The Marsh King's Daughter(19)

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.

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.