The Long-Shining Waters

by Sosin, Danielle

  Numb, Berit sits at the table, wearing Gunnar’s big green sweater, her hair in tangles, her face puffy. Out the window, the clothes hang on the line, going bright and then dull as clouds move over the sun. She pinches off a corner of bread, but it sits in her mouth like a piece of cloth and she has to pick it from her tongue. The lake drums against the shore. She drops her head into the crook of her elbow as again, the whole thing comes cascading down.

  Berit sprinkles water on a dish towel and pushes the hot iron across it, the crumpled terrain of the fabric flattening. She noses the iron into a corner, tears dripping off her chin. Ironing. She is ironing clothes, the basket of whites sits at her feet. The last time she saw him they were in bed, his face so close that he had a third eye. Now she can’t even conjure his face, just the shape of his head, vague and featureless.

  The iron trembles in her hand, and she drops it onto the stove top. What other face has she ever known better? She closes her eyes and wills it to appear, sees his eyes, his chin, but the whole won’t compose. She has lost his face. She goes to the window. The fish house stands stone quiet. This has to stop now, Berit reels. This can not be. She breaks at the knees.

  The fire is nearly out, but she can’t rise from the chair or light the lantern though night has come down. She sits unmoving at the table, her hand resting on two overturned photographs. In one, Gunnar stands with his uncle, their luggage behind them, and the passenger ship. He’s squinting into the sun, his weight on one leg, his hands deep in his coat pockets. The other, inside a cardboard frame, is the portrait taken when they married. They sit side by side on a small settee. Gunnar, in a dark suit, looks straight ahead, his face still and serious. She’d dug frantically through the trunk for the pictures, but now she fears looking at them any longer. She fears that those two images of his face will be all she will ever have. Two moments frozen in time, two expressions replacing all the rest.

  The morning’s rain has blown over, leaving a fine mist in the air and water clinging to the windowpane. Berit puts her arms in her long dark coat, shoves her feet in boots, and opens the door. The pot of beans that she’d thrown in anger sits upright on the ground, nearly clean. She’d heard the bear come for it in the middle of the night, snort and bang the pot around.

  She walks down through the mist carrying her bucket, the grasses wetting the hem of her coat. Warm sweetened water is all she can manage, tiny sips that she leaves on her tongue. She doesn’t care. Why should she have food if Gunnar can’t.

  Berit lowers the bucket from the rock ledge. Beast. Betrayer. This lake that she’d loved. She can see down through its clear water, the large boulder, the bed of stones. She’s hauling in the rope, feeling the water’s weight, when she hears the dip and splash of oars. Her heart leaps. She freezes. Listens. Drops everything and rushes to the end of the point, bursting into tears and waving her arms. He’s out there in the mist, rowing toward her. She runs back to land and across the beach to the boat slide, everything blurring as she cries out to the water, the skiff angling in toward shore.

  He stills his oars and turns his head. “Mrs. Kleiven. I came over to see that everything was all right here.”

  Berit stares at the pocked face of Hans Nelson, unable to utter a word.

  “Captain Shephard was asking. He said that Gunnar hadn’t been out with his fish. I rowed over and found his nets untended. The otters have had a day with them, so I thought I’d better come see if he were ill . . .”

  Berit can’t hear what he’s saying, but she can see the change drop over his face, his expression turning from neighborly to grave.

  No. She won’t go back with him. No. She doesn’t want him to send Nellie. Berit backs away, shaking her head. If they come the next day like he insists, she’ll hide in the woods. They’ll never find her.

  Berit sits on the ridge, her back against the rough bark of a pine. The water and sky are a milky agate, banded with lines of grey and white. If they’re coming, it will be anytime now. He’d have his fish in, and dinner would be over. A white-throated sparrow sings its song, the question and the answer repeating over and over. She wipes her eyes and leans her head against the bark, the sickening images rising again. Gunnar, floating faceup in the lake. Facedown, swaying on frigid night waves. Berit wipes the endless water from her face.

  Sure enough, she sees a boat coming. Good Lord. He has Gunnar’s skiff in tow.

  I hear voices. Over thick distance. Cold. Dark. But the sound has no source.

  A glimmering image. Color and light from the blackness. Fragments coalesce. Waver. Disappear.

  A French chorus rings. Around the silence. Red-headed paddles flash in time. Plunge and pull. Plunge and pull.

  The voyageurs come on a dark wall of water.

  Ten men to a boat, laden with furs bound for Europe.

  A calloused hand. Red wool. A wind-burnt cheek.

  Faces stunned. By the beauty. By the cold.

  They paddle to the perfect rhythm of their songs.

  Alouette.

  Gentille alouette.

  Currents whirl as the wall of water nears.

  Keep to the shore. To the shore. The shore.

  Red-headed paddles plunge and pull.

  Rile the heavy, slick, black water.

  I search among the paddlers for the man in the dark coat.

  But the wall curves.

  Darts away like a startled fish.

  2000

  A neon beer sign with a moving waterfall casts a cold bluish light over the surface of Nora’s vodka. She rattles the ice cubes and the light breaks apart.

  “You’re looking rested,” Jerry says.

  “Thanks,” replies Nora, looking at him dead-on, an unspoken acknowledgement hanging between them. His kindness the day before had saved her.

  When she’d headed out of Superior without a shred of a plan, she’d driven south into Wisconsin, but the further she drove the worse she felt. After nearly an hour, she turned around and backtracked to the T in the road. She sat at the stop sign a good long time, looking at her options, west or east, staring at the glass float as if it were a crystal ball that might direct her—toward home or away. Finally, a semi came up behind her, its grill filling the rearview mirror, and she had to move.

  She ended up on the scenic road east, following the shore of the lake. As she drove, she felt a little bit calmer. Finally, she landed at the Breakers. After sizing her up, Jerry gave her exactly what she needed, room and just enough conversation. He told her which motel to stay at, and where to get a good meal. Mostly, he made himself a solid presence, his eyes softening kindly when he spoke to her.

  “So you’re going to stay on then?” Jerry asks, opening a bag of pour spouts with his teeth. He dumps them in a highball and sets them below the bar.

  “I might, who knows.” Nora lifts her glass in a toast. “I guess I’m fancy free and on vacation.”

  “To the first of the tourists, then.” Jerry lifts his coffee cup.

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I was kidding,” he says. “We don’t actually get many tourists. We’re more of a drive-though, day-trip town, which is good and bad as I see it. Most of the folks who come through are fine, but a lot of them have a real city attitude. It drives my wife absolutely crazy. She jokes about tattooing ‘educated’ across her forehead.”

  “I don’t get much in the way of tourists. Mine is more of a working crowd. Though I do have some college kids this year, and they’re their own brand of annoying.” Nora stops herself. Have. Had. She’s talking as if the Schooner still exists. The light from the beer sign slides across her hand and the shiny surface of the bar.

  “You okay?”

  Nora manages a smile.

  “Why don’t you stick around for the music. I’ve got folksingers coming in, a husband and wife duo, but their music gets kind of jazzy if that makes any sense. He plays guitar and she plays fiddle. They usually draw a decent crowd. Did you book music at your bar?”

  “I could
n’t manage it. Didn’t have the room.” Couldn’t. Didn’t. “I had a cook once who had a lot of talent. He was a first-rate songwriter. He’d set up by the jukebox with a couple of other guys, but that was pretty occasional.”

  The door swings open and Nora feels the lake air.

  “Hey, Frank, it’s been a while.”

  Nora jiggles her drink. She had Rose’s piano in the middle of the night, of course, but that was different, and too personal to say.

  “Frank Basset, this is Nora . . .”

  “Truneau,” she says, holding out her hand.

  “What brings you through?” Jerry asks Frank, then turns to Nora to explain. “Frank’s on the pollution control agency’s gravy train. They send him around the region to drink the water and sniff the air.”

  “Something like that,” Frank says, sliding onto a stool a couple over from Nora’s.

  “Nora’s on a little explore,” Jerry winks. “Seeking new lives and new civilizations.”

  “Boldly going.” She lifts her glass, feeling the warmth of his generosity again.

  “To where no man has ever gone before?” Frank swivels toward her, and lifts an eyebrow.

  He has close-cropped hair, more salt than anything, stout hands, a crooked smile. Obviously, a streak of bad boy. She can see it in the ease of his posture, and the way he’d lifted just the one eyebrow.

  All the tables near the stage are full, and there are more in the back by the pinball machines. “Another place you should go is Pictured Rocks, on the Michigan coast. It’s a spectacular shoreline, crazy caves and rock formations.” Frank’s writing a list on a napkin for her, but Nora is turned toward the stage. She especially likes the woman’s fiddle playing, the way her hair falls in a yellow curtain when she leans forward, and her bow blurs when she plays the fast parts.

  “They call them pictured because the minerals in the cliffs form striations of color. It’s gorgeous. Worth the trip.”

  Jerry pours them a fresh round. “You two kids going to eat anything?”

  “You choose something, Frank,” Nora says, tapping her foot in time with the song. “I told you, I’m not making any decisions right now.”

  “Okay. Chicken wings.”

  Nora makes a face.

  Frank stubs his cigarette in the ashtray they’ve been sharing. “I thought you said it was up to me.”

  Nora shrugs.

  “I see how you are.” He bobs his head as if he has a real case on his hands. “Okay, we’re getting onion rings.” He slides the menu caddy back on the bar, and looks at Nora sideways to see her reaction.

  She smiles and blows out a stream of smoke.

  “She’s impossible,” Frank says to Jerry.

  Nora reaches back to the bar for her drink. The whole place has a simmering energy that’s lifting right through her. It’s good, the buzz and the blur of conversations, Jerry, and the woman playing the fiddle, Frank beside her lighting her cigarettes, and the blue light from the beer sign rhythmically crossing the bar, like luck or a lighthouse flashing home.

  1622

  “For three days she has hardly eaten.” Night Cloud looks up through the bare trees, where heavy drops of water hang from the branches, silver in the weak spring sun. “She draws back like a crayfish when I try to speak with her.”

  Bullhead carries a walking stick, which she taps along the forest floor mottled with brown and yellow leaves, wet with the thaw and smelling of dirt. Her son is right to be concerned. She has felt Grey Rabbit’s distance for some time.

  The moist air is a salve to her cheeks as she plants her stick near a tree root in the path and they begin their ascent to the bald rock. Her poor Little No Eyes, she can see him as she climbs, lifting herself higher, planting her stick again, his face half covered in the white poultice. Yet she is happy for the strength of Three Winds’s horsemint. The mixture is working to take out the fire, and it seems to be lessening the blistering. His cheek and his neck will surely scar, and his eye, well, it’s too early to know.

  The bald rock is damp and spotted with bird droppings. Bullhead, breathing heavily, noses her stick against a splotch of brown lichen, thankful she doesn’t have to eat it. Gichigami stretches to the horizon, the shallows tawny from the streams high with snowmelt, the deep water changing abruptly to grey. Night Cloud and Bullhead stand in silence as their eyes follow the sliding water and soft light.

  “Its mood is peaceful, somehow watchful,” muses Night Cloud.

  Bullhead smiles faintly. He has always been the most receptive of her children. Even in his cradleboard he was different than the others. She recalls the playthings she’d hung for him, the stick man and the tiny bow, which he’d bat around. But he wouldn’t play roughly with the dried mink skull. Instead, his face would grow still and thoughtful, as if there were an understanding between them.

  A raven calls from deep in the forest.

  Gichigami laps.

  The surface water slides.

  “It would be good for her to talk with someone,” says Night Cloud.

  Bullhead raises her eyebrows and sighs.

  1902

  Berit walks down to the cove for water, to find the boat slide, which is normally submerged, angling down to dry stones, and the lake receded to well beyond the point. She steps off the stone crescent of beach and, buckets in hand, walks toward the water. It’s interesting to stand in the center of the cove and to see all the rocks uncovered. Her point, no longer halved by the water surface, looms twice its usual size. She doesn’t remember ever seeing this. Certainly she’d remember walking into the cove. There are seagulls sitting in the stones, their white bodies dotting the lake bed, and further out, small stands of water glare like mirrors in the sun.

  Berit trudges out across the lake bed, but the water retreats in step with her progress. She pauses, and looks back toward land. The cabin stands ever so high above her, up the rock slope and then up the hill of land.

  The white seagulls sit in the stones. The lake lies perfectly flat and blinding like a sheet of tin under the sun. A faint sound is coming from the horizon, a whine like the quickening steam of a teakettle, and she’s scrambling down hot rock ledges, their cracks and crevices stuffed with rumpled clothes.

  She’s desperate now to reach the water, but it won’t let her draw near. Behind her the cabin is no longer visible, just steep rock cliffs and dry stone. The whine rises in pitch. The lake glares. Berit takes a tentative step forward. The lake doesn’t move; it lies flat and still. Buckets in hand, she runs toward it, the whine reverberating off the rocks. She’s closing the distance; the lake doesn’t move. One leg splashes in, cold to the calf, and then the other plunges through, and the water pulls back revealing the crack, and she’s falling and falling, screaming wind in her ears.

  Berit jerks awake in the corner of the net loft.

  Wind keens through a crack in the eaves and buffets the window she’s curled against. The afternoon is dense and coal grey, and the lake wild and hurling against the shore. Berit drops her head to her knees and reaches down for the cat, which is curled against her leg in the pile of blankets and quilts she’d dragged up. The shock of the breakers vibrates the walls and the wind whistles through the cracked wood. She pulls a blanket around her shoulders and watches the savage water from inside herself, from a tiny spot shrunk back from the raw edges of her body. She runs a hand over her hair, finds a sticky clump that smells like pine sap on her fingers.

  She’d evaded Hans and Nellie twice, running to the woods to hide. They’d left food. A cake. Of all things, a cake. And last time a burlap bundle tagged S. Vulgarus/Lilac. The note explained that the shrub had boarded the America in Duluth, marked paid in full by G. Kleiven. Captain Shephard had left it in Hans’s care. A lilac bush. They’d never discussed it. A lilac for her yard. Her birthday gift. The letter went on with worry and condolences, then mentioned the new church down the shore. It ended with the suggestion that a service be held. But it’s unthinkable. She can’t imagine gather
ing with other people, practically strangers, most of them. No. She wants to be left alone.

  She’d put the cake out for the animals, then wrote a reply in her most practiced hand. She thanked them for their kindness, and explained that she’d made arrangements to travel to Duluth and spend time with family members. She’d placed the folded paper on Nellie’s cake plate. Stowed some things, moved others to the fish house. It seems to have worked. She hasn’t been bothered since. Mostly, she stays in the net loft now.

  1622

  Grey Rabbit enters to find Bullhead at the fire, a calm but serious look on her face. “Sit with me,” is all she says, her eyes expanding as if beckoning her in.

  Bullhead unfolds the square of birch-bark on which she has just started a new design. She examines the beginning pattern of her teeth marks in the firelight, then folds the bark into a square.

  There is a long period of no words, only the crackling fire between them as Bullhead works calmly, grinding the soft inner bark between her teeth.

  At first Grey Rabbit’s words barely come, and those that do are only air around the thing itself.

  Bullhead nods, unfolding the bark, patiently keeping track of her work.

  Then the words, like swarming bees. The dreams. The dreams. She should have spoken. She thought they’d warned of hunger, but the hunger had passed. Still the dreams. She had thought it was clear that Little Cedar must be protected. She had thought she was protecting him. She had never been known as a powerful dreamer. She can’t explain why she didn’t speak.

  A long silence. The crackling fire.

  “Maybe you did protect the boy,” offers Bullhead.