The Marsh King's Daughter(67)

I couldn’t remember the last time my mother talked this much. I now knew her last name, though I realized suddenly that I did not know mine. Perhaps I didn’t have one, in which case I decided I would like to be called “Helena the Brave.” I knew the name of the town where my mother grew up. I knew my mother was a Viking, and that I was a Viking, too. I would have liked to learn more, but my mother said she was tired of talking and closed her eyes.

I put on my jacket and went out to the woodshed. I was hoping The Hunter would tell me more about the town where he and my mother grew up. I wondered if other Vikings lived there. I also wondered what it was about my mother and father that I didn’t know.

The woodshed smelled very bad. The cuts on The Hunter’s chest were swollen and red. His chest was smeared with brown, like my father filled The Hunter’s tattoos with excrement instead of soot.

“Help me,” The Hunter whispered. At first I thought he was whispering because he was afraid my father would hear. Then I saw the dark bruise on his throat. I understood now why last night, The Hunter had suddenly stopped screaming. “Please. I have to get out of here. Get the handcuff key. Help me.”

I shook my head. I didn’t like what my father was doing to The Hunter, but I also knew what he would do to me if I helped The Hunter get away. “I can’t. My father has the key. He carries it on his key ring all the time.”

“Then chop the ring out of the beam. Cut the beam with your father’s chain saw. There has to be something you can do. Please. You have to help me. I have a family.”

I shook my head again. The Hunter had no idea what he was asking. I couldn’t chop the ring loose even if I wanted to. The iron ring and the post it was fastened to were very strong. My father said the people who built the cabin made the ring and post this way so they could chain their bull inside the woodshed, and that back then, the woodshed had been filled with straw instead of wood. When I asked if this meant our woodshed used to be a bullshed or a strawshed, he laughed. And while I had watched my father use his chain saw many times, I’d never used it myself.

“Helena, your father is a bad man. He belongs in prison for what he did.”

“What did he do?”

The Hunter glanced toward the doorway and shivered like he was afraid my father would hear, which was ridiculous because there were big gaps in the slats, and if my father was hiding outside listening in, we would have seen him. He looked at me for a long time.

“When your mother was a girl,” he began at last, “somewhere around the same age as you, your father took her. He stole her from her family and brought her here, even though she didn’t want to come. He kidnapped her. Do you understand what kidnapping means?”

I nodded. The Yanomami often kidnapped girls and women from other tribes to be their wives.

“People looked everywhere for her. They’re still looking. Your mother wants to go back to her family. And your father belongs in prison because of what he did. Please. You’ve got to help me get away. If you do, I promise I’ll take you and your mother on the snowmobile with me when I go.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t like that The Hunter said my father belonged in a prison, like Alcatraz or the Bastille or Devil’s Island or the Tower of London. I also didn’t understand why he seemed to think that kidnapping was wrong. How else was a man supposed to get a wife?

“Ask your mother if you don’t believe me,” he called as I got to my feet and started back to the cabin. “She’ll tell you I’m telling the truth.”

—

I FIXED MY MOTHER a cup of yarrow tea and carried it to her room. While she drank it I told her everything The Hunter had said. When I finished, she was quiet for so long, I thought she had gone to sleep. At last she nodded.

“It’s true. Your father kidnapped me when I was a girl. I was playing with my girlfriend in the stationmaster’s empty house by the railroad tracks when your father found us. He said he’d lost his dog and asked if we had seen a little brown cockapoo running around. When we told him we hadn’t, he asked if we would help him look for it. Only it was a trick. Your father led me to the river. He put me in his canoe and brought me to the cabin and chained me in the woodshed. When I cried, he beat me. When I begged him to let me go, he stopped giving me anything to eat. The more I fought, the worse it got, so after a while, I did whatever he told me. I didn’t know what else to do.”

She pulled up a corner of her blanket and wiped her eyes. “Your father is a bad man, Helena. He tried to drown me. He put you in the well. He broke John’s arm and mine. He kidnapped me.”

“But the Yanomami take women from other tribes as wives. I don’t understand why kidnapping is wrong.”

“How would you like it if someone came to our cabin and took you away without asking if you wanted to go with them? What if this meant that you could never hunt and fish or wander the marsh again? If someone did that to you, what would you do?”

“I would kill them,” I said without hesitation. And I understood.

—

WHEN MY FATHER CAME BACK from the marsh that afternoon, I made sure I was busy in the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to watch him beat and torture The Hunter. But I could still hear him scream and yell.

“He’s going to kill me,” The Hunter said much later when I brought his evening chicory. His face was so bruised and swollen, he could barely talk. “Take the snowmobile. Tomorrow, as soon as your father is gone. Take your mother. Send someone back for me.”