The Marsh King's Daughter(62)

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LONG AFTER the cabin was quiet, I lay on my bed with my arms behind my head and stared at the ceiling. Memories crowded out my dreams.

My father and I were swimming in the beaver pond. He was teaching me how to float on my back. The sun was warm and the water was cold. I lay on my back on top of the water with my arms straight out to the sides. My father stood beside me. The water came up to his waist. My father’s hands were beneath my back holding me up, though I could hardly feel them. “Legs up,” he said when my feet started to droop. “Stomach out. Arch your back.” I pushed my stomach out and curled my shoulders back as far as they would go. My face dipped under the water. I sputtered, started to sink. My father caught me, lifted me up. I tried again. Later, after I learned to float, it was so easy, it was hard to remember a time when I didn’t know how.

My father was helping me bait my fishhook. The hook was very sharp. The first time I picked up a fishhook from my father’s tackle box, it got stuck in my thumb. It hurt, but not as much as when my father pulled it out. After that I was careful to hold the hook only by the loop at the top. Our bait can was full of worms. We dug the worms from the wet soil at the low end of our ridge. I fished through the dirt in the can and took one out. The worm was slippery and wet. My father showed me how to slide the hook into the middle of the worm and loop the worm around the hook and stick it again through its tail and head. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said when I asked how the worm felt about this. “Worms can’t feel anything.” If this was true, I asked, then why did the worm twist and wiggle? My father smiled. He said it was good that I was learning to think for myself and patted my head.

My father and I were sitting in the sweat lodge. My father was once again telling the story about the time he fell into the bear’s den. This time I noticed that whenever my father told the story, he changed the details to make the story more exciting. The hole was deeper, my father fell farther, it was harder for him to climb out, the bear started to wake up when my father landed on its back, the cub’s neck was broken. I could see that while it was important to always tell the truth, when you were telling a story, it was okay to change the facts to make the story more interesting. I hoped when I grew up, I would be as good a storyteller as he was.

I got up and crossed the room to the window and looked out over the moonlit yard. Rambo was moving around in the utility shed. The snowmobile was beneath me. The man in the woodshed was quiet.

I had loved my father when I was little. I still did. Cousteau and Calypso said my father was a bad man. I know they cared about me, but I couldn’t believe that this was true.

—

IN THE MORNING my father cooked breakfast while my mother stayed in bed. The oat cereal he fixed was bland and tasteless. It was hard to believe that yesterday the thing I was most concerned about was not having salt. All I could think about now was my mother’s betrayal. Not only the lie she told about the Geographics, but the way she betrayed my father. I knew he beat her for bringing the man into our cabin and this was why she was still in bed. I didn’t like when my father beat my mother, but there were times like now when she deserved it. My father said that because my mother was alone in our cabin with another man, this meant my mother had committed something called adultery, and when an Ojibwa woman commits adultery, her husband had the right to mutilate her or even kill her as he saw fit. My mother wasn’t Native American, but because she was my father’s wife she had to live by his rules. I knew she deserved to be punished, but even so, I was glad I didn’t tell my father I saw her kiss the man.

I scrubbed out our cereal bowls and cooking pot with cold water and a handful of sand and carried a mug of hot chicory to the man in the woodshed as my father instructed. The morning was sunny and bright. The snowmobile looked bigger in the daylight, shiny and black and as sparkly as a fresh snowfall, with a windshield the color of wood smoke and that extraordinary green stripe. It was nothing like the pictures in the Geographics. I left the mug on the porch step and picked up the helmet. It was heavier than I’d expected, with a piece of dark curved glass in front shaped like a shield. Inside the padding was thick and soft. I put on the helmet and sat down on the seat with my legs on either side the way the man did and pretended I was driving. I used to wish we had a snowmobile. If we’d had a snowmobile, we could have checked our ice-fishing lines in half the time it took to snowshoe from hole to hole. I asked my father once if we could trade some of his furs to get one. That led to a long lecture about how Indian ways were better than white men’s inventions, and faster wasn’t always better. But I thought that if our people had had snowmobiles back in the day, they would have used them.

I climbed off the snowmobile and picked up the mug and crossed the yard to the woodshed. The chicory was no longer steaming. The man was handcuffed to the post in the corner. His hair was bloody and his face was swollen. His jacket and pants were gone. He was wearing white thermal underwear like my father and I wore in the winter and nothing else. His feet were pushed into the woodchips and sawdust to keep them warm, though I could see his toes sticking out. His arms were handcuffed above his head. His eyes were closed and his beard rested on his chest. He didn’t look much like a Viking now.

I stopped in the doorway. I wasn’t sure why. This was my woodshed, my cabin, my ridge. I had every right to be here. This man was the one who didn’t belong. I think I was afraid to go in because I didn’t want to be alone with this man and possibly commit adultery. My father was the one who told me to bring the man a cup of chicory, but adultery was a new concept. I wasn’t sure how it worked.