The Marsh King's Daughter, page 7
I stayed at the cabin for two weeks. I fished, hunted, snared. Cooked my meals over a fire in the yard because someone had taken our woodstove. On the thirteenth day, when I found a mud puddle swarming with tadpoles and thought about how I’d love to show them to Mari and Iris, I knew it was time to go home. I loaded my things into my canoe and paddled back to my truck, taking a good long look at everything along the way because I knew this would be the last time I’d be back.
I realize two weeks probably seems like a long time for a young mother to stay away from her family. At the time, I would have been hard-pressed to explain why I needed to get away. I’d made a new life for myself. I loved my family. I wasn’t unhappy. I think it was just that I’d been hiding who I was for so long and trying so hard to fit in, I needed to reconnect with the person I used to be.
It was a good life, until it wasn’t.
—
MY MOTHER NEVER TALKED much about the years before my own memories kick in. I imagine an endless round of washing and nursing. “One to wash and one to wear” sounds good in theory, but I know from my own girls that babies can go through three or four outfit changes a day. Not to mention diapers. I overheard my mother telling my grandmother once how she struggled to control my diaper rash. I don’t recall being particularly uncomfortable as an infant, but if my mother said my entire bottom was covered in nasty, red, oozing, bleeding sores, I have to believe her. It couldn’t have been easy. Scraping the solids from my diapers into the outhouse, then rinsing the diapers by hand in a bucket. Heating water to wash them on the woodstove. Stringing lines across the kitchen to dry them when it was rainy and hanging my diapers in the yard when it wasn’t. Indians never bothered to keep their infants diapered, and if my mother was smart, after the weather warmed up enough to let me run around with my bottom half naked, she’d have done the same.
There was no fresh water on our ridge. The people who built our cabin had evidently tried to dig a well, because there was a deep hole in our yard that my father kept covered with a heavy wooden lid where he occasionally shut me inside as a punishment, but the well came up dry. Maybe that’s why they abandoned the cabin. We got our water from the marsh, in a rocky area shaped like a semicircle that we kept clear of vegetation. The pool it formed was deep enough to dip a bucket into without stirring up the sediment on the bottom. My father used to joke that by the time he carried the buckets up the hill, his arms were six inches longer than when he started. When I was little I believed him. When I got old enough to carry my share of buckets I understood the joke.
Cutting, hauling, and splitting the firewood my mother needed to keep me clean and dry was my father’s job. I loved watching him split wood. He’d braid his long hair to keep it out of the way and take off his shirt, even in cold weather, and the muscles rippling beneath his skin were like a summer wind shivering across the Indian grass. My job was to stand the logs on end so my father could move down the row without stopping: thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack. One blow per log, each log split cleanly in two as he gave the ax head that last-second twist that sends the two halves flying. People who don’t know how to split wood tend to bring the ax head straight down, as if weight and momentum alone would get the job done. But that only buries the head in the dense green wood as solidly as a chisel, and have fun getting it back out. One year the organizers of the blueberry festival in Paradise, Michigan, where I sell my jams and jellies brought in a traveling carnival with a sideshow. You know that game where you swing a mallet onto a platform that sends a weight up a pole and if it rings the bell at the top, you win a prize? I cleaned up on that one.
Our woodlot was on the low end of our ridge. After my father cut and limbed the trees and cut the logs to firewood length, we’d haul the wood up to our cabin. My father liked eight- and ten-inch-diameter trees best—not too big to handle, large enough that the chunks he left unsplit would hold the fire overnight. The maples near our cabin he let grow big for our sugar bush. The average maple or beech tree of that size produces about a cord of firewood, and we needed between twenty and thirty cords every year depending on the severity of any given winter, so cutting and stacking firewood was a year-round job. A full woodshed was like money in the bank, my father liked to say, though ours wasn’t always full. In the winter, he cut on a nearby ridge to make our woodlot last. He’d skid the logs across the ice using a cant hook or a pair of log dogs and a rope looped over his shoulder. The giant paper companies that log pulpwood throughout the U.P. like to say that trees are a renewable resource, but by the time we left the cabin, the trees on the lower end of our ridge were nearly gone.
Considering all of the effort we put into gathering firewood, you might think that life in the cabin during the winter was cozy. It was not. Surrounded by ice and snow five feet deep or more was like living in a freezer. From November to April, our cabin was never truly warm. Sometimes the outside temperature during the day never climbed above zero. Frequently the overnight low hit thirty and forty below. At those temperatures, you can’t draw a breath without gasping when your capillaries constrict as the cold air hits your lungs, while the hairs inside your nose crinkle when the moisture in your nasal passages freezes. If you’ve never lived in the far north, I promise you have no idea how incredibly difficult it is to counteract that kind of deep and all-pervasive cold. Imagine the cold as a malignant fog, pushing down and in on you from all sides, rising up from the frozen ground, working its way through every minute crack and chink in the floor and the walls of your cabin; Kabibona’kan, Winter Maker, coming to devour you, stealing the warmth from your bones until your blood turns to ice and your heart freezes and all you have to fight against him is the fire in your woodstove.
Often I’d wake after a storm to find my blankets dusted with snow that had blown through the gaps around the windows where the boards had shrunk. I’d shake off the snow and gather the blankets around me and hurry down the stairs to sit by the woodstove with my hands wrapped around a mug of hot chicory until I was ready to brave the chill. We didn’t bathe during the winter—we simply couldn’t—which is one of the reasons my father later built the sauna. I know that probably sounds terrible to most people, but there wasn’t much point to washing our bodies when we couldn’t wash our clothes. Anyway, it was just the three of us, so if we stank, we didn’t notice because we all smelled the same.
—
I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH from my toddler years. Impressions. Sounds. Smells. More déjà vu sensations than actual memories. Of course there are no baby pictures. But life in the marsh followed a regular pattern, so it’s not difficult to fill in the gaps. December through March is ice, snow, and cold. In April, the crows come back and the peepers hatch. By May the marsh is all green grass and flowers, though you can still find patches of snow in the shadow of a boulder or on the north side of a log. June is bug month. Mosquitoes, blackflies, horseflies, deerflies, no-see-ums—if an insect flies and it bites, we’ve got it. July and August are everything people who live in more southern latitudes associate with summer, with a bonus: we’re so far north, daylight lasts past ten o’clock. September brings the first frost, and we often see a September snowfall—just a light dusting because the leaves haven’t finished turning, but a portent of things to come. This is also the month the crows take off and the Canada geese flock. October and November the marsh shuts down, and by mid-December, we’re locked in the deep freeze again.
Now picture a toddler running around through all of that: rolling and sliding in the snow, splashing in the water, hopping around the yard pretending she’s a rabbit or flapping her arms like she’s a duck or a goose, her eyes, ears, neck, and hands puffy with bug bites despite the homemade insect repellent her mother slathers on her according to her father’s recipe (ground goldenseal rootstock mixed with bear grease), and that pretty much covers my early years.
My first true memory is of my fifth birthday. At five I was a pudgy, four-foot-tall version of my mother, but with my father’s coloring. My father liked long hair, so mine had never been cut. It reached almost to my waist. Most of the time, I wore it in pigtails or a single braid like my father’s. My favorite outfit was a pair of overalls and a red plaid flannel shirt that nearly matched one of his. My other shirt that year was green. My tan leather work boots were identical to the ones my father wore, only without the steel toe, and smaller. When I wore this outfit I felt as though I could one day become every bit the man my father was. I copied his mannerisms, his speech patterns, his walk. It wasn’t worship, but it was close. I was unabashedly, absolutely, and utterly in love with my father.
I knew this was the day I turned five, but I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary. My mother surprised me, however, by baking a cake. Somewhere in the stacks of cans and bags of rice and flour in the storage room, my mother found a boxed cake mix. Chocolate with rainbow sprinkles, of all things, as if my father knew that one day, he’d have a child. I wasn’t inclined toward doing anything in the kitchen I didn’t have to, but the picture on the front of the box looked intriguing. I couldn’t imagine how this bag of dusty brown powder would turn into a cake with tiny multicolored candles and swirly brown frosting, but my mother promised it would.
“What does ‘Preheat oven to 350 degrees’ mean?” I asked as I read from the directions on the back. I’d been reading since I was three. “And what are we going to do about an oven?” I’d seen pictures in the ads for kitchen appliances in the Geographics, and I knew we didn’t have one.
“We don’t need an oven,” my mother replied. “We’ll bake the cake the same way we bake biscuits.”
This worried me. The baking powder biscuits my mother made in our cast-iron frying pan on top of our box stove were sometimes burned and always hard. I once lost a baby tooth biting into one. Her lack of cooking skills was a constant sore point with my father, but it didn’t bother me. You can’t miss what you’ve never known. In hindsight it’s easy to see where he could have prevented the problem by kidnapping someone a little older, but who am I to second-guess my father? He made his bed, as the saying goes.
My mother dipped a rag in the bucket of bear grease we kept in a mice-proof cupboard and rubbed it over the inside of our frying pan, then set the pan to heat on top of the stove.
“‘Mix in two eggs and one-fourth C cooking oil,’” I continued. “Cooking oil?”
“Bear grease,” my mother said. “And the C means cup. Do we have any eggs?”
“One.” Wild ducks breed in the spring. Luckily I was born the end of March.
My mother cracked the egg into the powder, added the grease she melted in a tin cup on top of the stove along with an equal amount of water, and whipped up the batter. “‘Three minutes with an electric mixer at high speed, or three hundred strokes.’” When her arm got tired, I took a turn. She let me add the sprinkles, though by the time the batter was ready I’d eaten half. They were sweet, which was always nice, but the texture as I pushed them around in my mouth with my tongue made me think of mouse droppings. She added another dollop of grease to the pan so the batter wouldn’t stick, poured the batter in, and covered the pan with a cast-iron lid.
Ten minutes later, after admonishing me twice not to peek or the cake wouldn’t bake and then lifting the lid to check on its progress herself, she discovered that the edges of the cake were turning black while the middle was still goopy. She opened the firebox and stirred the embers so the heat distributed more evenly and added another log to the fire, and that did the trick. The final product looked nothing like the picture, but we polished it off all the same.
Maybe a cake made with duck eggs and bear grease doesn’t sound like much to you, but it was the first time I tasted chocolate, and it was heaven to me.
—
THE CAKE BY ITSELF would have been more than enough. But the day wasn’t over. In a rare demonstration of what I assume only in hindsight was motherly affection, my mother made me a doll. She stuffed one of my old baby sleepers with dried cattail rushes, poked five twigs into each sleeve for fingers and tied them in place with a piece of string, and fashioned a head by drawing a lopsided smiley face with a lump of charcoal on one of my father’s old socks. And yes, the doll was as ugly as it sounds.
“What is it?” I asked when she laid it on the table in front of me as I licked the last cake crumbs from my plate.
“It’s a doll,” she said shyly. “I made it. For you.”
“A doll.” I was pretty sure this was the first time I’d heard the word. “What’s it for?”
“You . . . play with it. Give it a name. Pretend it’s a baby and you’re its mother.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. I was very good at pretending, but imagining myself as the mother of this lifeless lump was beyond me. Thankfully my father found the concept just as ridiculous. He burst out laughing, and that made me feel better.
“Come, Helena.” He pushed back from the table and held out his hand. “I have a present for you, too.”
My father led me into my parents’ bedroom. He lifted me onto their high bed. My legs dangled off the edge. Normally I wasn’t allowed in their room, so I swung my feet in happy anticipation as my father got down on his hands and knees. He reached under the bed and pulled out a brown leather case with a brown handle and shiny gold trim. I could tell the case was heavy because he grunted as he lifted it, and when he plopped it down on the bed next to me, the bed bounced and jiggled like it did when I jumped on it, though I wasn’t supposed to. My father selected the smallest key from his key ring and inserted it into the lock. The latch sprang open—thwang. He lifted the lid and turned the case so I could see inside.
I gasped.
The case was full of knives. Long ones. Short ones. Skinny ones. Fat ones. Knives with wooden handles. Knives with carved bone handles. Folding knives. Curved knives that looked like swords. Later my father taught me their names and the differences between them and how to use each one for hunting or combat or self-defense, but at the time all I knew was that I itched to touch them. I wanted to run my fingers over every one. Feel the coldness of the metal, the smoothness of the wood, the sharpness of each blade.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Pick one. You’re a big girl now. Old enough to carry a knife of your own.”
Instantly my insides burned as hot as the fire in our woodstove. I’d wanted a knife for as long as I could remember. I had no idea such treasure lay beneath my parents’ bed. Or that my father would one day share a piece of his treasure with me. I glanced toward the doorway. My mother’s arms were crossed over her chest and she was frowning, so I could tell she didn’t like the idea. When I helped her in the kitchen, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything sharp. I looked again to my father, and suddenly, in a burst of insight, I realized I didn’t have to listen to my mother. Not anymore. Not when my father said I was old enough to have my own knife.
I turned back to the case. Looked over each knife carefully twice. “That one.” I pointed to a knife with a gold-colored hilt and a shiny dark wood handle. I especially liked the raised leaf design on the knife’s leather sheath. It wasn’t a small knife, because even though my father said I was a big girl I knew I would grow bigger still, and I wanted a knife I could grow into, not one I’d grow out of, like the pile of discarded shirts and overalls in a corner of my bedroom.
“Excellent choice.” My father held out what I now know is an eight-inch double-sided Bowie knife like a king presenting a knight with a sword. I started to reach for it, then stopped. My father had this game he liked to play where he pretended to give me something and when I tried to take it, he snatched it away. I didn’t think I could bear it if he was playing now. He smiled and nodded encouragingly as I hesitated. This was also sometimes part of the game.
But I wanted that knife. I needed that knife. Quickly, I grabbed it before he could react. I closed my fist around it and hid the knife behind my back. I’d fight him for it if I had to.
My father laughed. “It’s okay, Helena. Really. The knife is yours.”
Slowly I brought the knife out from behind me, and when his smile got bigger and his hands stayed by his sides, I knew that this beautiful knife was indeed mine. I slid the knife from its cover, turned it over in my hands, held it up to the light, laid it across my knees. The weight of the knife, the size and the shape and the feel told me I’d made the right choice. I ran my thumb along one edge to test its sharpness like I’d seen my father do. The knife drew blood. It didn’t hurt. I stuck my thumb in my mouth and looked again toward the doorway. My mother was gone.
My father locked the case and slid it back under the bed. “Get your coat. We’ll go check the snare line.”
How I loved him—and his invitation made me love him all the more. My father checked his snare line every morning. It was now late afternoon. That he would go out a second time just so I could try out my new knife made my heart explode. I would kill for this man. I would die for him. And I knew he would do the same for me.
Quickly I put on my winter gear before he changed his mind, then slipped my knife in my coat pocket. The knife bumped against my leg as I walked. Our snare line ran the length of our ridge. The snow on either side of the trail was almost as tall as me, so I matched my father’s footsteps closely. We wouldn’t go far. Already the sky and trees and snow were turning evening blue. Ningaabi-Anang glittered low in the west. I offered a prayer to the Great Spirit to please please please send a rabbit before we had to turn back.
