The Marsh King's Daughter(7)

Nothing pointed to the father I knew until I found his trout-fishing gear in a gunnysack hanging from the rafters in the basement. My father used to tell stories about fishing the Fox River when he was a boy. He knew all the best places to fish. Once he even guided a Michigan Out of Doors television crew. Since I found his gear, I’ve fished both the East Branch and the main stream of the Fox many times. My father’s rod has a nice, fast action. With a four-or five-weight floating line, sometimes a six if I’m nymph or streamer fishing, I usually come home with my creel full. I don’t know if I’m as good a trout fisherman as my father, but I like to think so.

I think about my father’s fishing stories as the news report plays on and on. If I murdered two men to get out of prison knowing my escape would generate one of the biggest manhunts in Michigan’s history, I wouldn’t go floundering around blindly in the marsh. I’d go to one of the few places on Earth where I was happy.

—

IT’S A QUARTER TO NINE. I’m sitting on our front porch waiting for Stephen and slapping mosquitoes. I have no idea how he’s going to react to the news that the escaped prisoner is my father, but I know it won’t be pretty. My mild-mannered nature-photographer husband rarely loses his temper, which is one of the things that attracted me to him in the first place, but everyone has their limits.

Rambo is stretched out on the porch boards beside me. I drove down to the Plott family breeders in North Carolina eight years ago to get him when he was a puppy. This was long before Stephen and the girls came along. He’s definitely a one-person dog. Not that he wouldn’t protect Stephen or the girls if the occasion called for it. Plott hounds are utterly fearless, so much so that fans of the breed call them the ninja warriors of the canine world, the world’s toughest dog. But if push came to shove and my entire family was in danger, Rambo would look out for me first. People who like to romanticize animals would call it love, or loyalty, or devotion, but it’s just his nature. Plotts are bred to stay on game for days at a time, to sacrifice themselves before they run from a fight. He can’t help what he is.

Rambo woofs and lifts his ears. I cock my head. I can discern crickets, cicadas, the shush of the wind through the jack pines, a rustling in the needles beneath that’s probably a mouse or a shrew, the “who cooks for you, who cooks for you” of a barred owl calling from the far side of the meadow between our place and the neighbors’, the cackles and squawks from the pair of night herons that nest in the wetland behind our house, and the Dopplered whoosh of a car whizzing past our place on the highway, but to his canine supersenses, the night is rich with sounds and smells. He whines under his breath and his front paws twitch, but other than that, he doesn’t move. He won’t unless I tell him to. I’ve trained him to both voice commands and hand signals. I put my hand on his head and he rests it again on my knee. Not everything roaming around in the dark needs to be investigated and chased down.

Of course I’m talking about my father. I know what he did to my mother was wrong. And killing two guards to escape from prison is unforgivable. But a part of me—a part no bigger than a single grain of pollen on a single flower on a single stem of marsh grass, the part of me that will forever be the little pigtailed girl who idolized her father—is happy my father is free. He’s spent the past thirteen years in prison. He was thirty-five when he took my mother, fifty when we left the marsh, fifty-two when he was captured and convicted two years later. This November, he’ll be sixty-six. Michigan isn’t a death penalty state, but when I think about my father spending the next ten, twenty, possibly even thirty years in prison if he lives to be as old as his own father, I think maybe it should be.

After we left the marsh, everyone expected me to hate my father for what he did to my mother, and I did. I do. But I also felt sorry for him. He wanted a wife. No woman in her right mind would have willingly joined him on that ridge. When you look at the situation from his point of view, what else was he supposed to do? He was mentally ill, supremely flawed, so steeped in his Native American wilderness man persona that he couldn’t have resisted taking my mother if he’d wanted to. Psychiatrists for both the defense and the prosecution even agreed on his diagnosis, antisocial personality disorder, though the defense argued mitigating factors, like the traumatic brain injury he suffered from being whacked on the head repeatedly as a boy.

But I was a child. I loved my father. The Jacob Holbrook I knew was smart, funny, patient, and kind. He took care of me, fed and clothed me, taught me everything I needed to know not only to survive in the marsh, but to thrive. Besides, we’re talking about the events that resulted in my existence, so I can’t very well say I’m sorry, can I?

The last time I saw my father, he was shuffling out of the Marquette County courtroom in handcuffs and leg shackles on his way to being locked up with a thousand other men. I didn’t attend his trial—my testimony was considered unreliable because of my age and upbringing, and unnecessary because my mother was able to supply the prosecution with more than enough evidence to put my father away for a dozen lifetimes—but my mother’s parents brought me over from Newberry the day my father was sentenced. I think they were hoping that if I saw my father get his just deserts for what he did to their daughter, I’d come to hate him as much as they did. That was also the day I met my paternal grandparents. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the mother of the man I’d always thought of as Ojibwa was blonde and white.