The Marsh King's Daughter(33)

My father saved his best stories for our madoodiswan, our sweat lodge. My mother called the sweat lodge a sauna. My father tore down our front porch the summer I was eight to build it. We didn’t need both a front and a back porch, my father said, and while the cabin looked odd without it, I had to agree.

My father built our sweat lodge because he was tired of bathing standing up. Also because while I could still sit down in the blue enamel washtub I’d been using since I was a baby, it wouldn’t be long before I would have to do the same. My mother never took baths, so her needs didn’t matter. (My mother never took off her clothes in front of my father and me and only wiped herself down with a wet cloth when she needed cleaning, though I saw her swimming in the marsh in her underwear when she thought no one was around.)

This was around late August or early September. I can’t be more specific than that because I didn’t always keep track. Late summer is a good time to tackle an outdoor construction project because the weather is still warm but most of the bugs are gone. My mother was one of those people bugs seemed attracted to. Often she was so covered with bites, she wept with frustration. I’ve read about pioneers in Siberia and Alaska being driven mad by mosquitoes, but generally speaking mosquitoes don’t bother me. Blackflies are a lot worse. Blackflies like to go for the back of your neck or behind your ears, and their bites stay itchy and sore for weeks. A single bite near the corner of your eye can make your whole eyelid swell shut. You can imagine what happens when you get two. Sometimes when we were cutting firewood in the woodlot during June, the blackflies would be so thick, we couldn’t take a breath without swallowing a few. My father used to joke that this only meant we were getting extra protein, but I didn’t like it, even if there was now one less fly to bite me. Horseflies take out a chunk. Deerflies will bite if you let them, but they’re so predictable as they buzz around your head that if you time it right you can clap your hands together when they pass in front of your face, and that’s that. No-see-ums are as tiny as the period at the end of a sentence, but with a bite all out of proportion to their size. If you’re sleeping in a tent and something keeps biting you that feels like a mosquito but you can’t see anything, that will be no-see-ums. There’s nothing you can do against them except burrow into your sleeping bag and pull the covers over your head and stay like that until the morning. People worry about the chemicals in insect repellent causing cancer, but if we’d had bug spray when we lived in the marsh, you can bet we would have used it.

Our sweat lodge was a family project. Picture a hot day with all of us pitching in and doing our part. Sweat rolled down my father’s back and dripped off the end of my nose as we worked. When I lent him the handkerchief I kept in my back pocket to wipe his face and neck, my father joked that it was such a good lodge, it was already making us sweat. My mother sorted and stacked the lumber: floorboards in one pile, floor joists in another, support beams in a third. The joists and beams would become the corner posts and uprights of our sweat lodge, while the floorboards would cover the sides. The porch roof my father took down in one piece. We only needed half, but my father explained that we could stack the firewood for our sweat lodge under the parts that stuck out to protect it from the weather. Our madoodiswan would have a bench along the back wall where we could sit and a circle of stones from the porch’s foundation where my father would build the fire. We burned maple and beech in our kitchen stove, but in the sweat lodge we would burn cedar and pine because we needed a hot, quick fire. It was hard for me to see how sitting in a tiny hot room would make us clean, but if my father said this was how the sweat lodge worked, I believed him.

My job was to straighten the nails he pulled. I liked the way the nails screeched before they let go, like an animal caught in a trap. I balanced the nails on a flat stone with the kinked side pointing up the way my father showed me and tap-tap-tapped with a hammer until the nails were as straight as I could make them. I especially liked the nails with square sides. My father said these nails were made by hand, and this meant our cabin was very old. I wondered how the other nails were made.

I wondered about the people who built our cabin. What would they think if they could see us tearing part of it down? Why did they build the cabin on this ridge instead of the one where the deer liked to gather? Why did they build the cabin with two porches instead of one? I thought I knew some of the answers. I thought they built our cabin with two porches so they could sit on the front porch and watch the sun come up and then sit on the back porch and watch the sun go down. And I thought the reason they built here instead of the ridge with the deer was so the deer would feel safe until the people who built our cabin were ready to hike over and shoot one.

Lately I’d been wondering about a lot of things. Where did my father get the blue pry bar he used to pull nails? Did he bring it with him, or was it already at the cabin? Why didn’t I have brothers and sisters? How would we cut firewood when my father ran out of gas for his chain saw? Why didn’t our cabin have a stove like the pictures in the Geographics? My mother said her family had a big white stove with four burners on top and an oven for baking when she was little, so why didn’t we? Most of the time I kept my wonderings to myself. My father didn’t like it when I asked too many questions.

My father told me to whack the nails with the hammer instead of tapping them to make the job go faster. Not that we were in a hurry, but he would like to use the madoodiswan this winter and not have to wait until the next. He smiled when he said this so I knew he was joking. I also knew he really did want me to work faster, so I swung the hammer harder. I wondered if I could straighten a nail with a single blow. I sorted through the pile looking for a nail that was only slightly bent.