Read The Long-Shining Waters Online
Authors: Danielle Sosin
The Long-Shining Waters (21 page)
Her pencil has lifted off the page. The smell of burning coal is coming off the lake. There’s a stalk of purple harebell in the jar, wild columbine, and oxeye daisy. She’ll know the boat is out of view by the change in the sound. She tries to focus, tracing a stem that dips over the mouth of the jar and then rises, but her line is too exaggerated. She never liked living in town. It was barren and noisy with the sawmill and the railroad, and the ship whistles from the working docks. But maybe it would be for the best now. She could throw herself into all the commotion, find full-time employment, rather than the piecework she’d done.
The boat’s gone. Her view peacefully unbroken. The banded water. The pale sky.
The hawkweed blooms on her curvy stalk are made of hundreds of tiny blunt petals, yellow in the center circled by orange. With small radiating lines she defines their texture, her pencil jotting quick marks. The room they rented after they married was much larger and papered blue. He’d leave his hat hanging from the bedpost at night. The train rumbled their windowpane. Berit’s pencil stills, hovers. She can’t go back to Duluth. He would be on every corner, in every striding gait. He’d be every grey hat.
The first wave from the boat’s wake angles in. It rises, curls, then hits, sweeping sideways along the shore. The hawkweed bloom. She applies herself, her pencil marks moving out from the center. There is no place she can imagine going to. The Keweenaw would feel like moving backwards, erasing the life she’d led. And the south shore’s been entirely logged. Entire vistas she once loved are gone. More erasure. More disappearances. Her thoughts turn backward, then forward again, eddies in circles. She applies her lead.
Berit holds her drawing at arm’s length. It’s a terrible mess. The curving stem of the hawkweed looks like a dark serpent, the bloom a bursting sun in its mouth.
She lies on her side. Grotesque. Inert. Her resting place at 112 fathoms. The wheel house windows. Eyes no longer seeing. Cheek to frigid lake bottom. Like no boat I have ever known.
A tolling silence.
I make no reflection in her windows.
But I see her hold filled with a cargo of ore.
The wind shrieks, and she’s taking spray. No green water on deck.
The spray, turned ice, hits the windows like gunshot. Zero visibility. Screaming wind.
Winches and kingposts thickening.
Grey beards reaching to twenty feet break over the bow and sprawl across her decks. Holding steady. Temperatures dropping. Deck ice-coated with freely roaming seas.
Forward crew members severed from aft.
Pitching and rolling dangerously.
They are shoveling like madmen at the fire doors.
Wastebaskets. Wheelbarrows. All hands fly as the rogue plunges her bow below the surface.
She dives headlong toward the lake bottom. Windows blazing yellow behind a curtain of bubbles. Icicled bow like a monster’s frozen maw.
She careens through the water in a reckless plunge.
I see her coming, she approaches herself, hits silently and merges.
She lies on her side. Grotesque. Inert.
Cheek to frigid lake bottom.
Everything and all hands entombed.
1622
She is wrapped tight as a papoose in a cradleboard, lying with her arms snug against her body, the weight of a fur heavy across her chest. Bear. The smell of the fur is bear. Above Grey Rabbit there is only clear blue, framed on the edges by smoothly carved cedar. There is rich brown birch bark and dark pitch seams. She’s in motion, her feet rhythmically lifting and falling, her whole body sometimes shuddering side to side. She hears water, the splash and drip of paddles. She understands that she is on Gichigami, vulnerable, her arms bound at her side. Her feet rise up and then fall again. She hears Night Cloud’s voice, though not his words, they fly away on the wind. There is only the cold blue pressing down on her face.
Blue.
Blue, close, cupped over her eyes, or sometimes seeming far away. The blue is alive with subtle patterns of light, with flecks and flashes that keep her eyes busy. When she closes them, orange flowers bloom.
A dragonfly has lit on the smooth cedar, and it’s watching her with bulging oval eyes. Its outstretched wings flutter on the wind. Its wings are water, held by strands of fine hair, and they’re snaring the flecks of light from the blue. Stay, she asks. Don’t fly away. But the dragonfly lifts and careens out of view.
The movement subsides to a gentle rocking. She hears lapping water and words of prayer. She feels the place, the all-watchful presence. They are at the base of the sacred cliff, where the stories are painted and the spirits honored in images. She can’t sit up or move her arms. She can see only part of the painted turtle. Whispers echo in the caves of her ears—eager, insistent—but she doesn’t understand. The water laps. A tear slips across her temple.
Again, the movement grows to a pitch and roll. Fingers of sparkling water reach over her body and fall, leaving tiny clear beads in the fur.
A white gull hovers, then slides away. A trail remains across the sky that looks as if it’s been drawn with a soft white rock. Her feet rise up and drop with force, shining scales of water arching. Grey Rabbit closes her eyes, her heart beating hard. Her feet drop and the spray flies. Her eyes open when the cold water hits her face. There are three white trails crossing the sky, and a hanging gull forming another. Sweat beads at her temples. The gull veers out of sight.
The white lines weave a web above her. A white net, and she is the fish. Cold water slides into her ear, and her hands ball into tight fists. Her body rolls up and down. She feels the great horned serpent below, only thin bark and fur between them. A flick of his tail, and they will be under. A nudge from his horns and the boat crumples like a dry leaf.
Her body rides the rolling seas, her face sweating cold, her shoulders tense, her fingernails cutting half-moons in her palms.
A dragonfly lights on the smooth cedar. Its thin bent legs grip the wood. Jaw moving. Oval eyes. Its wings are made of water and light. Stay, she asks. Please, stay. The dragonfly lights in the dark fur.
2000
The highway cuts through low knuckled hills, pink and white bluffs showing through the pines. Nora fiddles with the tuner and finds some soft jazz, the announcer speaking French between the songs. The map of Ontario is folded open and lying over her notebook on the passenger seat. It’s much more substantial than the circle map, showing towns, rivers, islands, and landmarks, with names like Batchawana and Point aux Mines. She lights the first of her new cigarettes. They’re short, fatter, stronger, tolerable. The design of the box is elegant though, with the cigarettes sliding out from a sleeve.
Another one, Nora remarks aloud. High on an outcropping at the side of the road is a pile of stones balanced like a statue. She’s been seeing them for miles. They’re like markers, cairns, or directional guides, but they don’t actually point anywhere. It’s impossible that they’re natural. No one lives in the area, it’s all Provincial Park land, so someone must have climbed up, and made them.
There aren’t any stations on the radio. None. The land is mountainous and the sky pristine blue, the sunlight in sheets on the high cliffs, where a thin waterfall is streaming down. Nora cranes her neck to look up through the windshield. It’s like she’s driving through a never-ending postcard. She wishes Nikki were along to see it. She pictures her holding the glass float to her eye, pretending that everything’s underwater.
There. Water is back on her left again, dark blue and sparkling. A touchstone in the unfamiliar landscape. Yet the water isn’t exactly familiar. It’s hard to believe it is all the same lake.
The lake shimmers to the horizon. If she could see across the hundreds of miles, she’d probably be looking at the Twin Ports. The sun shines through the green glass float. Home. The water connects this shore to that. To Rose. It touches Janelle and Nikki’s.
A place with Native pictographs is marked on the map, and Nora needs to find a restroom. She turns off the highway and follows a road that ends in a small gravel lot. As soon as she parks, she feels the quiet. She gets out of the car and stretches her back. There’s no store, bathroom, or building there, just a pickup truck with two girls on the tailgate. Sisters, she thinks, when they smile at her. The kiosk has a box with brochures inside, and a map that shows a path leading down to the lake. She looks at the map and then over to the girls.
“Did you go down there?” Nora asks.
“It’s amazing,” says one of them. “I can’t get over it. I mean, how could the paintings last hundreds of years when the Natives made their pigment from powdered rock?” The girl looks at Nora as if she might have an answer. “You’ve got to see it,” the other one says. “The turtle is awesome.” She smiles encouragingly.
Nora’s footsteps seem loud on the path. She stops, listens, peers through the woods. There are rustling noises on the forest floor. She lights a cigarette, refusing to indulge this new gutlessness that keeps coming over her.
The path descends between high rock bluffs. She must be close because she can hear rolling waves. Nora walks tentatively between the stone walls, feeling as if someone is watching her. It’s mossy and cool and the air is damp. She could reach out her arms and touch both sides. All she can hear is water dripping. Her own footsteps. The slow waves of the lake. Overhead is an empty strip of blue sky. No one is on the path in either direction, yet she can’t shake the feeling that she is not alone.
Nora steps onto a ledge that slants precariously into the clear water. The drone of a distant motorboat rings off the cliff as it passes. The cliff on one side, the lake on the other. Extreme Caution, the sign said. A wave rolls lazily halfway up the ledge.
Someone is watching her. She can feel it at the back of her neck. No one’s around. Just the receding boat. She will absolutely not edge herself along below the cliff. It’s not gutless; it’s common sense. If she fell in there would be no one to help her. The brochure showed the turtle the girl mentioned and stick figures in canoes, but a few faint lines, rust red and grainy, are all that’s visible from where she stands. The lake rolls. She is being watched, she’s certain of it.
The cliff top is lined with pines. It’s too high and sheer to tell if anyone’s up there. A large crow takes to the air, and the icy lake water is around her ankle. She gasps and the wave rolls back to the lake.
1902
The sky is warm white and the water grey, the horizon line long and empty. Berit sits on the slanting rock ledge, staring off across the water, her wood bucket submerged and heavy on the rope. The air is soft and the lake sounds muted—a swash, then a quiet lapping. Berit draws in the line and the bucket rises, breaks the surface, spilling over and dripping. She hauls the bucket up the ledge. Watches the dark water rings expand. With one hand on the handle and one underneath, she slowly tips the bucket over. A clear sheet of water pours back to the lake.
The air tingles on Berit’s wet cheeks. She wipes the tear streaks with her sleeve, tosses the bucket from the ledge. It’s curious to her, how much she can cry, how the water springs daily from her eyes. The bucket lists on the lake surface. A raven beats the air as it crosses overhead. Berit tugs the rope and the bucket rim tilts, the water instantly claiming the space. The bucket sinks and the rope tightens. She lets the wet fibers slide though her cold hands.
The lake appears grey and opaque, but if she looks carefully at its wavering surface she can see a thousand clear eyes of water, blinking under sky-hooded lids. The rope goes slack. The bucket sits on the lake bed. When she leans forward the lake holds her face. The dark circle of the bucket below. The stone ship is in her mind. As a child she’d spent many an afternoon there. One long leap from land to the craggy boulder, where she’d lay studying her face in the water, the rocks below, maybe a fish, the sky and the clouds around her head. Or else she’d sit scout, her eyes keen, searching for a smudge on the horizon that might become a sail, the possibility of a mast. She’d take herself to her stone ship when she was angry at her parents. Take herself there when she was sad, knowing that when she stared at the water, its beauty would eventually soothe her and her feelings would dissolve into calm.
Hand over hand, Berit draws in the rope, and the bucket rises toward the surface. When she gets hold of the handle she tips it over, pours it back to the lake in a long thick arc. A scavenging gull lands nearby, paddles back and forth as it turns its white head. The empty bucket lands in the water with a splash. All her life, most everything has come and gone by the water—ships filled with provisions, new settlers with their trunks. Always the possibility of something she desired—confections, glue, a new hair ribbon, pencils. And ships left, their holds filled with copper or fish. The old schoolteacher, waving good-bye from the deck.
Other books
Men and Angels by Mary Gordon
For Life by L.E. Chamberlin
One Night with Sole Regret 06 Tell Me by Olivia Cunning
Theft by BK Loren
His Submissive Pet by Jasmine Starr
Borderliners by Peter Høeg
Alcantaran 1: Alien Abduction by Terry Compton
The Tiger's Child by Torey Hayden
2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) by Jones, Nath
The Slide: A Novel by Beachy, Kyle