The Marsh King's Daughter, page 5
My father bought two of everything I’d need in every size from infant to adult. One to wash and one to wear, my mother later told me. Boy clothes, because they’d work no matter which sex I turned out to be, and what use would I have at the cabin for a dress? Much later, after the police cleared the crime scene and reporters swarmed our ridge, someone took a picture of the row of shoes lined up in graduated sizes along my bedroom wall. I’m told the picture trended on Twitter and Facebook. People seemed to see the photo as a commentary on my father’s evil nature, photographic proof that he intended to keep my mother and me prisoners for life. To me, the shoes just marked my growth the same way other people measure their kids against a wall.
In addition, my father bought my mother two long-sleeved shirts, two short-sleeved T-shirts, two pairs of shorts, two pairs of jeans, six pairs of underwear and a bigger bra, a flannel nightgown, and a hat, scarf, mittens, boots, and winter jacket. My father snatched my mother on the tenth of August; the only coat she’d worn the previous winter was his. My mother told me he didn’t ask what colors she liked or whether she wanted a scarf that was solid or striped; he simply picked out everything for her. I can believe that, as my father liked to be in control.
Even at Kmart prices, the trip must have cost a fortune. I have no idea where he got the money. It’s possible he sold some beaver skins. Possibly he shot a wolf. Wolf hunting was illegal in the Upper Peninsula when I was a child, but there was always a thriving market for skins, especially among Native Americans. He may have stolen the money, or he could have used a credit card. There was a lot about my father I didn’t know.
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I’VE THOUGHT a lot about the day I was born. I’ve read accounts of girls who were kidnapped and held captive, and they helped me understand some of what my mother went through.
She should have been in school, crushing on a boy or hanging with her girlfriends. Going to band practice and football games and whatever else kids her age were doing. Instead, she was about to have a baby with no one to help except the man who took her from her family and raped her more times than she could count.
My mother labored on the old wood-spindled bed in my parents’ bedroom. Covering the bed were the thinnest sheets my father could find; he knew by the time I arrived, he would have to throw everything away. My father was as solicitous in my mother’s most difficult moment as he was capable of being, which meant that occasionally he offered her something to eat or brought her a glass of water. Aside from that, my mother was on her own. It wasn’t cruelty on my father’s part, though he can be cruel. It was just that until it was time for her to give birth, there wasn’t a lot he could do.
At last my head crowned. I was a big baby. My mother tore enough to let me out, and it was over. Except it wasn’t. One minute passed. Five. Ten. My father realized they had a problem. My mother’s placenta had not detached. I don’t know how he knew this, but he did. My father told her to hang on to the spindles in the headboard and to get ready, because it was going to hurt. My mother told me she couldn’t imagine anything hurting worse than what she’d gone through, but my father was right. My mother passed out.
She also said my father damaged her when he reached inside to work the placenta loose, and that’s why she never had more children. I wouldn’t know. I don’t have brothers and sisters, so this could be true. I do know that when the placenta doesn’t detach, you have to act quickly if you’re going to save the mother, and you don’t have a lot of options. Especially when doctors and hospitals are out of the picture.
During the days that followed, my mother was out of her mind with fever as the inevitable infection took hold. My father kept me quiet with a rag soaked in sugar water between the times he laid me at my mother’s breast. Sometimes my mother was conscious. Most of the time she was not. Whenever she was awake, my father made her drink willow bark tea, and that broke her fever.
I can see now that the reason my mother was indifferent toward me is because she never bonded with me. She was too young, too sick in the days immediately after I was born, too scared and lonely and collapsed in on herself from her own pain and misery to see me. Sometimes when a baby is born in similar circumstances, she gives her mother a reason to keep going. This wasn’t true of me. Thank God I had my father.
6
Ifetch my rucksack from the hall closet and pack it with extra ammunition and a couple of granola bars and bottles of water, then toss my father’s fishing gear in the back of my pickup along with my tent and sleeping bag. The camping and fishing equipment will provide decent cover if anyone questions where I’m going or what I’m doing. I won’t be anywhere near the search area, but you never know. A lot of people are looking for my father.
I load my rifle and hang it on the rack over the cab window. Technically you’re not supposed to drive with a loaded weapon in your vehicle, but everybody does it. Regardless, I’m not about to join the hunt for my father without it. My weapon of choice these days is a Ruger American. I’ve shot at least a half-dozen Rugers over the years; they’re ridiculously accurate and they sell for a lot less than the competition. For bear, I also carry a .44 Magnum. An adult black bear is a tough animal with thick muscles and bones, and not many hunters can bring down a black bear with a single shot. A wounded bear doesn’t bleed out the way a deer does, either. Bear bleed between their layer of fat and fur, and if the caliber is too small, the bear’s fat can plug the hole while their fur soaks up the blood like a sponge, so the bear won’t even leave a blood trail. An injured bear will run till it’s too weak to keep going, which can be as far as fifteen or twenty miles. Another reason I only hunt bear with dogs.
I load the Magnum and put it in the glove box. My heart hammers and my palms are wet. I get nervous before any hunt, but we’re talking about my father. The man I loved as a child. Who took care of me for twelve years in the best way he knew. The father I haven’t spoken to in fifteen years. The man I escaped from so long ago but whose own escape just destroyed my family.
I’m too wired to sleep, so I pour a glass of wine and carry it into the living room. I set the glass on the coffee table without the requisite coaster and slouch into a corner of the sofa, put my feet on the table. Stephen has a fit when the girls put their feet on the furniture. My father, on the other hand, wouldn’t have cared about anything as inconsequential as scuffs on a table. I’ve heard it said that when it comes to picking a husband, a girl chooses a man like her father—but if this is the rule, I’m the exception. Stephen’s not from the Upper Peninsula. He doesn’t fish or hunt. He could no more break out of prison than he could drive a race car or perform brain surgery. At the time I married him, I thought I was choosing wisely. Most of the time I still do.
I drain the glass in one long swallow. The last time I messed up on this scale was when I left the marsh. I knew two weeks after my mother and I were recovered that the new life I’d envisioned for myself wasn’t going to work out as I’d hoped. I blame the media. I don’t think anyone can grasp the magnitude of the news feeding frenzy that nearly swallowed me whole unless they were at the center of it. The world was riveted by what had happened to my mother, but the person it couldn’t get enough of was me. The wild child who grew up in primitive isolation. The offspring of the innocent and her captor. The Marsh King’s daughter. People I didn’t know sent me things I didn’t want: bicycles and stuffed animals and MP3 players and laptops. One anonymous donor offered to pay for my college education.
It didn’t take my grandparents long to realize that the family tragedy had turned into a gold mine, and they were more than ready to cash in. “Don’t talk to the media,” they admonished my mother and me, meaning the hordes of reporters who left messages on my grandparents’ answering machine and camped out in news vans across the street. If we kept quiet, I gathered, one day we could sell our story for a lot of money. I wasn’t sure how long we weren’t supposed to talk, or how stories were bought and sold, or even why we’d want a lot of money in the first place. But if this was what my grandparents wanted, I’d do as they asked. Back then I was still eager to please.
People magazine turned out to be the highest bidder. To this day I don’t know what they paid. Certainly my mother and I never saw any money from the sale. All I know is that right before it was time to leave for the big welcome-home party my grandparents threw for my mother and me, my grandfather sat us down and told us that a reporter from People magazine was going to interview us at the party while a photographer took pictures, and we should tell her whatever she wanted to know.
The party was held at the Pentland Township Hall. Judging by the name I imagined something on the order of a Viking keep: high vaulted ceilings, thick stone walls, slitted windows, straw-covered floor. I pictured chickens and dogs and goats wandering about, a milk cow tied to an iron ring in the corner, a wooden table running the length of the room for the peasants, and private rooms upstairs for the lords and ladies. But this hall turned out to be a big white wooden building with its name on a sign in the front so no one would miss it. Inside there was a dance floor and a small stage on the main level and a dining room and a kitchen in the basement. Not nearly as grand as I had dreamed, but easily the biggest building I had ever seen.
We were the last to arrive. This was mid-April, so beneath the fluffy goose-down jacket somebody had sent me I wore a red sweater trimmed with what looked like white fur but wasn’t and a pair of blue jeans, along with the steel-toed work boots I was wearing when we left the marsh. My grandparents wanted me to wear a yellow-checked dress that belonged to my mother and a pair of tights to hide the tattoos on my legs. The zigzag bands around my calves were the first tattoos my father gave me. In addition to these and a double row of dots across my cheeks, my father tattooed on my right bicep a small deer similar to the ones you see in cave drawings to commemorate my first major kill, and in the middle of my upper back a bear to represent the one I faced down on our porch when I was a child. My spirit animal is mukwa, the bear. After Stephen and I started feeling comfortable with each other, he asked about my tattoos. I told him I got them as part of a tribal initiation ceremony when I was growing up, the daughter of Baptist missionaries on a remote South Pacific island. I’ve noticed that the more outlandish the story you tell, the more inclined people are to believe it. I also told him my parents were tragically murdered on the same island while they were attempting to settle a dispute between warring native tribes in case he ever got the idea that one day he would like to meet them. I suppose now that my secret is out I could tell the truth about my tattoos, but the truth is, I’ve gotten used to telling stories.
The dress my grandparents wanted me to wear to the party reminded me of the kitchen curtains in our cabin, only brighter, and with no rips or holes. I liked the way the material was so loose and floaty; it felt like I wasn’t wearing anything at all. But while I looked like a girl as I stood in front of my grandmother’s tall bedroom mirror, I still sat with my knees spread like a boy, so my grandmother decided it would be better if I stuck with jeans. My mother wore the blue dress and matching hair ribbon from her “Have you seen me?” posters, though my grandmother fussed that the dress was both too tight and too short. Looking back, I’m not sure which was worse: that my grandparents expected my twenty-eight-year-old mother to play the role of the fourteen-year-old daughter they’d lost, or that my mother was willing to go along with it.
As we walked up a wooden ramp that looked like a drawbridge to a castle, my muscles were strung so tight with anticipation, they were practically humming. I felt like I was about to take a shot at a rare wild turkey preening and spreading his tail feathers for a female, and if I so much as twitched I’d scare him off. I’d already met more people than I could have imagined, but this was family.
“They’re here!” someone shouted when they saw us. The music stopped. There was a moment of silence, and then the room exploded with the sound of a hundred people whistling and cheering and clapping. My mother was swept into a river of blonde aunts and uncles and cousins. Relatives swarmed over me like ants. Men shook my hand. Women pulled me into their bosoms, then held me at arm’s length and pinched my cheeks like they couldn’t believe I was really there. Boys and girls peeked out from behind them as wary as foxes. I used to study the street scenes in the Geographics and try to imagine what it would be like to be surrounded by people. Now I knew. It’s noisy. Crowded, hot, and smelly. I loved every second of it.
The People reporter pushed a path for us through the crowd and down the stairs. I think she thought I was frightened by the commotion and the noise. She didn’t yet know this was where I wanted to be. That I had left the marsh by choice.
“Are you hungry?” the reporter asked.
I was. My grandmother wouldn’t let me eat before we came because she said there would be plenty of food to eat later at the party, and she was right about that. The reporter led me to a long table next to the kitchen that was set with more food than I’d seen in my life. More than my father and mother and I could have eaten in a year, possibly two years.
She handed me a plate that was thin as paper. “Dig in.”
I didn’t see a shovel. What’s more, I couldn’t see anything that needed digging. But since I’d left the marsh, I’d learned that whenever I didn’t know what to do, the best thing was to copy other people. So as the reporter started down the length of the table putting food on her plate, I did the same. Some of the dishes were labeled. I could read the names—Meatless Lasagna, Macaroni & Cheese, Cheesy Potatoes, Ambrosia Salad, Green Bean Casserole—but I had no idea what they meant, or if I’d like how they tasted. I put a spoonful of everything on my plate anyway. My grandmother told me I had to eat a few bites from every dish or the women who brought the food would get their feelings hurt. I wasn’t sure how everything was going to fit on one plate. I wondered if I was allowed to take two. But then I saw a woman drop both her plate and the food on it in a big metal can and walk away, so I figured when my plate got full, that’s what I’d do. It seemed an odd custom. In the marsh we never threw food away.
When we came to the end of the long table, I spotted another off to the side full of pies and cookies and cakes. On it was a cake with thick brown frosting and rainbow sprinkles, and not just a few. Twelve tiny candles arching over the words Welcome Home, Helena written in yellow frosting meant this cake was for me. I dropped my macaroni-potato-ambrosia-casserole in the metal can, picked up an empty plate, and slid the entire cake onto it. The People reporter smiled while the photographer took pictures, so I knew I’d done the right thing. Since I’d left the marsh, I’d been doing a lot of things wrong. To this day I can taste that first mouthful: so light and fluffy, it was like biting into a chocolate-flavored cloud.
While I ate, the reporter asked questions. How did I learn to read? What did I like best about living in the marsh? Did it hurt when I got my tattoos? Did my father touch me in ways I didn’t like? I know now this last question meant did my father touch me in a sexual way, which he absolutely did not. I only answered yes because my father used to whack me on my head or backside when I needed punishing the same as he did to my mother, and of course I didn’t like that.
After I finished eating, the reporter and the photographer and I went upstairs to the bathroom so I could wash off the makeup my grandparents put on my face to hide my tattoos. (Why was it called a bathroom, I remember thinking, when there was no place to take a bath? And why were there doors labeled MEN and WOMEN, but no door for children? And why did men and women need their own bathrooms in the first place?) The reporter said that people would like to see my tattoos, and I agreed.
When I finished, through the open doors to the parking lot I saw a group of boys playing with a ball. I knew that’s what it was called because my mother had named it for me from the Geographics. But I hadn’t yet seen a ball in real life. I was particularly fascinated by the way the ball jumped back into the boys’ hands after they smacked it against the pavement, like it was alive, like it was inhabited by a spirit being.
“Want to play?” one of the boys asked.
I did. And I’m sure I could have caught the ball if I had known he was going to throw it at me. But I didn’t, so the ball whacked me in the stomach hard enough to make me go oof—though it didn’t really hurt—and then it rolled away. The boys laughed, and not in a good way.
What happened next has gotten blown all out of proportion. I only took off my sweater because my grandparents warned me the sweater needed to be “dry-cleaned,” and that cost a lot of money, so I shouldn’t get the sweater dirty. And I only pulled my knife because I wanted to throw it from behind my back and stick it in the wooden post that held their basketball hoop to show the boys that I was as skilled with my knife as they were with their ball. I can’t help that one of the boys tried to grab my knife away from me, or that he sliced his palm open in the process. What kind of idiot grabs a knife by its blade, anyway?
The rest of “The Incident,” as my grandparents forever after referred to it, was a blur of boys screaming and grown-ups shouting and my grandmother crying that ended with my sitting in the back of a police car in handcuffs with no idea why or what went wrong. Later I found out the boys thought I was going to hurt them, which was as ridiculous as it sounds. If I had wanted to slit someone’s throat, I would have.
