The Marsh King's Daughter, page 21
I’d like to point out that I wasn’t to blame for the way our lives fell apart. If my father was capable of the smallest logic, I’d tell him that the life he imagined was always unattainable, that his delusion that he could create a life in the marsh according to his wants and preferences ended the moment I was conceived. I was the chink in his armor, his Achilles’ heel. My father raised me and shaped me into a version of himself, but in so doing he sowed the seeds of his own demise. My father could control my mother. He could never control me.
“She’s dead,” I say. “Mother.”
I don’t know why I’m telling him this. I can’t even say for sure how my mother died. All I know is what I read in the papers: that she died unexpectedly at her home. It seemed an appropriate place for her to pass away. When I lived at my grandparents’, those four pink bedroom walls plastered with butterflies and rainbows and unicorns all but smothered me. Whenever the noise and the turmoil of the world beyond the marsh got too much for me, I had to go outside. As long as I could look up and see the trees moving, I was okay. My mother was the opposite. Looking back, I think the reason she spent so much time in her room after we left the marsh is that it was the last place she’d felt safe.
My father snorts. “Your mother was a disappointment. I often wished I’d taken the other one.”
“The other one”? The other girl she was playing with that day? It guts me to hear him speak so dispassionately of my mother’s abduction. I think about the day he kidnapped her, how she fell for his story about the dog, how terrified she must have been when she realized my father meant to harm her. There had to have been a point when she was helping him look for his nonexistent dog when she realized he wasn’t telling the truth. I should go home now, she would have said. Probably more than once. My parents will be looking for me. Tentatively, like she was asking permission, because back then little girls weren’t taught to be assertive like they are now. Maybe my father promised to get her an ice cream if she’d help him look a little longer. Maybe he tempted her with a ride in his canoe. My father can be convincing when it suits his purpose.
Whatever my mother was thinking or feeling, the moment she got into his canoe, she was done for. For the first few miles east of Newberry, the Tahquamenon River cuts through hardwoods and is relatively narrow. Maybe my mother thought about jumping over the side and swimming to shore once she realized she was in trouble. Maybe she held her breath each time they came around a bend, thinking they’d pass by a fisherman or a family and she could yell for help. But as soon as the river opened out into the marshland, she had to have known it was over. I think the marsh is beautiful, but to my mother the endless waving grasses must have looked as desolate as the moon. Did she realize then that there was no dog? That my father had tricked her? That she would never see her girlfriend, her house, her room, her clothes, her toys, books, and movies, or her parents ever again? Did she cry? Scream? Fight? Or did she slip into the fugue state that was her refuge for the next fourteen years? My mother never shared the details of that day, so I can only guess.
“You planned this from the beginning,” I say as understanding dawns. “You attacked the guards in the Seney Stretch because you knew I’d come looking for you if you escaped close to my home. You’ve taken me hostage because you want me to drive you to Canada and leave you there.” Of course there’s the matter of the four flat tires on my truck, but I’m sure my father has planned a way to get around that.
He smiles. It’s the same smile he used to get when he was teaching me to track. Not when I’d gotten it right. When I’d gotten it wrong.
“Almost. You’re not leaving me at the border, Bangii-Agawaateyaa. You’re coming with me. We’re going to be a family. You. Me. Your girls.”
Time slows to a crawl as this settles in. My father has to know I will never willingly fetch my girls and go away with him, even if I were physically able to form words and sentences to tell him. I’ll die first, and gladly. I can’t believe I wanted to see him again. That I ever loved this man. A man who murders as easily as he draws a breath. Who thinks that because he wants a thing, he should have it. My mother. Our cabin. My girls.
“Yes, your girls,” he says, as if he can see straight inside my head. “Surely you didn’t think we’d leave without them?”
We? But there is no we. This is entirely about him. It always has been. I think about how my mother and I did everything according to my father’s preferences without realizing this was what we were doing—eating what and when he said we could, wearing what he told us to, getting up and going to bed at the times that he decreed. I’ll never subject Mari and Iris to that kind of control. And what about Stephen? Where does my father think my husband will be in all of this? Stephen would go to the ends of the Earth to track down his daughters. Any normal parent would. There’s no way this can end except badly.
Then there is the fact that my father knows I have two daughters. He’s been in prison for thirteen years, and we’ve had no contact during that time. I’m not one of those parents who chronicle their kids’ lives online, and even if I did, prisoners can’t access the Internet. I keep a low profile, don’t do anything that will put me in the public eye for reasons that should be obvious by now to anyone who knows my history. I make my living selling homemade jam and jelly, for God’s sake. And yet somehow, my father knows about my family.
Or does he?
“What makes you think I have children?”
My father reaches into the dead man’s jacket and pulls out a dog-eared copy of Traverse magazine. I recognize the cover. My heart sinks. He tosses the magazine at my feet. The magazine falls open to the photograph of me and Stephen and the girls standing in front of the old lightning-scarred maple beside our driveway. The tree is distinctive—especially if it’s standing beside the driveway of the homestead where you grew up. The article doesn’t name my girls, doesn’t have to. The picture told my father everything he needed to know.
Stephen was so proud when the piece ran. He set up the interview a couple of years ago after the economy went bust and gas prices went up and tourism fell off and jam sales were slow. Seeing my name and picture in a magazine was just about the last thing I wanted, but I couldn’t think of a reason to tell Stephen no without telling him the truth. He said the publicity would boost my online sales, and he was right about that—after the article ran I started getting orders from transplanted Michiganders from as far away as Florida and California.
I honestly thought I’d covered my tracks well enough that the article wouldn’t be a problem. Maybe that sounds naive, but it’s easier to reinvent yourself in the U.P. than you might think. The towns may be only thirty to fifty miles apart, but each is like its own separate world. Folks keep to themselves—not only because the people who live in the U.P. are naturally independent and self-reliant, but because they have to. When you have to drive fifty miles to go to a Kmart or see a movie, you learn to be content with what’s around you.
Everyone knew all about The Marsh King and his daughter. But by the time I moved from Newberry to Grand Marais, I didn’t look anything like the twelve-year-old wild child in the newspaper pictures. I’d grown up, cut my hair, dyed it blonde, changed my last name. I even wore makeup when I was in public to hide my tattoos. As far as anybody knew, I was just the woman who bought the old Holbrook place, and that was fine by me.
If I’d had any idea that a copy of the magazine would one day find its way into the prison library and my father’s cell, I never would have agreed to do the piece. In the photo my girls’ faces are smudged. How many times did my father run his fingers over their pictures as he plotted and dreamed? The idea of his playing doting grandfather to my daughters . . . playing with them, tickling them, telling them stories . . . I simply can’t conceive of it.
“Tell me, do your girls help you make jelly and jam?” He leans in close and presses the Magnum against my chest. I can smell the bacon the old man was cooking for his breakfast on my father’s breath. “You thought you could hide from me? Change your name? Deny I’m your father? You’re living on my land, Helena. Did you really think I wouldn’t find you?”
“Don’t hurt them. I’ll do anything you want as long as it doesn’t involve my family.”
“You’re not in a position to make demands, Little Shadow.”
There’s no warmth when he says my pet name, no twinkle in his eyes. Maybe the charm I remember from my childhood has been snuffed out by the years in prison. Maybe it was never there. Memories can be tricky, especially those from childhood. Iris will tell a story with absolute conviction about something she thinks happened, even though I know it isn’t true. Maybe the man I remember never existed. Maybe the things I think happened never did.
“You won’t get away with this,” I can’t stop myself from saying.
He laughs. It’s not a pleasant sound. “You can get away with anything. You of all people should know that.”
I flash back to my last day in the marsh. I’m afraid that this is true.
He waves the Magnum in the direction of my house and stands up. “Time to go.”
I push myself to my feet using the tree as balance. I start walking. Father and daughter, together again.
24
THE CABIN
But there was one time of the day which placed a check upon Helga. It was the evening twilight; when this hour arrived she became quiet and thoughtful, and allowed herself to be advised and led; then also a secret feeling seemed to draw her towards her mother.
The Viking’s wife took her on her lap, and forgot the ugly form, as she looked into the mournful eyes. “I could wish that thou wouldst always remain my dumb frog child, for thou art too terrible when thou art clothed in a form of beauty. Never once to my lord and husband has a word passed my lips of what I have to suffer through you; my heart is full of grief about you.”
Then the miserable form trembled; it was as if these words had touched an invisible bond between body and soul, for great tears stood in the eyes.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
I thought about the man in the woodshed all the rest of that day. I wondered what he was going to tell me about my father and mother that I didn’t know. It must have been important, because my father beat the man for almost telling. I wanted to sneak out to the woodshed many times to ask him, but my father stayed close to the cabin, hauling water and splitting firewood and sharpening his chain saw, so I couldn’t.
I spent the entire day inside. It was without a doubt the longest, dullest, least exciting, and most boring day of my life. Worse than the day my father made me help my mother make jelly. I didn’t want to take care of my mother, though I was sorry about her broken arm. I wanted to run the snare line, check our ice-fishing holes, tag along with my father when he went to shoot our spring deer even though I was mad at him for breaking my mother’s arm—anything but stay inside. It felt like I was being punished, and I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Even so, I did everything my father and mother told me, and I did it cheerfully and without complaining in the hope that this would make everyone happy again and things would go back to normal. I washed the dishes, swept the floors, chopped a frozen chunk of venison into pieces with the hatchet and put it on the stove to boil as my mother instructed. I brought her a cup of yarrow tea every time she asked, and I brought her a bowl of leftover rabbit soup for lunch. I helped her sit up to drink and eat, and I fetched a pot from the kitchen for her to pee in and emptied the pot in the outhouse when she was done. My father said that yarrow tea would help stop the bleeding, though it didn’t seem to be working. The sling he made for her broken arm from one of our kitchen towels was stained and crusty. So were the sheets. I would have washed them if I could.
I honestly didn’t realize how much work she did until I had to do everything myself. I was standing on a step stool leaning over the woodstove, trying to decide if the venison I was cooking for dinner was ready to eat (“Stick a fork in the meat and pretend the fork is an extension of your teeth,” my mother said when I asked how I was supposed to know when the meat was done), when my father opened the back door and stuck his head inside.
“Come,” he said.
I moved the pot to the back of the stove and put on my winter gear gladly. It was almost dark. The day had been sunny and bright, but now the clouds were rolling in and the temperature was dropping and the wind was kicking up like it was going to snow. I breathed deeply in the frosty air. I felt like a prisoner who’d been let out of jail, or a zoo animal that had been released into the wild after a lifetime in captivity. As I followed my father across the yard, it was all I could do to keep from jumping.
My father carried his favorite knife in his hand, a seven-inch KA-BAR with a carbon steel blade and a leather-wrapped handle, like U.S. Marines used during World War II, though he got his when he was in the Army. The KA-BAR is an excellent combat knife, useful for opening cans and digging trenches and cutting wood or wire or cable as well as fighting hand to hand, though I preferred my Bowie.
Then I saw that we were going to the woodshed. The scars on my forearm tingled. I didn’t know what my father was planning to do to the man, but I could guess.
The man scrambled back as far as the handcuffs would let him when we went inside. My father squatted on his heels in front of the man and tossed his knife from hand to hand, letting the man get a good long look while he smiled as if he knew what he was going to do but he couldn’t make up his mind where to start. He stared at the man’s face for a long time, then let his gaze trail slowly down the man’s chest to his groin. The man looked like he was going to throw up. Even I felt queasy.
Suddenly my father grabbed the man’s shirt and stuck his knife through the fabric. He sliced the shirt open all the way from the neck to the man’s waist, then touched the tip of the knife to the man’s chest. The man squeaked with fear. My father pressed harder. The knife pierced the skin. The man yelped. When my father began cutting letters into the man’s chest, the man screamed.
My father worked on the man’s tattoos for a long time. This is what my father called them, though the words he cut into the man’s chest didn’t look much like tattoos to me.
My father stopped when the man passed out. He stood up and went outside and cleaned his hands and knife in the snow. As we walked back to the cabin, my head was dizzy and my knees were weak.
When I told my mother about the man’s tattoos, she pulled up her shirt and showed me the words my father had written on her: Slut. Whore. I didn’t know what the words meant, but she said that they were bad.
—
THE NEXT MORNING my father went into the marsh to shoot our spring deer without first torturing the man in the woodshed. He said we needed the meat more than ever now that we had one more mouth to feed. But my father wasn’t giving him anything to eat. Plus, we had enough vegetables in the root cellar to last until the ducks and geese came back, in addition to the cans and other food supplies in the storage room.
I thought my father was only pretending to go hunting, that he was really hiding somewhere close by to keep an eye on me to see if I would do as I was told when he was away. I was in charge of the man while he was gone. I was supposed to give him one cup of hot chicory in the morning and another at night, and nothing else. I didn’t see how he could survive drinking only chicory. My father said that was the point.
My father called the man The Hunter, though I knew his name was John. My mother told me The Hunter’s last name was spelled like it was pronounced, Lauk-ka-nen, with all of the syllables accented the same. I had to say it twice before I got it right. She said that Finnish last names might look like they were hard to pronounce because of all the double consonants and vowels, but they’re really not. Unlike English where some letters are silent, like the b in dumb or the w in sword, Finnish is written almost exactly like it’s spoken.
My mother said that she and The Hunter grew up in the same town, in a place called Newberry, and that she went to school with his youngest brother before my father brought her to the marsh. She said she used to have a crush on The Hunter’s youngest brother, though she never told him. I thought about the boy in the ’Teen magazine with three names, Neil Patrick Harris, who my mother also wanted to crush. It seemed a strange thing to do to a person.
My mother told me her last name was Harju, which was also Finnish, which I did not know. She said her grandparents moved from Finland to Michigan not long after they were married to work in the copper mines. I knew from the maps in the Geographics that Finland was sometimes included as part of Scandinavia along with Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and that the Scandinavians were descended from the Vikings. This meant my mother was a Viking, and so was I, which made me very happy.
I couldn’t remember the last time my mother talked this much. I now knew her last name, though I realized suddenly that I did not know mine. Perhaps I didn’t have one, in which case I decided I would like to be called “Helena the Brave.” I knew the name of the town where my mother grew up. I knew my mother was a Viking, and that I was a Viking, too. I would have liked to learn more, but my mother said she was tired of talking and closed her eyes.
I put on my jacket and went out to the woodshed. I was hoping The Hunter would tell me more about the town where he and my mother grew up. I wondered if other Vikings lived there. I also wondered what it was about my mother and father that I didn’t know.
The woodshed smelled very bad. The cuts on The Hunter’s chest were swollen and red. His chest was smeared with brown, like my father filled The Hunter’s tattoos with excrement instead of soot.
“Help me,” The Hunter whispered. At first I thought he was whispering because he was afraid my father would hear. Then I saw the dark bruise on his throat. I understood now why last night, The Hunter had suddenly stopped screaming. “Please. I have to get out of here. Get the handcuff key. Help me.”
