“Where? You’ve seen him?”
“He’s at the lumber camp, down by Swing Dingle.”
“Yes, I know, but . . . you were there?”
John is looking at the tabletop again. “I did some hunting for the camp and then for him, too.” He holds the soup under his chin and starts in, not seeming to mind the heat.
“Well, how is he? What did he say?”
“I agreed to dress the rabbits,” he says between spoonfuls.
“I meant for me. Any word for me.”
He eats like he hasn’t had a meal in days, scraping every bit from the edges of the bowl. Then he rises abruptly and produces a piece of paper that’s folded in a tight square.
Berit unfolds it to find a strange hand, neat and uniformly upright. My Dear, My Mrs., the message begins . . .
I’m sending John with some rabbit, as I know they’re your favorite.
“I don’t understand,” she looks up. “This isn’t Gunnar’s hand. He can barely write.”
“It’s mine.”
“Yours?” She looks at the neat rows of cursive, too late to cover her disbelief.
“Boarding school,” he says in a stony voice. But she has gone back to reading . . . as I know they’re your favorite. Be certain that I am thinking of you, my dearest. It is so odd to hear his voice in this way. Things are moving in good time, so I hope to be home as planned. Don’t consider saving any rabbit for me. I don’t want to find even a morsel left over . . .
John puts on his hat and draws the knife from his belt. He examines its edge and then slides it back in its sheath, watching Gunnar’s wife as she reads. Her pale skin, her thin frame, her hair the color of dried grass, bundled at the back of her head. He’ll dress the rabbits as he’d promised. “Don’t let her talk you out of it,” Gunnar had said. “She’ll go on about how she can do it herself.” Well, she’s not talking, she’s leaning against the cupboard, fully engrossed in the letter, and he needs to get back to his trapline if he’s going to make it back to camp and then home, if he’s lucky, before the week is out.
John closes the door on the cabin’s warmth and the earthy smell of pea soup. He lifts the rabbits from the nail, wondering what, if anything, she knows of the story Gunnar told him at the logging camp.
The telling has stayed strong in his mind, the heaviness in Gunnar’s voice, all the stops and starts as he seemed to search for words. They’d sat together in an empty log sleigh. There was a bright moon and the wind stirred the shadows, as the camp’s men snored and coughed. No, his wife doesn’t know about the dead man in the lake. It was clearly the first time that Gunnar had spoke it out loud.
John lays out one of the rabbits, and with a deft hand puts his knife to its fur. He makes his cut at the rabbit’s hind foot, then draws the blade up the inside of its leg. He’ll stretch the furs, give Gunnar’s wife the meat, and leave the entrails for scavenger birds.
Horse-stinger. Dragonfly. Oboodashkwaanishiinh. Predatory, of the order Odonata, meaning tooth.
They are of the most ancient creatures. Once they flew the skies as big as kites.
I knew them as sudden visitors. They’d alight on a seat plank or gunnel. Stay for a time. Fly off into the blue.
Their first life is in water. Their second in air. I see them transform on the floor of the lake. Each time shedding and growing a new skin. I follow them across the shallows. Try to join as they climb from the water, on a reed, a plank, a plane of rock.
But I know now.
Their path is not mine.
I watch through the wavering blue above as the dragonflies leave their last casings, crawl slowly out through the backs of their heads. Their black skins remain on the shore. Empty and weightless in the breeze.
They mate in winged circles, shining and airborne. Arching their bodies to form a wheel. Curving. The male clasps the female behind the head. This wheel. This ancient flying dance.
There is one who still feels the rhythm of our dance.
The particulars of my life are now hers to hold.
I take myself from these shining bright shallows. In search of something, yet I do not know what.
I move with the rhythm of the dragonflies.
They are here. Aloft in the water currents. The small. And their ancestors, whose long pulsing wings ripple the shadowy images. A luffing sail. A lost crate of lemons. A silver button tumbling to the lake bed.
2000
Nora turns onto the avenue to find smoke billowing into the sky. There’s a siren coming in from the east, and all of it feels like a scene in a movie. The street is blocked off, and red lights are streaming across the faces of the buildings.
“Quick hurry Jesus Nora!” Willard was hysterical on the phone.
Nora abandons her car at the blockade, her legs shaking as she moves down the sidewalk. Fire is leaping from the two upstairs windows, like some cartoon building with flaming eyes. She steadies herself against the wall of the drugstore as a sickening sensation turns her stomach.
Thick torrents of water arc from the hoses. “Put it out.” Tears spring to her eyes. “Put it out.” She weaves through the shiny red trucks, mist from the hoses, fast-moving men.
“Nora. Get back. ”
It’s Willard shouting. He has her by the arm. She twists away.
“Nora, Jesus.” His arm wraps around her waist. “Stop. Are you crazy?”
She beats back with her fists and butts back with her head, but he has her now, and he holds her tight.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he whispers at her ear.
The flames are leaping through the roof, causing a ruckus among the firemen. Radio voices and static crackle in the air as the red lights stream around and around and black smoke twists up to the sky.
“Come on, honey.” Willard loosens his grip. “Nobody knows what happened. Shit. Come on now, we’ll go sit with Rose.”
Nora wriggles free. “Oh my God, where’s Rose?”
“Don’t worry, okay? See, right there.”
Nora lets herself be steered across the street to where Rose sits on a low cement wall. She’s wearing tennis shoes and her ratty fur coat, and has Buck’s accordion strapped across her chest. Willard puts her next to Rose, then sits himself, still holding on.
The ground surrounding her bar is a lake, reflecting flames and jumping with sound, trampled by men in big rubber boots. Nora thinks the heat feels good on her face, thinks that it’s strange for her to think that. Her mind is buzzing, it’s radio static. She rises, but Willard pulls her back to sitting.
“They got me out the window with a ladder, but I said I wasn’t going unless they took the box, too.” Rose fingers the pearly buttons of the accordion, then reaches over and gives Nora’s hand a squeeze.
Nora can’t take her eyes from the flames and the black cloud of smoke rolling over the rooftops.
“Hey.”
Jimmy D. stands before her in full gear, sweat beaded on his face. “We’ve got another truck on the way. But these old wooden buildings . . . well, we’re doing what we can.”
“I hope so,” she manages, “if you ever want another free beer.”
A smile passes over Jimmy D.’s face, then fades to an expression that makes Nora feel sick, and she lowers her gaze to his boots.
She can’t grasp what’s actually happening. She feels like she’s not really there, but somewhere deep inside herself, a place that’s round, and smooth, and mouthless.
“My piano’s up there. My piano’s burning,” says Rose.
1622
The river splits around a black rock with a white cap of snow before sliding back under the ice and over the little waterfall. Bullhead squats to rest for a moment near the small stretch of open water. There are two bubbling lines streaming out from the rock in a pattern the shape of flying geese.
Walking up from the big water has tired her. She had hacked a hole in the ice at a place that felt right, but there, as in her usual spots, the net had come up dripping and empty.
Fish. Her mouth waters. Trout. Salmon. Whitefish. Herring. Cooking on sticks near a crackling fire. She would turn them slowly until they were done just right.
For two days they’ve eaten soup cooked from pieces of hide, lichen, and the stringy inner layers of bark. Night Cloud snared a rabbit, but it was small and shared mostly with Little Cedar. How proud Bullhead was of Standing Bird as he sat solemnly with his broth, the smell of cooked rabbit thick in the air, cramping her own stomach over and over with a desire more insistent than any passion she’d known.
A wind moves through the pines and they toss and creak, dropping small bits of snow to the ground. Little Cedar grows vulnerable. She has seen it many times before, the slowed response to what usually excites, and the dullness that settles over the eyes, like a snake as it begins to molt. She made a decoction of dried ox-eye root to give strength to the boy’s limbs, but its effect was mild. If only she’d had the root newly pulled, not dried. She could’ve chewed it and spit the softened bits directly onto his arms and legs.
The rock and water make a gurgling music, and the faint light plays in the streaming bubbles. Bullhead can hear Grey Rabbit working in the woods, her bone rasping against the high rock wall as she scrapes lichen to add to the soup. How quickly the soup leaves her stomach feeling empty, without even pumpkin blossom left for thickening.
Bullhead takes in a long weary breath. The air smells of old snow and open water. Across the river a chickadee sits perched on an icy limb. Its feathers are puffed around its body, causing its head to look small. Even the little birds make their own way, not nearly so weak as her kind, who are born without feathers, warm fur, or thick hide. She pulls off her rabbitskin mitt, looks at her fingers, the mean scar on her thumb. Yes, the Anishinaabeg were given the power to dream. And yet they are so fragile, so dependent, that they must take the very skins of other animals and wear them over their own to stay warm.
The chickadee sits puffed on its limb. The river water is dark, but also light in the places where it carries the color of the clouds. Bullhead follows the movement of the water. It slides in smooth sheets, circles and bends, wrinkling in lines that shrink and expand. Constant, constant. Constantly changing. Always the river, yet never the same. Slowly, the waters claim her, and her thoughts dissolve into the current. Gone is Bullhead, mother of three. Gone daughter, sister, clan member, widow. There is just the swift water as it twirls and glides, moves in smooth sheets that carry her downstream.
The sky lightens for a brief moment, illuminating Grey Rabbit’s hands and the patches of lichen, squash-orange and green, and then the light is gone and the rock face goes dull. Grey Rabbit looks to the sky as the long yellow crack in the cloud mantle passes, moving swiftly toward the big water. She must finish her work and get back to Little Cedar. She’d left him lying quietly by the fire, whispering to the cattail warrior in his hand.
Deep into the night she sits with him, willing herself to keep a close watch. But each night sleep overtakes her, and another child appears. The last was a girl, crying in her cradleboard. She disappeared into the woods, carried off by a creature made of ice.
Food. They need food. They had talked of moving on, in hopes of finding the animals in another place. Soon they will have to. Grey Rabbit rubs snow across her scraped knuckles, then wipes clean the long edge of her bone.
Bullhead makes her way toward the rasping sound. Her time at the river has soothed and calmed her, allowing her to see more clearly, to notice the wind-carved snow behind tree trunks, and the soft pink patterns in the bark of the red pines. “Ah, good.” She spots a dark vole in the snow, its feet curled and frozen, its head half eaten. She turns the rodent over in her hand, and drops it into the fish basket.
Her son’s wife looks small standing before the rock wall that rises from the forest. She has scraped a good amount of lichen already. She works hard every day, focused as a hawk, yet she stays as distant as one, too. Something troubles the girl. Something more than Little Cedar. Bullhead ducks below a snow-laden bough. She has tried sharing a number of stories about hunger, of times when she’d worried over her own children, but none of them have nudged Grey Rabbit to speak. She can only trust that the girl will confide if she needs.
“Don’t be so lazy.” Bullhead sets her basket on the ground. “Get those, up there.” She pouches her lips toward a high spot on the rock. “Those are the good ones. Those taste like beaver tail.”
Grey Rabbit smiles at the joke, though her smile fades when she sees what is in the fish basket.
Bullhead takes a scraping bone from Grey Rabbit’s bag and chooses a spot of her own to work. It’s an ancient rock with a solemn spirit, home to moss and lichen, and two small cedars growing out of a high crack. She places an offering at the base of the rock.
The two work in silence, tending their own thoughts, while their scraping falls into a shared rhythm.
Herring on a stick, slowly crisping near the fire. A line of herring, one more succulent than the next.
Little Cedar crying in his cradleboard, disappearing into the woods.
A bird’s call breaks the silence. It echoes off the high rock wall. Bullhead and Grey Rabbit stop scraping, and turn to meet each other’s eyes. Again, the bird calls, and they look to the trees, smiling at each other with growing delight. They search the bare limbs and the green pines for the one that cawed, black crow—whose return marks the coming of spring.
1902
Gunnar straps on his skis, then hoists his pack. The warmer days are turning the snow wet and heavy, so the more distance he can cover before the sun rises, the better. He’s no stranger to the hour before night gives way to day, as he’s up and rowing to his nets as soon as the sky holds enough light to navigate. Sure, it’s not exactly the same in the woods. Woods cling to darkness longer than water.
He winds the scarf Berit knit around his face, straps his poles on his wrists, and shoves off. For a time he can follow the cuts of the logging sleighs, its snow-covered width discernable in the dark. The grade is downhill so he uses his edges, slowing to avoid scraps of bark that are large enough to throw him over.
It’s likely John got the rabbits to his Mrs. He can feel her on the other end of his journey, and he’d love to let loose and ski at full steam. But he has to keep from working up too much of a sweat. If the temperature drops suddenly it will freeze on him.
The woods are quiet except for the swish of his skis and the wool-to-wool of his pant legs. The lake isn’t visible, but its icy smell is in the air. He can feel it below like a sleeping animal, breathing its dark watery breath. It was quite a story that John had told him. A giant, twenty miles long and turned to stone, lying face up in the lake. He couldn’t quite follow the whole tale, or tell whether this Nana’b’oozoo was a man or a god. Maybe he was some type of Indian troll. Humanlike. Shape-shifting. In Aunt Dorte’s stories back home, trolls often turned to stone. John could have made the yarn up to distract him after his own grim tale, but that didn’t seem to be the case. He’d told it like it was true. It would be something to see, this Nana’b’oozoo, a sleeping giant in the lake.
The sleigh cut looks like a grey floor, laid along the bottom of a dark cave. No sign yet of the dawn. Gunnar loosens his scarf, already warming as he poles up an incline. It was good of John to hear out his story, not that he feels much better for the telling, not that it changes what he’d done. He reaches the top of the hill and takes the slope down, gliding past the indiscernible woods, keeping to the grey trail, as that day, indelibly set in his mind, unfolds before him in the darkness.
It was a fresh pine morning with rippling dark breakers, the lake still billowing from a two-day northwester, and he was worried about his catch. The northwesterly wind was still blowing strong enough to keep him from getting back to land. It finally let up late-morning, and so he launched his skiff into the lake. He rowed straight-lined away from shore, practically feeling Berit’s thick silence as she watched him through the windowpane. They’d fought. Sure. Well, not e
xactly. A small quip the night before and no words exchanged come morning. It was a pattern that had grown too familiar. Too many things had grown in place of the children.
The first stiffness left his shoulders as he worked the oars, his course taking him over familiar lake bottom—the basalt table that continues off his cove, with its high spot that he has to skirt, and the group of mammoth boulders, then the scattered few that are visible only when the lake lies flat, at five fathoms, still visible at seven, before the bottom drops away.
The air was crystal and sharp, smelling of pine pitch and rot, and the seagulls were crying loops in the air, following in hope of easy food. He positioned himself first by pine and stone face, then by the shapes of the familiar ridges. As he rowed, the land transformed itself as always from a stagnant footing, solid with home and wife, to an abstraction of shape and texture, a tool for navigation, and a goal that meant safety if the weather were to turn. He was hoping there’d been no damage to his gang, though the herring should be fine if he could get them in soon.
At the top of a swell, he spotted the red cloth fastened to his uphauler, then down he went into a trough, where there was nothing to see but water and sky. The swells were too big to bring her in standing, so he waited for the lake to lift him again, adjusted his course, and rowed on.
The gulls settled on the dark blue water, paddling back and forth, watching him work his ropes. “You best forget about it,” he addressed the flock. “I’ll not be tossing any storm herring today.” One more day of weather and the fish would have been ruined, gone so soft that bones would poke through their flesh when he went to pick them from the nets. Sure he gets tense when he can’t get out; he hadn’t meant to speak to her so curtly.
He started in at one end of his gang, hauling a section of net to the surface, lifting it across his boat, the cold water running from the ropes. One by one he freed herring from the mesh and dropped them into the bottom of the skiff. They were fine. The catch was fine. Too much time he could spend worrying.
The Long-Shining Waters Page 4