“What?” Berit finally acknowledges him. “I can’t. I’m not.” Her head whips around at the sound of oars and the bow of a skiff appears around the point. Nellie is staring at her wide eyed, mouth agape. Hans turns the boat and stills it with a stroke.
“Is everything all right here, Mrs. Kleiven? Captain Shepard said you were still on the shore.”
He is speaking to her, but looking over her head. John, above her, stands arms crossed, his gaze somewhere out on the water. Everything all right? She is as confused by the question as by all the people.
“What happened here?” Hans asks sharply.
“Poor dear,” Nellie mutters, fingering her hair.
Berit puts her hand to her head, feels her short hair, and then bursts into laughter.
“Oh, my,” says Nellie, aghast.
John finally speaks. “I’m taking her to Duluth.”
Berit doesn’t know which is funnier, Nellie’s face, Hans with his hackles up, John talking to the water, or the notion that anyone is concerned about her hair. Oh, Good Lord, she laughs even louder, realizing that they think John did it. She slaps her hand against the rock. She can’t stop laughing. She’s being rude, she knows.
Berit’s unsteady walking barefoot over the stones, which strikes her as funny, too, as does the crow standing in the grass, a clump of her hair hanging from its beak. Out on the point, they’re all talking together, John gesturing down the shore. The crow flies past with the strands of her hair.
“Go away, all of you,” she calls out, and their heads swivel in unison. “Fly on,” she yells, flapping her arms. Let them think she’s gone daft.
John approaches Gunnar’s wife reluctantly. She sits on the beach raking her fingers through the stones. He should have agreed to let them handle things, but he was so incensed at the man’s insinuations that he simply wanted them to leave. “Are you well enough to travel?” he asks, standing over her.
“What do you mean, well?” She caws and juts her head toward him, watching the surprise in his eyes. She laughs and continues picking through the stones. The ones on top are smooth and dry, but as she digs down they grow smaller and wet.
John sits, draws out his tobacco.
“He’s out there somewhere,” says Berit.
John nods.
“I haven’t lost my senses. I’m fine.”
Thoughts of the dead man in Gunnar’s net come to mind, and John questions Gunnar’s choice to leave the body there. He lights his pipe and shakes out the match. Water spirits are not to be taken lightly.
“I only want people to leave me be.” Berit fans her hand through the stones. “Is that so difficult to understand?”
“How will you live? You don’t fish.” John blows pipe smoke toward the sky. “You don’t even have a boat.”
“I had it. I didn’t want it.”
Her profile is thin boned. Her hair wisps up, yellow in the light. “Had what?”
“Gunnar’s skiff. Hans found it and towed it over. It’s out there,” she lifts her face to the lake. “I returned it to him. Don’t ask me to explain.”
John watches her rake her thin fingers through the rocks. He understands sending Gunnar his boat. But not her. He doesn’t understand her.
Berit pushes away another layer of stones, the tiny wet ones sticking to her fingers. She picks a shiny red cylinder from among them.
“Look at this.” She holds out her hand.
John’s eyebrows lift and he picks it from her palm.
“It’s a trading bead,” he says, and flicks it into the cove.
I see sunlight hit the water surface. It bends back at its radiant angles of incidence.
Everything joins in the reflecting sun.
Rock to wading child. Canoe to bird in flight.
These receiving waters show the blue spectrum of the atmosphere. Or become a semblance of whatever floats above it.
The airy ricochet is shimmer and dazzle. It gives structure to what the darkness leaves vague.
It calls up color.
Articulates shape.
There is so much at play in this house of bent light. The lake holds each image. Moves in rivers of likeness.
I watch a rock ledge. It reflects on the water.
And its round splotch of lichen. The palest grey green.
Twins.
Forming two eyes.
One of water, one stone.
2000
Nora rests on a bench at a scenic overlook, high on a cliff above the water. Her skin feels alive and vulnerable in the air after being in the closed car for so long. She blows on her coffee-to-go, but it’s still too hot, so she sets the lid beside her on the bench. Young parents are laying out a picnic nearby, while their two girls laugh and chase each other, around and around a historic plaque. She’s at the top of the world, the water ranging forever, its surface filled with sparkling yellow light.
“Venez ici,” the father calls to his girls, a sandwich held in each of his outstretched hands. The two run over, but when they reach for their food he lifts his hands high over their heads. The girls jump up. They grab at his thighs. Nora can’t understand their French, though their laughter doesn’t need translation. The girls giggle and squeal. The light bounces on the water.
Janelle when little would laugh so hard that sometimes she’d simply fall down—on the floor, on the sidewalk, it didn’t matter. The steam from the coffee is warm and wet on her face. When was the last time she heard Janelle really cut loose and laugh? She wishes they had a better relationship. She has to learn not to react when Janelle aims for her soft spots. She has to learn to hold her tongue.
The girls run past laughing, sandwiches in hand. Down below, the wind blows dark streaks across the water. What’s hardest is watching her hover over Nikki, trying to control her every experience. Kids need room to make their own mistakes. Nora feels a pang of guilt. She probably gave Janelle too much room. She’d made plenty of mistakes parenting. But all you want in the end is for your children to be happy. Nora stares at the light and the water.
The giggling girls run past again and the light on the water jumps, jiggles, and spreads. The sparkling water fills Nora’s eyes. Nikki’s in her mind. Bright. Skipping stones. The sparkling water titters. It jumps. The air is filled with the jangle of laughing and shimmering light. Then her thoughts dissolve and she feels the light slowly collide with the laughter, merge, become one, indistinguishable. She is seeing laughter. The lake is laughter.
A wind picks up the lid to her coffee cup and sends it skittering across the ground. Nora jumps up and follows, but she’s not fast enough. By the time she reaches the guardrail the lid has sailed off the cliff. Nora peers down the sheer rock wall. A kayak is in the water below, tiny, like a toy. The light on the lake jiggles and spreads, the girls are still laughing, but the sensation has passed. When she looks at the lake, it’s only water and light.
The thick gold sunlight is mixed with shadows that make the forested hills seem to vibrate. Nora turns down her visor. She has passed a lot of things that she should’ve stopped for. Nikki would have been interested in the amethyst mines.
The lake is back again, a big swath of it visible. Always, it seems to change color and mood. It disappears for miles, and then opens up. According to the map, if she could see across the lake she’d be looking at Michigan. She pictures the lighthouse at the Shipwreck Museum. Mike Stone pouring taps for the O’Mearas. It’s weird how memory freezes time and place, as if the O’Mearas are still sitting at the bar, as if she’s sitting next to them, too, or in her blue car on the other shore, driving the opposite direction. Nora finds an aspirin in her purse, and washes it down with the dregs of cold coffee. It’s still thirty-eight miles to Thunder Bay. Thunder Bay is going to have to be the end of the line.
There are strip malls, car washes, and grain elevators, the familiar smell of pulpwood in the air. The sign reads Population 113,000. Nora chooses blindly from a string of motels on the street paralleling the working ha
rbor. She lugs her suitcase up the open stairway and opens the door to number 18. She doesn’t even bother to check out the room, just leaves her clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor, and takes a long hot shower, still seeing the road.
A plastic letter holder on the table is stuffed with pamphlets. Nora calls for pizza delivery and slides open the heavy drapes. Her view is crisscrossed with power lines. There’s a lumberyard across the road, the lake beyond, and lying in the lavender water, the prone body of the sleeping giant. There’s not a shred of trying to imagine it. It’s enormous, lying face up. Oval head, arms crossed over its chest, the long thick length of its torso and legs. Nora can’t take her eyes off the giant as the water darkens purple and the day slowly fades.
1622
There are frogs trilling in the night air, their rhythmic chorus encircling the wigwam, pulsing through the bark walls. Night Cloud and Grey Rabbit lie in the dark, the boys asleep, Bullhead snoring softly.
“Have you gone to see Stony Ground’s blanket?” whispers Night Cloud.
“Not up close, but one can see it from everywhere. It’s as red as a chokecherry from end to end. Bullhead says it’s rough like dry moss.”
“He boasts that it’s warm, yet light across his shoulders. And he claims to have seen the Huron’s white-faced man.”
Grey Rabbit ducks her head and giggles.
“Shhhhh.” Night Cloud touches her lips. “It’s rumored that he will travel west.”
“Is it true that like the white squirrel, his eyes are red?”
“Ha,” laughs Night Cloud.
“Shhhhh,” she giggles.
The frogs chirp and croak.
“Look.” Night Cloud rises to his elbow.
Grey Rabbit rolls over. Out the open door flap there are beams of green light rippling across the night sky. “The ancestors dancing in the land of the spirits.”
Night Cloud sighs and pulls Grey Rabbit closer. Thinking of his father. Gone so suddenly. And the raw hole that took his place. Already, he has passed his father in years.
Grey Rabbit nestles into Night Cloud. Beams of light shift in the sky. His hand is softly stroking her leg. His thumb now tracing the contour of her hip bone. A bright streak of light sways back and forth. His breath is warm at the edge of her ear, as his fingers stroke her side, tentative, asking.
She’s willing, her body responding as it used to, her breath quickening as his hand rides her skin. She rocks her hips back against him, his hand circling softly at her belly, his mouth now against her neck. She rolls toward him, her heart soft, remembering their private world of mouths and rhythm.
It’s been so long. So long. Her fingers reach into his hair. The chorus of frogs chirp and croak. The sky above his head shimmers green through the smoke hole, and once again they choose each other.
2000
Nora wakes bolt upright in bed and runs her hand over the lamp until she finds the hard round switch. TV. Bureau. Luggage stand. Thunder Bay. She has no idea what woke her. The room is still, the door’s chain lock in place.
She turns off the lamp and pulls up the covers, but her eyes remain wide open. The clock reads 1:45. She considers a slice of cold pizza. The open box lies on the table, and behind it the sky out the window is flickering. Fire. Nora snaps on the lamp and is out of bed, shoving her arms into her coat. She throws open the door to her room.
The entire sky is moving with bits of light. She leans over the balcony rail, her heart beating rapidly as she scans the rooftops for flames. In every direction the sky is tumultuous, but there is no fire. It’s northern lights that fill the sky, and not just a hovering glow, or a few shimmering curtains to the north. Everything is green and wild, breaking and scattering overhead.
Nora hears the click of a lighter in the parking lot. Someone is smoking by the office door. It surprises her to hear the small sound with all the commotion going on. But then she realizes it’s absolutely quiet. Everything is coming through her eyes, not her ears.
The sleeping giant lies in the lake. Flat oval head, arms over its chest, the long thick length of its body and its feet. Above it, the green lights shimmer and undulate, beams flare bright and then disappear. The curtain of light above the sleeping giant jumps. Spears of green light stretch and shoot, appear and disappear faster than she can track, rippling like runs of piano keys.
Nora pulls a chair up to the rail and feels for cigarettes in her coat pocket. She regards the giant’s long dark profile as she smokes. It seems to be watching the sky, too. No, she decides. The giant looks to be presiding.
The person down below has their head thrown back. Nora follows their gaze to a ring of light spinning at the top of the sky. The light circles, then suddenly breaks apart. The lights dash and twirl around the rim of the sky, then rush together, reforming the circle. Nora’s cigarette falls from her hand. The lights scatter, sway, and pulsate. The circle breaks apart again. When Nora looks back to the lake, she half expects to meet the giant standing, its head towering into the green sky, black water to its knees. Tinker says hi, she nearly whispers.
1622
The day is hot, humid, and still, with bugs droning and pesky flies. Grey Rabbit dips her finger in a bowl of hot water, where she has a buck’s brain soaking. Around her are the familiar sounds of women tanning, the rasp of the scraping bones, low voices, punctured by small bursts of laughter.
Grey Rabbit has kept mostly quiet, not because she has nothing to say, but because, for now, she enjoys simply listening. The smell of the brain is acrid and unpleasant as she works it to a paste between her fingers. At least it gives her arms a rest. They are sore from the scraping and her thighs ache, too. She wonders for a moment and then smiles, thinking of Night Cloud.
Grey Rabbit scoops a handful of paste onto the hide and rubs it in vigorous circles, trying to saturate the skin evenly. The flies harass her and land on the fresh paste, and she wishes for a wind to keep them down.
“Aieee, this heat, even in the shade.” Bullhead lowers herself to the hot dry ground and waves a reed fan at her neck. “I know the heat is good for the squash. But on days like this I see the gift of snow.”
Grey Rabbit stiffens. Her hands stop moving on the hide.
“What is it? What did I say?”
Grey Rabbit picks brain from her fingers, reluctant to speak. “A dream,” she whispers. “It wasn’t like the others,” she adds quickly. “There weren’t any children, I’ve not dreamt of children, it just gave me that feeling of heaviness.”
“Can you tell me?”
Grey Rabbit squats on her haunches, holding her pasty hands in the air. She’s sweating everywhere beneath her robe, her back and belly, behind her knees. With her forearm, she shoos a fly from her head. “I just remembered it.”
“What did you see.”
“There was snow. And I was underneath it, tunneling with the voles and the rabbits. They showed me how to move and how to keep watch for the swooping shadows of hunting birds. Then I felt the weight . . .” She slowly closes her fist, the paste squeezing between her fingers.
Bullhead starts fanning again. “I’ve made arrangements with one who interprets. She is willing, when you feel ready.”
“I am ready.” Grey Rabbit bends to her work. “When I’m finished I’ll clean up and approach her myself.”
The heat has only grown thicker, and in the small cove the air bends and waves. Grey Rabbit walks to the water, holding her pasty hands from her body. Her people are gathered up the shore where smoke from the drying fires hangs in the air. The women work and the men sit in the shade while dogs chase a group of children who turn and twist like a flock of birds. Little Cedar is there among them; she can pick him out even at a distance by his funny jumping gait.
The water in the small cove is so still that it looks like it’s layered with ice, just the barest skin stretched over the surface. She slips off her moccasins and steps in. A crow calls from high in a tree. The cold around her calves is good, and the feel of the sand giv
ing way beneath her feet. It’s luscious to plunge her arms in the still clear water, to swirl them in the cold while bits of brain float away.
The crow calls again and again. She finds it at the pointed top of a pine. It caws and opens its black wings against the sky.
Grey Rabbit stands unmoving.
In her dream she’d heard crows cawing, huge numbers of them, as she’d tunneled and the snow drifts claimed the land.
Grey Rabbit wades deeper, tosses water over her hair and face. Her reflection breaks into bits of color and scatters across the water surface.
She hears them first and then she looks up, blinking bright water from her eyes as the high bows of the Huron canoes quietly traverse the flat water before her. There are three boats, and in the last sits a man with pale skin. His face is scarred, his cheeks covered with spidery brown hair.
The white-face pauses his paddle midstroke. He looks in her direction, nods as he glides past.
Grey Rabbit feels the dream heaviness come over her. It expands and spreads like wide wings in her chest. The crow caws. The boat wakes cleave the water.
Grey Rabbit turns and splashes back to shore. His eyes were not red, but the blue of a winter sky. She rushes along the shoreline, after the canoes that fast approach the long cove.
Already the men have moved from the trees and are standing tall along the beach. Her mind spins. The dream heaviness drops through her legs, forcing her urgent steps to a halt.
The three canoes draw in their paddles. They drift in slowly. Show no aggression.
The men line the beach.
The canoes hover in the bay.
The Long-Shining Waters Page 18