The Marsh King's Daughter(40)

My hands were red from squeezing the hot apple mash through a piece of folded cheesecloth to separate the juice from the pulp. The kitchen was stuffy and hot. I felt like a miner chipping away at a coal seam deep underground. I peeled my T-shirt over my head and used it to wipe my face.

“Put your shirt on,” my mother said.

“I don’t want to. It’s too hot.”

My mother shot my father a look. My father shrugged. I wadded up my shirt and threw it into a corner and stomped up the stairs to my room and flopped onto my bed with my arms behind my head and stared at the ceiling and thought bad thoughts about my father and mother.

“Helena! Get down here!” my mother called up the stairs.

I didn’t move. I could hear my parents argue.

“Jacob, do something.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Make her come down. Make her help. I can’t do everything myself.”

I rolled off the bed and dug through the piles of clothes on the floor for a dry T-shirt, buttoned a flannel shirt over it, and stomped back down the stairs.

“You’re not going out,” my mother said when I crossed the kitchen and grabbed my coat from the hook by the door. “We’re not finished.”

“You’re not finished. I’m done.”

“Jacob.”

“Listen to your mother, Helena,” my father said without looking up from the knife he was sharpening. I could see his reflection in the blade. My father was smiling.

I threw my coat on the floor and ran into the living room and threw myself on my bearskin rug and buried my face in its fur. I didn’t want to learn how to make jelly. I didn’t understand why my father wouldn’t take my side against my mother, what was happening to me and to my family. Why I felt like crying though I didn’t want to.

I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees and sank my teeth into my arm until I tasted blood. If I couldn’t stop myself from crying, I’d give myself a reason to.

My father followed me into the living room and stood over me with his arms crossed. The knife he’d been sharpening was in his hand.

“Get up.”

I got up. Tried not to look at the knife as I stood as straight and tall as I was able. I crossed my arms over my chest and stuck out my chin and stared back. I wasn’t challenging him. Not yet. I was only letting him know that whatever he was planning to do to me in punishment for my defiance was going to come at a cost. If I could go back in time and ask the eleven-year-old me what I was planning to do to my father in retaliation, I couldn’t have said. All I knew was that there was nothing my father could say or do that would make me agree to help my mother make jelly.

My father looked back just as steadily. He hefted the knife and smiled. A sly, crooked smile that said I would have been a whole lot smarter if I’d done as he said, because now he was going to have a little fun. He took my wrist and held it tightly so I couldn’t pull away. Studied the bite mark I’d left on my forearm, then touched the tip of the knife to my skin. I flinched. I didn’t want to. I knew that whatever my father was planning to do would be worse if he knew I was afraid. And I wasn’t afraid—not really, not of pain, anyway. I’d had plenty of experience enduring pain because of my tattoos. In hindsight, I think the reason I flinched was that I didn’t know what he was going to do. There’s a psychological component to controlling a person that can be just as powerful as the physical pain you inflict on them, and I think this incident is a good example.

My father drew the knife along my forearm. The cuts he made weren’t deep. Just enough to make the blood well up. Slowly he connected the teeth marks until they formed a crude O.

He paused, studied his handiwork, then drew three short contiguous lines on one side of the O and four more on the other.

When he finished, he held up my arm so I could see. Blood ran down the inside of my arm and dripped off my elbow.

“Go help your mother.” He tapped the tip of the knife against the word he’d cut into my arm and smiled again, like he’d be happy to keep this up for as long as he had to if I didn’t do as he said, and so I did.

The scars have grown faint over time, but if you know where to look, you can still read the word NOW on the inside of my right forearm.

The scars my father left on my mother, of course, went much deeper.





15





I stare at the agate my father left on the stump. I don’t want to touch it. This is exactly the sort of trick he used to pull when he was teaching me to track. Just when I thought I was at the top of my game, merrily anticipating the moment when I could shoot a bullet between his feet, he’d do something to throw me off: brush out his tracks with a leafy branch, or use a long stick to bend the grass where he wanted me to think that he had walked, or walk backward, or walk on the sides of his feet so he wouldn’t leave heel or toe marks at all. Every time I thought I had mastered everything there was to know about tracking a person through the wilderness, my father would come up with something new.

Now it’s an agate. That my father was watching for who knows how long, that he could sneak up while I was occupied and leave the agate for me to find proves my father is a better woodsman after thirteen years in a five-by-nine jail cell than I will ever be. Not only can he escape from a maximum security prison, he can make the people who are looking for him think he’s in an area where he’s not, then lure me here knowing that our shared history will lead me to this spot. I knew when I went looking for my father this morning that I would find him.