The Marsh King's Daughter(26)

I sling the Ruger over my shoulder and hold the Magnum with both hands in front of me. My footsteps are virtually silent, thanks to the moccasins I wear when I’m in the bush. Thanks to my father’s training.

The trail leads through a stand of mixed birch and aspen to the top of a steep ravine. I walk to the edge and look down. At the bottom of the ravine is a body.





10





THE CABIN

Soon it became clear to the Viking’s wife how matters stood with the child; it was under the influence of a powerful sorcerer. By day it was charming in appearance as an angel of light, but with a temper wicked and wild; while at night, in the form of an ugly frog, it was quiet and mournful, with eyes full of sorrow.

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.