Read The Long-Shining Waters Online
Authors: Danielle Sosin
The Long-Shining Waters (17 page)
John cuts into his food. It’s good, and he’s hungrier than he’d realized. His plate is nearly half empty when he notices that Gunnar’s wife hasn’t touched hers.
“You should eat,” he says, but she stares out the window.
The music teacher. That’s who she reminds him of—the straw hair, the line of her jaw. He pushes fish bones to the edge of his plate. The fire in the stove caves and crackles. She is the one who haunted him the longest, with her soft approach and her urging them to sing in the new language. And the singing would feel good to him, but afterward, he always felt bad.
Berit doesn’t know what to say. Her only words have been to the cat. She nudges her plate to the side.
“Thank you for planting the lilac,” she says. “I missed the smell of them in the spring. He remembered things like that.” She glances at John, her eyes welling, but he’s intent on eating, not looking at her.
“Katt-Katt,” she says, glad for her appearance at the door. She rubs her fingers together under the table. The cat trots over and brushes against her leg. Berit sets her plate on the floor, and the cat launches in hungrily. She looks up to find John’s incredulous face. He picks up his coffee cup, and strides out the door.
“Why are you even here?” says Berit, marching out of the cabin. “I didn’t ask you to come. There’s no one keeping you.” John stands at the woodpile, cup in hand, looking up at the spring-green woods.
“That was good food you put on the floor.”
“I don’t need you here judging me.” Berit paces back and forth. “How dare you even. You don’t know.” Tears stream down her cheeks. “You have no idea what this is.” Her hands wave in the air.
John turns his head slowly, and she sees in his eyes something soft and penetrable. In that moment, she knows that she’s absolutely wrong.
1622
“Just a few more,” says Bullhead, holding a bowl in each hand.
Grey Rabbit maneuvers hot rocks under the stew, sets the antler on a mat, and takes up a spoon. Portioning food into the bowls, she makes sure that each has a piece of the deer that was Standing Bird’s first kill. There are wild potatoes, new sugar for seasoning, young green ferns, and last season’s dried berries. Bullhead breathes in the rich aroma. “Is the stew container going to last?”
“The bark still has a little moisture left.”
“Imagine if we had the pot that doesn’t burn.” Bullhead laughs remembering last summer, when she’d finally made it through the crowd and touched the pot with her own hand. “Even without fire, it heated better than a rock in the sun. Walking Through says that more could come over the eastern trade routes. We’ll see when we get to Bawating.” Bullhead sniffs the stew again. “Regardless, you’ve done well with the feast. It’s no easy task to prepare for so many.”
Grey Rabbit lowers her eyes. A hopeful watchfulness lies between them these days as they see how the medicine takes hold. Bullhead considered the white butterflies a good omen and Grey Rabbit is grateful, yet tentative. She feels as if she’s floating in a placid inlet, with the fast flashing river still near. She checks the stew pot, now beginning to burn, pours what’s left into Bullhead’s fresh container, then looks over the gathering.
Her husband and sons sit together with the guests, everyone having made it a point to greet Standing Bird and acknowledge his new status among them. Little Cedar sits watching his brother in awe, looking even prouder than Night Cloud, she thinks. Her son glances over and smiles, or half smiles, as the thick poultice stiffens his skin, and the pain keeps one side of his face still. Daily, he greets her without any blame, only love for the care she gives. She sees the way he hides his discomfort, barely flinching as she spreads the mixture on the wound, still seeping and raw red. It splits her like wood every time, though she hides her feelings too, and tries to be only soothing.
Bullhead approaches, more bowls in hand. “These are for us. Everyone’s well fed.” Grey Rabbit serves up a large portion for Bullhead, but takes only a taste for herself.
They find a place to sit behind the guests as pipes and pouches of tobacco are drawn out, and the story of the hunt is told again. Standing Bird isn’t brash in its telling, but cautious, as if ordering each detail in his memory. He’d prepared his whistle with milkweed root, and she’d answered its call, doe to fawn, stepping out from behind a dense spruce. While she sniffed the air, he took aim, then let loose an arrow that found the base of her neck. The sharp flint sent her leaping, the arrow shaft breaking off against a tree. He shot another, but missed her entirely, and the arrow was lost in the woods.
He told how she ran in fear, he following her through the dark cedar grove, and beyond the place of brown water through split rocks. At one point he was certain he’d lost her, but then he picked up her blood trail on new green moss. Eventually, she’d slowed to a walk. He could hear her snapping twigs as she moved, still trying to rid herself of him. By now they were near the deep hole in the river. Heads nod around the circle, the guests tracking the tracker in their minds, knowing each landmark he describes. It was there that he realized the doe was circling, so he began to circle as well, a larger circle that slowly enclosed her, until at last he could hear her breathing and see her plainly, bloodied and exhausted.
The guests joke and tease, stand to speak in earnest. Bullhead scrapes the last stew from her bowl. She’s only half listening to their words, as similar words once spoken echo in her head—the first feast she’d given for each of her sons, the first feast of her brother, when she was just a girl. And though she wasn’t there, her father’s first feast. The same skills learned, the same rites of passage. The same challenges presented by the land, while the people of the people of the people pass through it. And so will be the feast of Standing Bird’s son someday.
By then she will have crossed to the land of the spirits. She thinks of those she’ll see again. Her parents, who lived long and died in peace, and her husband, captured and murdered in a raid. There are stories equally as awe-filled as brutal. She looks up into the evening sky, where the fisher with the arrow in its tail is rising.
I see corralled logs. A giant wooden rug. Rolling slowly overhead.
And the many scattered timbers. They waterlog and sink on the long journey across the great lake.
Cedar. Red birch. Bird’s eye maple. Hemlock. Red oak. The pine, and the fir.
Voices stream on the currents. Men at work in the woods. The undercutters. The swampers. The crosscut saw teams. Comes a whinnying horse. The ring of an ax. And a tree rooted for half a millennium falls.
From east to west. In fifty-odd years.
The sky opens. The winds sweep in.
I find logs in jumbles like broken-down cabins. Each marked with the timber stamps of the men who staked claim. They lay at the bottoms of pitch-black valleys. Appear as ridges beneath the silt.
This one lies on a ledge of bedrock swept clean by an underwater current. A slumbering giant. Femur of a god. A sharp flint lodged in its side.
And then his dark shape. It slips over the ledge. His pale hand trailing like a falling star.
2000
The afternoon keeps changing from grey to sunny, Nora’s mood swinging along with it. She sips on her coffee-to-go, the hole in the plastic lid sharp against her lip. Going around the lake is Nikki’s idea, not hers. And while it holds only a mild appeal, she didn’t want to turn around and go home any more than she wanted to stay in Bayfield.
“Sorry, lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The man’s condescending tone still irks her.
That morning, she’d gone back to the pier, the dream clinging like a dryer sock. Gulls cried in the morning sky as she retraced her steps, eyeing the cold water.
“Excuse me, is there a sunken ship off the pier?” she asked a man bent over his boat engine.
He looked at her like she was stupid. “Off the pier? It’s shallow. Maybe fifteen feet.”
“Are you sure? Really? What about farther out?”
“I guess there are schooner wrecks off the islands that people dive.”
“No. This was a fancy boat, with dressed-up passengers.”
“Sorry, lady.” He turned his back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Nora checks her rearview mirror. There aren’t any cars, just the orange sky of Rose’s painting and her old suitcase on the seat. She hasn’t seen the lake for a long time, only sensed it at the end of long red dirt roads. According to the circle map she’d picked up, she is still going the right way. The map is simple, small and glossy, with nothing on it but major roads and an outline of the lake. She would have needed to buy a handful of real maps—Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, Minnesota—just to have all the pieces.
“In area, the largest lake in the world, holding ten percent of its fresh water,” the map reads. “Maximum depth 1,333 feet.” Nora lights a cigarette, her mind attempting to picture the depth. She recalls being in the lighthouse on the cliff, but that is nowhere near high enough. She pictures a thousand-foot-long freighter, then flips the ship on end in her mind, but a distance in open air is simply not the same as a drop below the water surface. It’s unimaginable in the worst way.
Michigan has a different feel than the forested land of Wisconsin. There are yellow yield signs for deer and for moose, and occasionally a huddled community. Winter-battered with peeling signs for fresh pastries, they have names like Tula, Topaz, and Matchwood. None of the towns are marked on her map.
Watch for falling rock, the signs read.
It’s mining country, with rugged hills and cliffs. Even the sky looks worked hard, as if all the metal below the ground had leeched up and was tarnishing the air. “Watch for blowing and drifting snow.” A fat bug splats against her windshield. She’s watching all right. Just plain watching.
Nora squeezes the cold metal handle of the gas nozzle, and flips the tab down so she doesn’t have to hold it. She reaches through the window and lifts out the map. The gas station sits at a clearly marked juncture, and she has to choose which way to go. North up the Keweenaw Peninsula, the long arm of land that juts into the lake, or east toward Marquette, passing the whole thing by. She doesn’t remember the shape of the lake appearing so much like an animal’s face. A wolf, maybe, pointy and menacing, with Isle Royale for an eye and the Keweenaw forming the animal’s open mouth.
“Anything else?” the man asks, stacking two packs of cigarettes next to her coffee.
“Actually,” Nora sets the map on the counter, “can you tell me about these different ways to go?”
“Where do you want to end up?”
“I’m doing the circle drive.”
“Then you want to go toward Ironwood.” He taps his finger on the map.
“I just came from there.”
“You did? That’s unusual. You’re going around backwards. Everyone goes the other way.”
Big snow country, the sign says. She is out in the boonies, and second guessing her decision. Mass City. Winona. Toivola. She’d picked the north route up the Keweenaw so she could tell Nikki about the peninsula. But there’s nothing to see, just the two-lane road flanked by pines stunted from all the snowfall. “An average of twenty feet,” the man at the gas station told her. “The lake effect is extreme up here. The clouds fill up over the water and then dump their load when they hit the land.” But there is no water in sight, only short trees, and the road that is taking her further from anywhere familiar.
Nikki is in her thoughts, then Ralph’s lost ship photos. She tries in vain to recall a passenger boat like the one in her dream. It’s weird how dreams sometimes affect her, like strange weather inside her head.
The road unspools endlessly before her. She’s in the middle of nowhere. What if she had car trouble? Nora pushes the lighter knob and opens her notebook. “Storage Room.” She sets her mind to a task.
The long curve descending to the towns of Houghton-Hancock appear without hardly a warning. There are fast-food restaurants, a superstore, a car lot lined with pickup trucks—red ones, yellow, and black, all in a row like bright hard candies. Just like that, Nora’s back in civilization. She feels like waving and honking her horn.
In minutes she’s on a bridge above a river that separates the towns. It feels a little like a miniature Duluth/Superior—old buildings, old neon signs. Right away there are markers for the road out of town, so Nora drives into the lot of a place called Alfredo’s.
“I’ll have the spaghetti and a side salad with French.” Nora closes the menu, feeling dazed. It was only that morning that she’d left Bayfield, though it feels like a week’s time has passed.
“Anything to drink?” asks the waiter. He’s small waisted and wiry, with short legs. Nora wonders if he’s Alfredo.
“I’ll have a glass of the red.” She points to the menu.
She can feel the road in her body, the constant motion and the blur of green trees. Nora smoothes the bent cover of her notebook. There is a coffee spill on the back now, too. “No one knows if you belong or not,” she reads.
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