by Linda Hogan
I almost believed her. I doubted my own mind, my eyes. It took a while before I knew she told the truth. That there was a man come in the night, a ghost. Anyway, it was the truth to her. Because of the others inside her. They were the ones who had done what she denied. They were the ones who were dangerous.
Old Man said you could sing the soul back if you knew the old song. All I could figure how to do was to sing myself into her. I thought, if all this could dwell in her, maybe I, too, could go inside. To understand them, the ones who lived in her, to coax them out, to cajole them into stillness and rest. I wanted to know where she had gone. I thought there must be a way to call lost souls back.
And so I did it. I prepared myself. I slept outdoors on the sacred ground. I sang. I fasted. And one day a part of me stepped inside the girl and looked around. I saw the hand she spoke of, heard the voices in languages neither of us knew. I could see how dangerous it was. An inescapable place with no map for it. Inside were the ruins of humans. Burned children were in there, as well as fire. It pulled me toward it, like gravity, like dust to earth and whatever it was, I had to call on all my strength to get away.
• • •
WHILE THE BIRDS MIGRATED SOUTH, noisy and swift, we prepared for the trout run. In the dimming light of fall we lifted nets in the clear water of the stream. The fish were thick. The water seemed full of them, turning crowded and wild, shining in the light of afternoon. They were thick, the flashing sides of them, the white stomachs, as if the waters themselves were thrashing. It was dark when we returned home along the white stones of the path, a storm brewing out in the other world.
One day I went to Adam’s Rib to purchase some caulk and plastic to place over the windows.
“Let me see you,” said Agnes. “You are getting busty. Are you gaining weight? It’s about time.”
But Dora-Rouge said, “It’s my time to die. I need to go back home to the Fat-Eaters. You can come, Angel. Your mother is there.” And then she drifted off. “There are things Bush won’t tell you about your mother.”
“Won’t tell me?”
“Bush will never tell you about the killing of the dog. She’s never talked of it yet.”
This was all she said. But she was wrong about Bush. She did tell me. She told me on a day when the last rain fell, before water froze, before the clouds transformed themselves into six-sided flakes with a fleck of solar dust at each one’s center.
One day she killed the dog. I heard him yelp. I ran out the door to see where he was and he lay still and bent. She kicked him. There were needles in his mouth and nose and ears, and he’d been cut, the red blood on the fur, matted, one foot cut off. He died panting, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.
It haunts me. All this time I wanted that out of my mind. I can’t bear to think of it.
That’s how dangerous she was. That’s what I want you to know. I loved the dog. I loved you. But we were all afraid of the naked ice inside her. We didn’t want to send her away because it was not her fault. At least we thought that. But it wasn’t long, anyway, until she drifted away, first to the north, where she lives now, then to Oklahoma. We were grateful she was gone.
And then there was you. When she returned, she was pregnant with you. Then we needed to keep her here. We knew she would kill you. You, yourself, seemed to know what you were born to; I heard you cry one time when you were not even in the house. Agnes heard it, too, or I wouldn’t have believed my own ears.
She would kill you. Husk said that was a law of probability. He also said that a glacier gives off what it can’t absorb, blue light and beauty, and that you were the light given off by your mother.
ON THE ISLAND THAT YEAR, I thought if it was true that there’s no true north, no still center, no steady magnetic pole, how could I believe anything I’d learned before? Even land moves. So in a swampy place where peat fires burn for years with the power of rising gas, I learned to doubt things I’d previously learned. And so, too, I began to believe things, like the stories Bush told, things I would not have listened to months before.
I would one day understand my mother. I would one day take in the fact that we were those who walked out of bullets and hunger, and even that walking was something miraculous. Even now I think of it. How the wind still sweeps us up in it. Even now there are places where currents meet and where people are turned to ice. I understood it first like this: the mouth of a river goes one way; my mother was the opposite. Things and people fell into her like into the eye of a storm, and they were destroyed. Like the black hole Husk had described to me. I understood things then in the manner of Husk’s telling. Except for how I emerged from Hannah and how there are rages and wounds so large, love is swallowed by them and is itself changed, the lover taken in and destroyed.
AUTUMN MOVED BACK and made way for winter. A wind began to blow the leaves and they swirled upward and were gone. The windows creaked. Where did the wind gather its strength, I wondered. That was what I wanted to know so I could go there.
Husk brought us Agnes’ old treadle sewing machine that had sat beside the cot. It had gold leaves painted and engraved on it, and a bunch of silver grapes. It was the first time I’d seen it dust-free and now I noticed it was a lovely machine, dark cherry. Bush showed me the technique for sewing ribbons, and how to finish a sleeve. We borrowed another, perfume-scented sewing machine from Frenchie. This one was electric and Bush used it only when the generator was on, doing hand hemming at other times.
I sat for hours, aching, and moved my legs rhythmically. It was a good idea at first, this shirt business. But when the first needle broke, I stood up and paced with frustration. It was just the beginning. Thread broke if the machine wasn’t threaded perfectly. Once, the oil leaked onto a precious, nearly finished shirt. Sometimes the feeder wouldn’t move. Then I would cuss under my breath and go outside to look at the lake. Everything that could go wrong, did. The bobbin was not wound right and I’d rip out a seam, start over. I hated to sew. But I did it over and over and soon I grew patient with it. From school, I remembered Psyche and how she had to separate a hill of grain one grain at a time. Perhaps I was separating grain.
Perhaps I was remaking myself. As with the machine, I tried to put words to things over and over, in the way Bush put together the skeletons. They would one day look like a living animal, with eyes of glass, clean fur. But for them, something was missing, always. The spirit was gone. They would never breathe. For me, it would be different. One day I would wake up and know that everything had started to change, that I was no longer empty space, that I had become full, or was growing toward it. It would start with a small, warm circle inside my stomach. It was longing. It was sadness. It was moments of joy. It was new dreams I blamed on Dora-Rouge’s potion for sleeplessness. It was everything that entered through my eyes, the northern lights that were bright and gauzy clothing on night’s skin of darkness. It was moose meat given by the hunters, and the fish Bush caught, and Husk with his theories.
A wind began to blow, a storm from far off. Then rain fell, a hint of winter. And on land, the air filled with ice crystals and the odor of smoke. Grasses became stiff, earth solid. My footprints in mud were iced over. There was the sound of a distant wolf.
The lake froze, moved slightly, and with the sound of broken glass, re-formed itself.
And what I pieced together was more than shirts or dresses, sleeves and collars. From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived this narrowing circle of life.
EIGHT
IN THE NORTH, people measured their lives by the winters and kept account of what happened in each one. As with what I called the “House of No,” some winters were remembered by what wasn’t there. There was the winter of no wolves, the winter of no ptarmigan, the time of no children. There were winters, too, of terrible presences, th
e appearance of influenza, the winter of frozen rain that covered snow in a hard shell of ice so that it broke the legs of deer and moose and left the snow red with their bleeding. This was the winter Frenchie’s horse fell and froze into the ice while it was still alive, melting the ice with its warmth as it sank deeper. It was the time of shadows, they said. A woman was found inside a block of clear ice that year. And certain currents of air met near the water and turned a man to ice.
And I belonged to that winter. I was born one February inside a snow so deep it collapsed the roofs of houses. I crossed infinity to come to life through an angry, screaming woman, as if I arrived from the place where storms were created, a world where bad medicine was made from the bodies of women and men, the milk of deer, the loss of land. I arrived in the place where traders had passed with sleds of dead, frozen animals.
According to Bush, I was born in a house of snow.
It was a winter when snow fell so thick in trees it crowded out what light was left and the white men, in such darkness, believed it was a total eclipse.
Roofs collapsed under winter’s weight. Trees swayed and groaned. They complained of so much heaviness that even their voices were weighed down. And all the houses, too, were covered with mounds of snow that shifted in the wind. And the midwife said she heard you crying when you were still inside your mother.
When you left forever the waters of your mother that night, that early morning, cold went so deep the trees outside your birthing place shattered from inside themselves and flew apart. The explosions of heartwood sounded like gunshots. Bark flew in all directions across the snow, hitting a window, hitting a wall. Remembering history, the people dropped and hid themselves on cold floors. Except your mother, who was not threatened by anything as simple as gunfire.
The midwife was Ruby Shawl, a small, square woman with a red headscarf, perfect hands, and a peaceful face. She presided over the passages of people into both life and death. And she was miserable when those were the same person. She hated to be at both ends of the same life. She went to the one-room house your mother shared with a trapper, a man who took in troubled young girls on the pretext of helping them. Hannah was one of his girls, but he was not there the day you were born. He had gone out to check his snares and follow his trapline to the north. For trappers, February was a busy time; furs were at their thickest.
When she cut the birth cord that connected you to your mother, Mrs. Shawl didn’t say what she said to the other mothers at every birth. She didn’t tell Hannah, “Say good-bye to your baby.” She watched Hannah closely, as if she knew that the good-bye would be permanent, she told me later, as if she knew why.
The sky was clear for a few moments that first night and Mrs. Shawl could see by the light of snow how heavy the snow was, the trees bent under the weight of it. Looking up, she told me, she saw the roof begin to bulge inward, but she was afraid to go out and clean it off. She did not want to leave you alone with Hannah. She feared you were in danger. She felt what was to come.
She avoided sleep the first days of your life, listening to the trees creak with the weight of snow, guarding you, fearing to let dreams take her away from the dark, cold room and the fiercely awake woman who gave birth to you. She melted buckets of snow but each bucket yielded only small amounts of water. Ruby Shawl had children at home, and a husband, but she stayed on with Hannah, hoping the bitter weather would let up. She was sure help would come, but no one appeared. She could see the snow-covered road, but no one walked it.
You were a good child, and didn’t fuss, she said. The firewood was mostly gone and there were only a few staples of rice and dried milk. Hannah’s breasts were dry. Like her mind and heart, her body had nothing to offer. It had already abandoned you.
The snow was tireless and without end. One day the roof sagged so much that it seemed sure to collapse; mice scratched about in corners and inside walls.
After waiting for Hannah to sleep, Mrs. Shawl finally, in that terrible freeze, had no choice; she pulled on her boots, bundled herself in her coat and red scarf, salted the ice-covered steps and went silently outside to shovel snow off the roof I can see her in my mind’s eye, her round belly, her breath stopped before her face, the red clothing she always wore. The snow was so deep that she climbed it and stepped onto the roof with ease. She worked quickly. In such cold, there is always too little time.
As she returned, winded, she heard Hannah fumble at the lock. When she tried the door, it was latched from inside. “Let me in!” she called. She rattled the door, hit it. Steam from her breath froze, surrounding her in something like a halo. She went around the house and tapped the little windows. “Hannah! Open the door.” The windows were frozen over with breathing and steam from within. She could see nothing through them, and she was wasting precious time in the terrible, ungodly cold. And so she had no choice but to find her way through the bitter wind to where I lived at Old Fish Hook, as it was called then. Hannah, she thought, would listen to me.
It wasn’t quite a mile walk, but she had no snowshoes and now and then she fell through the snow up to her waist. There were trails the wind had made, where a shining crust had formed on the snow, and she tried to walk on these trails.
Tree limbs had broken along the way and Ruby Shawl moved several of the fallen branches from what she thought was the path. By then a cutting storm of sleet slanted down, the kind you can hear as it hits the snow. Under different conditions the sleet might have been a good sign because it meant the sky was warming; but in fact it only made the journey more treacherous. She hurried along. There was the light of winter, its sheen across the white and frozen world. It was beautiful, it always is, but there was no comfort in it; it was a beauty like Hannah’s, dangerous, and it made the whole weight of winter fall at the back of Ruby Shawl.
I’d been at work, chipping ice from inside the door. I held a dark blue umbrella up against the sleet. I chipped ice with only one hand. In such cold, the sounds were sharp and brittle, hollow winter sounds. At first I didn’t see Mrs. Shawl. When I looked up, I saw that Ruby’s scarf had frozen to her hair. She was staggering, exhausted. Her face was burning, her lips looked pale. I went to her at once. I slipped my hand inside the older woman’s bent arm, took her through the door, and sat her down in front of the stove. That kind of ice and cold steals a woman’s mind and voice, so Mrs. Shawl said nothing as I heated coffee and wrapped a warm blanket around her. The umbrella sat on the floor beside her, frozen open. Outside, a chill wind roared through the trees. It rattled frozen limbs.
As soon as the midwife sipped the coffee, and took her voice back from the cold, she said, “You need to come with me, and we should hurry.” She stood up, ready to go.
I slipped on my rubber boots. I put on my black coat. I was afraid for you.
Along the way a tree branch broke and crashed in front of us. Neither of us spoke. We went around the fallen branch and hurried along, half-running, both of us certain you would be hurt. I fell on a strip of glare ice along the way and bruised my thigh. The snow began to fall again. We wasted no time.
When we arrived at the trapper’s house, the door was still locked. “It’s Bush,” I said. I hit the door with my fist. “It’s Bush. Let me in.”
At once, the door opened, but there were no sounds of footsteps along the wooden, settled floor. Hannah was not the one who opened it, even though no others were there to be seen. Inside, there was little warmth. There was only a thin, spare fire in the stove, and the firewood was gone. Hannah sat in a rocking chair across the room, her back to the door. “She’s not my baby,” she said. “My baby died at birth.”
You were nowhere in sight. The firewood was gone.
I pretended to sip from a cup of cold coffee. The room was so chilled, our breaths were like ghosts speaking themselves into existence right in front of our faces.
Rocking in the chair, Hannah looked like a child. The midwife looked at me. Knowing Hannah, I was careful to sound calm. By then, I had learned how to sp
eak with her. “Where is the baby?” I asked, surprised at how calm I sounded. I was quiet and slow, trying not to upset her, but all the while I looked for you, in the trash can, the closet, beneath the bed still spotted with birth blood.
“It’s in none of those places.” Hannah listened to me move across the room. She was smart. She could hear like an animal, stronger and better than other people, more like a lynx or wolf.
The midwife was crying. “It’s my fault,” she cried. “I knew better than to leave her.” It crossed her mind, she said later, that a child born to such a woman might have been better off dying.
“Keep it away from me. It’s not mine,” said Hannah, meaning you, the baby. She held a lock of her red hair. The rest of it was beside the bed, a pile of fire cut through by scissors.
An empty black kettle sat on the stove smoking over a dwindling flame. I took it off the fire and looked inside. I was afraid that I would find you there.
But you were not in the kettle. You weren’t in the oven, either. And you weren’t smothered beneath a pillow. I went outside, glancing back at windows that were frozen over with all the breathings. There were no tracks outside. Nothing human could survive such cold, I was certain, but I began walking a circle, an ever-widening spiral across snow and ice, and there were no tracks to follow and you didn’t cry out. You didn’t even kick or wave your arms.
Maybe you were resigned to fate, to a birth delivered to ice. I found you tucked into the branches of a birch tree. You were still and blue and a thin layer of snow had fallen over your head and naked stomach, the kind Indians call pollen snow because it meant more was coming, that winter would continue. You were alert, alive, but silent and cold as ice. I put you beneath my shirt, next to the warmth of my body, and you searched for a breast. You searched out warmth. You wanted to live. You were tiny, you were cold, and you wanted to live.
NINE
IN WINTER, when living stood still, it was easy to forget that seeds lived in the ground, dark and preparing for spring. There was a fresh smell to winter, clean and moist, and snow drifted over the turtle bones and whirled around us. The other seasons might have been only imagined by need or desire, because when winter occupies the land, it makes its camp everywhere. You cannot step through its territory without knowing that what has fallen over the land has a stronger will than ours, and that tragedy is sometimes held in both its hands.