The Marsh King's Daughter(31)
Later, after my grandmother drove my mother to her therapist and my grandfather finished lunch and went back to his shop, I took out the box and spread my treasures over my bed. Sometimes when I played with my collection I sorted the items into piles according to kind. Other times I arranged them in the order I received them, or from the most-liked to the least, though of course I loved them all. My mother’s appointments normally lasted an hour and sometimes more, so I figured I had forty-five minutes before I had to put them away. I still resisted the idea of carving up a day into hours and minutes, but I could see that there were times when it was useful to know exactly how long a person was going to be gone and when they’d be back.
I was sitting on my bed, pretending my father was sitting beside me at last, telling this knife’s true story, when my mother and grandmother came into the room. They shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on me. All I can think is that I was so caught up in my father’s story, I didn’t hear the car pull in. Later I found out my mother’s therapy session hadn’t gone well, and that’s why they came home early. That part didn’t surprise me. I was supposed to be seeing the same therapist, but I’d stopped going six months before this because the therapist kept pushing me to finish school no matter how miserable I was so I could enroll at Northern Michigan University in Marquette and get a degree in biology or botany and get a job somewhere one day doing field research. I couldn’t see how sitting in a classroom could possibly teach me more about the marsh than I already knew. I didn’t need a book to tell me the difference between a swamp and a marsh and a bog and a fen.
The first thing my grandmother spotted when she came into the room was the knife. She came over to the bed and glared down at me and held out her hand.
“What are you doing with that? Give that to me.”
“It’s mine.” I tossed the knife into the shoe box along with the rest of my things and shoved the box under my bed.
“Did you steal it?”
We both knew I couldn’t have purchased the knife on my own. My grandparents never let me have any money, not even the money people sent after I left the marsh that was supposed to be for me. They said the money had been put into something called a “trust” and that meant they couldn’t touch it. After I turned eighteen, the lawyer I hired to get it for me told me there was no trust and never had been, which went a long way toward explaining the Ford F-350 my grandparents drove, as well as the Lincoln Town Car. I can’t help thinking that if my grandparents had been less concerned about making money from what had happened to my mother and more concerned about helping her get over it, things would have gone a lot better for her.
My grandmother got down on her hands and knees and pulled the box out from under the bed, which wasn’t easy because she was a large woman and her knees were bad. She dumped the contents on my bed and grabbed the knife and started waving it around and yelling like I wasn’t sitting two feet away and couldn’t hear her perfectly well even if she had whispered. I still hate when people yell. Say what you will about my father; he never raised his voice.
The knife was so distinctive, as soon as she saw it, my mother knew right away that it used to belong to my father. She clapped her hand over her mouth and started backing out of the room like the knife was a cobra and it was going to attack her. At least she didn’t scream. My mother still tended to freak whenever anything reminded her of my father or someone said his name, though by this time it had been two years. Maybe her therapist really was helping.
My grandmother took the shoe box to the police. The police found my prints on the knife along with a set that matched the ones they’d taken from the cabin. They still didn’t know my father’s name, but the prints proved he was in the area. The detective promised my grandparents it was only a matter of time before they’d catch my father, and he was right about that. Inquiries about an Indian with a big knife collection led to a remote logging camp north of Tahquamenon Falls, where my father was living with a couple of First Nations men. Back then it wasn’t uncommon for a jobber to hire Indians from Canada to cut the junk wood nobody else wanted. They’d set them up on the job site in a trailer or a camper and bring them gas for their generator and groceries once a week and pay them under the table.
I’ve watched the body cam footage of the FBI raid many times on YouTube. It’s like an episode of Cops or Law & Order starring your very own father, though the uncut version runs a little long. There’s a lot of whispering and odd camera angles as the team sets up behind a log pile and under the skidder and behind the tool trailer and even inside the outhouse because they weren’t taking any chances. Then there’s a long stretch of nothing while they wait for my father and the men he was living with to come back from the day’s cutting. The look on my father’s face as the team swarms out with their weapons drawn, shouting for him to “Get down! Get down!” still makes me laugh. But it goes by so fast, you have to be ready to hit pause or you’ll miss it. I’m sure the jobber was more than a little surprised when he found out he was harboring the top man on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
In theory, my father should have remained a free man forever the first time he was on the run, because back then no one knew who he was. My mother and I always assumed Jacob was his real name, because why would we think otherwise? But that’s all we knew. I always thought the police artist did a decent job of capturing my father’s likeness, but my father must have had one of those faces that looked like a lot of other men’s, because even though you couldn’t turn on the television or pick up a newspaper or drive down the highway without seeing his picture, in the end nothing came of it. You might think my father’s parents would have recognized their son and come forward to identify him, but they must have found it difficult to step up and admit that their child was a kidnapper and a murderer.