The Marsh King's Daughter(21)

—

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.