The Marsh King's Daughter, page 18
Still, I wanted that salt. So the next time my mother went to the outhouse, I pushed the kitchen curtains open as far as they would go and propped one of our chairs against the closet door so it wouldn’t swing shut. I would have liked to use the oil lamp to search the closet, but we weren’t allowed to light the lamp when my father wasn’t home.
The closet was very small. I don’t know what the people who built our cabin used to put in it, but for as long as I could remember, the closet had been empty. When I was little I fit inside with room to spare, but now I was so big, I had to sit with my back against the wall and my knees drawn up to my chin. I closed my eyes so the darkness would feel more natural and quickly patted down the walls and the backs of the stairs. Cobwebs stuck to my fingers. The dust made me sneeze. I was looking for a loose board or a knothole or a nail sticking out that could be used as a hook—any place a box or a bag of salt could hide.
In the space between a stair riser and the outside wall, my fingers touched paper. The people who built our cabin nailed newspapers to the outside walls as insulation to keep out the cold, but this didn’t feel like newspaper, and anyway we’d used up all of the newspaper as fire starter long ago. I pried the paper loose and carried it to the table and sat down with it next to the window. The paper was rolled into a tube and tied shut with a piece of string. I untied the knot and the paper fell open in my hands.
It was a magazine. Not a National Geographic. The cover wasn’t yellow and the paper was too thin. It was too dark to make out details, so I opened the door to the woodstove and stuck a sliver of cedar into the coals until it caught fire and lit the lamp, then pinched out the taper and put the taper in our dry sink so I didn’t accidentally burn down the cabin. Then I pulled the oil lamp close.
Printed in big yellow letters at the top of the page against a pink background was the word ’TEEN. I assumed this was the magazine’s name. There was a girl on the cover. She looked to be about the same age as me. She had long blonde hair, though hers was loose and curly instead of straight and braided like mine. She was wearing an orange, purple, blue, and yellow sweater with a zigzag pattern like my leg tattoos. A+ LOOKS MAKE THE GRADE it said on one side of her picture, and MAGNETIC MAKEOVERS: ATTRACTIVE HOW-TO’S on the other. Inside the magazine were more pictures of the same girl. A caption beneath one of the pictures said her name was Shannen Doherty and she was the star of a television show called Beverly Hills, 90210.
I turned to the table of contents: Earth S.O.S.—How You Can Help; Fad Dieting: Safe or Scary?; Clip ’N’ Keep Booklet: Bonus Fashion Planner; Hottest New TV Hunks; Mr. Right: Could He Be Wrong for You?; Teens with AIDS: Heartbreaking Stories. I had no idea what the titles meant or what the articles were about. I flipped through the pages. Hot looks for school the caption said beneath a picture of a group of children standing beside a yellow bus. The children looked happy. No ads for kitchen appliances that I could see; instead the ads were for things called “lipstick” and “eyeliner” and “blush,” which as far as I could tell were what the girls used to color their lips red and their cheeks pink and their eyelids blue. I wasn’t sure why they’d want to.
I sat back, tapped my fingers on the table, chewed my thumb knuckle, tried to think. I had no idea where this magazine came from, how it got here, how long it had been hidden in the closet. Why anyone would make a magazine about only girls and boys.
I pulled the lamp closer and paged through a second time. Everything was described as “hot” and “hip” and “cool.” The children danced, played music, had parties. The pictures were bright and colorful. The cars didn’t look at all like the ones in the Geographics. They were sleek and low to the ground like weasels instead of big and round and fat like beavers. They also had names. I especially liked a yellow car the magazine called a Mustang because it had the same name as a horse. I assumed this was because the car could go very fast.
Outside on the porch my mother stomped the snow from her boots. I started to snatch the magazine off the table, then stopped. It didn’t matter if my mother saw me looking at it. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.
“What are you doing?” she cried as she shut the door behind her and shook the snow out of her hair. “You know better than to light the lamp before Jacob gets home.” She hung her coat on the hook by the door and hurried across the room to turn off the lamp, then stopped when she saw the magazine. “Where did you get that? What are you doing with it? That’s mine. Give it to me.”
She reached for the magazine. I slapped her hand away and jumped to my feet and put my hand on my knife. That this magazine belonged to my mother was absurd. My mother had no possessions.
She took a step back and held up her hands. “Please, Helena. Give it to me. If you do, I’ll let you look at it whenever you like.”
As if she could stop me. I waved my knife toward her chair. “Sit.”
My mother sat. I sat down across from her. I laid my knife on the table and put the magazine between us. “What is this? Where did it come from?”
“Can I touch it?”
I nodded. She pulled the magazine toward her and slowly turned the pages. She stopped at a picture of a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy. “Neil Patrick Harris.” She sighed. “I had such a crush on him when I was your age. You have no idea. I still think he’s handsome. Doogie Howser was my favorite TV show. I also loved Full House and Saved by the Bell.”
I didn’t like that my mother knew things I didn’t. I had no idea what she was talking about, who these people were, why my mother acted like she knew them. Why she seemed to care about the boys and girls in this magazine as much as I cared about Cousteau and Calypso.
“Please don’t tell Jacob,” she said. “You know what he’ll do if he finds this.”
I knew exactly what my father would do with this magazine if he knew about it—especially if he thought the magazine was important to her. There was a reason I kept my favorite Geographics under my bed. I promised—not because I wanted to protect my mother from my father, but because I wasn’t done looking at the magazine yet.
My mother flipped through the pages a second time, then turned the magazine around and pushed it toward me. “Look. See this pink sweater? I used to have a sweater just like this. I wore it so much, my mother used to say I would have slept in it if she’d let me. And this one.” She turned back to the cover. “My mother was going to buy a sweater like this one for me when we went shopping for school clothes.”
It was hard to imagine my mother as a girl like the ones in this magazine, wearing these clothes, going shopping, going to school. “Where did you get this?” I asked again, because my mother still hadn’t answered my question.
“It’s . . . a long story.” She pressed her lips together like she did when my father asked her a question she didn’t want to answer, like why she let the fire go out, or why his favorite shirt was still dirty even though she claimed she’d washed it, or why she hadn’t fixed the holes in his socks or brought in more water or firewood, or when was she going to learn how to make a decent biscuit.
“Then you’d better get started.” I locked eyes with her the way my father did, letting her know I wasn’t going to take silence for an answer. This was going to be interesting. My mother never told stories.
She looked away and bit her lip. At last she sighed. “I was sixteen when your father told me I was going to have a baby,” she began. “Your father wanted me to make the diapers and baby clothes you’d need out of the curtains and blankets we had at the cabin. But I didn’t know how to sew.” She smiled to herself like her not knowing how to sew was funny. Or like she was making this story up.
“I managed to cut a blanket into diapers using one of his knives, but there was no way I could make clothes for you without scissors or sewing needles or thread. And we still needed diaper pins to get the diapers to stay on you. Your father stormed off when I told him—you know how he gets. He was gone a long time. When he came back, he said we were going shopping. This was the first time I’d left the marsh since . . . since he’d brought me here, so I was very excited. We went to a big store called Kmart and got everything you’d need. While we were in the checkout line, I saw this magazine. I knew your father would never let me have it, so when he wasn’t looking, I rolled it up and hid it under my shirt. When we got back to the cabin, I hid it in the closet while he was unloading the things we bought. It’s been there ever since.”
My mother shook her head like she couldn’t believe she was ever that brave. If it wasn’t for the magazine on the table between us, I wouldn’t have believed it, either. I pictured her going to the closet whenever my father and I were away, taking the magazine from its hiding place, carrying it to the kitchen table or outside to the back porch if it was a sunny day, reading the stories and looking at the pictures when she was supposed to be cooking and cleaning. It was hard to believe she had been doing this since before I was born and my father had never caught her. That this magazine was the same age as me.
An idea began to form. I looked at the date on the magazine’s cover. If my mother took this magazine when she was pregnant with me and I was almost twelve, then this magazine was also almost twelve. This meant that the girl on the cover wasn’t a girl at all—she was a grown woman like my mother. So were the rest of the children.
I’ll admit, I was disappointed. I liked it better when these boys and girls were the same as me. I understood the concept of dates and years, of course, and why important events had their year-number attached to them so people could know which came first and which came later. But I’d never really thought about the number of the year I was born, or what year it was now. My mother kept track of the weeks and the months on the calendar she drew with charcoal on our kitchen wall, but I’d always been more interested in what the weather would be like on a given day and the seasons.
Now I realized that the numbers of my years were important as well. I subtracted the dates on the Geographics from the date of the current year and felt like my father had punched me in the stomach. The Geographics were fifty years old. Far older than the ’Teen magazine. Older than my mother. Older even than my father. My Yanomami brothers and sisters weren’t children; they were old men and women. The boy with the double row of dots tattooed across his cheeks whose picture I showed to my father so he could do the same to me was not a boy at all; he was an old man like my father. Cousteau—the real Jacques-Yves Cousteau—was a grown man in the Geographic pictures, which meant he must be very old. He might even be dead.
I looked at my mother sitting across the table, smiling like she was happy I found her magazine because now we could read it together, and all I could think was, Liar. I’d trusted the Geographics. I’d trusted my mother. She knew the Geographics were fifty years old, yet she let me believe that everything they said that was happening in the present was current and true. Color television and Velcro and a vaccine to cure polio weren’t recent inventions. The Soviets didn’t just send the dog Laika into orbit on Sputnik 2 as the first living creature to orbit the Earth. Cousteau’s amazing discoveries were fifty years old. Why would she do this to me? Why had she lied to me? What else was she not telling me?
I grabbed the magazine off the table and rolled it up and stuck it in my back pocket. After this, she was never getting it back.
Outside there was a noise. It sounded like my father’s chain saw, only it was almost dark and my father wouldn’t cut firewood at night. I ran to the window. A small yellow light was coming toward us from the direction of the tree line. It looked like a yellow star except that it was moving and it was close to the ground.
My mother came over to the window and stood beside me. The noise got louder. She cupped her hands against the glass so she could see.
“It’s a snowmobile,” she said when she turned away at last, her voice full of wonder. “Someone is coming.”
21
Rambo doesn’t bark again, but once was enough. My gamble paid off. Not only have I caught up to my father, Rambo’s bark proves he is not so very far away. Picture the quarter-mile section of road between the place where my father’s trail began and the logging road where I’m running as the base of an isosceles triangle. My house is the apex, and the paths my father and I are traveling are the sides. The closer we get to my house, the quicker our paths will converge.
I could pinpoint his location more precisely if Rambo would bark a second time, but frankly I’m surprised he was able to bark at all. I guess the pants my father stole from the man he murdered didn’t come with a belt. Back at the cabin, my father used to fasten his belt around my dog’s nose as a muzzle when we were hunting and my father didn’t want him to bark, or when Rambo was tied in the woodshed and my father got tired of listening to him wanting to be let out. Sometimes my father put the muzzle on Rambo for no reason at all that I could see and left it on a lot longer than I thought he should. I’ve read that one of the signs that a person might become a terrorist or a serial killer when they grow up is if they were cruel to animals when they were a child. I’m not sure what it means if they’re still cruel as an adult.
I shield my eyes against the rain and scan the crest of the ridge, half expecting my father’s head to poke over the top at any second. I move off the road into the trees. Wet pine needles muffle my footsteps. I shake the rain from my hair and slide the Ruger from my shoulder, holding the rifle with the barrel pointing down so I can swing it up at the first sign of trouble. The ridge is steep. I climb as quickly and quietly as I can. Normally I’d use the scrub trees as handholds, but jack pines are brittle and I can’t risk the sound of a branch snapping off.
I near the top, drop to my belly, and crawl the rest of the way using my feet and elbows, the way my father taught me. I set up the Ruger’s bipod and sight through the scope.
Nothing.
I pan slowly north and south, then check the other side of the ravine for movement. It’s movement that gives a person away. If you’re fleeing someone through a forest, the best thing you can do is go to ground as quickly as possible and stay absolutely still. I scan every conceivable hiding place a second time on the chance that my father made Rambo bark on purpose to draw me out, then pack up the Ruger and work my way down the ridge and start climbing the next.
I repeat the process twice more before I come to the top of the fourth ridge and feel like cheering. At the bottom of the slope, not more than fifty feet below me and fifty yards south, walking purposefully up the middle of a creek that normally would be little more than ankle-deep but that now reaches almost to his knees is my father.
My father.
I’ve found him. Outpaced him. Outsmarted him in every way.
I set up the Ruger one last time and watch my father through the scope. He of course looks older than I remember. He looks thinner. The dead man’s clothes hang loosely on his frame. His hair and beard are gray, and his skin is wrinkled and sallow. In the photo the police are circulating, my father looks as scraggly and wild-eyed as Charles Manson. I assumed they chose the most intimidating picture they could find so there’d be no question my father is dangerous. In person, he looks even worse: cheeks as hollow as a cadaver’s, eyes sunk so deep into their sockets that he looks like the wendigo from his old sweat lodge stories. Now that I’m seeing him for the first time as an adult, I realize precisely how unhinged he looks. I suppose, to my mother, he always did.
My father has my dog in a choke hold, the cut end of the leash wrapped several times around his left hand. He carries a Glock in his right. I imagine the other guard’s weapon is beneath his jacket in the back of his jeans. Rambo trots along easily on the creek bank beside him. Not for the first time, I marvel at how effortlessly my dog moves with only three legs. The vet who put him back together after the bear incident told me a lot of hunters would have put down a dog that severely injured. I took this to mean that if I couldn’t afford the surgery to fix him, she’d understand. Most of the people who live in the Upper Peninsula have a hard enough time taking care of their families, let alone paying for an expensive operation for an animal, no matter how much they want to. I could tell she was happy when I told her I’d rather give up bear hunting than give up my dog.
I track my father through the scope as he continues toward me, unaware. I used to fantasize about killing him when I was a child—not because I wanted to, but because he’d planted the idea when he changed the rules of our tracking game. I’d watch him for a long time after I found him, thinking about what it would be like if I shot him instead of the tree. How killing my father would make me feel. What my mother would say when she found out I was now the head of our family.
As I watch him walk ever closer, I think again about killing him—this time, for real. From this distance and angle I could take him down easily. Put a bullet through his heart or head, and the game would be over without his even realizing I’d won. I could shoot him in the gut. Make him bleed out slowly and painfully as payback for what he did to my mother. I could shoot him in the shoulder or in the knee. Hurt him badly enough that he wouldn’t be going anywhere without a stretcher. Go home, call the police as soon as I can pick up a signal, and tell them where to collect him.
So many choices.
Back at the cabin, my father and I used to play a guessing game where he’d hide some small object he knew I’d like in one hand—a piece of smooth white quartz or an unbroken robin’s egg—and I had to choose which hand held the treasure. If I guessed correctly, I got to keep it. If not, my father threw the treasure in our garbage pit. I remember trying so hard to reason it out. If my father held the treasure in his right hand the last time we played, did that mean that this time the treasure would be in his left? Or would he hold it in his right hand again to trick me? Perhaps several times? I didn’t realize then that reason and logic had nothing to do with the outcome. No matter which hand I chose, the odds of guessing correctly remained the same.
