by Linda Hogan
Frenchie wore a black chiffon scarf on her head, tied under her chin. She ate absentmindedly, looking up with her great sad eyes at nothing, taking a sip of wine, then one of coffee. She said this was how she liked to drink, to come down and up at the same time.
Tommy was there with the people of the Hundred-Year-Old Road. They cried. They had lived so long and seen so many of the younger generations gone, but even at that they had been unable to convince later generations to follow the paths of the older ways. The secrets of their longevity were to shun the ways of the white world and remember to live each day with reverence for all that was around them.
Other people cried, too, in that way my people had, and still have, of weeping out loud, without self-consciousness or apology or embarrassment. I’d never met Helene and my own eyes remained dry in spite of how their crying touched me. I took the dishes to the sink and rinsed them. I carried coffee around the room and filled cups and then stood looking out the kitchen window as steam rose from the sun-covered land.
The gathering was meant to dignify the loss. Helene would not be buried. Instead, Frenchie wanted to bury her favorite things. That day, the men had heated the ground with a torch and placed hot rocks on it. It was hard work, but finally there was a long, narrow grave, deep and wet. What was buried in Helene’s place, inside an old wooden grub box, was a ring of silver, a pair of Cree shoes someone had once given her, a piece of red earth she had believed could heal varicose veins, a marten fur, and a hair comb made of old tortoiseshell. A picture of a young man she had once loved went into the box, along with an unopened bottle of Tweed cologne, and a pocketknife that served as both a sharp blade and a beer-can opener. The grub box with Helene’s things was placed inside a small blue canoe and it was buried, with Helene’s favorite doll, blond-headed, and wearing a red scarf, the doll sitting behind the grub box, as if to paddle. It was lowered into the thawed ground, and clods of dirt were thrown in on top. But what touched me most was that they buried with her a song that was not ever to be sung again. Her song. I tried not to learn it as we stood around the wooden box. Frenchie sang it in a dry voice, stopping a few times, her throat choked up, and then beginning again. The mist of the ground floated behind her as she wiped her eyes on her sleeve. The others bent their heads even more.
I would never forget that song, buried or not. I thought, this is the way to keep the song in our memory. By making it forbidden. By burying it. It haunted me. I hear it still, the song of a woman I never met.
TOMMY WENT WITH ME back to Agnes’ house. He carried the black cast-iron kettle that contained stew. Above us, I could feel the life returning to the trees. Tommy said, “Think of how many people have carried this kettle.”
I did. I thought of it. It was iron that had probably been mined from our own earth. Suddenly I saw how old it was, this kettle. It had witnessed the killing of my people. It had been fired by trees no longer there, and forged in the presence of women talking at night. Now Frenchie’s tears were a part of it, too, and God only knew what other sorrows. Agnes once said it had contained a soup of rocks, twigs, and moss. Food for lean times.
It had other uses, too. It had bathed my grandfather, Harold, when he was an infant. It held a river. It was alive. I thought I’d heard sounds from it one night. Now I told Tommy and he nodded like he knew just what I meant. I think he was proud of me for hearing such things.
Outside, too, I heard singing in the distance. And I could still hear, in my own ears, the song we were supposed to bury and forget.
I looked in on Dora-Rouge. She slept like a child. I pulled her door silently closed. “Why don’t I fix us some coffee?” I said.
I measured out twice the amount of coffee grounds that Agnes would use. I stood in front of the stove, suddenly silent. Tommy stood behind me and took me in his arms and held me. I felt the warmth of the stove on my stomach and thighs, felt his warmth along my back. I bent my neck and he kissed it and I realized I was crying, that my face was covered with tears I hadn’t known were there, and he turned me around slowly and wiped them away, and tenderly he smoothed my hair. I felt his rough wool shirt against my cheek. We hated death and feared it, at least I did, but its presence, as it always does, made us desperate for love, the shining part of life, and to make love, to enter creation. I believe it happens this way to ensure that life will go on, that our people would continue.
Love is a beginning, a secret warmth that grows, something that comes alive; inside skin a soul turns over and opens its eyes. Love, I realize now, is a third person come to stand between the loving two.
From the next room Dora-Rouge said, “I can hear the grass growing.”
I looked at the kettle on the counter. The sunlight came inside it and filled it. It was a new angle of light, springtime, one I’d never before seen in this place.
WHEN THE LAKE was mostly thawed, when there were only a few islands of ice floating in the water, I decided to paddle to the Hungry Mouth. Near it I felt an undertow, a pull, as if something wrapped itself around me. I thought I saw hands, human hands, pale white and thin, and the face of the beluga and the red scarf of a snowmobiler. I sang Helene’s song as if to leave it there.
OVERNIGHT, all at once, it seemed, the world became green. In one day the snow was gone, the dark earth visible. Because of the sudden thaw, I could believe a god, any god, created water in one day, animals in another. In still another, trees were set to bud, then opened. There was a change in light. Ice moved and floated. It hit itself. Then parts of it broke away. There was a loosening, winter breaking in half, then in smaller and smaller pieces, all the way down to atoms and particles. The world was filled with sound. It was a wonderful din, the many voices of spring, the running of water, the ice breaking up, the wind and stars telling birds the way home so that they could fly even while asleep, return, and take count of us wingless people.
Even the island of the spiders came unmoored and began to float away, and Bush sent for Husk to tow it back to its place at Fur Island.
In this way winter struck its camp.
ELEVEN
THE SKINS of the dead are traveling toward us,” said Dora-Rouge.
I was having trouble lighting a fire in the cookstove. I blew on the smoking embers, then looked over my shoulder at her, sure I’d hear a prophecy or a vision from the other world. Instead I heard Bush’s squeaky-wheeled red cart rattling toward us on the road.
I went to the window. Against the soft, new green of springtime, Bush looked small. She wore her fishing vest and her hair was loose. She pulled the wooden wagon behind her. It was piled high with a mound of animal skins, and it looked as if a large animal tracked her, smelling her steps, and creeping forward. Mud swallows flew up from the road as she walked. I could tell by the way the wagon moved that the thick, gold-tinged furs of wolves and dark beaver hides made for a heavy load. From the window I waved at Bush, but she didn’t see me. She looked straight ahead.
The men had smoothed the road the previous day, raking rocks and filling in potholes, but a brief night rain had returned the road to its uneven, washboard state. Now the stubborn puddles reflected blue sky. Bush went around them. Once or twice, she had to turn around and use both hands to tug the wagon along.
She parted with the skins unwillingly, I knew. They meant something to her, more than just the symbol of her fight with the trapers. They were what was left of a past. Grasses and moose meat lived in the pelts of the wolves, water and trees in the skins of beavers. But she no longer worked for Rue; the nearly assembled turtle bones and shells sat in pieces outside her dark stone house like ancient things cast out of a changing sea. In order to buy provisions for our journey, Bush was forced to sell the furs that rattled behind her on the road.
It was the day before our journey. All of us were busy with preparations. I went back to the stove. The fire didn’t take. I held another stick match to the kindling. This time it caught and the little fire roared in that smaller way fires have of sounding like their large
relations who sweep through forests and consume everything in their path—trees, burrows, and nests.
Before long, Bush and the red-painted cart squeaked back down the road. This time the cart was loaded with sacks of oats, Carnation powdered milk, dried meat, three pairs of olive green lace-up rubber boots, and what was left of the beaver pelts, which Bush planned to take along to trade at outposts and stations along the northern waterways. In the north, some things were more valuable than money, and these were prime pelts, old, but thick and dense.
“It’s damned inconvenient, if you ask me,” Agnes mumbled as soon as Bush was inside the door. For the last few days, Agnes had wandered around the house nervous and distracted, unable to remember what she was doing. Now she’d forgotten why she had come into the living room.
Bush carried an armload of supplies through the door. “Give me a hand, Angel.” She ignored Agnes’ complaint.
I lifted the furs onto the cot. They smelled of cedar and were slightly dusty.
Agnes, I think, was angry about her mother’s planned death. She was angrier still that she had no choice but to go along on the difficult death journey. But her anger, I figured, had a root of sadness. I followed her back to the little laundry room off the kitchen. I chatted with her, trying to distract her. “Do you think the weather’s going to stay warm?” I asked.
She glared at me.
“What would happen if we had trouble up there?”
“What are you?” she said. “The FBI?”
I backed out and went into the kitchen. I pretended I was busy, but I kept an eye on Agnes. She wore a sour look and ran clothing through the wringer. When she came to Dora-Rouge’s white blouse, she ran it through as if Dora-Rouge were still in it and she was punishing her, but her eyes were moist.
Dora-Rouge was every bit as stubborn as her daughter. It had long been her dream to return to the land of the Fat-Eaters to die and she wasn’t going to let any child of hers keep her from doing one more thing in her life. She was beyond that now. “You don’t have to go,” she told Agnes.
It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that by now Dora-Rouge was the only one who believed wholeheartedly that we would complete the journey. Even Bush now realized the magnitude of our responsibility. She wore a stern, tight-lipped look. It didn’t help, either, that all the men thought we were crazy, and even worse, they said so. Justin LaBlanc spared no words when he said to Bush, “The strongest men wouldn’t do such a stupid thing as that. And with old Dora, too, carrying her and all.” But in spite of everything a quickness filled the house as we packed. Agnes cleaned out her drawers and tucked her large underpants into a backpack. I rolled my jeans to make them more compact.
I picked up a rubber boot. “What are these?” They had lace-up supports at the ankles.
“They’re for us. Here, hand me one.” Bush sat down on the cot next to the furs. She pulled off a shoe and tried on the boot. “Yes, I think they’ll fit.” She stood up and tested it. “My old ones don’t have enough support.” She didn’t mention that they were nearly ruined from her run through the thickets and that she’d placed them on the woodstove to warm. “Now, that’s what I call a boot.”
“How attractive,” I said.
The boots were all the same size, 7. A little tight for me. It was all they’d gotten in. That’s why they were on sale, the price marked on them with red pen: $4.98.
When I’d arrived there such a short time ago, I cared only about what I looked like. My eyes had been lined in dark blue and I showed only the good side of my face. I never gave much thought to what things were like inside me or how I felt. I had never cared what was practical, either. I’d walked to school, through snow, in white plastic shoes, my red-painted toes squeezed up tight inside them. And now I was going to wear army boots, tall ones at that.
I wondered if we’d reach our destination, the four of us. Destination. I liked that word, with its hint of fate. I believed in destiny as much as I believed everything was a sign. It had been a sign to get Agnes’ letter with the folded dollar bills. It was a sign when a woodpecker tapped at a dead tree. Sometimes a person smiled at me a certain way and I knew we’d be friends or that our fates would, in some way, overlap. Once, I’d dreamed German words. Achtung. Halt. The next day two boys from Munich in dirty jeans showed up at the A&W and I went off with them to Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I was sure it was meant to be, that my dream was a sign. I was always looking for signs. I even called the two boys Stop and Look. But as I packed for our journey, I wondered about this particular destiny, if it was really ours. Maybe there were others to be pursued. Maybe destiny was a limitless, open road. Something dark and doubting weighed me down. I tried to talk those doubts away. Angel, I said to myself, you are being silly, Angel, you are this, you are that. As I went through my clothing, fresh from the line, I had feelings of dread and joy, hope and futility all linked together at once, as when people’s destinies twine around each other like roots or vines. I had it in my stomach, that feeling of doubting, wondering if it really mattered if we stayed or went. Maybe we would head toward our destinies all the same without this trip, the four of us. And though my grandmothers accepted me without misgivings, slow as I was in their ways, and as fast as I was in others, I had cold feet. Bush trusted I could do the work, could paddle and lift, could hunt if I had to. But I was not so sure. What did matter to me was how much I wanted to find my mother, Hannah Wing, whose red hair was braided and twined together with my own, at least in color. I wanted to know the truth about her, whatever it was.
We worked all that day, chatting busily about what to take and what to leave until our supplies and equipment filled up the small living room. To my annoyance, Agnes worried about everything. She fidgeted and fussed over whether we had enough toilet paper, whether we should take the gray wheels from the office chair we now used to wheel Dora-Rouge about. “Just in case she needs them,” Agnes said, but Dora-Rouge said, “Honey, don’t worry so much about me. There’s not a smooth piece of land between here and where we’re going, anyway.” But that only gave Agnes something else to worry about.
I helped to pack all Dora-Rouge’s things into boxes to send to the people she was leaving behind. It was a sad chore, but I closed and labeled cardboard boxes of silverware, old moccasins, and carnival glass platters wrapped in newsprint. I folded an unused nightie and a bottle of wine from 1947 in a box for Frenchie and then I went to the bathroom to wipe my eyes. I’d packed herbs and seeds, including a few kernels of corn, for the old people on the Hundred-Year-Old Road.
When we were quiet, there was a weighty, downpouring silence which took up far more room than words and tents. At these moments, Dora-Rouge pushed her chair around the room with the canoe paddle, drifting as if she were already on water. She glided to the window and looked out in one last attempt to memorize the land, the fresh green light of the trees, and all the things she would never see again, even the broken-down, rusted old cars she’d complained about so often. Her eyes grew soft, reminding us all that this was an unhappy occasion.
Dora-Rouge felt guilty about depriving the others of her death. They saw it as a hardship of the heart, she knew, but the old land was calling her, and she had an unflagging loyalty to the land and to her own heart, and she had to obey. But once she said to me, as I put a paperweight in a brown bag, “I don’t dare come back. They’d hate me for putting them through all this. Give that weight to Justin, will you?”
Afraid of the silence, I asked Bush again how many days she thought it would take. I already knew the answer. Bush played along with it, though. She closed her eyes, trying to calculate the distance by dark fathoms, and as if I had never asked the question before, said, “Thirteen. I’m sure of it.”
“That’s pretty optimistic, if you ask me,” said Agnes. She handed me another roll of toilet paper. “Put that in the top of the bag.” She’d already added odds and ends, lotion, an extra knife. “Put this in, too.” She gave me a container of Morton’s salt. “W
e might get dehydrated.”
And Bush replied, “In a lake?” She stood there with her hands on her hips, a woman’s gesture that to this day needs no words.
THE SOUND OF VOICES and fiddle music floated down the road toward us as we walked toward Frenchie’s going-away party. Agnes hummed to herself in the manner that said she was in her own private world, which was often those days, as she tried to drown out the sound of our watery plans and the death talk of Dora-Rouge. I walked beside her in silence, my own mind still occupied with thoughts of fate and destiny. Tied in her secretary chair, Dora-Rouge looked like a scrawny hostage as Bush pushed her up the road. John Husk walked slightly ahead of us.
“He’s the alpha male of the pack,” Dora-Rouge joked. “Just look at him.” He wore a starched white shirt, freshly ironed. Above us, bats flickered through the night sky.
Every once in a while, Agnes stopped humming and added some last thing to the list of what we should take. “We might need aspirin,” she would say, and, “Don’t let me forget the witch hazel.”
Frenchie had done her best to blow up some balloons, but they were halfhearted little affairs. They were tacked to the door next to the “Bon Voyage” sign, and they were as wrinkled and rosy as Frenchie herself.
Inside her house was another world. Suddenly we were among the smell of perfumes, the bright blue vases and colored waters, the noise and flickering of the television that was always on and never in proper adjustment.
Dora-Rouge lit up with more than just the fluttering light of the television. “Just look at this room!” The others parted like the Red Sea to let her pass.
It was going to be an occasion, I could see that. Frenchie would call it a “festive occasion” if she hadn’t been so sad from the loss of her daughter. Still, she tried her best. Red carnations and baby’s breath had come in from the florist by Tinselman’s ferry. I’d forgotten such things as greenhouse flowers. This was a measure of the distance between the Oklahoma I grew in and the north, and I was like one of those flowers, a forced bloom in unnatural conditions.