The Marsh King's Daughter(30)

One other thing stands out about my mother: she always wore long pants and long sleeves when she was working in her garden. Never the shorts and T-shirts my father bought for her. Not even on the hottest days. So different from the Yanomami mothers.





11





Istand at the top of the ravine looking down. The sides are steep, the vegetation sparse. I can clearly see the body at the bottom. The dead officer—buzz-cut brown hair, ruddy cheeks, sunburned neck—looks to be somewhere in his early forties. Reasonably fit, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds—smack-dab in the middle of the weight range I predicted based on his footprints. His head is turned toward me, eyes open in surprise, like he can’t quite comprehend the enormity of the bullet hole in his back.

I think about the dead prison guards, about their families. About the grief that will consume them long after my father is once again behind bars. I think about this man’s family. How they’re going about their day as if it were normal. How they have no idea that their husband and father and brother is gone. I think about how I’d feel if something happened to Stephen.

I scan the area moving only my eyes, looking for activity at the periphery of my vision that would indicate my father is nearby. But when a jay shrieks from the other side of the ravine and a woodpecker starts drilling, I know my father is gone.

I make my way down the hill. There’s no doubt that the officer is dead, but I roll him over anyway, intending to put two fingers to his neck to confirm. When he flops onto his back, I yank my hand away like I’ve been burned. His shirt has been ripped open. Written in blood on his ruined chest is this: For H.

I shudder, force my breathing to slow. I flash back to the last time my father left a similar message. The Lake Superior agate I found on my bedroom windowsill two years after I left the marsh was a big one, about the size of a baby’s fist: a rich, deep red surrounded by orange and white concentric bands with a cluster of quartz crystals in the center. The kind that would be worth a lot of money after it was cut and polished. When I turned it over, I saw four letters written in black marker on the bottom: For H.

At first I assumed the agate was a prank. By this time I had beaten all of the boys at school who felt compelled to challenge me after the knife incident at my welcome home party, but there were still a handful who couldn’t let it go who had moved on to stupid stuff like putting dead animals in my locker, and some clever guy had once sprayed the words The Marsh King’s Daughter across the front of my grandparents’ house in red paint.

All I did with the agate was put it in a shoe box and put the shoe box under my bed. I didn’t say anything to my mother or my grandparents because I didn’t know what to think. I hoped the agate was from my father, yet I didn’t. I didn’t want to see him, yet I did. I loved my father, but at the same time, I blamed him for my deep unhappiness and for my struggle to fit in. There was so much about the outside world he should have taught me that I didn’t know. What did it matter if I could hunt and fish as well as any man and better than most? To my classmates I was a freak—a know-nothing who thought color television had only recently been invented, had never seen a computer or a cell phone, had no idea that Alaska and Hawaii were now states. I think things would have been different if I had been a blonde. If I had looked like my mother, my grandparents might have loved me. But I was a carbon copy of my father, a daily reminder of what he’d done to their daughter. I thought when I left the marsh that my mother’s parents would be thrilled to get their long-lost daughter back with a bonus. But I was his.

When a second agate appeared on my windowsill tucked inside a sweetgrass basket, I knew the gifts were from my father. My father could make anything out of natural materials: woven baskets, birch-bark boxes decorated with porcupine quills, miniature snowshoes made from willow twigs and rawhide, tiny birch-bark canoes with carved wooden seats and paddles. The mantel above the fireplace at the cabin was lined with his creations. I used to walk its length admiring the things he’d made, hands clasped behind my back because I was allowed to look, but not to touch. My father did most of his craft work during the winter, as there were a lot of empty hours to fill. He tried to teach me more than once, but for some reason when it came to artwork I was all thumbs. A person can’t be good at everything, my father said after I’d mangled yet another attempt at working with porcupine quills—but as far as I could see, that wasn’t true of him.

I knew why my father was leaving me presents. The gifts were his way of telling me that he was close by. That he was watching me, and he would never leave me, even though I’d left him. I knew I shouldn’t keep them. I’d seen enough television cop shows to know that withholding evidence made me an accessory to my father’s crimes. But I liked that this was our secret. My father trusted me to keep quiet. Keeping quiet was something I could do.

The gifts kept coming. Not every day. Not even every week. Sometimes so much time went by between presents, I was sure my father had moved on and forgotten all about me. Then I’d find another. Each went into the box beneath my bed. Whenever I was feeling lonely, I’d take out the box and finger each gift and think about my father.

Then one morning I found a knife. I snatched it off the windowsill before my mother woke up and I hid it in my shoe box. I could hardly believe my father had given this knife to me. My father and I used to sit on my parents’ bed at the cabin with the knife case open between us while he told each knife’s story. This small silver knife shaped like a dagger with the initials G.L.M. etched into the base of the blade was my second favorite, after the knife I chose for myself on my fifth birthday. Whenever I asked my father who G.L.M. was, all he would say was that it was a mystery. I used to make up my own stories. The knife belonged to the man my father murdered. He won it in a bar fight, or in a knife-throwing competition. He stole it when he picked somebody’s pocket. I had no idea if picking pockets was among my father’s many skills, but it served the story.