The Marsh King's Daughter(38)
“Will you pick them for me?” my mother asked. “If I stop stirring now, this batch won’t set.”
And this is why my mother’s near-drowning was my fault: I wanted to say yes. There was nothing I loved better than taking out my father’s canoe, except possibly deer hunting or beaver trapping. Normally I would have jumped at the chance. In hindsight I wish I had. But at eleven I was just getting to that age where I was driven much of the time by the need to assert myself. So I shook my head. “I’m going fishing.”
My mother looked at me for a long time, like there was more she wanted to say but couldn’t. At last she sighed and moved the pot to the back of the stove. She picked up one of the willow twig baskets my father had woven the previous winter and went outside.
As soon as the screen door banged behind her, I drizzled some of the hot strawberry syrup over a plateful of yesterday’s biscuits, poured myself a cup of chicory, and carried my breakfast to the back porch. The day was already warm. In the U.P., winter lasts forever and the spring drags on and on until, suddenly, you wake up one morning in the middle of June—and just like that, it’s summer. I unbuckled my overall straps and took off my shirt, then rolled up my pant legs as high as they would go. I seriously considered using my knife to cut off the legs and make the overalls into shorts, but this was the biggest pair of overalls I owned, and I was going to need those pant legs next winter.
I had almost finished eating and was about to go back into the kitchen to sneak a second helping when my father came over the side of the hill with a water bucket in each hand. He set the buckets on the porch and sat down beside me. I gave him the last biscuit, tossed what was left of my chicory into the dirt, and dipped my cup into one of the buckets. The water was cool and clear. Sometimes mosquito larvae got scooped up with the water. We’d find them swimming in our buckets, twisting and turning in on themselves like fish on dry land. When that happened we dipped our cups around them or flicked them out with a finger. We probably should have boiled the water before we drank it, but you try passing up a nice, cool drink of marsh water on a hot summer day. Anyway, we were never sick. After we left the marsh, my mother and I spent the next two years coughing and sneezing. That was one benefit of our isolation that people never think about: no germs. I always think it’s funny when people say they caught a cold because they went outside without a hat or a jacket. According to that logic, you should catch a fever in the summer if you get too hot.
“Where’s your mother going?” My father’s voice was thick with biscuit and syrup as he chewed. I wanted to ask why he was allowed to talk with his mouth full while my mother and I couldn’t, but I didn’t want to spoil the mood. There wasn’t a lot of physical contact in my family, and I liked sitting next to my father on the top step with our hips and knees pressed together like Siamese twins.
“To pick strawberries,” I told him proudly, pleased that thanks to me, this year we would have plenty of strawberry jam. “I found a patch on the next ridge.”
By this time my mother was almost to the woodlot. Our woodlot was on the low end of our ridge. At the bottom of the woodlot was the V-shaped depression where my father kept his canoe.
My father’s eyes narrowed. He jumped off the porch and took off running down the hill. I’d never seen him move so fast. I still had no idea what was about to happen, why my mother’s taking the canoe could possibly be a problem. I honestly thought my father only wanted to go with her to help, though he always said that picking berries was a job for women and children.
He caught up to her as she was pushing off and splashed into the water. But instead of getting into the canoe as I expected, he grabbed my mother by the hair, yanked her out of the canoe, and dragged her screaming all the way up the hill to our back porch, where he jammed her head into one of the water buckets and held it there while she flailed and clawed. When she went limp, I thought she was dead. The look on her face when he pulled her head out—hair dripping, eyes wild as she choked and coughed and sputtered—said she’d thought so, too.
My father tossed her to the side and strode off. After a while my mother pushed herself to her knees and crawled across the porch boards into the cabin. I sat on the big rock in the yard and stared at the trail of water she’d left behind until it dried. I had always been afraid of my father, but until that moment it had been more of a respectful awe. A fear of displeasing him, not because I was afraid of being punished, but because I didn’t want to disappoint him. But watching my father almost drown my mother terrified me—especially since I didn’t understand why he wanted to kill her or what she’d done wrong. I didn’t know then that my mother was his prisoner, or that she might indeed have been trying to run away. If I had been her, that near-drowning would have made me more determined than ever to escape my captor. But one thing I’ve learned since I left the marsh is that everybody’s different. What one person must do another one can’t.
Anyway, that’s why I have a problem with drowning.
—
BEFORE MY FATHER TRIED to drown my mother, I used to enjoy trapping beaver. There was a beaver pond about a half mile up the Tahquamenon River from our cabin. My father trapped beaver in December and January when the pelts were prime. He’d walk the edges of the pond looking for places where the beaver had come out for fresh air and sunlight, and set both leg traps and snares. I assume the pond is still there, but who knows? Sometimes the Department of Natural Resources will blow up a beaver dam if they think it’s interfering with the way a river ought to run, or if the dam is somehow making problems for people. Property damage caused by beavers runs into the millions of dollars every year, and the DNR takes its management responsibilities seriously. Timber loss, crop loss, damage to roads and septic systems from flooding, even the destruction of ornamental landscape plantings in suburban gardens are all considered legitimate reasons for taking out a beaver dam. Never mind the needs of the beavers.