The Marsh King's Daughter, page 20
“I know who you are.” She glanced around the yard, then quickly pulled the man inside.
—
I STARED AT THE CABIN long after the door shut. More lies. More tricks. More deception. My mother knew this man. He came to see her while my father was gone. I didn’t know what the man and my mother were doing inside our cabin, but I knew it was wrong. I sheathed my knife and climbed down from the woodpile. The snowmobile crouched in our yard like a big black bear. I wanted to slap it on its rump and run it off. Call my father to come with his rifle and shoot it. I tiptoed across our back porch and peeked through a gap in the curtains. My mother and the man were standing in the middle of the kitchen. My mother was talking and waving her hands. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She looked scared and excited. She kept glancing at the door, like she was afraid my father would walk through at any second. I wished he would.
The man just looked scared. My mother kept talking and gesturing until, at last, he nodded. Slowly, like he didn’t want to do what my mother was asking him to do, but he had to, like I did when my father told me I had to help my mother make jelly. My mother laughed and stretched up on her toes and threw her arms around the man’s neck and kissed his cheek. The man’s cheeks turned red. My mother laid her head on his shoulder. Her shoulders shook. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying. After a moment the man put his arms around my mother and patted her on the back and held her close.
I sank down on my heels in the snow. My own cheeks burned. I knew what a kiss meant. A kiss meant you loved the person you were kissing. This was why my mother never kissed my father. I couldn’t believe my mother kissed this man, this stranger, after she brought him into our cabin while my father was away. I did know what my father would do to them if he was here. I took out my knife. Crept silently across the porch and flung open the door.
“Helena!” my mother cried. The man and my mother pulled apart as cold air swept the cabin. Her face was flushed. “I thought you were . . . Never mind. Hurry. Shut the door.”
I left the door open. “You have to leave,” I told the man as harshly as I could. “Now.” I waved my knife so he’d know I meant business. I’d use it if I had to.
The man backed away, put up his hands. “Whoa. Easy. Put the knife down. It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.” Talking to me like I was my dog.
I made my face as hard as my father’s and took a step closer. “You have to go. Now. Before my father comes back.”
My mother’s face turned white when I mentioned my father, as it should. I didn’t know what she was thinking when she brought this man into our cabin, how she thought this might end.
She sank down into a chair. “Helena, please. You don’t understand. This man is our friend.”
“‘Our friend’? Our friend? I saw you kiss him. I saw you.”
“You saw . . . Oh, Helena. No, no—I was only thanking John because he’s going to take us away. Put your knife down. We have to hurry.”
I looked at my mother—excited, hopeful, happy, like this was the best day of her life because this man showed up on our ridge. All I could think was that she was out of her mind. I knew she didn’t like living in the marsh, but did she really think she could leave now, in the cold and the dark? Get on the snowmobile behind this stranger and let him take her away without my father’s permission? I couldn’t imagine why she would think for a second that I would agree to this plan.
“Please, Helena. I know you’re scared—”
I most certainly was not.
“—and this is all very confusing.”
I was not a bit confused.
“But you have to trust me.”
Trust her? The magazine in my back pocket burned like an ember. After this, I would never trust my mother again.
“Helena, please. I’ll explain everything, I promise. But we have to hur—”
She broke off as my father’s footsteps clomped across the porch.
“What’s going on?” he roared as he burst into the room. He sized up the situation in an instant and swung his rifle between the man and my mother like he couldn’t decide which of them he should shoot first.
The man held up his hands. “Please. I don’t want any trouble—”
“Shut up! Sit down.”
The man fell into one of our kitchen chairs like he’d been pushed. “Look here, now. There’s no need for the gun. I just wanted to use your phone. I got lost. Your—um, wife let me in, and—”
“I said shut up.” My father spun on his heel and smashed the rifle butt into the man’s gut. The man gasped and toppled off the chair and rolled around on the floor, moaning and clutching his stomach.
“No!” my mother screamed, and covered her face.
My father handed me the rifle. “If he moves, shoot him.” He stood over my mother and drew back his fist. The man scrambled to his knees, crawled toward my father, grabbed my father’s ankle. I knew I should shoot. I didn’t want to pull the trigger.
“Leave her alone!” the man cried. “I know who you are. I know what you did.”
My father froze, whirled around. There was an article in one of the Geographics that described a person’s face as being “black with rage.” My father looked like that now. Angry enough to kill us all.
He roared like a wounded black bear, advanced on the man, kicked him in his kidney. The man cried out and fell facedown on the floor. My father grabbed the man’s left wrist and planted his foot on the man’s elbow, then twisted the man’s arm higher and higher behind his back until the bone snapped. The man’s scream filled the cabin, mixed with my mother’s, my own.
My father grabbed the man by his broken arm and yanked him to his feet. The man screamed again. “Please! No! Oh, God—no! Stop! Please!” he yelled as my father marched him across the yard to the woodshed. My mother sobbed. My hands shook. I looked down and realized I was still holding the rifle. The rifle was pointed at my mother. My mother was looking at me like she thought I was going to shoot her. I didn’t tell her the safety was on.
My father came back into the cabin. His jacket was bloody and his knuckles were red. He took the rifle from my shaking hands and locked it in the storage room. I waited in the kitchen with my mother. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do.
When he came back his expression was calm, like nothing had happened, like this was an ordinary day and he didn’t just break the arm of the first person to show up on our ridge. This could have meant one of two things: his anger was spent or he was just getting started.
“Go to your room, Helena.”
I ran up the stairs. Behind me I heard the sound of a fist hitting flesh. My mother screamed. I shut the door.
—
LONG AFTER the cabin was quiet, I lay on my bed with my arms behind my head and stared at the ceiling. Memories crowded out my dreams.
My father and I were swimming in the beaver pond. He was teaching me how to float on my back. The sun was warm and the water was cold. I lay on my back on top of the water with my arms straight out to the sides. My father stood beside me. The water came up to his waist. My father’s hands were beneath my back holding me up, though I could hardly feel them. “Legs up,” he said when my feet started to droop. “Stomach out. Arch your back.” I pushed my stomach out and curled my shoulders back as far as they would go. My face dipped under the water. I sputtered, started to sink. My father caught me, lifted me up. I tried again. Later, after I learned to float, it was so easy, it was hard to remember a time when I didn’t know how.
My father was helping me bait my fishhook. The hook was very sharp. The first time I picked up a fishhook from my father’s tackle box, it got stuck in my thumb. It hurt, but not as much as when my father pulled it out. After that I was careful to hold the hook only by the loop at the top. Our bait can was full of worms. We dug the worms from the wet soil at the low end of our ridge. I fished through the dirt in the can and took one out. The worm was slippery and wet. My father showed me how to slide the hook into the middle of the worm and loop the worm around the hook and stick it again through its tail and head. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said when I asked how the worm felt about this. “Worms can’t feel anything.” If this was true, I asked, then why did the worm twist and wiggle? My father smiled. He said it was good that I was learning to think for myself and patted my head.
My father and I were sitting in the sweat lodge. My father was once again telling the story about the time he fell into the bear’s den. This time I noticed that whenever my father told the story, he changed the details to make the story more exciting. The hole was deeper, my father fell farther, it was harder for him to climb out, the bear started to wake up when my father landed on its back, the cub’s neck was broken. I could see that while it was important to always tell the truth, when you were telling a story, it was okay to change the facts to make the story more interesting. I hoped when I grew up, I would be as good a storyteller as he was.
I got up and crossed the room to the window and looked out over the moonlit yard. Rambo was moving around in the utility shed. The snowmobile was beneath me. The man in the woodshed was quiet.
I had loved my father when I was little. I still did. Cousteau and Calypso said my father was a bad man. I know they cared about me, but I couldn’t believe that this was true.
—
IN THE MORNING my father cooked breakfast while my mother stayed in bed. The oat cereal he fixed was bland and tasteless. It was hard to believe that yesterday the thing I was most concerned about was not having salt. All I could think about now was my mother’s betrayal. Not only the lie she told about the Geographics, but the way she betrayed my father. I knew he beat her for bringing the man into our cabin and this was why she was still in bed. I didn’t like when my father beat my mother, but there were times like now when she deserved it. My father said that because my mother was alone in our cabin with another man, this meant my mother had committed something called adultery, and when an Ojibwa woman commits adultery, her husband had the right to mutilate her or even kill her as he saw fit. My mother wasn’t Native American, but because she was my father’s wife she had to live by his rules. I knew she deserved to be punished, but even so, I was glad I didn’t tell my father I saw her kiss the man.
I scrubbed out our cereal bowls and cooking pot with cold water and a handful of sand and carried a mug of hot chicory to the man in the woodshed as my father instructed. The morning was sunny and bright. The snowmobile looked bigger in the daylight, shiny and black and as sparkly as a fresh snowfall, with a windshield the color of wood smoke and that extraordinary green stripe. It was nothing like the pictures in the Geographics. I left the mug on the porch step and picked up the helmet. It was heavier than I’d expected, with a piece of dark curved glass in front shaped like a shield. Inside the padding was thick and soft. I put on the helmet and sat down on the seat with my legs on either side the way the man did and pretended I was driving. I used to wish we had a snowmobile. If we’d had a snowmobile, we could have checked our ice-fishing lines in half the time it took to snowshoe from hole to hole. I asked my father once if we could trade some of his furs to get one. That led to a long lecture about how Indian ways were better than white men’s inventions, and faster wasn’t always better. But I thought that if our people had had snowmobiles back in the day, they would have used them.
I climbed off the snowmobile and picked up the mug and crossed the yard to the woodshed. The chicory was no longer steaming. The man was handcuffed to the post in the corner. His hair was bloody and his face was swollen. His jacket and pants were gone. He was wearing white thermal underwear like my father and I wore in the winter and nothing else. His feet were pushed into the woodchips and sawdust to keep them warm, though I could see his toes sticking out. His arms were handcuffed above his head. His eyes were closed and his beard rested on his chest. He didn’t look much like a Viking now.
I stopped in the doorway. I wasn’t sure why. This was my woodshed, my cabin, my ridge. I had every right to be here. This man was the one who didn’t belong. I think I was afraid to go in because I didn’t want to be alone with this man and possibly commit adultery. My father was the one who told me to bring the man a cup of chicory, but adultery was a new concept. I wasn’t sure how it worked.
“Are you thirsty?” An obvious question, but I didn’t know what else to say.
The man cracked open one eye. The other was swollen shut. My father often told me that if I was ever in a situation where I had to take someone captive, no matter how badly I had to beat them, I should always make sure they had one good eye so they could see me coming and anticipate what I might do so I wouldn’t lose my psychological edge. When the man saw me standing in the doorway, he scrambled as far away as the handcuffs would let him, so I could see that what my father said was true.
“I brought you something to drink.” I knelt in the sawdust and held the cup to his lips, then took out the biscuit I’d hidden in my coat pocket and broke it into pieces and fed it to him. The feel of his whiskers on my fingers and his breath against my skin made me shiver. I’d never been this close to a man who was not my father. I thought again about adultery and brushed away the crumbs that fell on the man’s chest.
The man looked better when he finished, though not by much. A cut over his eye was bleeding, and the left side of his face was swollen and purple from where my father had hit him. The broken arm stretched over his head was going to be a problem. I’d seen animals die from less.
“Is your mother all right?” he asked.
“She’s okay.” I didn’t tell him that my mother’s left arm was similarly broken. “A matched pair,” my father said that morning when he told me how last night he’d twisted my mother’s arm behind her back the same as he did to the man.
“Your father is crazy.” The man jutted out his chin to indicate the woodshed, the handcuffs, his lack of clothing.
I didn’t like when he said this. This man didn’t know my father. He had no right to say bad things about him.
“You shouldn’t have come,” I said coldly. “You should have left us alone.” Suddenly, I had to know. “How did you find us?” The question didn’t come out the way I meant it. It sounded like I thought we were lost.
“I was riding trail with a couple of my buddies and took a wrong turn. We’d been drinking,” he said, as if this was some kind of explanation. “Whiskey. Beer. Never mind. I drove a long time looking for a trail marker. Then I saw the smoke from your cabin. I didn’t know that this cabin . . . that your mother . . .”
“What about my mother?” I didn’t care how badly this man was hurt. If he said he came here because he was in love with my mother, I was going to hit him on his broken arm.
“I didn’t know that your mother has been here all along. That after all these years, someone had finally found her, and that your father . . .” He stopped and looked strangely at me. “My God. You don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“That your mother . . . your father—”
“What about me?” my father demanded.
The man shrank back as my father’s shadow filled the doorway. He closed his good eye and started to whimper.
“Go inside, Helena,” my father said. “Your mother needs you.”
I grabbed the empty mug and jumped to my feet and ran past my father to the cabin. I rinsed the cup and put it in our dry sink, then stood at the kitchen window for a long time, watching through the slats in the woodshed as my father punched and kicked the man while the man screamed and yelled. I wondered what the man was going to tell me.
23
My shoulder throbs. I have no idea how badly I’m wounded. It’s possible the bullet only grazed my shoulder and a couple of stitches will put me to rights. It’s just as possible the wound is much worse. If the bullet hit an artery, I’m going to bleed out. If it hit one of the major nerves, I could lose the use of my arm. For now, all I know is that it hurts. A lot.
If this was your typical accidental shooting, I’d be riding in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital while medics worked to stabilize me instead of sitting on the ground with my back against a tree. Doors would fly open when we arrived, orderlies would rush out and roll me inside. Doctors would treat the wound, give me something to stop the pain.
But this shooting was no accident.
After my father shot and handcuffed me, he dragged me by my shoulders to a large red pine and pulled me up and propped me against it. I don’t even want to try to describe how that felt.
Rambo is gone. I think I yelled “Home!” when my father charged up the hill to disarm me, but it’s hard to know if I actually shouted the command or only thought it. Those first few seconds after my father shot me are a blur.
I blink. Force my thoughts away from the pain. Try to stay focused. What a fool I was to think that my father would surrender. I should have killed him when I had the chance. Next time, I will.
My father is sitting on the ground with his back against a log. My Magnum is in his hand. My knife hangs from my belt at his waist. My cell phone is dead, and I’m not talking about the battery. After my father found the iPhone Stephen gave me for our last anniversary, he tossed it into the air and shot it.
My father is relaxed, completely at ease—and why shouldn’t he be? He has every advantage, and I have none.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he says. “You made me do it.”
Typical narcissist. No matter what happens, it’s always the other person’s fault.
“You shouldn’t have left,” he goes on when I don’t answer. “You ruined everything.”
