The Marsh King's Daughter(36)

When I woke up, daylight poured through the slats in the woodshed. It was so cold, I could see my breath. Rambo curled against me. I pulled up a corner of my blanket and laid the blanket over the sleeping dog. Rambo sighed.

—

IT HURTS ME PHYSICALLY to think about how much I loved that dog. For the rest of that fall and on into the winter until it got too cold, I slept beside Rambo in the woodshed. The sides of the woodshed were slatted and open to the weather, so I made a shelter out of firewood and hung my blankets over the sides and top, similar to the forts Stephen and the girls build with pillows and couch cushions in our living room.

Rambo had been trained to basic commands like “come” and “sit” and “stay,” but I didn’t know this. So as I gradually learned Rambo’s vocabulary, I thought that he was learning mine. Whenever Rambo would break off in the middle of following a rabbit trail or gnawing on a deer antler or worrying a chipmunk and come or sit at my command, I felt as powerful as a shaman.

My father hated my dog. At the time, I couldn’t understand why. Indians and dogs were supposed to be friends. Yet whenever Rambo tried to follow my father, my father would kick him away or yell at him or hit him with a stick. When he wasn’t beating Rambo, all he did was complain about how Rambo was one more mouth to feed. I couldn’t see where this should be a problem. My father said Rambo was a bear dog who got lost during a hunt. Bear season is in August. This was the middle of November, which meant that Rambo had been feeding himself perfectly well for months. I only gave him the food scraps we didn’t want. Why should my father care if Rambo ate the bones and entrails we were only going to throw away?

Now I know that my father hated my dog because my father is a narcissist. A narcissist is only happy as long as the world runs the way he wants it to. My father’s plan for our life in the marsh didn’t include a dog; therefore he couldn’t see a dog as anything but a problem.

I also think he saw Rambo as a threat. He let me keep Rambo initially as a display of generosity, but when in time I grew to love my dog as purely as I loved my father, he was jealous because he thought my affections were divided. But my affections weren’t divided; they were multiplied. My love for my dog didn’t diminish my love for my father. It’s possible to love more than one person. Rambo taught me that.

I think Rambo was the reason why the next spring, my father disappeared. One day he was with us at the cabin, and then he wasn’t. My mother and I had no idea where my father had gone or why he left, but we had no reason to think that this time was any different from the other occasions when he’d disappear for hours or even a day or, every once in a while, overnight, so we held to our regular routine as much as possible. My mother hauled water and kept the fire going while I chopped wood and checked the snare line. Most of the time the snares came up empty. Rabbits breed in the spring, so they spend most of their time in their nests and are harder to catch. I would have tried to shoot a deer, except that my father had taken the rifle. Mostly we ate the vegetables that were left in the root cellar. I thought many times about using my father’s ax to chop down the door to the storage room so we could get at the supplies. But then I thought about what he would do to me when he came back and saw it, so I didn’t. When Rambo dug up a nest of rabbits to get at the babies, we ate those, too.

And then two weeks later, as abruptly as he’d disappeared, my father returned, whistling as he strode up the ridge with his rifle over his shoulder and a marsh marigold poking out of his gunnysack as if he had never left. He had a bag of salt for my mother and a Lake Superior agate that was almost identical to the one he wore: a gift for me. He never said where he had been or what he had been doing, and we didn’t ask. We were just glad he came back.

In the weeks that followed, we went about our chores as if nothing had changed. But it had. Because for the first time in my life, I could imagine a world without my father.





13





I’m driving down the road, head swiveling like a barn owl’s as I watch for signs of my father. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Certainly I don’t expect to come around a bend and see my father standing in the middle of the road waving for me to stop. I guess I’ll know it when I see it.

Rambo’s leash is tied to the grab handle above the passenger door. I generally don’t tie him up when he rides with me in the truck, but Rambo is as antsy as I feel, nose twitching, muscles trembling. Every once in a while, he lifts his head and whines like he’s caught a whiff of my father. Every time he does this my hands clench and my stomach gets tight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Stephen as I drive. About our argument last night. About how he came back this morning. How he wants to support me in spite of everything I’ve done to him. I think about the roles we play in our relationship, me as protector and Stephen as nurturer, and how I used to think this was a problem.

And of course I think about the day we met at the blueberry festival, a day I’m sure the gods arranged. After I set out my jars and hung my sign off the front of my table, I watched Stephen set up his tent directly across from mine. To be honest, I was more impressed with his display than I was with his photos. I understand that lighthouse pictures are popular with tourists because, with more than three thousand miles of coastline, Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state, but still it’s hard for me to see why anyone would want to hang a picture of one on their wall.