Authors: Danielle Sosin

The Long-Shining Waters (14 page)

BOOK: The Long-Shining Waters

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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 gathering 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.

“But his face.”

“Worse might have happened had he gone to the traps. Dreams have many sides. One can only interpret.”

The fire smoke lifts in the air between them as Grey Rabbit tries to let that truth in.

Bullhead chews on the soft bark. “Well, it has ended. Now we go on.”

“No,” whispers Grey Rabbit, looking down at her hands. “The children still come.”

Bullhead adds another piece of wood to the fire and tiny sparks rise into the air. She unfolds the design. Folds it again. “There is no one here who is known for interpreting. Not that I trust. At Bawating, yes.” She hands Grey Rabbit the opened piece of birch-bark, a beautiful circle of four turtles. “I’ll discuss it with Three Winds.” She stands and walks out.

2000

A frame of light shines around a bulky drape, and Nora hears running water. It sounds like it’s dropping through the wall behind her head. Slowly the pieces connect: Rucker’s motel, the bar and the music, then strolling back late with Frank, who has a room somewhere on the other end of the parking lot. She’d had a night, a great time.

She’ll walk back to the Breakers for her car, then drive over to the café. Hopefully they’ll still be serving breakfast because there is nothing like eggs, hash browns, and a Coke on ice after drinking like she did last night. She ought to call someone. Rose. Janelle. Nobody knows where she is.

Nora opens the door to the sound of surf and the motel parking lot flooded with sunlight. The light’s bouncing off chrome and the painted lines, and making the lake back between the trees look like a flashing marquee.

It doesn’t take long out on the road before she needs to turn up the collar of her coat. There’s a wind off the lake that the sun is no match for. She pulls her sleeves down and balls her hands inside them. The road is a narrow two-lane with soft gravel shoulders, so she walks on the blacktop and checks back for cars. Not a one in either direction, just a pair of small white butterflies tumbling in circles out in front of her. The lake blazes blindingly through the trees, and the birch trunks couldn’t be any whiter. She remembers last call, and walking back with Frank. She remembers him teasing her about her shoes, saying something about her not being in the city anymore. Well, she’s never been much of an outside walker; she’s on her feet enough at work.

The butterflies land on the gravel shoulder, their small wings quaking in the wind. Nora glances at them as she hurries past, then realizes that she’s hurrying. When she rounds the bend the Breakers is right there, and thank God, her old Buick is parked in the lot, and not the burned out shell of a car.

The Breakers looks sound asleep, the windows pale, the neon turned off. She has always appreciated the brazenness of bars, the way they sleep shamelessly during the day and only come alive at night. A folded square of paper is tucked under her windshield wiper. It’s a note from Frank, saying he’ll be free around three o’clock, if she hasn’t left for another galaxy and wants to meet him back at the motel. Perfect. Her day has a shape.

The bright sky of morning is now streaked with clouds, the water rolling in toward shore. Nora stands on a sandy beach in her coat with a scarf tied around her head.

“I can see you’re not very impressed,” says Frank. “There aren’t too many people I’ve shown this place to. I found two of my best agates here.”

Nora watches a boat on the horizon. “Well, my granddaughter likes to look for them.” She turns to Frank. “I’ve never given them much thought.”

BOOK: The Long-Shining Waters

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