The Marsh King's Daughter, page 6
Naturally People magazine published the most sensational pictures. The photograph of me with my bare chest and facial tattoos and the sun glinting off my knife blade like a Yanomami warrior graced the cover. I’m told mine was one of their best-selling issues (number three, after the one about the World Trade Center and the Princess Diana tribute), so I guess they got what they paid for.
In hindsight I can see where we were all more than a little naive. My grandparents, for thinking they could cash in on what had happened to their daughter without repercussions; my mother, for thinking she could step back into her old life as if she’d never left; me, for thinking I could fit in. After that, the kids I went to school with fell into two camps: those who feared me and those who admired and feared me.
I stand up and stretch. Carry my glass to the kitchen and rinse it in the sink, then go into the bedroom and set my phone alarm and lie down fully dressed on top of the covers so I can head out as soon as it gets light in the morning.
This won’t be the first time I’ve hunted my father, but I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure it will be the last.
7
The alarm goes off at five. I roll over and grab my phone off the nightstand and check my messages. Nothing from Stephen.
I thread my knife onto my belt and go to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. Growing up, the only hot drink we had besides my father’s foul-tasting medicinal teas was chicory. Digging the taproots, then washing, drying, and grinding them was a lot of work to make what I now know is essentially a second-class substitute for coffee. I’ve noticed you can buy ground chicory in grocery stores. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to.
Outside it’s just starting to get light. I fill a thermos and grab my truck keys from the hook by the door. I’m torn about leaving Stephen a note. Normally I would. Stephen likes to know where I am and how long I’ll be gone, and I’m okay with that as long as he also understands that my plans could change and I might not be able to let him know when they do, since cell reception is spotty to nonexistent over much of the U.P. I always think it’s ironic that in an area where you might conceivably truly need to use a cell phone, you so often can’t. But in the end, I decide not to. I’ll be home long before Stephen gets back. If he comes back.
Rambo scents out the window as I pull out of the driveway. It’s 5:23. Forty-three degrees and dropping, which after the Indian summer weather we had yesterday only proves what everybody says: if you don’t like the weather in Michigan, just wait a few minutes. Winds are steady out of the southwest at fifteen miles an hour. There’s a thirty percent chance of rain later this morning, increasing to fifty percent this afternoon, which is the part of the forecast that worries me. Not even the best tracker can read sign after it’s washed away.
I turn on the radio long enough to confirm that the hunt for my father is still going strong, then turn it off. The maples along the highway I pass are halfway to yellow. Here and there a swamp maple blazes bloodred. Overhead the clouds are dark as bruises. Traffic is light because it’s a Tuesday. Also because the roadblock on M-77 at Seney has slowed traffic coming north to Grand Marais to a trickle.
I figure after my father laid down his decoy trail yesterday, he cut a wide circle and doubled back to the river and walked through the night in order to put as much distance between himself and the refuge as possible. He followed the Driggs River north because that’s easier than striking out cross-country, and following it south would have led him deeper into the refuge. Also because wading through the river culvert under M-28 would be a convenient way to cross the highway without being seen. I picture him making his way carefully through the dark, weaving between trees and wading creeks as he avoids the old logging roads that would make travel easier but would leave him vulnerable to the helicopter’s searchlight.
Then as soon as it started to get light, he holed up for the day in someone’s empty cabin. I’ve broken into a cabin more than once myself when I got caught out after the weather turned. As long as you leave a note explaining why you broke in and a few dollars for the food you ate and any damage you caused, nobody cares. My challenge now is to find that cabin. Even if the rain holds off, as soon as it gets dark, my father will be on the move. I can’t follow his trail if I can’t see it, so if I don’t find him before nightfall, by morning he’ll have such a long lead, I never will.
Ultimately, I believe my father is heading for Canada. In theory he could roam the Upper Peninsula wilderness for the rest of his life, constantly on the move, never lighting a fire, moving strictly at night, never making a phone call or spending any money, hunting and fishing and eating and drinking whatever he finds in whatever cabins he breaks into like the North Pond Hermit did in Maine for almost thirty years. But it will be a whole lot easier if he just leaves the country. Obviously he can’t cross at a manned border crossing, but there’s a long stretch of border between Canada and northern Minnesota that’s only lightly monitored. Most of the roads and railroad crossings have buried sensors to let authorities know when someone’s trying to sneak through, but all my father has to do is pick a remote, deeply forested section and walk across. After that, he can keep going as far north as he likes, maybe settle near an isolated native community, take another wife if he’s so inclined, and finish out his days in peace and obscurity. My father can pass as First Nations when he wants to.
Five miles south of our place I turn west onto a sandy two-track that will eventually come out at the Fox River campground. The entire peninsula is crisscrossed with old logging trails like this one. Some are as broad as a two-lane highway. Most are narrow and overgrown. If you know your way around the back roads as well as I do, you can drive from one end of the peninsula to the other without hitting pavement. If my father is heading toward the Fox River, as I suspect, there are three roads he’ll have to cross. Taking into account the time he escaped and how far he could travel before he had to go to ground, this middle road is my best guess. There are a couple of cabins down this road I want to check. No doubt the searchers would be investigating these cabins as well if my father hadn’t led them into the wildlife refuge. I imagine they’ll get around to it eventually. Or maybe not. My mother stayed missing for close to fifteen years.
The irony of my mother’s kidnapping is that it happened in a place where kidnappings never happened. The towns in the middle of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula barely qualify for the descriptor. Seney, McMillan, Shingleton, and Dollarville are little more than highway intersections marked by a welcome sign, a church, a gas station, and a bar or two. Seney also has a restaurant with a motel and a laundromat. Seney marks the beginning of the “Seney Stretch” if you’re traveling west on M-28 or the end of it if you’re traveling east. Twenty-five miles of straight-as-an-arrow, flat-as-a-pancake, mind-numbingly boring highway between Seney and Shingleton that crosses the remains of the Great Manistique Swamp. Travelers stop at the towns on either end to top off their gas tanks, or to grab some chips and a Coke to break up the ride, or to use the bathroom one last time before they head out because this is all they’re going to see of civilization for the next half hour. Some say the Seney Stretch is really fifty miles long, but it only feels that way.
Until my mother’s abduction, the children of Luce County weren’t kept under lock and key. Possibly not even after, because old habits die hard, and because no one ever really thinks that bad things are going to happen to them. Especially after they’ve already happened to somebody else. The Newberry News reported every crime, no matter how small. And they were all small: a CD wallet taken from the front seat of an unlocked car, a mailbox vandalized, a bicycle stolen. No one could have dreamed the theft of a child.
Also ironic is the fact that during the years my grandmother and grandfather were desperately trying to find out what had happened to their daughter, she was less than fifty miles away. The Upper Peninsula is a big place. Twenty-nine percent of the land area of the state of Michigan, three percent of the population. One-third state and national forest.
The newspaper’s microfiche archives show the progress of the search.
Day One: Missing. Presumed to have wandered off and expected shortly to be found.
Day Two: Still missing. State police search and rescue dogs brought in.
Day Three: Expanded search, including a Coast Guard helicopter from St. Ignace assisted by Department of Natural Resources officers on the ground and assorted small aircraft.
And so on.
It wasn’t until a full week after she went missing that my mother’s best friend admitted they were playing in some empty buildings by the railroad tracks when they were approached by a man who said he was looking for his dog. This is also the first time the word abducted appears. By then, of course, it was too late.
From my mother’s newspaper photo, I can see what drew my father’s eye: blonde, chubby, pigtailed. Still, there must have been plenty of chubby blonde fourteen-year-olds my father could have taken. I’ve often wondered why he chose her. Did he stalk her in the days and weeks before he grabbed her? Was he secretly in love with her? Or was my mother’s abduction merely the unfortunate convergence of time and place? I tend to believe the latter. Certainly I can’t recall ever seeing anything pass between my father and mother that remotely resembled affection. Was keeping us supplied with food and clothing evidence of my father’s love for us? In my weaker moments, I like to think so.
Before we were recovered, no one knew if my mother was dead or alive. The story The Newberry News published every year on the anniversary of her kidnapping grew progressively shorter. The last four years the headline and the single paragraph of text that accompanied it were exactly the same: “Local Girl Still Missing.” No one knew anything about my father beyond my mother’s girlfriend’s description: a small, slender man with “darkish” skin and long, black hair, wearing work boots and jeans and a red plaid shirt. Considering the ethnicity of the area at the time was roughly evenly split between Native Americans and Finns and Swedes, and every other male over the age of sixteen tramped around in work boots and flannel, her description was next to useless. Except for those annual two column-inches and the twin holes in my grandparents’ hearts, my mother was forgotten.
And then one day, fourteen years, seven months, and twenty-two days after my father kidnapped my mother, she returned, setting off the most extensive manhunt that Upper Peninsula residents had ever seen—until today.
—
I’M DRIVING approximately as fast as a man can walk. Not only because this road is the kind where if I drive too close to the edge and I’m not paying attention, the deep sand will pull my truck in up to its axles before I realize what’s happening and there’s no way I’m getting out without a tow truck, but also because I’m looking for footprints. I can’t really track a person on foot from a vehicle, of course, and the odds that my father left a visible trail as he traveled this road—if he traveled this road—are extremely small, but still. When it comes to my father, I can’t be too careful.
I’ve driven this road many times. There’s a place about a quarter mile ahead as the road curves where the shoulder is solid enough to pull off and park. From there, if I walk another quarter mile north and west, then make my way down a steep incline, I come to the biggest patch of blackberries I’ve ever seen. Blackberries like a lot of water, and a creek runs along the bottom of the gully, so the berries grow especially big. When I’m lucky, I can gather enough to make a year’s worth of jam from a single picking.
Strawberries are a different story. The thing people have to understand about wild strawberries is that the berries are nothing like the California behemoths they buy in grocery stores. Not much bigger than the tip of an adult’s little finger on average, but with a flavor that more than makes up for their tiny size. Every once in a while, I might come across a berry that’s as big as the end of my thumb (and when I do, that berry goes into my mouth and not into my berry pail), but that’s about as big as wild strawberries ever get. Obviously it takes a great many wild strawberries to make a decent quantity of jam, which is why I have to charge a premium for mine.
Anyway, today I’m not looking for berries.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out. A text from Stephen:
Home in half an hour. Girls at my parents. Don’t worry. We’ll get through this. Love S
I stop in the middle of the road and stare at the screen. Stephen coming back is just about the last thing I expected. He must have turned around and started for home as soon as he dropped off the girls. My marriage isn’t over. Stephen is giving me another chance. He’s coming home.
The implications are almost overwhelming. Stephen isn’t giving up on me. He knows who I am and he doesn’t care. We’ll get through this. Love S. I think about all of the times I said or did something off and tried to cover for my ignorance as if my gaffe was a joke. Now I realize I didn’t have to pretend. I put myself in this box. Stephen loves me for who I am.
Home in half an hour. Of course I won’t be there when he arrives, but that’s probably just as well. I’m glad now that I didn’t leave him a note. If Stephen had any idea where I am or what I’m doing, he’d lose his mind. Let him think I went out for breakfast, or I’m picking up a few things at the store, or I went down to the police station to help them follow up on a lead, and I’ll be right back. Which, if all goes according to plan, I will be.
I read the text one last time and put the phone in my pocket. Everyone knows how spotty cell reception in the U.P. can be.
8
THE CABIN
The Viking’s wife was above measure delighted when she found the beautiful little child lying on her bosom. She kissed it and caressed it, but it cried terribly, and struck out with its arms and legs and did not seem to be pleased at all. At last it cried itself to sleep, and as it lay there so still and quiet, it was a most beautiful sight to see.
When the Viking’s wife awoke early the following morning, she was terribly alarmed to find that the infant had vanished. She sprang from her couch and searched all round the room. At last, she saw, in that part of the bed where her feet had been, not the child, but a great, ugly frog.
At the same moment the sun rose and threw its beams through the window till it rested on the couch where the great frog lay. Suddenly it appeared as if the frog’s broad mouth contracted, and became small and red. The limbs moved and stretched out and extended themselves till they took a beautiful shape; and behold, there was the pretty child lying before her, and the ugly frog was gone.
“How is this?” she cried, “Have I had a wicked dream? Is it not my own lovely cherub that lies there.” Then she kissed it and fondled it; but the child struggled and fought, and bit as if she had been a little wild cat.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
My father liked to tell the story of how he found our cabin. He was bow hunting north of Newberry when the deer he shot jumped at the last second and was only wounded. He trailed it to the edge of the marsh, then watched the panicked deer swim out to deep water and drown. As he turned to leave, the sun caught a glint of the metal flashing along the edge of our cabin’s roof. My father used to say that if this had been another time of year, or another time of day, or if the cloud cover had been different that day, he never would have discovered it, and I’m sure that this is true.
He marked the spot and came back later in his canoe. As soon as he saw the cabin, he says he knew the Great Spirit had led him there so he’d have a place to raise his family. I know now this means that we were squatting. At the time, it didn’t seem to matter. Certainly during the years we lived there, nobody cared. There are a lot of abandoned properties like that all over the U.P. People get the idea they’d like to have a place to get away from it all, so they buy a piece of property on a backwoods road surrounded by state land and build a cabin. Maybe it works for a while and they like having a place they can go to when they feel like roughing it until life gets in the way: kids, jobs, aging parents. A year goes by without their going to their cabin, and then another, and the next thing you know, paying taxes on a piece of property they’re not using starts to look pretty unattractive. Nobody’s going to buy forty acres of swamp and a rustic cabin except some other poor fool who wants to get away from it all, so in most cases, the owners let the property go to the state for back taxes.
After the police cleared the crime scene and the media attention died down, the state quietly took ours off the tax rolls. Some people thought the cabin should be torn down because of what happened there, but in the end, no one wanted to take on the cost.
You can visit the cabin if you want, though it might take a few tries to find the tributary that leads to our ridge. Souvenir hunters have long ago stripped the place bare. To this day you can buy items on eBay that are supposed to have belonged to me, though I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that most of the things people are selling did not. But aside from a hole in the kitchen wall where a porcupine has chewed through, the cabin, the utility shed, the woodshed, the sweat lodge, and the outhouse are all as I remember them.
The last time I went back was two years ago, after my mother died. Ever since I’d had my girls, I’d been thinking about what it was like for me growing up, and I wanted to see how the reality matched my memories. The porch was covered in leaf litter and pine needles, so I broke a branch off a pine to sweep it clean. I set up my tent under the apple trees and filled a couple of milk jugs with marsh water, then sat down on an upended piece of firewood munching a granola bar and listening to the chickadees chatter. The marsh gets quiet right before dusk after the daytime insects and animals have gone silent and the nighttime creatures haven’t yet come out. I used to sit on the cabin’s porch steps every evening after supper paging through the Geographics or practicing the square knots and half hitches my father taught me while I waited for the stars to appear: Ningaabi-Anang, Waaban-anang, and Odjiig-anang, Evening Star, Morning Star, and Big Dipper, the three main stars of the Ojibwa people. When the wind was quiet and the pond was still, you could see the stars reflected perfectly in the water. After I left the marsh, I spent a lot of time on my grandparents’ porch looking up.
