The Marsh King's Daughter(59)

I keep my finger on the trigger. Just because a man looks like he’s beaten doesn’t mean he’s ready to give up. Especially when that man is as devious and manipulative as my father.

“Jacob.” The name feels foreign on my tongue.

“Bangii-Agawaateyaa.”

I shudder, and not because of the rain. Bangii-Agawaateyaa. Little Shadow. The name he gave me when I was a child. The name I haven’t heard spoken since. I can’t begin to articulate how these words coming out of my father’s mouth after all these years make me feel. All of the anger and hatred and resentment I’ve been holding on to for more than a decade evaporate, ice on a woodstove. I feel like a part of me I didn’t even realize was broken is now whole. Memories wash over me: my father teaching me to track, to hunt, to snowshoe, to swim. How to sharpen my knife and skin a rabbit and button my shirt and tie my shoes. Naming the birds, the insects, the plants, the animals. Sharing the marsh’s endless secrets: a cluster of frog eggs floating on the still pond water beneath an overhanging branch, a fox den burrowed deep into the sand on the side of a hill.

Everything I know about the marsh that’s worth knowing, this man taught me.

I tighten my grip on the Ruger. “Toss your weapons.”

My father looks back for a long time before he flings the Glock into the bushes. He pulls a Bowie from inside his right boot and tosses the knife after the gun.

“Slowly,” I say as he reaches behind his back for the second handgun. If I were him and he was me, this is the moment I’d make my move. I’d whip out my weapon, shove it against Rambo’s head, and use my adversary’s weakness for her dog to disarm her.

My father brings the second Glock out from behind him slowly as I instructed. His arm goes back like he’s going to throw it, but instead of letting go when his arm reaches its apex, he drops to one knee and shoots.

Not at Rambo.

At me.

The bullet slams into my shoulder. For the briefest of moments, all I feel is shock. He shot me. Deliberately, and with no thought to the consequences except to take me down.

I didn’t beat him. I didn’t save my family. I didn’t win, because my father changed the rules of our game once again.

Then my shoulder explodes. Someone stuck a stick of dynamite inside of me and set it off. I was hit by a baseball bat and run through with a hot poker. I got run over by a bus. I clap my hand over the wound, fall to the ground, and writhe as the pain washes over me in waves. Blood gushes between my fingers. Grab the Ruger, my brain tells my hands. Shoot him like he shot you. My hands don’t answer.

My father climbs the ridge and stands beside me looking down. The Glock points at my chest.

How incredibly stupid I am. I thought I was being strategic when I shot the branch instead of him. How tragically the consequences of my decision are going to play out. The truth is I didn’t want to kill my father. I love him, even though he doesn’t love me. He used my love for him against me.

I hold my breath as I wait for my father to finish me off. He looks down for a long time, then sticks the Glock in the back of his jeans and kicks the Ruger down the other side of the ridge. He rolls me onto my back and pockets my Magnum. I don’t know how he knew I was carrying, but he did. He pulls a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket—no doubt the same cuffs he was wearing when he escaped from prison—and yanks my arms in front of me despite my wounded shoulder and snaps the cuffs over my wrists. My whole body shakes with the effort not to scream.

He takes a step back, breathing heavily.

“And that,” he says, looking down with a triumphant grin, “is how you beat someone at hunting and tracking.”





22





THE CABIN

Early in the autumn, the Viking again returned home laden with spoil, and bringing prisoners with him. Among them was a young Christian priest, one of those who contemned the gods of the north. In the deep stony cellars of the castle, the young Christian priest was immured, and his hands and feet tied together with strips of bark.

The Viking’s wife considered him as beautiful as Baldur, and his distress raised her pity; but Helga said he ought to have ropes fastened to his heels, and be tied to the tails of wild animals.

“I would let the dogs loose after him,” she said, “over the moor and across the heath. Hurrah! that would be a spectacle for the gods, and better still to follow in its course.”

But the Viking would not allow the young Christian priest to die such a death as that, especially as he was the disowned and despiser of the high gods. The Viking had decided to have him offered as a sacrifice on the blood-stone in the grove. For the first time, a man was to be sacrificed here.

Helga begged to be allowed to sprinkle the assembled people with the blood of the priest. She sharpened her glittering knife; and when one of the great, savage dogs, who were running about the Viking’s castle in large numbers, sprang towards her, she thrust the knife into his side, merely, as she said, to prove its sharpness.

— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,

The Marsh King’s Daughter


Someone is coming,” my mother said again as we stood together at the kitchen window, as if she couldn’t believe her own words unless she said them twice.

I was surprised as well. My father was always so careful about not drawing attention to our cabin: cutting firewood on the low end of our ridge so the sound of his chain saw didn’t carry; shooting the rifle only when necessary to get the venison we needed; never leaving the marsh to restock our supplies even though we were running out of things it would have been nice to have; hiding from that family so we wouldn’t accidentally lead them to our cabin; running practice drills so my mother and I would know what to do in case anyone showed up on our ridge. It was hard to believe that after all of that, someone had actually come.