The Marsh King's Daughter, page 19
This is different. This time there is no wrong call. I take off the safety. Slip my finger through the trigger and hold my breath and count to ten.
And shoot.
—
I WAS TERRIFIED the first time I shot my father. I remain astounded that he let me do it. I try to imagine putting a gun in Iris’s hands and telling her to point it at me and pull the trigger—and, oh, yes, make sure you miss—and I simply can’t picture it. I doubt I would ever consider doing such a thing with Mari, either, no matter how good a shot she turns out to be. It’s reckless to the point of being suicidal. And yet this is exactly what my father did.
This happened the summer I was ten. We didn’t play our tracking game in the winter because after there was snow on the ground, following my father’s trail would have been too easy, and we didn’t play in the late fall or in the early spring after the leaves had fallen or before the trees had budded out for the same reason. Only when the foliage was lush and dense was tracking a person through the forest a true challenge, my father said. This is also the time of year when the bugs are at their worst. You have to admire the self-control it must have taken him to sit in the swamp for hours while he waited for me to find him, bugs swarming and biting but my father resisting the urge to swat or even to twitch.
My father explained the new game rules at breakfast. After I found him, I had two options. I could shoot into the tree he would be hiding behind, either beside him or above his head, or I could shoot into the dirt near his feet.
If I didn’t find him—or worse, if I was too scared to take the shot when I did—I would have to give up something that was important to me. We would begin with the National Geographic issue with the pictures of the Vikings that I’d hidden under my bed. I don’t know how my father even knew it was there.
My father took me in his canoe to a ridge where I had never been. I was blindfolded to make it harder to judge how far we’d traveled and how much time had passed, and also so I wouldn’t be able to see which direction he went when we got there. I was very nervous. I didn’t want to shoot my father. I did want to keep my Geographic. I thought a lot about my two options. Shooting into the dirt would be easier and safer than shooting into a tree because the bullet would bury itself in the sand and be less likely to ricochet and hurt either me or my father. Also, if I missed the dirt shot and accidentally hit my father, shooting him in the leg or in the foot would be a lot less traumatic than shooting him in the chest or head.
But shooting into the dirt was the coward’s shot, and I was no coward.
“Stay here,” my father said as the canoe nudged the shore. “Count to a thousand, and then you can take the blindfold off.”
The canoe rocked as he got out. I heard splashing as he waded toward the shore, a rustling as he made his way through the vegetation—arrowroot and cattails, most likely—and then nothing. All I could hear was the wind moving through the pines that my nose had already told me grew on this ridge and the papery sound of aspen leaves knocking against each other in the breeze. The water was quiet, and the sun was hot on my head. The light felt slightly warmer on my right side than on my left, which meant that the canoe was facing north. I wasn’t sure how this was going to help, but it was nice to know. The Remington sat heavy on my knees. Beneath the blindfold, I was beginning to sweat.
Suddenly I realized I had been so busy gathering clues about my surroundings, I had forgotten to count. I decided to begin with five hundred to make up for lost time. The question was, did my father expect me to count to the full one thousand as he had instructed, or did he expect me to take off the blindfold before I finished counting and start looking for him sooner? It was hard to know. Most of the time I did exactly what my father told me to do because there was always some kind of punishment at the end of it if I didn’t. But this was different. The whole point of tracking my father was learning to outthink him. Deviousness and trickery were part of the game.
I took off the blindfold and tied it around my forehead to keep the sweat out of my eyes and climbed out of the canoe. My father’s trail was easy to follow. I could see clearly where he had waded through a patch of sedges—not arrowroot and cattails as I had supposed—and climbed onto the bank. The disturbances in the pine needles in the clearing he crossed before disappearing into the bracken ferns on the other side were also readily visible. I assumed the fact that I could follow my father’s trail so easily meant that I had gotten very good at tracking. Looking back, I’m sure he left an easy trail that day because he wanted the game to reach its conclusion, and for that, he needed to be sure that I found him.
I almost lost the trail at the top of the ridge when the footprints ended at a smooth, bare rock. Then I saw a tiny pile of sand where it shouldn’t have been. I picked up the trail on the other side and followed it to the edge of a small cliff. Bent bracken ferns and loose rocks showed where my father had climbed down. I followed the trail through the Remington’s scope and found my father squatting on his heels on the far side of a beech tree a hundred feet away. The tree was fat but not fat enough: I could see both his shoulders sticking out.
I grinned. The gods were truly smiling on me this day. Not only had I found my father, shooting conditions were close to perfect. I had the high ground. There was no wind. The sun was at my back, and while that meant my father would be able to see me silhouetted against the sun if he happened to step out from behind the tree and turn around and look up, it also meant I would be able to see him clearly when I took my shot and would be less likely to miss.
I took cover behind a big red pine and held the Remington close while I considered my next move. The Remington was almost as tall as me. I dropped to my belly and pushed it in front of me until I was in a better position to shoot from beneath a bush. I braced the Remington against my shoulder and looked through the scope. My father hadn’t moved.
I slipped my finger through the trigger. My stomach got tight. I pictured the crack of the rifle, my father’s head snapping up in surprise. I saw him stepping out from behind the tree and walking up the hill to pat my head and congratulate me for making the shot. Or perhaps he would look down in dismay as his shoulder turned red and charge up the hill like a wounded rhino. My hands shook. I didn’t understand why I had to shoot him. Why my father had changed the rules of our game. Why he’d taken something that was fun and made it into something dangerous and scary. I wished that things could always stay the same.
And with that thought, I understood. Things had to change because I was changing. I was growing up. This was my initiation, my chance to prove that I would be a worthy member of our tribe. To a Yanomami man, courage was valued above everything. This was why they were always fighting other tribes and stealing each other’s women and why they would fight to the death even though they were shot full of arrows rather than quit and be branded a coward. According to the Geographic, almost half the Yanomami men had killed a man.
I braced the Remington more securely against my shoulder. My hands were no longer shaking. It’s impossible to describe the mix of terror and exhilaration I felt when I pulled the trigger. I imagine it’s similar to what a person feels when they jump out of an airplane or dive off a cliff, or the way a heart surgeon feels when she makes her first cut. I was no longer a little girl who loved and admired her father and hoped one day to become like him. I was his equal.
After that, I couldn’t wait till I got the chance to shoot him again.
—
THE CRACK OF THE RIFLE and the snap of the branch above my father’s head are nearly simultaneous. The branch falls into the creek directly in front of him. Exactly where I intended it to fall. The same move that ended our last hunting and tracking game.
My father freezes. He looks up to where the shot originated with his mouth hanging open like he can’t believe I beat him again, let alone in the same way. He shakes his head and holds his arms to the side in surrender. Rambo’s leash is wrapped around his left hand. The Glock dangles from his right.
I keep my finger on the trigger. Just because a man looks like he’s beaten doesn’t mean he’s ready to give up. Especially when that man is as devious and manipulative as my father.
“Jacob.” The name feels foreign on my tongue.
“Bangii-Agawaateyaa.”
I shudder, and not because of the rain. Bangii-Agawaateyaa. Little Shadow. The name he gave me when I was a child. The name I haven’t heard spoken since. I can’t begin to articulate how these words coming out of my father’s mouth after all these years make me feel. All of the anger and hatred and resentment I’ve been holding on to for more than a decade evaporate, ice on a woodstove. I feel like a part of me I didn’t even realize was broken is now whole. Memories wash over me: my father teaching me to track, to hunt, to snowshoe, to swim. How to sharpen my knife and skin a rabbit and button my shirt and tie my shoes. Naming the birds, the insects, the plants, the animals. Sharing the marsh’s endless secrets: a cluster of frog eggs floating on the still pond water beneath an overhanging branch, a fox den burrowed deep into the sand on the side of a hill.
Everything I know about the marsh that’s worth knowing, this man taught me.
I tighten my grip on the Ruger. “Toss your weapons.”
My father looks back for a long time before he flings the Glock into the bushes. He pulls a Bowie from inside his right boot and tosses the knife after the gun.
“Slowly,” I say as he reaches behind his back for the second handgun. If I were him and he was me, this is the moment I’d make my move. I’d whip out my weapon, shove it against Rambo’s head, and use my adversary’s weakness for her dog to disarm her.
My father brings the second Glock out from behind him slowly as I instructed. His arm goes back like he’s going to throw it, but instead of letting go when his arm reaches its apex, he drops to one knee and shoots.
Not at Rambo.
At me.
The bullet slams into my shoulder. For the briefest of moments, all I feel is shock. He shot me. Deliberately, and with no thought to the consequences except to take me down.
I didn’t beat him. I didn’t save my family. I didn’t win, because my father changed the rules of our game once again.
Then my shoulder explodes. Someone stuck a stick of dynamite inside of me and set it off. I was hit by a baseball bat and run through with a hot poker. I got run over by a bus. I clap my hand over the wound, fall to the ground, and writhe as the pain washes over me in waves. Blood gushes between my fingers. Grab the Ruger, my brain tells my hands. Shoot him like he shot you. My hands don’t answer.
My father climbs the ridge and stands beside me looking down. The Glock points at my chest.
How incredibly stupid I am. I thought I was being strategic when I shot the branch instead of him. How tragically the consequences of my decision are going to play out. The truth is I didn’t want to kill my father. I love him, even though he doesn’t love me. He used my love for him against me.
I hold my breath as I wait for my father to finish me off. He looks down for a long time, then sticks the Glock in the back of his jeans and kicks the Ruger down the other side of the ridge. He rolls me onto my back and pockets my Magnum. I don’t know how he knew I was carrying, but he did. He pulls a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket—no doubt the same cuffs he was wearing when he escaped from prison—and yanks my arms in front of me despite my wounded shoulder and snaps the cuffs over my wrists. My whole body shakes with the effort not to scream.
He takes a step back, breathing heavily.
“And that,” he says, looking down with a triumphant grin, “is how you beat someone at hunting and tracking.”
22
THE CABIN
Early in the autumn, the Viking again returned home laden with spoil, and bringing prisoners with him. Among them was a young Christian priest, one of those who contemned the gods of the north. In the deep stony cellars of the castle, the young Christian priest was immured, and his hands and feet tied together with strips of bark.
The Viking’s wife considered him as beautiful as Baldur, and his distress raised her pity; but Helga said he ought to have ropes fastened to his heels, and be tied to the tails of wild animals.
“I would let the dogs loose after him,” she said, “over the moor and across the heath. Hurrah! that would be a spectacle for the gods, and better still to follow in its course.”
But the Viking would not allow the young Christian priest to die such a death as that, especially as he was the disowned and despiser of the high gods. The Viking had decided to have him offered as a sacrifice on the blood-stone in the grove. For the first time, a man was to be sacrificed here.
Helga begged to be allowed to sprinkle the assembled people with the blood of the priest. She sharpened her glittering knife; and when one of the great, savage dogs, who were running about the Viking’s castle in large numbers, sprang towards her, she thrust the knife into his side, merely, as she said, to prove its sharpness.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
Someone is coming,” my mother said again as we stood together at the kitchen window, as if she couldn’t believe her own words unless she said them twice.
I was surprised as well. My father was always so careful about not drawing attention to our cabin: cutting firewood on the low end of our ridge so the sound of his chain saw didn’t carry; shooting the rifle only when necessary to get the venison we needed; never leaving the marsh to restock our supplies even though we were running out of things it would have been nice to have; hiding from that family so we wouldn’t accidentally lead them to our cabin; running practice drills so my mother and I would know what to do in case anyone showed up on our ridge. It was hard to believe that after all of that, someone had actually come.
I pressed my nose against the glass and watched the snowmobile’s headlight bob and weave toward us. It was too dark to make out details, but I knew what a snowmobile looked like. Or rather, I knew what a snowmobile looked like fifty years ago. I was still struggling to comprehend the enormity of my mother’s deception.
My mother shook her head slowly, like she was waking up from a long sleep. She yanked the curtains shut and grabbed my hand. “Quick. We have to hide.”
Hide where? I wanted to say. I knew this was what my father wanted. I also knew what he’d do to us if we didn’t follow his instructions. But it was too late to run out into the marsh and roll around in the muck to disguise ourselves, even if the marsh wasn’t frozen. Whoever was driving the snowmobile had already seen our cabin. They were coming straight toward us. There was a fire in our woodstove, smoke coming from our chimney, firewood in our woodshed, footprints in the snow. Inside, our coats were hanging by the door, our dishes were laid out on the table, the rabbit stew was bubbling away on our woodstove. And what about Rambo?
Rambo.
I grabbed my coat and ran out to the woodshed. Rambo was whining and pulling at his chain so hard, I was afraid he was going to choke. I unbuckled his collar and turned him loose, then crouched between a row of firewood and the shed wall to watch through the slats. The engine’s pitch changed as the snowmobile began climbing our ridge. Moments later it whipped past my line of sight in a cloud of snow and exhaust. I ran to the other side of the woodshed and climbed on top of the woodpile and crouched with my knife at the ready, the way my father taught me. The snowmobile stopped directly below me. The noise was so loud, my ears rang long after the driver turned the engine off.
“Hey, boy.” The driver whistled and patted his leg as Rambo barked and circled. I couldn’t see his face because he had on a helmet like the kind deep-sea divers wore—or rather, the kind of helmet a deep-sea diver used to wear—but I could tell it was a man by his voice. “Come ’ere, boy. Come on. It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.”
Rambo stopped barking and ran up wagging his tail and rested his chin on the man’s knee. The man pulled off one glove and scratched Rambo behind his ear. I wondered how he knew this was where my dog liked to be scratched.
“Good boy. What a good dog you are. Yes, you are. Yes, you are.” I’d never heard anyone talk so much to a dog.
The man nudged Rambo aside and climbed off the snowmobile. He wore thick black pants and a black jacket with a stripe down the sleeves in a shade of green I’d never seen. The snowmobile had the same colored stripe on the side with the words ARCTIC CAT written in white letters. He pulled off his helmet and left the helmet on the seat. The man had yellow hair like my mother and a big bushy beard like a Viking. He was taller than my father, and younger. His clothes made a rustling sound like dry leaves when he walked. I couldn’t imagine they’d be any good for hunting, but they looked warm.
The man climbed our porch steps and rapped his knuckles on the door. “Hello! Anybody home?” He waited, then hit the door again. I wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. “Hello!”
The cabin door opened and my mother came out. I couldn’t see her expression because the light was behind her. I could see that her hands were shaking.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” the man said, “but can I use your phone? I got separated from my group and lost the trail.”
“Our phone,” my mother said softly.
“If you don’t mind. My cell’s battery died.”
“You have a cell phone.” My mother giggled. I had no idea why.
“Um, yeah. Right. So if I could use yours to let my buddies know I’m all right, that’d be great. I’m John, by the way. John Laukkanen.” The man smiled and put out his hand.
My mother made a choking sound, then grabbed his hand like a drowning person grabbing a lifeline. She held on to his hand long after their hands stopped going up and down.
