by Linda Hogan
By then, Bush spoke of my mother, the girl filled with ice. There are things living in humans that bruise the sweet-bodied human fruit, she said, things like what poisoned the hungry tribe of my ancestors. Rage and fear. Mortal wounding. She knew the wound and how it was passed on, the infinite nature of wounding. But she had not known before about the failures of love, the remote indifference of a god, people only a shade away from evil, an atom away, a speck of dust.
I drank swamp tea and listened. I took in my life. At night, as winter approached, there was the sound of the lake talking to the sky, revealing some part of itself or what lay inside its blue-green light. The lake was recalling the memory of last year’s ice, the jewelry lost in its waters, the fishermen who’d fallen through storms, and who lay inside it even now. It was a wet autumn and there were snails on darker rocks in the shade, and their shining paths that were journeys we couldn’t know.
ONE DAY ON THE MAINLAND, Bush and I went to the home of LaRue, who so offended the fish. She stopped at the door before going in. Then she let the screen door slam. I heard the sound of animal paws scuttle away to hide. I stood just inside the door waiting for Bush to get the boxes of bones from LaRue. It was too cool in there, too dark. It was a frightening place to me, a place where muscles and flesh were boiled away from bones. Large beetles with iridescent backs were stored in small glass containers. LaRue paid Bush to assemble the bones for schools and museums. She was a woman who put things together. That was the reason for the turtle curing in sun.
They conducted business as I looked around. There were bear teeth, a pheasant with a red face. Curiosities, he called them. A stuffed bobcat with a cigar in its mouth.
After we left, I said to Bush, “This is terrible. What about selling shirts?” I looked at her. “I can help. I know how to sew.”
It was true, I did, and I hated it. I amended my words. “Or I can cut and you can sew. Then you won’t have to work with him.”
“Except, when I put the bones together,” Bush said, “I help the soul of the animal.” I think she hated to sew, too. “When I put them together, I respect them,” she said. “I feed them and consider their skills. I think of their intelligence. For instance, Wolverine is a thief. He stores food. He knows what men need and he takes it. He steals the flints of the people. I respect him for this. And he removes animals from traps and frees them if he is not hungry.”
She leaned forward as she spoke. Whenever Bush talked about the animals, she took on their ways of moving. She became bright. I think she preferred them to people. I think she had the brilliant soul of an animal, that she lived somewhere between the human world and theirs.
Like me, Bush had trouble sleeping. Many nights I heard her pouring water, moving things into their places. She wore jeans and walked as if she had all the time in the world. She was slow that way and she liked to wander the island. One night, giving up on sleep, I went to the window. Out on the path of whitewashed stones, I saw Bush walking down to the lake.
She was haunted by what the two young men had said when they’d gone to Fur Island to tell her about the dams and river diversions. She dwelled on it. Sometimes, after a long silence, she’d say, as if we’d been talking about it, “Yes, I think I’ll go up there.”
Throughout autumn, she fell into their words, worrying about the people, the animals.
And there were other words. “You want to know more about your mother,” Bush said on a chilly day when a new angle of slanting light above us was at the top of the trees. I waited. Like the others, she too searched for a beginning. My beginning was Hannah’s beginning, one of broken lives, gone animals, trees felled and kindled. Our beginnings were intricately bound up in the history of the land. I already knew that in the nooks of America, the crannies of marble buildings, my story unfolded. This, I suppose, was the true house of my mother. The real place from which I originated was in the offices of social workers. Bush’s anger was still strong about what had happened with Hannah, with me. It never diminished, that anger. The social workers were unable to do what they should have done. But what was there to fight, she said: a case-worker with an office full of abused and neglected children she’d picked up late at night, a locked file cabinet, lost papers, a hierarchy of administrators and secretaries? It was systems we ended up fighting. But it went even farther back than that, to houses of law with their unkept treaties, to the broken connections of people to the world and its many gods.
“Your mother was a door,” Bush said. “Always closed. But sometimes I thought she was a window, instead, because through her I glimpsed scenes of suffering.”
Even young, I understood this in a way. I understood already from what the women said that my mother was stairs with no destination. She was a burning house, feeding on the air of others. She had no more foundation, no struts, no beams. Always, a person would think she was one step away from collapsing. But she remained standing.
We lived in the dark blue house at Old Fish Hook, Agnes and I, when your mother washed up with nothing but a dirty comb and the clothes she wore on her back. She walked out of the dark, cold water. Agnes saw her first. She said, “My God, it’s Harold’s daughter.”
We carried her to the house. I was afraid she’d stop breathing. She didn’t make a sound. She was white with shock.
“She even has that smell,” said Agnes.
It looked like she was born of the storm. And she was so cold. I said to her, “Let me dry your clothing.” I gave her some fresh things, but she would not undress. A day or so later, Agnes went out and bought her new clothing, thinking that would help, but Hannah still wore the men’s pants and large shirt.
There was something not right with her. I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I told myself it was the circumstances, the cold water, the wreck, the dark clouds and waves. “Where do you think she came from?” I asked.
Agnes said there’s one place she comes from for sure, the body of Loretta, because she had that smell of bitter almonds and apple seeds. I smelled it, too. And she had the same red hair and dark skin.
I felt for her; she was half Harold. Agnes’ granddaughter by blood. You could tell just by looking. And so we took her in.
Her fingernails were broken, some to the quick. Maybe she’d clawed her way onto a log. Maybe that was how she escaped the water. She couldn’t have survived the storm on her own. Or maybe, Agnes said, there’d been some other kind of help. A spirit or something. Me, I didn’t believe those superstitious things.
One day Mrs. Illinois came by to tell me Hannah’d gone into her house and stolen her dark gray shawl. I had seen that shawl, I said to Mrs. Illinois. I remembered it.
Later, when I asked Hannah, “Where is the shawl?” she looked right at me and said she hadn’t taken it. I could almost believe her, even though I’d seen her wrapped up in it. But her look of honesty made me doubt my own eyes.
Other people, too, found her in their houses or at their clotheslines. And she wore one thing over another, a stolen green skirt over the large men’s pants we found her inside, a brown dress on top of that. Even when it was hot. By then, even though she denied it, I knew she was the thief. I posted a note at Tinselman’s store saying I would replace whatever she took. People signed their names and the item she’d taken—Frenchie: cardigan sweater with blue pearl buttons; Wiley: work shirt. I think now that clothes were the only protection she had, the only skin between her and all the rest.
I watched her walking about in all that clothing, looking larger than she was, looking like a ragpicker and an old, broken woman instead of the girl she was. Her eyes had no trust, not in anything or anyone. They were dark and flat. No light. It was the expression the tortured wear. Even now I study their faces. Their faces are like Hannah’s face. Even now I look for a clue. The darkness beneath their eyes. As if it would explain things people do to one another.
The old people said it was soul loss, an old sickness. I tried to put their words out of my mind because no one knew the antidote
for such disease. But still I could not rid myself of their words. I started to think, if there was soul loss, where would it go? Where would a soul wander? How could I get it back? There must be a way, was what I thought.
We were afraid of her. I didn’t know why, exactly. I’d always been brave. I was never afraid of anything, not dark or ice. I’d hunted deep forests in the dark of night and I was stranded once on an open ledge of ice, peering down into its blue fracture, and even then I was not afraid; I knew I’d find a way to live. But with her, even the corners of the house were dark. They seemed to be in pain. You could feel it. You could almost see it. There are those even now who say it was evil. They still call it a bad spirit, a heart of ice. But I didn’t want to believe them, because once I did, I knew nothing could be trusted, not water, not children, not even love, and I believed in the power of love. But even that would fail us.
From the very beginning she didn’t sleep. She paced at night. Like she was trapped, or something was trapped in her. Not insomnia or tossing and turning in bed, you understand. She didn’t sleep at all. I’d hear her feet. They sounded so busy. I thought she’d exhaust herself. Many times the covers were not pulled back and the bed had not been touched. Other nights when I’d look in the room, she appeared to sleep, lying at peace, her breathing relaxed and regular, but the minute I walked away, her feet again creaked the floorboards.
Sometimes she sat in a corner and became still. She became a part of the wall itself, nearly invisible. The old people used to say that animals in danger from men could shrink themselves, go off into a cave or lake or beneath a stone where they would hide until the world was safe again. I think it was like that. Maybe she waited for the world to be safe. She was a body under siege, a battleground. But she herself never emerged. The others, with their many voices and ways, were larger than she was. She was no longer there.
One day the smell was so bad that I was determined to give her a bath if I had to hold her down and wash her myself. The acid odor was deep in the house by then, in the walls and floors. I’d been patient enough. I heated water on the stove. I filled the metal tub and called her over. Two more kettles of water were heating on the stove to keep her warm. I stood in the kitchen beside the tub. “You have to take a bath,” I said. “Take off your clothes.”
She must have sensed my determination. She cowered at first, but one by one, to my surprise, she took off the layers. I watched her from the corner of my eye while I grated soap. Fels Naptha and Lifebuoy. There were chiggers that year. I tried not to watch her, I felt so bad for her. I didn’t want to be one of her abusers. I got her a cloth. I looked away. I didn’t want to frighten her. I cleaned the countertop again as if it needed it. But she did not fight, not this time. She removed the pants while I wiped the table. She came down to a swimsuit, much too large. But when I saw her in her small, bare nakedness, I stopped and stared. Beneath all the layers of clothes, her skin was a garment of scars. There were burns and incisions. Like someone had written on her. The signatures of torturers, I call them now. I was overcome. I cried. She looked at me like I was a fool, my tears a sign of weakness. And farther in, I knew, there were violations and invasions of other kinds. What, I could only guess.
I held up first one of her arms, then another. I washed her back and poured water over her. She sat still. She waited for me to hurt her.
Back when the lii plants were plentiful, Dora-Rouge used to make a sleeping medicine. It was a precious, rare medicine because so many of the plants had disappeared with the felled trees. That night I gave her some of it, thinking if she would just sleep, if only she would sleep. But even then she didn’t and soon I realized that They came awake at night, those who’d hurt her. Them. Those who walked the floor in her skin.
Some people believe the northern lights steal people and carry them up into the sky. Maybe that was where she went long ago. That’s what some people said. By then that was what I hoped. I hated to think of her still in that abused body. I hoped she’d been taken up in the hands of sun.
Everyone had a name for what was wrong. Dora-Rouge said it was memory and I think she was the closest. After a time, I thought, yes, it was what could not be forgotten, the shadows of men who’d hurt Loretta, the shadows of the killers of children. What lived in her wears the skin of children. That’s what I thought. It walks with us, inside those we know.
As I looked at her from scar to scar that day, I could feel the edges of her. I touched the scars on her back and I could feel the hands of the others. They had ice-cold fingers. They had hearts of ice. Just like the old people said.
Sometimes I could hear the voices that were not hers. They’d murmur at my ear. Or I’d feel the wings of something brush by me. The priest said she was a miracle in reverse. It was out of his domain, he said, when I took her there. “Whose domain is it?” I wanted to know, but he didn’t answer.
Some people even thought the storm originated with her, that she’d stepped out of it just like she was passing through a cloud.
One day in a rare moment of speaking, she told me a hand lived inside her. It was fingers, fist. At night it crept out of its home, her body, and tried to molest her, to strangle her. At first I thought her words were just part of the sickness. I didn’t pay them much mind. But one day I came in from shoveling snow and when I walked in the door something pushed me back. It’s true. I know you must doubt this. So did I. But it nearly knocked me over and it wasn’t her. She was in the far corner, her back against the wall. What struck me was powerful and large, and it was cold. It felt solid but I saw nothing. My dog was alive then, barking at what I couldn’t see.
The religious people would never go near her. She tested their faith and next to her, their faith failed. She molested one of their children. This was what she’d learned, you know, and whenever she walked by a person, they felt what lived in her. They felt the world that was ruined and would never be whole again.
So we went to see Old Man on the Hundred-Year-Old Road. She still hadn’t slept. I still heard the walking sounds at night, the way an animal or man might sound in a room, closed in, in a jail.
No one except me would stay in a room with her. I was the most brave. I was willing to live with her, or them, whatever it was. To help her. And Old Man, too, was not afraid.
Whenever you go to see Old Man, there is silence first. Maybe you take him cloth or tobacco or food. Then, maybe you eat. After that you say what you want. But he knew why we had come. He picked up a feather as soon as we entered. He accepted no gift. He offered no food. He went right next to her. “She is the house,” is what he said. He waved the feather. “She is the meeting place.”
I didn’t know what he meant at first. But I saw it in time, her life going backward to where time and history and genocide gather and move like a cloud above the spilled oceans of blood. That little girl’s body was the place where all this met.
“They used to call back lost or stolen souls,” Old Man said. “They beckoned spirits out from an innocent body.” What was needed was a ceremony, he said, the words of which were so beautiful that they called birds out of the sky, but the song itself would break the singer’s life. No one still alive was strong enough to sing it. Not him, he said. Because things had so changed. Not any of the old men or women. And there was a word for what was wrong with her, he said, but no one would say it. They were afraid it would hear its name and come to them.
Still, she had such perfect fingers and toes, a delicate face. All I could think was that she was the sum total of ledger books and laws. Some of her ancestors walked out of death, out of a massacre. Some of them came from the long trail of dying, people sent from their world, and she was also the child of those starving and poisoned people on Elk Island.
“I can smell it,” Old Man said. “I can see them. All of them. She is the house, the meeting place.”
SEVEN
I AM THINKING of my past. There are powerful songs. Husk who saw everything in terms of science, told me once how m
etal bridges were taken down, collapsed by the song of wind, a certain tone, a certain pitch of wind. If wind spoke across a bridge just right, he said, the bridge would fall. But there were songs with other strengths. People say this and it is true. According to John Husk, Bush knew a song that broke down other kinds of bridges. It had to do with the wrong beings walking down from sky or across water. Or maybe rising up from the ground. Through her words, through her singing, something was taken apart. Bush learned these songs, he said, not because she wanted to, but because she had to keep some things from being put together again. Because the beings in Hannah came from other places. She had to take out the bridges between bad spirits and people, to close bridges between those places and here. And she sang to keep the spirit bridges closed, to keep them from coming back together again. She knew the pathway, he said.
At the time I didn’t know what he meant by this or what lived behind the words, but now I’ve seen that bridge and it wasn’t so unlike the ones that were being built up north, with muddy, earth moving water flowing beneath them, bridges that should not have been there. Animals in the path of it were killed, people’s lives displaced, plants and lives gone forever to make way.
“Last night a man hurt me,” your mother said one day. No one had come toward us that winter. I would have seen if they had.
“He came in here,” she said. “See, my pants are all stretched out.”
I looked. It was true, her pants were stretched, torn at the seam.
Another day she said, “A ghost unbuttoned my dress.” It was true. Her dress was open, and she, Hannah, had a look of terror on her face.
“Did you see that man come in here? He was carrying my head.” Hannah said this.
She broke the window. I saw her do it. And she said she didn’t, even though I stood right there. “I saw it with my eyes,” I told her.
“No, I didn’t.”