The Marsh King's Daughter(37)

I never would have gone into his tent except that when I left my table to use a porta-john and walked past, I happened to look inside and see a photograph of a bear. I’ve seen a lot of bear pictures and postcards in the souvenir shops when I make my rounds, but there was something about this bear that grabbed my attention. Whether it was the lighting when he took the photo or the angle he chose is hard to say. All I know is that there was something about the glint in the bear’s eye and the set of its jaw that caught my eye.

I stopped. Stephen smiled, and I went inside. On the opposite side of the wire framework on which he’d hung his lighthouse photos were the pictures that captured my heart: herons and bitterns, eagles and minks, otters and beavers and martins. All animals from my childhood, all photographed in such a way as to show off their unique characteristics and personalities, as if Stephen could see into their souls. I bought the bear photo, Stephen bought all my remaining jam and jelly, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I know what I saw in Stephen. I’m still not sure what he saw in me, but I try not to think about it too much. Stephen is the only person on the face of the Earth who chose me. Who loves me not because he has to, but because he wants to. My gift from the universe for surviving my past.

I think again about all of the years and all of the chances I had to come clean about who I am but didn’t. The sacrifices I made to keep my secret. Staying away from my father. Wanting to introduce the newborn Iris to my mother but not being able to. The times when I said or did something outside the norm and Stephen looked at me as if I’d lost my mind and I wasn’t able to offer an explanation. Things would have been a lot easier if I’d told the truth.

—

TEN MINUTES LATER, I pull over and park. Rambo puts his paws on the window ledge and presses his nose against the glass like he thinks I’m going to let him out, but this time, it’s me who has to go. I walk a short way into the underbrush and unzip my jeans. There’s hardly any traffic on this road, but you never know. My father and I never worried about privacy when we were hunting or fishing and needed to answer nature’s call, but out here people are a lot more sensitive.

I’m almost finished when Rambo barks the sharp staccato warning that means he’s spotted something. I zip my jeans and grab the Magnum and drop to my belly with the gun in both hands in front of me and peer through the underbrush.

Nothing. I belly-crawl using the wind as cover to a spot where I can see the truck from another angle, thinking there’ll be a pair of legs crouched on the other side, but everything is quiet. I count slowly to twenty, and when nothing changes, I stand up. Rambo sees me and starts barking and scratching to get out. I walk over to the truck and crack the passenger door enough to slip my hand through, then grab him by his collar and untie his leash from the grab handle. If I let Rambo have his way in this condition, I won’t see him again for days. Maybe never. There’s a reason the first Rambo showed up on our ridge.

As soon as he hits the ground, Rambo drags me over to a stump not twenty feet from where I was occupied, barking and running circles around it like he’s treed a squirrel or a raccoon. Only there is no squirrel. Instead, in the exact middle of the stump is a Lake Superior agate.





14





THE CABIN

The wife of the Viking lived in constant pain and sorrow about the child. Her heart clung to the little creature, but she could not explain to her husband the circumstances in which it was placed. If she were to tell him, he would very likely, as was the custom at that time, expose the poor child in the public highway, and let anyone take it away who would.

The good wife of the Viking could not let that happen, and she therefore resolved that the Viking should never see the child excepting by daylight. After a while, the foster-mother began to love the poor frog, with its gentle eyes and its deep sighs, even better than the little beauty who bit and fought with all around her.

— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,

The Marsh King’s Daughter



My childhood came to an end the day my father tried to drown my mother. It was my fault. The incident began innocently enough, and while the outcome wasn’t anything I could have foreseen, I can’t change the facts. It’s not the sort of thing you get over quickly. To this day whenever the radio plays that song about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, or I hear a news report about a ferry tipping over or a cruise ship capsizing or a mother pushing a car full of toddlers into a lake, it makes me want to throw up.

“I saw a patch of strawberries on the next ridge,” I told my mother one late June morning. It was the summer I was eleven, after she had complained that the berries I’d picked for her on our ridge weren’t going to be nearly enough to make the quantity of jam she wanted.

The thing you need to know in order to understand what happened next is that when I told my mother I’d seen a patch of strawberries growing on “the next ridge,” she knew exactly which ridge I was talking about. White people tend to name geographic features for themselves, or for other important people, but we followed the Native tradition and named our surroundings according to how we used them, or for their proximity to our own. The next ridge. The cedars where the deer like to gather. The bog where the arrowroot grows. The place where Jacob shot the eagle. The rock where Helena cut her head. Like the Ojibwa word for the Tahquamenon River, Adikamegong-ziibi, “river where the whitefish are found.” I still think the Native way makes more sense.