The Marsh King's Daughter(20)

It was a good life, until it wasn’t.

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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.