Authors: Danielle Sosin

The Long-Shining Waters (24 page)

BOOK: The Long-Shining Waters

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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 shoot 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?”

“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 harbor. 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.”

BOOK: The Long-Shining Waters

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