forestry long before there was a word for it.
I keep running. There’s no way to know for sure if taking the longer but potentially faster route will allow me to get out in front of my father. I do know it’s going to be close. Running isn’t as easy as I’d hoped. The logging road is a road in name only: rough, uneven, and canted so steeply in places that it feels like I’m running on the side of a cliff. Deep sand, rocks and tree roots sticking out, potholes as big as duck ponds. My breathing is ragged and my lungs burn. My hair and jacket are drenched from the rain and my boots and pant legs are soaked to the knees from splashing through puddles. The rifle slung over my shoulder bruises my back with every step. My calf muscles scream at me to stop. I desperately need to catch my breath, to rest, to pee. The only thing keeping me going is knowing what will happen to Stephen if I don’t.
Which is when, off to my right, a dog barks. A sharp, distinctive yelp that any Plott hound owner would recognize instantly. I bend over with my hands on my knees until my breathing slows. I grin.
20
THE CABIN
The Viking’s wife looked at the wild, badly disposed girl with great sorrow; and when night came on, and her daughter’s beautiful form and disposition were changed, the Viking’s wife spoke in eloquent words to Helga of the sorrow and deep grief that was in her heart. The ugly frog, in its monstrous shape, stood before her, and raised its brown mournful eyes to her face, listening to her words, and seeming to understand them with the intelligence of a human being.
“A bitter time will come for thee,” said the Viking’s wife; “and it will be terrible for me too. It had been better for thee if thou hadst been left on the high-road, with the cold night wind to lull thee to sleep.” And the Viking’s wife shed bitter tears, and went away in anger and sorrow.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
The days and nights I spent in the well taught me three things: My father didn’t love me. My father would do whatever he wanted with no regard for my safety or feelings. My mother was not as indifferent toward me as I thought. For me, these were big ideas. Big enough that each required a great deal of careful thought. After three days, Cousteau and Calypso and I were still trying to sort it all out.
Meanwhile, I learned that the good thing about almost dying from hypothermia, which is what the Geographic article about the failed 1912 Scott expedition to the South Pole called it, was this: as long as you didn’t lose any fingers or toes to frostbite, as soon as you warmed up again you were fine. The warming-up part wasn’t fun—far more painful than smashing your thumb with a hammer or the kickback from a rifle or getting a large tattoo—and I sincerely hoped I would never have to go through anything like that again. On the other hand, I now knew that I was a lot tougher than I thought I was, which had to count for something.
I didn’t know if my father pulled me out of the well because he knew I had reached the limit of what I could endure or if he wanted to kill me and he got the timing wrong. This was what Cousteau and Calypso said. They might have been right.
All I knew was that from the moment I opened my eyes, everyone was angry. Cousteau and Calypso were angry with my father for what he did to me. My mother was angry with him for the same reason. She was also angry with me for making my father so angry that he wanted to kill me. My father was angry with me for refusing to shoot the wolf, and he was angry with my mother for helping me after he pulled me out of the well. I didn’t remember my mother crawling under the covers to warm me, but there was a fresh bruise on her face that proved she did. And around and around it went. There was so much anger filling the cabin, it felt like there was no air left to breathe. My father stayed in the marsh by himself most of the time, and that helped. I had no idea if he was still trying to shoot our spring deer or if he was hunting the wolf. I didn’t very much care. All I knew was that every evening he came back angrier than when he’d left. He said just looking at my mother and me made him sick, and this was why he stayed away. I didn’t tell him that Cousteau and Calypso felt the same way about him.
Also, we were out of salt. When my mother discovered that all of the salt was gone, she threw the empty salt box against the wall and screamed that this was the last straw, and why didn’t my father do something about it before now, and how was she supposed to cook without salt? I expected my father to slap her for yelling at him and talking back, but all he did was tell her that the Ojibwa never had salt until the white men came, and she’d just have to get used to doing without. I was going to miss it. Not all the wild foods we ate tasted good, even after they were boiled in several changes of water. Burdock root definitely took getting used to. And I never did like wild mustard greens. Salt helped.
The next morning, however, everything was quiet. My mother fixed the hot oat cereal we ate for breakfast without saying anything about salt. I didn’t particularly like how it tasted, and I could tell by the way my father pushed his spoon around his bowl and left half his cereal behind when he got up from the table that he didn’t, either. My mother ate hers like nothing was wrong. I assumed this was because she had a secret salt stash hidden somewhere in the cabin that she was keeping for herself. After my father strapped on his snowshoes and slung his rifle over his shoulder and went out into the marsh for the day, I spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon looking for it. I searched the storage room, the living room, and the kitchen. I didn’t think my mother would hide her stash in the bedroom she shared with my father, and I knew she wouldn’t hide it in my room. Though it would have been a good trick if she had, and it was something I would have done if I was her and she was me, my mother wasn’t that smart.
The only place left to look was the closet under the stairs. I wished I had searched the closet before it started snowing and the cabin got dark. When I was little, I used to shut myself inside the closet and pretend it was a submarine or a bear’s den or a Viking’s tomb, but now I didn’t like small, dark places.
