The Marsh King's Daughter(12)

Our ridge was far enough from the main branch of the Tahquamenon that it couldn’t be seen by fishermen or canoeists. The swamp maples that grew around the cabin make it nearly invisible from the air as well. You might think the smoke from our woodstove would have given away our location, but it never did. If anyone happened to notice during the years we lived there, they must have assumed the smoke came from a fisherman’s dinner or a hunting cabin. At any rate, my father is nothing if not cautious. I’m sure he waited months after he took my mother before he risked a fire.

My mother told me that for the first fourteen months of her captivity, my father kept her shackled to the heavy iron ring set in a corner post of the woodshed. I’m not sure I believe her. I’ve seen the handcuffs, of course, and used them myself when the need arose. But why would my father go to all the trouble of keeping her chained in the woodshed when there was no place for her to go? Nothing but grasses as far as the eye could see, broken only by the occasional beaver or muskrat lodge, or another solitary ridge. Too thick to push a canoe through, too insubstantial to walk on.

The marsh kept us safe during the spring, summer, and fall. In winter, bears, wolves, and coyotes occasionally crossed the ice. One winter, as I was pulling on my boots to go to the outhouse before I went to bed—because believe me, you do not want to leave your bed to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night in the winter—I heard a noise on the porch. I assumed it was a raccoon. The night was unseasonably warm, the temperature almost above freezing, the kind of bright, full-moon midwinter night that stretches the shadows and fools the hibernators into thinking it’s spring. I stepped onto the porch and saw a dark shape almost as tall as me. Still thinking coon, I yelled and slapped it on the rump. Coons can make a real mess if you let them, and guess whose job it would’ve been to clean it up.

But it wasn’t a raccoon. It was a black bear, and not a young one, either. The bear turned around and looked at me and chuffed. If I close my eyes, I can still smell its warm fish breath, feel my bangs flutter as it exhales in my face. “Jacob!” I yelled. The bear stared at me and I stared back until my father came with his rifle and shot it.

We ate bear for the rest of that winter. The carcass strung up in the utility shed looked like a person without its skin. My mother complained that the meat was greasy and tasted like fish, but what would you expect? “You are what you eat,” as my father says. We spread the hide in front of the fireplace in the living room and nailed it to the floor so it would stay flat. The room smelled like rotten meat until the skin side dried, but I liked sitting on my bearskin rug with my toes stretched toward the fire and a bowl of bear meat stew in my lap.

My father has a better story. Years ago, long before my mother and me, when he was still a teenager, he was hiking through the woods north of his parents’ place on Nawakwa Lake near Grand Marais to check his snare line. The snow was extra deep that year, and another six inches had fallen overnight, so the trail and the markers he used to navigate it had gotten buried. He wandered off the path before he realized it, and all of a sudden, his foot broke through the snow and he fell into a big hole. Snow and sticks and leaves fell down with him, but he wasn’t hurt because he landed on something warm and soft. As soon as he realized where he was and what had happened, he scrambled up and out, but not before he saw that he was standing on a tiny wee bear cub no bigger than his hand. The cub’s neck was broken.

Every time my father told that story, I wished his story belonged to me.

—

I WAS BORN two and a half years into my mother’s captivity. She was three weeks shy of seventeen. She and I weren’t a bit alike, neither in looks nor in temperament, but I can imagine what it must have been like for her to be pregnant with me.

You’re going to have a baby, my father would have announced one late autumn day as he stomped the muck from his boots on our back porch and strode into the overheated kitchen. He had to tell my mother what was going on because she was too young and naive to understand the significance of the changes to her body. Or possibly she did know, but was in denial. A lot depends on how good the health classes at the Newberry Middle School were and how closely she paid attention.

My mother would have turned to face him from where she was cooking at the stove. She was always cooking, or heating water for cooking and washing, or hauling water to heat for washing and cooking.

In my imagination’s first version, disbelief spreads across her face as her hands fly to her belly. A baby? she whispers. She doesn’t smile. In my experience she rarely did.

In the second, she tosses her head defiantly and spits out, I know.

As much as I prefer the second version, I’m going with the first. In all the years we lived together as a family, I never once saw my mother talk back to my father. Sometimes I wish she would have. Think about what it was like for me. I was an infant, a toddler, a growing girl, and all I knew of motherhood aside from the perky, aproned housewives in the National Geographic advertisements was a sullen young woman who shuffled through her chores with her head down and her eyes rimmed red in secret misery. My mother never laughed, barely talked, seldom hugged or kissed me.

I’m sure she was terrified at the idea of having a baby in that cabin. I know I would have been. Maybe she hoped my father would realize a cabin in the marsh was no place for her to give birth, bring her to town, and leave her on the hospital steps like a foundling.