The Marsh King's Daughter, page 9
Here were two natures, changing inwardly and outwardly with the absence and return of sunlight. And so it happened that by day the child, with the actual form of its mother, possessed the fierce disposition of its father; at night, on the contrary, its outward appearance plainly showed its descent on the father’s side, while inwardly it had the heart and mind of its mother.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
The National Geographics were my picture books, my early readers, my history and science and world culture textbooks rolled into one. Even after I learned to read, I could spend hours paging through the pictures. My favorite was of a naked Aboriginal baby somewhere in the outback of Australia. She had stringy, reddish-brown hair, reddish-brown skin, and was sitting on dirt almost the same color as she was, chewing on a strip of bark and grinning like a baby Buddha. She looked so fat and happy, anyone could see that in that place and at that moment, she had everything she could ever want or need. When I looked at her picture, I liked to imagine this baby was me.
After the Aboriginal baby, I liked the pictures of the Yanomami tribe in the rain forest in Brazil. Mothers with straight-cut bangs and tattooed faces naked from the waist up nursing babies or carrying toddlers on their hips, their cheeks and noses pierced with sticks decorated with tufts of yellow feathers. Boys wearing string loincloths that didn’t cover their boy parts and carrying over their shoulders dead monkeys and brightly colored birds they had shot with their very own bows and arrows. Boys and girls swinging from vines as thick as their arms and dropping into a river that the article said was home to black caiman, green anaconda, and red-bellied piranha. I liked to pretend that these wild, brave boys and girls were my brothers and sisters. On hot days I’d take off all my clothes and paint myself with marsh muck and run around the ridge with a piece of string tied around my waist, brandishing the bow and arrows I made from willow saplings that were too springy and green to take down so much as a rabbit but were good enough for pretending. I hung the doll my mother made from the handcuffs in the woodshed and used it for target practice. Most of the time the arrows only bounced off, but once in a while I could get one to stick. My mother didn’t like seeing me without my clothes on, but my father didn’t mind.
I tore these pictures from the magazines and hid them between my mattress and the box spring. My mother hardly ever came up to my room, and my father never did, but I wasn’t taking any chances. The other magazine I kept beneath my bed was the one with the article about the first Viking settlement in the New World. I loved everything about the Vikings. The artist’s drawings of what their settlement life must have been like looked a lot like mine, only with sod houses and more people. On the nights my father built a fire, I’d sit as close to the fireplace as I could stand and pore over the pictures of the artifacts they’d found, including human bones, until my father decided it was time for the three of us to go to bed.
I loved to read, but only on rainy days or at night by the fire. I especially loved my book of poems. The descriptions of morning mist and yellow leaves and frozen swamps really spoke to me. Even the poet’s name was appropriate: Frost. I used to wonder if he made it up, like how I called myself “Helga the Fearless” when I played Viking. I was genuinely sorry when my father cut the cover off the book and put the pages in the outhouse. My mother said we had real toilet paper once, but if this was true we must have run out a long time before this, because I don’t remember. The Geographics were far too stiff and glossy for anybody’s liking, but they got the job done.
If I had realized sooner that the book of poems wasn’t going to be around forever, I would have worked harder to memorize more. To this day I can recall snippets: The woods are lovely, dark and deep . . . To the midnight sky a sunset glow . . . Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the road less traveled on. Or is it by?
Iris taught herself to read before she started school. I like to think she gets that from me.
—
I REALIZE some people will find aspects of my childhood offensive. For instance, people who don’t hunt might be upset to learn that I was six years old when my father taught me to shoot. Then again, my mother had no objections to that. In the U.P., hunting is practically a religion. Schools close on the first day of hunting season so teachers and students alike can bag their buck, while the handful of businesses that stay open operate with a skeleton crew. Everyone old enough to pick up a rifle heads out to deer camp to hunt and drink and play euchre and cribbage in a two-week-long “Who’ll get the biggest buck this year?” celebration. Toll booth operators at the Mackinac Bridge post a running tally of the number of deer that cross from the Upper to the Lower Peninsula on the tops of cars or in the backs of pickups. Most are taken at bait piles using carrots and apples that gas stations and grocery stores sell to hunters in fifty-pound sacks. You can probably guess what I think about that.
We heard their gunshots every year, day after day, sunup till sundown during those two frenetic weeks in November, just as we occasionally heard the distant whine of a chain saw that was not my father’s. My father explained that this was the white man’s “hunting season” and that white men were only allowed to shoot deer during these two weeks. I felt sorry for the white men. I wondered who would make such a rule and if the people who made it would punish those who broke it by shutting them inside a well like my father did to me when I disobeyed him. I worried about what would happen to us if the white men found out we shot deer whenever we wanted. My father said that because he was Native American, the white men’s hunting rules didn’t apply to him, and that made me feel better.
My father shot two deer every winter, one in the middle of December after the deer settled down from all the commotion and another in the early spring. We could have lived perfectly well on fish and vegetables, but my father believed it was better to eat a variety. Aside from the black bear who came calling and ended up as our living room rug, the only game animals we shot were deer. We had only one rifle, and we had to be careful with ammunition. Rabbits we snared. We also ate the hindquarters and backstraps of the muskrats and beavers my father trapped. Squirrels and chipmunks I killed with my throwing knife. The first time I pinned a chipmunk, I cooked it over a fire in the yard and ate it because not being wasteful is the Indian way. But there was so little meat on those tiny bones, after that, I didn’t bother.
My father promised that as soon as I could pick off ten cans from the line he set up on our split-rail fence without missing a shot, he would take me deer hunting. That my father would use some of our precious ammunition to teach me to shoot showed how important it was. I think he was surprised at how quickly I learned, but I wasn’t. The first time I picked up my father’s rifle it felt natural, like an extension of my eyes and arms. At eight pounds, the Remington 770 was on the heavy side for a six-year-old, but I was big for my age, and thanks to carrying water buckets I was very strong.
Weeks passed after I met my father’s requirement, and nothing happened. We fished, we trapped, we snared, while my father’s Remington remained securely locked in the storage room. My father carried the key on a ring that jangled constantly from his belt. I don’t know what the others were for. Certainly we never locked the cabin. I think he just liked the sound and the weight and the feel. As though carrying a lot of keys meant you were important.
The first time I saw the storage room, I thought we had enough food for an army. But my father explained that every can we used could never be replaced, so we needed to make our supply last. My mother was allowed to open one can a day. Sometimes she let me pick. Creamed corn one day, green beans another, Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup the next, though I didn’t learn until later that the “cream” part of the name comes from using milk to thin the soup, not water. Sometimes when I was bored I’d count how many cans were left. I used to think that when all of the cans were gone, we would leave.
Each time I asked my father when we were going deer hunting, he told me a good hunter needed to be patient. He also said that every time I asked would push the day back by one week. I was only six, so it took me a while to grasp the concept. When I did, I stopped asking.
When my father unlocked the storage room early one morning the following spring and came out with his rifle over his shoulder and his pockets jingling with ammunition, I knew this was the day at last. I put on my winter gear without being told and followed him outside. My breath made white clouds as we hiked over the frozen marsh. My mother hated going outside when it was cold out, but I loved exploring the marsh in winter. It was as if the land had magically expanded and I could walk wherever I wanted. Here and there, frozen cattail heads poked out of the snow to remind me I was walking on water. I thought about the frogs and fish sleeping below. I closed my mouth and blew two streams from my nose like a Spanish bull. When my nose got drippy, I leaned over and blew the snot into the snow.
The snow squeaked as we walked. Snow makes different sounds at different temperatures, and the squeak from our footsteps meant that it was very cold. A good day for hunting, because the deer would be huddled together for warmth and wouldn’t be foraging and moving around. A bad day because our noisy footsteps would make it harder for us to get close.
A crow cawed. My father gave the crow’s Indian name, aandeg, and pointed to a distant tree. My eyesight was sharp, but the crow’s black body melted so cleverly into the branches that if aandeg hadn’t given away his location by cawing, I’m not sure I would have seen him. My heart warmed with admiration for my father. My father knew everything about the Anishinaabe, the Original People, and about the marsh: how to find the best places to cut ice-fishing holes, what time of day the fish would bite, how to test the thickness of the ice so we didn’t fall through. He could have been a medicine man or a shaman.
When we came to the snow-covered mound I recognized as the beaver lodge where my father set his traps, my father crouched behind it so the sound of his voice wouldn’t carry. “We’ll take our shot from here,” he said quietly. “Use the lodge for cover.”
Slowly I raised my head. I could see the cedar trees surrounding the ridge, but no deer beneath them. Disappointment stung my eyes. I started to stand, but my father pulled me back down. He put his finger to his lips and pointed. I squinted and looked harder. At last I saw the faint puffs of white smoke from the deer’s breath. Snow-covered deer lying on snowy ground under snow-covered cedar branches weren’t easy to spot, but I found them. My father handed me his rifle, and when I sighted through the scope, I could see the deer clearly. I panned the herd. One animal lying apart from the others was bigger than the rest. The buck.
I pulled off my mittens and dropped them in the snow, then clicked off the safety and slid my finger through the trigger. I could feel my father watching. In my head I heard his instructions: Keep your elbows down. Put your support hand farther forward on the forestock; it will give you better control. Watch carefully. Always follow up on any deer you take a shot at. Never assume you missed completely. I held my breath and squeezed. The gun exploded against my shoulder. It hurt, but no more than when my father hit me. I kept my eyes on my buck as the herd scattered. A heart or a lung shot will make the deer jump and run off at full speed. A gut-shot deer holds its tail down and hunches its back as it runs away. My deer did neither. My shot was clean.
“Come.” My father got to his feet and stepped to the side so I could take the lead. I broke trail through snow higher than my knees until we came to the carcass. The buck’s eyes were open. Blood ran down its neck. Its tongue hung out the side of its mouth. My buck didn’t have horns, but this time of year, I didn’t expect him to. His belly was huge, and that’s what was important.
Then the buck’s belly moved. Not a lot. Just a ripple or a shiver, like when my father and mother rolled around under the bedcovers. At first I thought the deer wasn’t dead. Then I remembered that anaconda swallow their prey whole while it’s still alive and you can sometimes see the prey moving inside. But deer didn’t eat meat. It was a puzzle.
“Hold the legs.” My father rolled my buck onto its back. I moved to the rear and took one leg in each hand to keep the buck steady. My father slid his knife carefully through the white belly fur and opened the buck’s stomach. As the slit widened, a tiny hoof appeared, and then another, and then I understood that the deer I had shot wasn’t a buck at all. My father lifted the fawn from the doe’s belly and laid it in the snow. The fawn must have been close to being born, because when my father cut the birth sack, the fawn thrashed and kicked like it wanted to stand.
My father pressed the fawn into the snow and exposed its neck. I pulled out my knife, remembering to stay to the side so the blood sprayed away from me and not toward. As my father field-dressed the doe, I followed his instructions with the fawn: “Find the sternum. Feel for the place where the breastbone ends and the belly begins. Okay, now cut the belly from the sternum to the crotch. Take it slow. You want your knife to penetrate the hide and the membrane beneath it, but not to pierce the guts. Good. Now pull the guts out like this, starting from the crotch and working your way up, cutting the membranes that link the innards to the spine as you go. Now cut the skin around the anus and pull the colon out of the body cavity. Good. Okay. That’s it, you’re done.”
We cleaned our hands and knives in the snow. I dried my hands on my jacket and pulled on my mittens and looked down proudly at my gutted fawn. The fawn was too small for more than one or two meals, but the hide looked big enough for my mother to make me a pair of spotted mittens.
My father heaped the steaming entrails into a pile as aandeg and his friends waited noisily in the trees for us to leave. He lifted my doe easily across his shoulders. I did the same with my fawn. The fawn was so small and light, as I followed my father back to our cabin, it felt like nothing at all.
—
OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, my mother worked on my mittens. There was a lot of stretching and rubbing and pulling involved. Native women used to chew the skins to soften them, but my mother’s teeth weren’t that good. My mother rubbed the fawn’s hide back and forth, back and forth over the top knob of one of our wooden kitchen chairs, going over and over a small section until it was soft and then moving on to the next.
My father tanned the skin with the hair on because a fawn’s spots don’t go all the way down. He used the fawn’s brains for tanning. We could have tanned our hides the Indian way by weighting them down with rocks in a cold stream and letting the force of the water and time loosen the hair. But we weren’t going to eat the brains anyway, and this way they didn’t go to waste. Each animal’s brain is just the right size to tan its hide, my father said, which told me the Great Spirit really knows what he’s doing. After you scraped off every bit of flesh from the hide, you cooked the deer’s brains with an equal amount of water and mashed them into an oily liquid. Then you spread your hide on the ground or on the floor with the skin side up and slopped half the brain mixture on. The trick was making sure the hide had just the right amount of moisture after it finished soaking. If the hide was too dry, the brains wouldn’t penetrate the skin. But if it was too wet, there wouldn’t be any place for the brains to go. When you finished, you rolled up the hide and left it overnight in a place where animals couldn’t get to it, and the next day, you unrolled it and did the same thing again. Once the brains finished working and you scraped off all the hair and washed the hide, the next step was to soften the skin, which was where my mother came in.
I realize I haven’t said much till now about my mother. It’s hard to know what I should say. Aside from wondering what she was going to fix for dinner when I came home hungry from my wanderings, growing up I honestly didn’t give her much thought. She was just there, hovering in the background, doing the job nature assigned to her by way of procreation by keeping me clothed and fed. I know she didn’t get the life she deserved or wanted, but I don’t think living in the marsh was as bad as she liked to claim. There had to have been times when she was happy. I’m not talking random, fleeting moments, like when the family of baby skunks that crossed our yard every evening during the spring made her smile. I’m talking times when she was well and truly happy. When she could step outside of herself and look down objectively as if from above and think, Yes, I like this. Right here, right now. This is good.
I believe she felt this way when she worked in her garden. Even as a child, I could see that whenever my mother was hoeing or weeding or harvesting, her shoulders seemed less stooped. Sometimes I’d catch her singing: I’m gonna always love you girl . . . Please don’t go girl. I thought she was singing about me. After we left the marsh and I saw the posters of the four dark-haired boys in white T-shirts and ripped jeans plastered all over her time-capsule-of-a-bedroom walls, I learned the song was performed by a group called a “boy band” and that the band claimed to be the new kids on the block, though by then they were neither kids nor new. More astonishing than learning the origin of what I had always thought of as my song was the discovery that my mother had once hung her favorite pictures on her walls.
My mother’s obsession with vegetables bordered on the fanatic. I never understood how she could find passion in peas and potatoes. Every spring, as soon as the ground began to thaw and long before the snow had finished melting, she would bundle up in her hat, scarf, and mittens and head outside, shovel in hand, to begin turning the soil. As if exposing the frozen underside of each laboriously hand-carved spadeful to the strengthening sun would hurry the process.
My mother’s garden was small, not more than fifteen feet on each side and surrounded by a six-foot-high chicken-wire fence, but it produced abundantly thanks to the vegetable scraps we threw year-round in her compost pile. I don’t know how my mother knew that decomposing vegetable matter would eventually turn the ridge’s sandy soil into something approximating loam, just as I’m not sure how she knew to let some of each crop go to seed every fall so she could plant them again the next spring—or for that matter, how she figured out that some of the carrots had to be left in the ground over winter to grow again the next year because carrots need two seasons to complete the process. I don’t think my father taught her; he was more hunter than gatherer. I don’t think she learned from her parents, either. Certainly during the years I lived with my grandparents they never showed any interest in gardening, and why should they? All they had to do was drive down to the Supervalu or the IGA to buy fresh vegetables by the cart if they wanted. Perhaps she read about it in the Geographics.
