The Marsh King's Daughter(72)

A flash of memory: My father and I were in his canoe. I was very small, perhaps two or three. As we came around a bend in the river, I leaned over the side to reach for a leaf or a branch or whatever it was that had caught my eye and tumbled out. I opened my mouth to yell and took in nothing but water. I remember looking up, seeing the sunlight refracted by the water above my head. Instinctively, I kicked, keeping my mouth closed, even though in no time it felt as though my lungs were going to burst.

Then my father grabbed my jacket. He lifted me out and pulled me into the canoe, then paddled quickly toward a sandbar. He beached the canoe, jumped out, and dragged the canoe onto the shore, then stripped me down and took off his shirt and rubbed me all over to warm me. When my teeth stopped chattering, he wrung the water out of my clothes and laid them out on the sand and held me on his lap and told me stories until my clothes dried.

This time, I’m on my own.

I keep going, one careful footstep after another, until at last I make it to the other side. When I climb up onto the creek bank and look up, the slope that looms over my head looks as daunting as Everest. I start climbing, working my way sideways up the loose limestone scree, hooking the handcuffs over a stump or a branch when I need to rest, pushing through the exhaustion and the pain, willing my body to function independently of my brain, looking for that trance state that long-distance runners use to keep going long after their bodies are screaming at them to stop.

All the while Cousteau and Calypso scamper ahead like monkeys. “You can do it,” they urge whenever I think I can’t.

At last I reach the top. I throw a leg over and roll onto my back, gasping. Catch my breath, and stand up. I look around expecting Cousteau and Calypso to congratulate me on my herculean effort, but I am alone.





26





THE CABIN

Helga knelt by the corpse of the Christian priest, and the carcass of the dead horse. She thought of the Viking’s wife in the wild moorland, of the gentle eyes of her foster-mother, and of the tears she had shed over the poor frog-child.

She looked at the glittering stars, and thought of the radiance that had shone forth on the forehead of the dead man, as she had fled with him over the woodland and moor.

It is said that rain-drops can make a hollow in the hardest stone, and the waves of the sea can smooth and round the rough edges of the rocks; so did the dew of mercy fall upon Helga, softening what was hard, and smoothing what was rough in her character.

These effects did not yet appear; she was not herself aware of them; neither does the seed in the lap of earth know, when the refreshing dew and the warm sunbeams fall upon it, that it contains within itself power by which it will flourish and bloom.

— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,

The Marsh King’s Daughter


I stepped out of the woodshed and headed for the cabin. My hands shook. I didn’t want to leave The Hunter hanging from the handcuffs. A corpse was supposed to be washed, groomed, dressed in fine clothing, and wrapped in birch bark before it was buried in the forest in a shallow grave. A priest or a medicine man was supposed to talk to the dead person to ease their passage from this world into the next, and offer tobacco to the spirits. I hoped my father would care for The Hunter according to Indian tradition and not throw his body in our garbage pit.

“Gas,” Cousteau said. “You need to fill the snowmobile with gas so you don’t run out.”

“He’s right,” Calypso said. “You don’t know how long The Hunter was driving before he came. The tank could be almost empty.”

I felt like I should have thought of this myself, but things were happening so fast, it was hard to know what to do. I was glad Cousteau and Calypso were there to help me. I pushed the snowmobile over to our gravity-feed gas tank. My father kept track of how much gas we had by dipping a long stick through a hole in the top of the tank and drawing a line on the outside to show how much gas was left. He wasn’t going to be happy that I took some without asking.

“Do you think this is the right kind?” I wished I’d thought to ask The Hunter while I had the chance.

“The snowmobile sounds like a chain saw,” Cousteau said. “Use the chain saw mix.”

My father cut the gas for his chain saw with a pint of oil for every two gallons, so I poured the oil in our big red metal can and topped it off with gas from the nozzle, then put as much of the mixture into the snowmobile as the tank would hold.

“Fill the can again,” Calypso said. “Tie it on the back, just in case. You never know.”

I ran to the utility shed for a piece of rope, ran back, tied the gas can in place, and pushed the snowmobile as close to the back steps as I could. Cousteau and Calypso waited on the porch while I went inside. My mother was still sitting at the table. Her head was resting on her arm and her eyes were closed. Her hair was straggly and wet. At first, I thought she was dead. Then she lifted her head. Her forehead was creased with pain and her face was white. She started to stand, swayed, sat back down. Getting her to the snowmobile was going to be harder than I thought.

I slung her good arm over my shoulder and hung on to her wrist, then slid my left arm around her waist and pulled her to her feet. Judging by the angle of the sun, it was almost noon. This time of year, it would be fully dark by the time we finished dinner. I hoped six hours would be enough.

I took a last look around our kitchen: at our table, the box stove, my father’s underwear drying on the lines above it, the pie cupboard where we kept our dishes because my mother never made pies, the shelves lined with jelly and jam. I thought about packing a rucksack with food for our journey, but Cousteau and Calypso shook their heads.