The Marsh King's Daughter(29)

I believe she felt this way when she worked in her garden. Even as a child, I could see that whenever my mother was hoeing or weeding or harvesting, her shoulders seemed less stooped. Sometimes I’d catch her singing: I’m gonna always love you girl . . . Please don’t go girl. I thought she was singing about me. After we left the marsh and I saw the posters of the four dark-haired boys in white T-shirts and ripped jeans plastered all over her time-capsule-of-a-bedroom walls, I learned the song was performed by a group called a “boy band” and that the band claimed to be the new kids on the block, though by then they were neither kids nor new. More astonishing than learning the origin of what I had always thought of as my song was the discovery that my mother had once hung her favorite pictures on her walls.

My mother’s obsession with vegetables bordered on the fanatic. I never understood how she could find passion in peas and potatoes. Every spring, as soon as the ground began to thaw and long before the snow had finished melting, she would bundle up in her hat, scarf, and mittens and head outside, shovel in hand, to begin turning the soil. As if exposing the frozen underside of each laboriously hand-carved spadeful to the strengthening sun would hurry the process.

My mother’s garden was small, not more than fifteen feet on each side and surrounded by a six-foot-high chicken-wire fence, but it produced abundantly thanks to the vegetable scraps we threw year-round in her compost pile. I don’t know how my mother knew that decomposing vegetable matter would eventually turn the ridge’s sandy soil into something approximating loam, just as I’m not sure how she knew to let some of each crop go to seed every fall so she could plant them again the next spring—or for that matter, how she figured out that some of the carrots had to be left in the ground over winter to grow again the next year because carrots need two seasons to complete the process. I don’t think my father taught her; he was more hunter than gatherer. I don’t think she learned from her parents, either. Certainly during the years I lived with my grandparents they never showed any interest in gardening, and why should they? All they had to do was drive down to the Supervalu or the IGA to buy fresh vegetables by the cart if they wanted. Perhaps she read about it in the Geographics.

My mother grew lettuce, carrots, peas, squash, corn, cabbage, and tomatoes. I don’t know why she bothered with tomatoes. Our growing season was so short that by the time the first tomatoes started turning red we had to pick off all the fruits no matter how small and green they were so they didn’t get turned to mush by the first frost. My mother wrapped each tomato individually in paper and spread them over the floor of our root cellar to ripen, where nine out of ten immediately started to rot. Corn was also a lost cause. Raccoons have an almost uncanny ability to time their nighttime raids to when the ears are a day or two away from being ripe, and there’s not a fence in the world that can keep them out.

One summer a groundhog burrowed under the chicken wire and wiped out my mother’s entire carrot crop. The way she carried on, you’d have thought someone died. I knew this meant that we would never again enjoy carrots, but there were other root crops we could eat. For instance, arrowroot tubers. The Indians call arrowroot wapatoo. My father told me the Indian method of harvesting wapatoo is to wade barefoot into the mud and pull the tubers from the connecting roots with your toes. I couldn’t always tell when my father was serious and when he was joking, so I never tried it. We used an old four-tined rake like farmers use for pitching hay. My father would strap on his waders and step out into the deep muck near the shore and drag the rake back and forth. My job was to collect the tubers that floated to the surface. The water was so cold, I could barely stand it, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, my father liked to say. My father taught me to swim when I was a toddler by tying a rope around my waist and tossing me in.

After I learned the truth about my father and mother, I used to wonder why my mother didn’t run away. If she hated living in the marsh as much as she later claimed, why didn’t she leave? She could have walked across the marsh when it was frozen while my father and I were running the snare line. Strapped on my father’s waders and slogged her way out while we were fishing in his canoe. Stolen his canoe and paddled away while we were hunting. I understand she was a child when my father brought her to the cabin, so some of these options might not have occurred to her right away. But she had fourteen years to figure something out.

Now that I’ve read accounts of girls who were kidnapped and held captive, I understand more of the psychological factors that were at work. Something breaks in the mind and the will of a person who’s been stripped of autonomy. As much as we might like to think we’d fight like bobcats if we were in a similar situation, odds are we’d give in. Most likely sooner rather than later. When a person is in a position where the more they fight the worse they’re punished, it doesn’t take them long to learn to do exactly what their captor wants. This is not Stockholm syndrome; psychologists call it learned helplessness. If a kidnapped person believes her captor will withhold punishment or even give her a reward such as a blanket or a scrap of food if she does what he wants, she’ll do it, no matter how disgusting or degrading it might be. If the kidnapper is willing to inflict pain, the process goes a lot faster. After a while, as much as she wants to, the captive won’t even try to escape.

It’s like when you catch a mouse or a shrew and you put it in a metal washtub to see what it will do. At first, it hugs the edges of the tub and runs around and around in a circle looking for a way out. After a few days, it gets used to being in the tub and will even come into the middle for food and water, though that goes against its natural instincts. After a few more days, you can make a way out for it by tying a piece of cloth or a rope to one of the handles and draping both ends over the sides, but the mouse will just keep running in circles because that’s all it knows. Eventually, it dies. Some creatures just don’t do well in captivity. If it wasn’t for me, my mother and I would still be living on that ridge.