by Linda Hogan
TWELVE
THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE AT North House, the first ones, kept their dead on Bone Island during hard winters, carrying or pulling them there by sled to await the first thaw, when they could be buried. Then came the Europeans, who left the bodies of their horses who did not survive the cold. Soon, too, they took the bones of their pigs to that place. The pigs had carried diseases that wiped out tribes of people, and all those dead were left on the island, too. In the spring of 1913, three British men arrived. They rowed to Bone Island and found seething white maggots more than a foot thick consuming all the newly thawed flesh. There were so many dead that they called it the Island of Maggots. After that it became the place where the ill were sent during contagions. No one except the dying would go there or even take their boats or canoes close by. Later, lime was poured over all the bodies so they would decompose, leaving behind only a few sharp teeth and a finger bone or two. A song of wailing came from there. People maintained it was only the wind.
Now we passed Bone Island on our way to North House. We didn’t stop, but I thought I could hear the tragic crying of wind, weeping for what had happened there.
• • •
DESPITE THE FACT that it was summer, North House, a onetime fur post, the place where we could stock up on goods and rest, looked wet and cold and dark. It appeared to be made up of one large building with a black roof. As we pulled the canoes to land, a swarm of dogs ran down to the edge of water to greet us, wagging their tails in gestures of friendship. Following behind them were three dark-eyed children who stared at us as if they’d never before seen women. I held some gum out to them. They took it and put it in their mouths, but continued to stare at us. Then, from behind them, a big-boned German woman, still drying her hands on a towel, came down to see what the commotion was all about. She was a large woman with reddish-blond hair, not her natural color.
“Shoo!” she yelled at the dogs, shaking her towel in their faces. Despite the fact that she commanded a kind of order and obedience from humans, the dogs ignored her and continued to snarl and bark, one of them with his head up, howling like a wolf, another yapping like one of those poodle-mix lapdogs of city women.
The woman, Gita, smiled at us. She had a soft look that tried to belie the fact that she was clearly in charge here. Immediately she tucked the towel in her belt and set to work, helping us ground the canoes, leaning down, large-armed and heavy, her hair in an unkempt bun, her eyebrows each a single, thin-penciled line.
“Come with me.” She said this with something like authority. “I’ll get you a cold drink.”
She watched as Bush lifted Dora-Rouge. “She doesn’t walk? Wait a moment.” She turned to the kids. “Go get Ivan’s chair!” She waved the kids away with another shake of the towel. In her hands anything became a tool for getting things done. “Hurry up, now.” The dark-eyed children ran off. She lifted our packs up onto gray rocks and we waited.
Soon the children returned, pushing the chair, and the woman, Gita, helped Dora-Rouge into the chair as if she had once been a nurse, using one foot to put down the footrest at the same time that she turned and set Dora-Rouge down like a bag of rice or flour. “It’s my husband’s chair,” she said. Then, as if we might think her unkind, “He doesn’t need it right now.”
Loaded with a pack, she took us first into a part of the building that was something like a bunkhouse. Except for a few small windows, it was long and dark inside. The windows were cut low to the ground to allow sun to warm the floor. The entire building contained the smell of men, and a few of them stood about looking at us as if they’d seen no one except this German woman for the longest time. Most of them seemed European, though there were a few men with tribal blood. They were easy to spot; they were softer, their bodies more relaxed. They had different walks, different eyes from the others.
“Men, out!” said Gita.
The men were clearly accustomed to following her orders, and, obedient as children, they left.
“Go get the rest of their packs,” she yelled after two of them. “Bring them up here.”
“Drinks are on the house for women,” she said. “I get lonely here with just the men. But only drinks.” She was a practical businesswoman; she didn’t want us to think we’d get a free bill of fare. “The food you must purchase.”
As much as we wanted to clean up, we headed straight for the dining hall. I stared long and hard at the pastries and sweets, as if I’d never seen them before.
“Go ahead,” Bush said. “Pick one.”
“Wait a minute,” said Agnes. To Bush she said, “Did you bring any money?”
“Yes. I have some left from the skins. It’s enough.”
Agnes smiled. “Go ahead, Angel, take your pick.” And then Agnes picked two, which was a relief to me. Her appetite, at least, was good.
Shortly after we went back to the bunkhouse, Gita brought over trays of sausages and fresh, hot, buttered bread. I was hungry and the food was wonderful, but even more than that, I was tired. We all were. Dora-Rouge had already dozed off. Fatigue moved across my muscles and bones. I was relieved we would be able to rest there a few days.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, after we ate breakfast, Gita turned toward Bush and me with a suspicious look. She eyed us sharply. “Are you here after the Spanish silver?”
“Silver?” Bush looked at her like she was crazy. I thought it was a joke and broke out in a large smile. Bush said, “What silver?”
“You haven’t heard?” Gita sat up straight and looked from one to the other of us to see if we were lying. Our faces didn’t betray us, but she said, “Yes. Everybody has heard this.” She pointed outside. “It’s what most of these men are looking for.”
“No, we haven’t heard of it,” Bush said.
I looked out one of the windows as if I might see a Spanish galleon turned on its side by the trading post. Instead, all I could see were the mixed-blood men sitting back watching the white men make holes in the ground.
“So you really haven’t heard about the silver.” It was more of a comment than a question. In a while, she changed the subject. “The men don’t talk much, you know, not even to each other.” I’m afraid we weren’t much company either. We had become used to silence and to the sounds of nature. There was something jarring about being there. The pulse of human activity was too quick for us. We would need time to adjust to places of noise, business, order, and rules.
The trappers were easy enough to make out; they had deeper features than the silver chasers, an eye of solitude. The silver-hunters were all of a kind, it seemed. They alternated between dreaminess and high anxiety. Even with strained muscles they would go outside each morning and dig a new hole. In the evening, they were still at work, dusty and fatigued. Some concentrated on depth, others moved from place to place, making shallow holes, searching, but all of them worked as if riches would escape them.
Some of the darker men worried that the forest would become only piles of gravel, and that the waters would be dredged and ruined. These Indian men were quiet when the others, more unruly and tense, were around. They were also thoughtful. They brought Dora-Rouge tobacco, sweet grass, and a few yards of nice cloth that some of them had bought for their women at home. This was the custom. Then they sat and talked with her. They were kind to me, acknowledging my presence, and they were interested in Bush and Agnes, but it was Dora-Rouge they wanted to know about. She spoke the same language they did, only a different dialect, and everyone, especially Dora-Rouge, found this comforting. It made her feel how near we were to our destination.
As for the silver, one night, some time ago, a man who was digging a grave had found several Spanish coins near North House. Word of the discovery had spread quickly and men poured into North House to lay claim to the riches. In the mysterious way a rumor travels, the story grew larger all the time, so now some believed that veins of silver and gold ran through the granite and limestone. Even if the coins had not been enough to summon t
he needy men, their imaginations would have urged them on. They were like men with buck fever, men who would think another man, a dog, even a motorcycle, was a deer. They were possessed. Each believed he was the one fated to find the money, that it was his destiny. This made friendship impossible between them; no one could be trusted when so much was at stake. There was a theory, too, just started, that galleons had gone down in the lakes of the region, that the Spanish had found a passage from the sea into this place of divided waters and land.
The men, digging earth, had lucky charms that would lead them to coins and other shining things. They had prayers, even though they were not, under normal circumstances, praying men. One fellow wore his mother’s picture in a silver locket. Every few hours, he rubbed the shining back of it and prayed for his dear mother to guide him to the silver. Another used a rabbit’s foot that he carried always in his left hand. One watched for signs from God in patterns of weather.
And two young men, a set of twins, used a Ouija board, which said yes to most all of their questions. “Is there silver on the left side of Peat Hill?” they asked. Yes. “Is there silver near the propane tanks?” This time it didn’t move, even though they sat for an hour, at least, with their fingers lightly touching the beige plastic heart, and trembling. They thought surely this was a sign and dug near the propane tanks until one of the tanks rolled down into the hole and hit a building and exploded, starting a fire that was now only a black, scorched place behind the barracks.
“We hope they never find any silver,” said Gita. “Though God knows it would be good for business.”
Some of the men slept in the fort. Others pitched a tent or lean-to on the site they had a hunch about and wanted to claim, afraid someone would take over the place if they left.
Gita’s husband was more subdued than she was. It was easy to see how they made a good marriage. He barely spoke at all and she was seldom quiet. “What’s your name?” he asked us, then said, “Oh, Agnes Iron? You’ve got a package here. We expected you a week or two ago.”
Weeks, I thought. We’d only been gone weeks. Bush and I looked at each other, aware again of time and commerce and men digging their ways to hell, thinking it was heaven. It seemed like we’d been gone for years.
Agnes knew at once Husk had mailed her coat. It was a heavy package wrapped in taped-together brown paper bags. Agnes beamed. She was delirious with joy. Husk had sent along a note that she didn’t share with us, but she chuckled when she read it and color returned to her cheeks. For Dora-Rouge, Husk sent some canned salmon. Bush got a new lure. There was an astrology book and chocolate bar for me, along with a letter from Tommy, saying that he was considering traveling to the Fat-Eaters to meet us. He had met a man, a rabble-rouser from a southern tribe, who thought he knew how to enter the territory via back roads and water channels, even if all the other entries were blocked off.
Bush bought a newspaper at the post store, but there was nothing in it about Wounded Knee. And there was no word about the dam project we were headed toward. “How can that be?” she wondered aloud, but it was no surprise to her that these things were covered up.
I felt free and light during our stay there, our stopover from swamps and portages. It was good to walk without carrying anything, no backpack, no food, no old woman. It was good to have a few nights’ decent sleep, to be inside walls. I took a walk with Agnes and her coat, and hid a smile as she pretended not to be looking around the ground for silver, but I could see her eyes looking this way and that for anything the men might have overlooked, anything shining.
“What would you do if you had money?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.”
At North House we slept in beds, real beds, the luxury of which was beyond imagining, even with bumpy mattresses and used-up blankets, even with the smell of working men’s skin and clothing. While we were there, the men slept on the other side of the room, and Gita put up a curtain between us. None of them, she assured us, dared look in the direction of the curtain, as if Gita herself would jump out and chide them. In the mornings I could hear them pull on their pants and zip them. Worse even than hearing them, I could feel how much each one wanted to be the one to strike a claim. It was a tension, a kind of feverish energy that, once started, could not be stopped. It was like one of the rules of physics Husk would tell about, an object set in motion. To make it worse, the shoveling began at the crack of dawn, or what seemed like dawn, not that the hour was easy to discern with nights so brief. But whatever the time was, their noise began during the precious hours of my sleep.
Behind the main building, Gita had a little garden that she’d nurtured. It contained future turnips and big-leafed potential squash. She loved the plants. One morning when one of the miners began shoveling there, she ran out the door and yelled at him. “Stop that this minute! There is no silver! No coins. Nothing. Nichts.”
As SOON AS the young men spread the word that four Indian women had come out of the water, native people from nearby came to see us for themselves, bringing food and shirts and other items we might need or want. One young woman offered earrings to me. They were long and silver. “But not Spanish silver,” the young woman said. She wanted no misunderstandings. She stayed to talk a long time beneath the trees, and played a tape of Barry Sadler, “You tell me no war, no war, no war again my friend.” “The Eve of Destruction.”
It turned out that some of the visitors had known about Dora-Rouge, and one woman who came to visit, as old as Dora-Rouge, said she was related to the Hundred-Year-Old Road people. Her name was Jere and she was born at Adam’s Rib. She missed it and wanted to know what the Hungry Mouth of Water had eaten in the years since her presence there. “Two Skidoos! Really?” She put her hand over her mouth. “Were the people still in them?”
Jere and Dora-Rouge talked all the next day. From what little I understood of the language, they talked about the time when everything was still alive. That’s what they remembered and missed. It was what all the old people longed for again, the time when people could merge with a cloud and help it rain, could become trees, one with bark, root, and leaf. People were more silent in those days. They listened. They heard. After they talked, the two old women cast long, brooding looks about the post and at the men who broke open the ground. The next day, Gita brought raisins, almonds, and dates, and joined us in our talking, eating, and tea drinking.
And then, too soon, we made preparations to leave. I hated to go, as if we were leaving people we had known longer than a few days.
ON THE MORNING we left, the Indian women came to say “Good-bye, sister,” and we promised them we would be back. They reminded us that water levels had changed and our directions might become confused.
“Precious metal,” Bush said as we paddled north once again, as if the diggers were a mystery to her. “What do you think they really want? What does silver mean to them?”
Agnes said she thought it meant the world was ending.
In a history book I once read, Cortés was quoted as saying, “We white men have a disease of the heart, and the only thing that can cure it is gold.” With those words, with that disease, came the end of many worlds. So Agnes could very well have been right: precious metals signaled an ending.
WITH THE COAT BACK in her possession, Agnes rallied somewhat. She still seemed slightly confused, but overall she seemed happier. She sat erect in the canoe and looked once again like a bear. Behind her, Bush paddled and steered through fine, long grasses and lakes, and once again we traveled, some evenings to the sound of wolves, some days with the warm sun on our backs. Once again we dropped down into the rhythm of it, forgetting our lives in the other world. For me it was as if there had been no years in school learning numbers, no fights, no families who wouldn’t keep me. Gone were the times my hands were tied down so I wouldn’t hurt myself. None of it mattered now, not the lives on Adam’s Rib or Fur Island, not even the future. What mattered, simply and powerfully, was knowing the curre
nt of water and living in the body where land spoke what a woman must do to survive.
We slipped back into a deep wildness, into beauty and eeriness where spirits still walked on land, and animals still spoke with humans, toward a place where wolves and their ancestors remembered the smell of Dora-Rouge and her ancestors from years before.
WE CAME TO THE Place of Sleepers. It was on the edge of a mainland where there had been no electric light since 1920. At that time, inventor Nikola Tesla had sent a surge of energy all the way from Colorado Springs across the continent. With no way to measure or sell it, this light would have been free and available to everyone, but this, of course, was not permitted. The Sleepers, as the people who lived there were called, refused to pay for what could have been free, refused light on principal alone. All light, even oil-light, or that generated by gas, was abolished. They chose, instead, to live by natural cycles. It was a small act of resistance, but the people were healthier for it. In the long darkness of winter they slept like bears, waking only now and then to stretch, eat, make love, and fall asleep again.
The Place of Sleepers was partially submerged. Only the tops of a few hills, once tall, were dry. Again, I was surprised that the water was clear. I’d always thought floodwaters should be murky and dark. Peering down as we passed through, there were trees, and even a few buildings that hadn’t fallen or floated away. A flag on top of a pole still waved, as if the currents of water were merely a gentle wind.
Dora-Rouge was distraught that this place was so nearly under water. Below it, not long ago, one of the first dams had been built, flooding the Place of Sleepers and other islands to the south. One woman, we heard later, had refused to leave. It was said her bones still floated inside her little kitchen, alongside dish towels and a tablecloth and a measuring cup.