The Marsh King's Daughter(6)

But I’m a quick study. It didn’t take me long to figure out that, to most people, my skill set was seriously undervalued. And in all honesty, their world offered some pretty amazing technological marvels. Indoor plumbing ranks high on the list. Even now when I wash dishes or run a bath for the girls, I like to hold my hands under the stream, though I’m careful to do it only when Stephen isn’t around. There aren’t many men who’d be willing to put up with my staying alone overnight in the bush on foraging expeditions, or going bear hunting, or eating cattails. I don’t want to push it.

Here’s the true answer: the most amazing discovery I made after my mother and I were recovered is electricity. It’s hard to see now how we managed all those years without it. I look at people blithely charging their tablets and cell phones and toasting bread and microwaving popcorn and watching television and reading e-books late into the night and a part of me still marvels. No one who’s grown up with electricity gives a thought to how they’d get along without it except on the rare occasion when a storm knocks out the power and sends them scrambling for flashlights and candles.

Imagine never having power. No small appliances. No refrigerator. No washer or dryer. No power tools. We got up when it got light and went to bed when it got dark. Sixteen-hour days in the summer, eight-hour days in the winter. With electricity, we could have listened to music, cooled ourselves with fans, heated the coldest corners of the rooms. Pumped water from the marsh. I could easily live without television and computers. I’d even give up my cell phone. But if there’s one thing I’d miss if I had to do without it now, it’s electricity, hands down.

A shriek comes from the play yard. I crane my neck. I can’t always tell from the pitch of my daughters’ screams if their emergencies are trivial or real. A genuine emergency would involve buckets of blood pouring from one or both girls, or a black bear nosing around outside the fence. Trivial would be Iris waving her hands and screaming like she’s eaten rat poison while Mari claps her hands and laughs. “Bee! Bee!” Another word she has no trouble saying.

I know. It’s hard to believe that a woman who was raised under what were arguably the ultimate wilderness survival conditions has produced a daughter who is afraid of bugs, but there it is. I’ve given up bringing Iris with me in the field. All she does is complain about the dirt and the smells. I’m doing better so far with Mari. A parent isn’t supposed to favor one child over the other, but sometimes it’s hard not to.

I stand at the window until the bee wisely retreats to calmer airspace and the girls settle down. I imagine their grandfather watching from across the yard behind the tree line. One girl fair, the other girl dark. I know which one he’d choose.

I open the window and call the girls inside.





3





I give Mari and Iris their baths as soon as the dishes are cleared and put them to bed over their objections. We all know it’s too early. No doubt they’ll giggle and talk for hours before they fall asleep, but as long as they stay in their beds and out of the living room, I don’t care.

I make it back to the living room in time to catch the six o’clock news. Two hours since my father escaped, and no reported sightings as yet, which really doesn’t surprise me. I still don’t think he’s anywhere near the wildlife refuge. The same terrain that makes the refuge difficult to search makes it a hard place to escape into. That said, my father never does anything without a purpose. There’s a reason he escaped where he did. I just have to figure out what it is.

Before I had my grandparents’ house razed, I used to wander the rooms looking for insight into my father. I wanted to know how a person goes from child to child molester. The trial transcripts offer a few details: My grandfather Holbrook was a full-blooded Ojibwa who was given his non-Native name when he was sent away as a child to Indian boarding school. My grandmother’s people were Finns who lived in the northwestern part of the U.P. and worked in the copper mines. My grandparents met and married when they were in their late thirties, and my father was born five years later. The defense painted my father’s parents as perfectionists who were too old and rigid to adapt to the needs of their rambunctious little boy and punished him for the least infraction. I found a cedar spanking stick in the woodshed with the handle end worn smooth, so I know this part is true. In a cubby beneath a loose board in his bedroom closet I found a shoe box with a pair of handcuffs, a nest of blonde hairs I assumed were from his mother’s hairbrush with a tube of lipstick and a pearl earring tucked inside like bird’s eggs, and a pair of white cotton underpants I assumed were also hers. I can imagine what the prosecution would have done with that.

The rest of the transcripts don’t offer much. My father’s parents kicked him out of the house after he dropped out of school in the tenth grade. He cut pulpwood for a while, then joined the Army, where he was dishonorably discharged after a little more than a year because he couldn’t get along with the other soldiers and wouldn’t listen to his commanders. The defense said none of this was my father’s fault. He was a bright young man who was acting out only because he was looking for the love and acceptance his parents never gave him. I’m not so sure. My father may have been wise in the ways of the wilderness, but I honestly can’t recall a single instance when he sat down and read one of the Geographics. Sometimes I wondered if he knew how. He didn’t even bother looking at the pictures.