The Marsh King's Daughter(66)

Even so, I did everything my father and mother told me, and I did it cheerfully and without complaining in the hope that this would make everyone happy again and things would go back to normal. I washed the dishes, swept the floors, chopped a frozen chunk of venison into pieces with the hatchet and put it on the stove to boil as my mother instructed. I brought her a cup of yarrow tea every time she asked, and I brought her a bowl of leftover rabbit soup for lunch. I helped her sit up to drink and eat, and I fetched a pot from the kitchen for her to pee in and emptied the pot in the outhouse when she was done. My father said that yarrow tea would help stop the bleeding, though it didn’t seem to be working. The sling he made for her broken arm from one of our kitchen towels was stained and crusty. So were the sheets. I would have washed them if I could.

I honestly didn’t realize how much work she did until I had to do everything myself. I was standing on a step stool leaning over the woodstove, trying to decide if the venison I was cooking for dinner was ready to eat (“Stick a fork in the meat and pretend the fork is an extension of your teeth,” my mother said when I asked how I was supposed to know when the meat was done), when my father opened the back door and stuck his head inside.

“Come,” he said.

I moved the pot to the back of the stove and put on my winter gear gladly. It was almost dark. The day had been sunny and bright, but now the clouds were rolling in and the temperature was dropping and the wind was kicking up like it was going to snow. I breathed deeply in the frosty air. I felt like a prisoner who’d been let out of jail, or a zoo animal that had been released into the wild after a lifetime in captivity. As I followed my father across the yard, it was all I could do to keep from jumping.

My father carried his favorite knife in his hand, a seven-inch KA-BAR with a carbon steel blade and a leather-wrapped handle, like U.S. Marines used during World War II, though he got his when he was in the Army. The KA-BAR is an excellent combat knife, useful for opening cans and digging trenches and cutting wood or wire or cable as well as fighting hand to hand, though I preferred my Bowie.

Then I saw that we were going to the woodshed. The scars on my forearm tingled. I didn’t know what my father was planning to do to the man, but I could guess.

The man scrambled back as far as the handcuffs would let him when we went inside. My father squatted on his heels in front of the man and tossed his knife from hand to hand, letting the man get a good long look while he smiled as if he knew what he was going to do but he couldn’t make up his mind where to start. He stared at the man’s face for a long time, then let his gaze trail slowly down the man’s chest to his groin. The man looked like he was going to throw up. Even I felt queasy.

Suddenly my father grabbed the man’s shirt and stuck his knife through the fabric. He sliced the shirt open all the way from the neck to the man’s waist, then touched the tip of the knife to the man’s chest. The man squeaked with fear. My father pressed harder. The knife pierced the skin. The man yelped. When my father began cutting letters into the man’s chest, the man screamed.

My father worked on the man’s tattoos for a long time. This is what my father called them, though the words he cut into the man’s chest didn’t look much like tattoos to me.

My father stopped when the man passed out. He stood up and went outside and cleaned his hands and knife in the snow. As we walked back to the cabin, my head was dizzy and my knees were weak.

When I told my mother about the man’s tattoos, she pulled up her shirt and showed me the words my father had written on her: Slut. Whore. I didn’t know what the words meant, but she said that they were bad.

—

THE NEXT MORNING my father went into the marsh to shoot our spring deer without first torturing the man in the woodshed. He said we needed the meat more than ever now that we had one more mouth to feed. But my father wasn’t giving him anything to eat. Plus, we had enough vegetables in the root cellar to last until the ducks and geese came back, in addition to the cans and other food supplies in the storage room.

I thought my father was only pretending to go hunting, that he was really hiding somewhere close by to keep an eye on me to see if I would do as I was told when he was away. I was in charge of the man while he was gone. I was supposed to give him one cup of hot chicory in the morning and another at night, and nothing else. I didn’t see how he could survive drinking only chicory. My father said that was the point.

My father called the man The Hunter, though I knew his name was John. My mother told me The Hunter’s last name was spelled like it was pronounced, Lauk-ka-nen, with all of the syllables accented the same. I had to say it twice before I got it right. She said that Finnish last names might look like they were hard to pronounce because of all the double consonants and vowels, but they’re really not. Unlike English where some letters are silent, like the b in dumb or the w in sword, Finnish is written almost exactly like it’s spoken.

My mother said that she and The Hunter grew up in the same town, in a place called Newberry, and that she went to school with his youngest brother before my father brought her to the marsh. She said she used to have a crush on The Hunter’s youngest brother, though she never told him. I thought about the boy in the ’Teen magazine with three names, Neil Patrick Harris, who my mother also wanted to crush. It seemed a strange thing to do to a person.

My mother told me her last name was Harju, which was also Finnish, which I did not know. She said her grandparents moved from Finland to Michigan not long after they were married to work in the copper mines. I knew from the maps in the Geographics that Finland was sometimes included as part of Scandinavia along with Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and that the Scandinavians were descended from the Vikings. This meant my mother was a Viking, and so was I, which made me very happy.