The Long-Shining Waters

by Sosin, Danielle

  “Pretty nice legs.”

  Nora chokes on a swallow and a laugh.

  “My great, great,” Tinker says, twirling her hand. “Who knows how many greats, was a voyageur. Of course, I never knew him. My son did the research. He filled four contracts with the fur company before getting killed at Fort William.”

  “What happened?” Nora pictures an Indian raid.

  “He died in a brawl over a game of checkers.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “That’s what George says.” She holds the tray out again. “This place is filled with hard-to-believe stories.” Her gaze floats off past the voyageur. “A lot of strange things happen.”

  Nora sips her drink and nods, thinking it’s hard for her to tell what’s strange from what’s normal anymore.

  “Today when I was driving there was an island in the lake. It had a dreamy look, with a collar of cloud around it. But then,” she smoothes her blanket, “it disappeared.”

  “I’ve heard stories like that from sailors. It’s some kind of weather phenomenon.”

  “Some say weather, others say it’s an optical illusion. I wouldn’t put a name on it. Would you care for a peanut butter cup?” Tinker pours some out on the tray and leans over. “There’s a crack in the lake where boats disappear,” she says quietly, before settling back into her chair.

  “I’ve heard that one, too.” Nora lights a cigarette and throws the match into the coffee can. “But really,” she says, blowing out smoke, “How can a lake have a crack? Water doesn’t crack. It’s water.”

  “If you say so.” Tinker pops a candy in her mouth. “What about ice?”

  “Boats don’t sail on ice.”

  “True, true, but nonetheless.”

  Nora watches the end of Tinker’s cigarette flare orange and then fade. The rest of her is a silhouette.

  “Where was it you said you were from?” she asks.

  “Superior, Wisconsin. It’s on the other side. But I’m thinking of moving to California.” Nora exhales a stream of smoke. She’s never said it out loud. She likes the sound of it.

  “All right, well, you’ve come quite a distance. Haven’t you seen anything strange?”

  “No, not really. Not seen.” Nora ashes in the can. “Unless you count what I’ve seen in my sleep.”

  “This water does that. It gets into your head. Tell me.”

  Nora shrugs.

  “Please, I’d like to hear.”

  “My dreams?”

  Tinker nods encouragingly.

  Nora feels stupid describing how Frank pulled her underwater, but Tinker doesn’t laugh or judge. The woman in the emerald-green dress stared at her with those weird catlike eyes. Then Nora finds herself talking about how she’d felt on the Keweenaw, standing alone looking down through the water, and that even the tree was a ghost of itself. Something was watching her down at the pictographs—maybe just that bird, but she swears to God she felt it. The litany seems long as she strings it together.

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” is all Tinker says.

  “So what is it?” Nora asks.

  “Well, dear, it just is.” Tinker chuckles and reaches deep into her bag.

  Nora waits. She tops her drink, sure that she must have more to say about it.

  “You’ll be seeing Thunder Bay then.” Tinker pops open a can of soda. “Give my regards to the giant.”

  “What?”

  “The Sleeping Giant. You can’t miss him, he’s lying right there in the water. You’ll hear a lot of differing versions about how Nana’b’oozoo was turned to stone. The point to remember is that he’s only asleep. One has to wonder about his dreams.”

  “Nana who?”

  “Oh, you’ll meet him for yourself. He’s Ojibwe. Half human, half manitou, so to speak.”

  “What is that word, manitou? There’s a river named that on the way to my daughter’s.”

  Tinker takes a long drink of soda, then covers her mouth and burps quietly. “There are a lot of ways to think about it. One could say spirit. Or mystery, or God.”

  “Good grief, I thought it was a deer.”

  “Could be a deer.”

  Nora cocks her head, but doesn’t ask for an explanation. “I guess the Indians used to live all around here,” she says, recalling the drawings of the village she’d seen at the locks.

  “Used to? That’s a funny comment. Haven’t you noticed they’re still here?”

  Tinker sets down her can and wags her finger toward the voyageur. “I’ll tell you, it really bothers me the way that statue’s lit up. It’s light pollution. The night is supposed to be dark.” She pours more peanut butter cups on the tray. “Have you seen the UFOs?” she whispers.

  “UFOs?” Nora rolls her eyes. “You’re not serious, are you?”

  “Uh-huh,” Tinker nods. “Absolutely.”

  1902

  Berit reaches to the back of her head and feels for a knot of hair. The sound of the scissors blades meeting is succinct, and a clump falls down her back to the ground. The morning is filled with the sounds of summer—the white-throated sparrows calling back and forth, and the persistent hollow knock of a woodpecker.

  Berit looks for its bobbing head, sees a jay pass like a blue ribbon through the trees. She slides her hand over her head, feeling for the next knot. Pale tufts lie on the ground around the chair, and long strands taken by the breeze hang in the tall grasses around the fish house. There is satisfaction in the cutting, in feeling the abrupt ends of her hair, and the sun on her newly bared neck.

  Up at the cabin, Berit finds mouse droppings on the table, and all along the kitchen shelf. She flicks one off the bar of soap. There is something else, too, she can sense it, maybe a bird or a squirrel in the roof beams. She takes clothes from the box she’d shoved under the bed, and leaves the animal to its new home.

  The lake mirrors the wide sky, except for the dark skittering patches where it’s grazed by a zigzag breeze. She unbuttons her blouse and lets it fall, feeling both the warm sun and the cold lake air on her skin. It’s difficult to stand shoeless on the beach; the rocks dig into the soles of her feet. She unfastens her skirt and steps out, leaving her undergarments in a heap, feeling achingly vulnerable in the elements—the warm and the cool touching her everywhere. She’s not been in the lake since Gunnar disappeared.

  The water is icy cold, even with the surface water blown toward shore. Still, she has experienced much colder. She steps gingerly along the rocky bottom, gets in past her knees, pauses, winces.

  She hesitates, but not because of the cold. What if she were to find him now, her hand brushing against something underwater? It’s silly. The lake bottom is clearly visible. The water swirls where her legs disturb it, the sunlight rippling, the cold starting to grab. He’d be her Gunnar. He’d be a monster.

  She squats and stands. Good Lord. She braves in to her waist, takes a full breath and dives under. Berit rises with a yelp, turns immediately, and scrambles to shore. Shaking, she rubs her body down with soap.

  Her fears are a schoolgirl’s, and yet they are not. Being in the water connects her to him. She walks in waist-deep, clenching her fists as the soap floats milky from her skin. The second time is always easier. Just go ahead now. She takes a breath and dives.

  Berit stands in the sun on the slanting rock ledge. Her skin is still taut with cold, her nipples tight, her body hair risen, though she feels only a vague numbness, and the water from her hair dripping down her spine. She dabs at herself with her old blouse, and steps into clean undergarments and a skirt. Her hair feels strange as she combs her fingers through it, its stubbiness and lesser weight.

  She finishes dressing and climbs to a dry rock where she sits, legs drawn up under her skirt, feeling the lake chill set in as her half-numb skin slowly comes back to life. She drops a round birch leaf into the shallows. Submerged yet still floating, it casts a shadow over the stones. The leaf drifts over a waxy orange agate, it grows dark in the shadow, then light again.
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  2000

  There’s pounding on the door, and pounding at her temples.

  “Housekeeping.”

  Nora lifts her head from the pillow. It’s almost noon. She must not have taken aspirin before bed. She doesn’t remember. She feels like hell.

  “Housekeeping.”

  “Yeah. Okay. Give me a minute.”

  When Nora hands her key to the man at the desk, he looks her up and down accusingly. “Do you know anything about my lights out there?” He points. “The lights. The ones around my statue. Somebody tampered with them during the night.”

  Nora walks slowly around the giant voyageur. Sure enough, the spotlights are disassembled, their glass covers lying in the grass. The man’s watching her from the window, and she’s doing her best to look concerned, but she has to turn away from him when an image of Tinker on her knees, armed with a screwdriver, pops into her head. It’s possible she’d been in on it too. Part of her night is a flat blank.

  The icy fizz of Coke is heavenly on her throat, and she alternates between the cold pop and the warm coffee. Nora slides her plate to the side to make room for the new notebook she’s bought. “Pool Room,” she writes at the top of a page. “Main Bar.” “Storage Room.” Surprisingly, she’s able to jot quite a few things beneath each heading.

  “What Next?” She adds more cream to her coffee. “California,” she writes. The word sits on the page, the big C and the rest rolling out after. She could start over someplace new. In California, she wouldn’t have to deal with winter. No freezing cold. No dirty grey snow. No scraping ice from the windshield of her car. The last time she’d traveled to California in the winter, she’d gone from clench-fisted, skin-freezing cold to lounging in the sun on Joannie’s patio, marveling at the gorgeous bright pink flowers of that huge plant—bougan . . . something—that grows up her house. People leave the northern climates as they age for a good reason. “No winter,” she writes under California. “Pink plant.” Joannie would put her up in the guest room until she got settled.

  “Can I take your plate, ma’am?”

  “Just a bump to warm it, thanks.”

  But California would mean being far from Nikki.

  The day out the window is too bright for her eyes. Nora swallows another pair of aspirin. She’s been drinking a lot more since the fire. Or differently, at least. Used to be she’d pour one toward the end of the night, and then one, maybe two, to wind down during closing. Not this all or nothing routine.

  The clock on the restaurant wall reads past one o’clock. If she hauls, it’s possible she could make it back to the States today.

  The lake is brilliant blue and shining, the sky cloudless. It’s blue over blue. But her car is sluggish on the roller-coaster terrain, the high rock bluffs and steep drops to the water. Nora cracks the windows to let in fresh air. She’d been driving, she couldn’t say for how long, without being behind the wheel. Her eyes saw the road obviously enough to stay on it, but her head was in a different place entirely. She was thinking about how scared she’d been when the wave got her foot at the pictographs, and how she’d hightailed it back to her car, thinking about Frank and searching for agates, and the deserted town on the Keweenaw. It’s crazy. She’d left home just over a week ago, planning to spend a little time at Janelle’s, and now here she is in Canada, driving around the never-ending lake.

  She crests a hill and the view is panoramic, then she’s down in a gorge with a waterfall. How is she going to explain what she’s been through? And aside from Rose, who would she even want to tell? She’d always felt that her life was full of people, but since the fire it doesn’t seem true. Seeing old customers out of context is different—say, in the grocery store, with a spouse or a kid in tow. Even with the regulars she’d known for years, there had always been the bar between them.

  The lake shines between a hopscotch of islands, and the road continuously climbs and falls, curving one direction and then back, her glass float swinging like the pendulum of a clock. She passes a rock statue on a ledge over the road. She should have asked Tinker about them. She’d probably know who made them, and why. She sees Tinker sitting in the dark, the blanket tucked over her heavy thighs. Nodding her head—“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” She liked her. Tinker was good company. Rose will get a kick out of that night’s story.

  Nora turns off to find a restroom. The sign on the shoulder reads First Nation. She stops at a small store just beyond a bridge, where two Indian women are fishing. She’d never thought about Canada having reservations, if in fact this is one. Minnesota and Wisconsin, she knew about those. She saw them in Michigan, too.

  A furry fly buzzes around Nora’s head as she makes her way back to the car. Leaning aganst it, she cracks a can of cold Coke. The man behind the counter was Indian too. The women on the bridge laugh as one reels in a small wriggling fish. She’s thinking about how little she knows of Canada, that her mind is no better than the TV weather map, when the woman with the fish turns around and gives her an annoyed “Take a picture . . .” look. Nora turns away, embarrassed. She hadn’t realized she was staring. The fly won’t stop harassing her, and it’s too large to want to swat with her hand, so she gets in the car and quickly closes the door. She is a voyeur, she supposes. How else can it be when you pass through a place where other people spend their lives.

  1622

  The water of the long rapids swirls, parting around boulders and sliding over ledges, flitting like tiny white butterflies in the shallows. Grey Rabbit no longer hears the fast water, though its sound is constant throughout day and night. She only notices its absence when she ventures to the woods. Nor does she smell the smoking whitefish in the air, as each day they’re split and dried over the fires, to be stored for the next turn of winter.

  She feels quiet and numbed, her thoughts drift like mist.

  “That’s good,” she says to Night Cloud again, as he helps her tighten the thongs of her tanning frame.

  “Are you sure you want to keep working here alone?” He looks back over his shoulder at her.

  She’d set up downstream, in a clearing near the water, instead of in the tall pines behind the long bay where all the other women are working. She wants to work beside them, she feels the need, but still she knows she is not ready. She touches her fingertips to the small scabs at her temple. “It’s better that I work here,” she says quietly. She sees the disappointment in the shift of his shoulders. “I’ll move back once I finish this hide.”

  Night Cloud works in a circle, tightening the thongs around the splayed skin. He doesn’t care about the teasing he’ll meet with for helping her with women’s work. He was scared that he was going to lose her, felt helpless as an overturned beetle. Now that she’s getting stronger, he is determined to assist her in any way he can. He has never felt so close to her. He thinks of how they sleep now each night, like two cedars grown together, her back warm down the length of his chest as she holds on to his arm or his hand.

  “Are you sure you feel well enough?” he asks, tightening the last of the thongs.

  Grey Rabbit kneels next to him and bounces her finger off the hide. “It’s good for me to work.”

  “Do you want me to send Little Cedar?”

  “No, let him play. He needs to.”

  “He’s well,” Night Cloud assures her again. “The wound is healing, and his vision is good.”

  Grey Rabbit nods, her eyes lowered. “The scar looks terrible, like a crayfish on his cheek.”

  Night Cloud squeezes her shoulder and stands. In the long cove upstream, the men are sitting in the shade. “There is talk of sending a war party to avenge Always Day.”

  Grey Rabbit looks up with interest. ”Has anyone stepped forward?”

  “Five will go.”

  The scraping is hard on Grey Rabbit’s back, but she’d rather feel her body ache than be left to her mind’s lulling numbness. From her spot, she can see up to the cove, and beyond it to the island and the tail of the rapids, where the older boys sho
ot down in canoes, whooping and hollering and showing off, their nearempty boats skittering over the water. She watches for Standing Bird among them, but she hasn’t seen him all day. She was told that he was the one who found her the morning she disappeared from camp, but she has no memory of it.

  She wipes the coarse hair from the edge of her scraper. Slowly, small pieces of memory have returned—Bullhead‘s cool hands hovering over her, the whisper of concerned voices. The hard remembering comes only as a sensation in her body, a slow-growing heaviness that spreads through her chest, weighting her arms with a feeling of helplessness.

  Grey Rabbit fingers the new medicine bag at her neck. She can feel the small piece of copper inside, hard among the roots and herbs. In the long cove, her people are gathered. Soon she will take her place among them. Soon she will feel her own worth again.

  1902

  John’s hand rests on the straight-backed chair, pale hair at his feet like an animal kill. There’s no sign that anything has changed around the homestead, nothing packed or sorted, no sign that anyone has come.

  Gunnar’s wife is sitting on the rock ledge, still, as if she were part of the stone. She’s cared for the lilac at least; its twiggy branches have dark green leaves. He couldn’t keep the images from his last visit at bay—the hollow look in her eyes as she held him at gunpoint, her dirt-streaked cheek as she poured his coffee. In the end, he felt he owed it to Gunnar to see her safely off the shore. Still, he had hoped that someone else would take care of it, and that he’d arrive to find the place deserted.

  John’s not sure if she looks better or worse. She’s loose in her clothes, her hair is cut jagged, and without the dirt she looks yet frailer. He recalls her small breasts and her pale pink nipples as she scrambled naked from the water. “I’ve come to take you away from here,” he announces, mounting the ledge behind her. She doesn’t answer or turn around, just continues staring into the lake. A squirrel natters defensively. John looks down at her dripping wet head, then over to the approaching boat. “How long do you need to get your things ready?”