The Marsh King's Daughter, page 23
We stopped in the doorway. The woodshed smelled as bad as a wendigo’s breath. Urine and feces; death and decay. The Hunter’s broken arm was swollen and black. His shirt was ripped and his chest was so caked with blood and pus, I could no longer read the words my father had written. His head hung to the side. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow and ragged.
I went inside. I wanted to thank The Hunter for what he did for my mother and me. For bringing us the snowmobile so we could leave the marsh, for giving me the opportunity to return my mother to her parents, for telling me the truth about my mother and father.
I said his name. Not the name my father called him, but his real name.
He didn’t answer.
I looked back toward the doorway. Cousteau and Calypso nodded. Calypso was crying.
I thought again about all of the things my father would do to The Hunter when he came back and discovered that my mother and I were gone. I took my knife from its sheath.
I remembered to stand to the side.
25
The rain has stopped. I’m trying to figure out if I can use this to my advantage. I realize that sounds desperate. That’s because I am. My father killed four men in twenty-four hours. Unless I figure out a way to stop him, my husband is going to be the fifth.
We’re less than a mile from my house. Just ahead is the beaver pond. Beyond that, the wetland, the grassy meadow that borders our property, and the chain-link fence surrounding our backyard that was supposed to keep my family safe and predators out.
I am in the lead. My father covers me with my Magnum from behind. The handguns he took from the dead prison guards are tucked in the waistband of his jeans. I’m walking as slowly as I can. It’s not nearly slow enough. I’ve run through my options a dozen times, which didn’t take long, because there aren’t many. I can’t use misdirection and lead my father away from my house, because my father knows exactly where to go. I can’t overpower him and grab one of the three handguns, because I’ve been cuffed and shot.
There’s only one option that could conceivably work. The deer trail we’re following hugs the edge of a high cliff. At the bottom is the creek that drains the beaver pond. As soon as we come to a place that’s relatively clear of trees, I’m going to throw myself off. It has to be a place with a steep slope where I will tumble all the way down so that when my father sees me lying motionless in the creek at the bottom, he’ll conclude I’m too injured to climb up or dead and go on without me.
Diving headfirst off a cliff and rolling down a hill with a wounded shoulder is going to hurt. A lot. But if I’m going to fool my father, the fall has to look real. Something big and dramatic. Something that involves genuine risk. Something where I might actually die. My father will never suspect a trick because he can’t imagine that anyone would be willing to sacrifice herself for her family.
The idea of my father continuing to my house while I play dead at the bottom of a cliff might sound counterintuitive, but it’s the only way I can think of to separate myself from him. The deer trail we’re following takes the long way around the wetland behind my house. The moment my father is out of sight, I’ll cross the creek and climb the slope on the opposite side, cut through the marshland below the beaver pond, circle back to the trail ahead of my father, set up my ambush, and do what I have to do. I don’t want to hurt my father, but he brought this on himself. He changed the rules of our game when he shot me. Now there are no rules.
If my father doesn’t continue on to my house and decides instead to follow me down the cliff intending to pull me out of the river and drag me up the hill and force me to keep going as his prisoner, I’ll be ready. I’ll lock my arms around his neck and choke him with the handcuffs; pull him into the creek with me and drown alongside him if that’s the only way to stop him.
But I’m betting it won’t come to that. I know how my father thinks. His narcissism is going to work now in my favor. A narcissist can alter his plan to allow for changing circumstances, but he can’t change his endgame. My father wants to possess my girls even more than he wants me. By leaving the marsh, I chose my mother over him. By choosing her, I disappointed him. Kidnapping my daughters gives him another chance. He can mold and shape and coerce them into the new and improved versions of the daughter who betrayed him. All of which means that my father will go after my girls with or without me.
I hope.
I stumble once to set the stage. Fall to my knees and put out my arms to catch myself even though I’m wearing handcuffs because that’s what a person who’s not thinking clearly would do. The pain that blasts through my shoulder when my hands hit the ground makes me gasp. I cry out, curl into a ball, stay still. I could have choked it down if I had to—my father trained me well when it comes to enduring pain—but I want him to think I’ve reached my limit and am ready to break.
He kicks me in the ribs and rolls me onto my back. “Get up.”
I don’t move.
“Get up.” He grabs me by the cuffs and hauls me to my feet. I cry out again. This time, the cry is real. I remember all of his past acts of cruelty: smashing my thumb to teach me to be more careful, torturing The Hunter for no reason other than that he could, handcuffing me in the woodshed when I was a toddler when he got tired of my following him around or asking questions. There’s no way I will ever let this man get near my husband or my daughters.
“Now walk.”
I walk, scanning the trail ahead for the best place to make my move. Every tree and rock calls up a memory. The boggy place where Iris picked a spring bouquet of trillium and mayflowers. The place where Mari turned over a rock and found a red-bellied salamander. The rocky outcropping where Stephen and I shared a bottle of wine on our first anniversary and watched the sun set over the beaver pond.
I stumble over a tree root. Twice is enough to establish a pattern. More than that and my father will become suspicious.
A break in the trees ahead looks promising. The slope is steeper than I’d like, a hundred feet to the bottom and close to sixty degrees, but it’s covered in bracken ferns and not scrub pine. I doubt I’ll find anything better.
I trip over nothing, then stumble toward the edge like I’m trying to stop myself from falling and throw myself over. Headfirst, because what person in her right mind would do such a thing?
My wounded shoulder slams into the ground. I bite my lip. Keep my arms and legs loose while I tumble down and down.
It takes longer than I expected to reach the bottom. At last I crash to a stop on a clump of branches the current pushed together, my face inches from the water, and stay still. I try not to think about how much I hurt as I listen for sounds of my father. Remind myself I’m doing this for my family.
All remains quiet. When my gut says I’ve waited long enough, I lift my head enough to scan the top of the cliff.
My plan worked. My father is gone.
—
I SIT UP. The pain that blasts through my shoulder makes me gasp. I fall back, close my eyes, try to breathe, sit up again more slowly. I unzip my jacket and slide it off my wounded shoulder. The good news is it looks like my father’s bullet only grazed the skin. The bad news is I’ve lost a lot of blood.
“Are you okay?”
Calypso is sitting on the creek bank beside her brother. They look exactly as I remember. Cousteau still wears his red watch cap. Calypso’s eyes are as blue as a summer day. They’re wearing work boots and overalls and flannel shirts because, I now realize, at the time I created them that was the only kind of clothing I knew. I remember how I used to make up stories about our adventures.
Cousteau stands up and holds out his hand. “Come on. You have to hurry. Your father is getting away.”
“You can do it,” Calypso says. “We’ll help you.”
I push myself to my feet and assess my surroundings. The creek isn’t wide, no more than twenty feet, but judging by the angle of the slopes on either side, the middle is deep, possibly over my head. If I weren’t wearing handcuffs, I could easily swim across, but as it is, I can’t even put out my arms for balance. “Helena Drowns Because She Can’t Swim While Wearing Handcuffs” is not a story I’d like to tell.
“This way.” Cousteau leads me down the stream to a fallen cedar that spans the creek. It’s a good idea. I step into the water on the upstream side of the log, bracing myself against the log to keep from being swept away. Broken branches and fallen leaves litter the bottom. The branches are slick. I take my time; place my feet carefully. The log shifts from my weight as I lean against it. I try not to think about what will happen if it breaks loose.
A flash of memory: My father and I were in his canoe. I was very small, perhaps two or three. As we came around a bend in the river, I leaned over the side to reach for a leaf or a branch or whatever it was that had caught my eye and tumbled out. I opened my mouth to yell and took in nothing but water. I remember looking up, seeing the sunlight refracted by the water above my head. Instinctively, I kicked, keeping my mouth closed, even though in no time it felt as though my lungs were going to burst.
Then my father grabbed my jacket. He lifted me out and pulled me into the canoe, then paddled quickly toward a sandbar. He beached the canoe, jumped out, and dragged the canoe onto the shore, then stripped me down and took off his shirt and rubbed me all over to warm me. When my teeth stopped chattering, he wrung the water out of my clothes and laid them out on the sand and held me on his lap and told me stories until my clothes dried.
This time, I’m on my own.
I keep going, one careful footstep after another, until at last I make it to the other side. When I climb up onto the creek bank and look up, the slope that looms over my head looks as daunting as Everest. I start climbing, working my way sideways up the loose limestone scree, hooking the handcuffs over a stump or a branch when I need to rest, pushing through the exhaustion and the pain, willing my body to function independently of my brain, looking for that trance state that long-distance runners use to keep going long after their bodies are screaming at them to stop.
All the while Cousteau and Calypso scamper ahead like monkeys. “You can do it,” they urge whenever I think I can’t.
At last I reach the top. I throw a leg over and roll onto my back, gasping. Catch my breath, and stand up. I look around expecting Cousteau and Calypso to congratulate me on my herculean effort, but I am alone.
26
THE CABIN
Helga knelt by the corpse of the Christian priest, and the carcass of the dead horse. She thought of the Viking’s wife in the wild moorland, of the gentle eyes of her foster-mother, and of the tears she had shed over the poor frog-child.
She looked at the glittering stars, and thought of the radiance that had shone forth on the forehead of the dead man, as she had fled with him over the woodland and moor.
It is said that rain-drops can make a hollow in the hardest stone, and the waves of the sea can smooth and round the rough edges of the rocks; so did the dew of mercy fall upon Helga, softening what was hard, and smoothing what was rough in her character.
These effects did not yet appear; she was not herself aware of them; neither does the seed in the lap of earth know, when the refreshing dew and the warm sunbeams fall upon it, that it contains within itself power by which it will flourish and bloom.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
I stepped out of the woodshed and headed for the cabin. My hands shook. I didn’t want to leave The Hunter hanging from the handcuffs. A corpse was supposed to be washed, groomed, dressed in fine clothing, and wrapped in birch bark before it was buried in the forest in a shallow grave. A priest or a medicine man was supposed to talk to the dead person to ease their passage from this world into the next, and offer tobacco to the spirits. I hoped my father would care for The Hunter according to Indian tradition and not throw his body in our garbage pit.
“Gas,” Cousteau said. “You need to fill the snowmobile with gas so you don’t run out.”
“He’s right,” Calypso said. “You don’t know how long The Hunter was driving before he came. The tank could be almost empty.”
I felt like I should have thought of this myself, but things were happening so fast, it was hard to know what to do. I was glad Cousteau and Calypso were there to help me. I pushed the snowmobile over to our gravity-feed gas tank. My father kept track of how much gas we had by dipping a long stick through a hole in the top of the tank and drawing a line on the outside to show how much gas was left. He wasn’t going to be happy that I took some without asking.
“Do you think this is the right kind?” I wished I’d thought to ask The Hunter while I had the chance.
“The snowmobile sounds like a chain saw,” Cousteau said. “Use the chain saw mix.”
My father cut the gas for his chain saw with a pint of oil for every two gallons, so I poured the oil in our big red metal can and topped it off with gas from the nozzle, then put as much of the mixture into the snowmobile as the tank would hold.
“Fill the can again,” Calypso said. “Tie it on the back, just in case. You never know.”
I ran to the utility shed for a piece of rope, ran back, tied the gas can in place, and pushed the snowmobile as close to the back steps as I could. Cousteau and Calypso waited on the porch while I went inside. My mother was still sitting at the table. Her head was resting on her arm and her eyes were closed. Her hair was straggly and wet. At first, I thought she was dead. Then she lifted her head. Her forehead was creased with pain and her face was white. She started to stand, swayed, sat back down. Getting her to the snowmobile was going to be harder than I thought.
I slung her good arm over my shoulder and hung on to her wrist, then slid my left arm around her waist and pulled her to her feet. Judging by the angle of the sun, it was almost noon. This time of year, it would be fully dark by the time we finished dinner. I hoped six hours would be enough.
I took a last look around our kitchen: at our table, the box stove, my father’s underwear drying on the lines above it, the pie cupboard where we kept our dishes because my mother never made pies, the shelves lined with jelly and jam. I thought about packing a rucksack with food for our journey, but Cousteau and Calypso shook their heads.
We started down the steps. I was afraid my mother would fall and I’d never be able to get her back up, so Cousteau and Calypso stood on either side to catch her if she did. It took a long time to get her to the snowmobile. As soon as she was seated on it I hurried around to the other side and swung her leg around.
“Do you think I should I tie her on?” My mother was so wobbly, she could barely sit.
“It can’t hurt,” Calypso said.
“But hurry,” Cousteau said.
As if I wasn’t already working as fast as I could.
I ran to the utility shed for another piece of rope, ran back, looped it around my mother’s waist, and tied the ends around the handles. I put on The Hunter’s helmet. It was very heavy. The glass was so dark I could hardly see. I took it off and put it on my mother instead, then went around to the back of the snowmobile and opened the compartment and found the extra key. The Hunter said the snowmobile had something called an electric start, and all I had to do was turn the key. He said if the engine didn’t start right away, which it might not because the snowmobile had been sitting for several days and the days and nights had been very cold, I should let go of the key quickly so I didn’t burn out the starter, then keep doing this until the engine turned over. I hoped it wouldn’t be as complicated as it sounded.
I squeezed between my mother and the gas can and reached around her to grab the handles. After two tries the engine roared to life. I leaned to the side so I could see past my mother and eased off the brake and opened the throttle. The machine leaped forward. I cut back on the throttle, and the machine slowed, just as The Hunter had said it would. I opened the throttle again, and the snowmobile jumped forward again. I drove slowly once around the yard to get a feel for the machine, then cut back the throttle and followed the trail The Hunter had left down the side of our ridge.
“Are you okay?” I shouted when I drove onto the marsh. My mother didn’t answer. I didn’t know if she couldn’t hear me because of the helmet or because the engine was so loud. There was another possibility as to why my mother didn’t answer, but I didn’t want to think about that.
I opened the throttle as far as it would go. The wind stung my cheeks, whipped my hair. The extraordinary speed made me want to shout. I glanced over my shoulder. Rambo ran easily behind. The gauge The Hunter had said would tell me how fast I was going pointed to the number twelve. I had no idea Rambo could run so fast.
I thought about my grandparents as I drove. I wondered what they would be like. The Hunter said they had never stopped looking for my mother and they would be excited to see her again. I wondered if I would like them. I wondered what they would think of me. If they had a car, what it would be like to go for a ride in it. If I would one day take a trip with them on a train, or on a bus, or in an airplane. I had always wanted to visit the Yanomami in Brazil.
Then something whizzed past my head. At the same time, a sharp crack echoed across the marsh.
“Helena!” my father shouted. His voice was so angry and sharp, I could hear him clearly over the noise of the machine. “Get back here right now!”
I slowed. In hindsight, I should have gunned the engine and never looked back, but I was not in the habit of disobeying my father.
“Keep going,” my mother said, suddenly alert. “Hurry! Don’t stop!”
I stopped, looked back. My father was silhouetted on the top of our ridge with his feet spread like a colossus: rifle at the ready, long black hair whipping around his head like the snakes of Medusa. The rifle was pointed at me.
