Read The Long-Shining Waters Online
Authors: Danielle Sosin
The Long-Shining Waters (5 page)
Berit raps on the window and holds up a coffee cup, but John passes without looking in. Before she knows it, he’s in the doorway, standing there in his heavy wool coat, mitts to his elbows, boots to his knees. Filling it. Though he’s not that tall. He’s broad, but that’s not it either. He’s one of those people that just seems bigger.
“Please come in. Sit down. Do forgive me. I just didn’t see you standing there . . . Of course, I wasn’t expecting anyone . . .” Her voice is babbling like a stream.
John nods and scrapes a chair from the table. She’s glad he chose the one facing the window, so she can stand behind him near the stove. She pours him coffee and offers sugar and a spoon, feeling the cold coming off of his clothes.
“What brings you?” She retreats back to heat the soup, a false cheerfulness in her voice. Here she’d been pining for someone to talk to and now she can’t seem to manage.
John tastes the coffee, nods, adds sugar.
Lord, the bed is still unmade. “I hope you like pea soup,” she says, moving the pot to the center of the heat. She’ll have to be careful when she ladles it up so as not to scrape the bottom where she burned it yesterday. “It’s not much, but I’ll get that beef boiling.”
When she turns she finds him looking at her drawing on the chair. His head bobs approvingly, and she feels a puff of pride. People have always been complimentary of her pictures. When they lived in Duluth she drew a series of cards in colored ink that some said she could sell if she wanted—deer bedding in the snow, pinecones, tumbling waterfalls. Someday she’ll paint. Have a palette of oils and be able to mix any color. She looks at John, then at her lead-drawn bear. John turns away with a funny expression.
“They’re black bears,” she says, picturing them painted on canvas.
He stirs his coffee.
“Well? What do you think?”
He lifts his cup and nods.
“No, tell me, what do you think?”
“Your bears don’t have tails.”
“What?”
“No tails.”
Berit takes the book from the chair. “Bears don’t have tails. I’ve never seen a bear’s tail.”
“Maybe you’ve only seen them from the front.”
“What kind of tail?”
“Small. Furry.”
She can feel heat rising on her neck. John sits gazing at the tabletop, as if there was something interesting there, a smile, she thinks, playing at the edge of his mouth. She certainly doesn’t see what’s amusing.
“Well, it’s a drawing from memory. I’ll have to wait until spring and see for myself. Honestly I can’t recall seeing a bear with a tail.”
“All the animals in these woods have tails. All the mammals, that is, except you and me.”
Berit carries her book to the nightstand, not really sure what she’s feeling. Why should she care what he thinks? He probably has never even seen a real painting. She certainly didn’t like the reference to her tail, or his, or that she doesn’t have one.
The soup is burning. Berit hurries to the stove and lifts the pot off the heat. She can only make the best of it. She ladles the steaming soup into a bowl. “So what brings you this way? You never did say.” There’s the false cheer again.
“Rabbits.”
“Rabbits?” She sets the bowl in front of him.
“That’s why I came. I’m delivering them from Gunnar.”
“Where? You’ve seen him?”
“He’s at the lumber camp, down by Swing Dingle.”
“Yes, I know, but . . . you were there?”
John is looking at the tabletop again. “I did some hunting for the camp and then for him, too.” He holds the soup under his chin and starts in, not seeming to mind the heat.
“Well, how is he? What did he say?”
“I agreed to dress the rabbits,” he says between spoonfuls.
“I meant for me. Any word for me.”
He eats like he hasn’t had a meal in days, scraping every bit from the edges of the bowl. Then he rises abruptly and produces a piece of paper that’s folded in a tight square.
Berit unfolds it to find a strange hand, neat and uniformly upright.
My Dear, My Mrs.,
the message begins . . .
My Dear, My Mrs.,
the message begins . . .
I’m sending John with some rabbit, as I know they’re your favorite.
“I don’t understand,” she looks up. “This isn’t Gunnar’s hand. He can barely write.”
“It’s mine.”
“Yours?” She looks at the neat rows of cursive, too late to cover her disbelief.
“Boarding school,” he says in a stony voice. But she has gone back to reading . . .
as I know they’re your favorite. Be certain that I am thinking of you, my dearest.
It is so odd to hear his voice in this way.
Things are moving in good time, so I hope to be home as planned. Don’t consider saving any rabbit for me. I don’t want to find even a morsel left over . . .
as I know they’re your favorite. Be certain that I am thinking of you, my dearest.
It is so odd to hear his voice in this way.
Things are moving in good time, so I hope to be home as planned. Don’t consider saving any rabbit for me. I don’t want to find even a morsel left over . . .
John puts on his hat and draws the knife from his belt. He examines its edge and then slides it back in its sheath, watching Gunnar’s wife as she reads. Her pale skin, her thin frame, her hair the color of dried grass, bundled at the back of her head. He’ll dress the rabbits as he’d promised. “Don’t let her talk you out of it,” Gunnar had said. “She’ll go on about how she can do it herself.” Well, she’s not talking, she’s leaning against the cupboard, fully engrossed in the letter, and he needs to get back to his trapline if he’s going to make it back to camp and then home, if he’s lucky, before the week is out.
John closes the door on the cabin’s warmth and the earthy smell of pea soup. He lifts the rabbits from the nail, wondering what, if anything, she knows of the story Gunnar told him at the logging camp.
The telling has stayed strong in his mind, the heaviness in Gunnar’s voice, all the stops and starts as he seemed to search for words. They’d sat together in an empty log sleigh. There was a bright moon and the wind stirred the shadows, as the camp’s men snored and coughed. No, his wife doesn’t know about the dead man in the lake. It was clearly the first time that Gunnar had spoke it out loud.
John lays out one of the rabbits, and with a deft hand puts his knife to its fur. He makes his cut at the rabbit’s hind foot, then draws the blade up the inside of its leg. He’ll stretch the furs, give Gunnar’s wife the meat, and leave the entrails for scavenger birds.
Horse-stinger. Dragonfly. Oboodashkwaanishiinh. Predatory, of the order Odonata, meaning tooth.
They are of the most ancient creatures. Once they flew the skies as big as kites.
I knew them as sudden visitors. They’d alight on a seat plank or gunnel. Stay for a time. Fly off into the blue.
Their first life is in water. Their second in air. I see them transform on the floor of the lake. Each time shedding and growing a new skin. I follow them across the shallows. Try to join as they climb from the water, on a reed, a plank, a plane of rock.
But I know now.
Their path is not mine.
I watch through the wavering blue above as the dragonflies leave their last casings, crawl slowly out through the backs of their heads. Their black skins remain on the shore. Empty and weightless in the breeze.
They mate in winged circles, shining and airborne. Arching their bodies to form a wheel. Curving. The male clasps the female behind the head. This wheel. This ancient flying dance.
There is one who still feels the rhythm of our dance.
The particulars of my life are now hers to hold.
I take myself from these shining bright shallows. In search of something, yet I do not know what.
I move with the rhythm of the dragonflies.
They are here. Aloft in the water currents. The small. And their ancestors, whose long pulsing wings ripple the shadowy images. A luffing sail. A lost crate of lemons. A silver button tumbling to the lake bed.
2000
Nora turns onto the avenue to find smoke billowing into the sky. There’s a siren coming in from the east, and all of it feels like a scene in a movie. The street is blocked off, and red lights are streaming across the faces of the buildings.
“Quick hurry Jesus Nora!” Willard was hysterical on the phone.
Nora abandons her car at the blockade, her legs shaking as she moves down the sidewalk. Fire is leaping from the two upstairs windows, like some cartoon building with flaming eyes. She steadies herself against the wall of the drugstore as a sickening sensation turns her stomach.
Thick torrents of water arc from the hoses. “Put it out.” Tears spring to her eyes. “Put it out.” She weaves through the shiny red trucks, mist from the hoses, fast-moving men.
“Nora. Get back. ”
It’s Willard shouting. He has her by the arm. She twists away.
“Nora, Jesus.” His arm wraps around her waist. “Stop. Are you crazy?”
She beats back with her fists and butts back with her head, but he has her now, and he holds her tight.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he whispers at her ear.
The flames are leaping through the roof, causing a ruckus among the firemen. Radio voices and static crackle in the air as the red lights stream around and around and black smoke twists up to the sky.
“Come on, honey.” Willard loosens his grip. “Nobody knows what happened. Shit. Come on now, we’ll go sit with Rose.”
Nora wriggles free. “Oh my God, where’s Rose?”
“Don’t worry, okay? See, right there.”
Nora lets herself be steered across the street to where Rose sits on a low cement wall. She’s wearing tennis shoes and her ratty fur coat, and has Buck’s accordion strapped across her chest. Willard puts her next to Rose, then sits himself, still holding on.
The ground surrounding her bar is a lake, reflecting flames and jumping with sound, trampled by men in big rubber boots. Nora thinks the heat feels good on her face, thinks that it’s strange for her to think that. Her mind is buzzing, it’s radio static. She rises, but Willard pulls her back to sitting.
“They got me out the window with a ladder, but I said I wasn’t going unless they took the box, too.” Rose fingers the pearly buttons of the accordion, then reaches over and gives Nora’s hand a squeeze.
Nora can’t take her eyes from the flames and the black cloud of smoke rolling over the rooftops.
“Hey.”
Jimmy D. stands before her in full gear, sweat beaded on his face. “We’ve got another truck on the way. But these old wooden buildings . . . well, we’re doing what we can.”
“I hope so,” she manages, “if you ever want another free beer.”
A smile passes over Jimmy D.’s face, then fades to an expression that makes Nora feel sick, and she lowers her gaze to his boots.
She can’t grasp what’s actually happening. She feels like she’s not really there, but somewhere deep inside herself, a place that’s round, and smooth, and mouthless.
“My piano’s up there. My piano’s burning,” says Rose.
1622
The river splits around a black rock with a white cap of snow before sliding back under the ice and over the little waterfall. Bullhead squats to rest for a moment near the small stretch of open water. There are two bubbling lines streaming out from the rock in a pattern the shape of flying geese.
Walking up from the big water has tired her. She had hacked a hole in the ice at a place that felt right, but there, as in her usual spots, the net had come up dripping and empty. Fish. Her mouth waters. Trout. Salmon. Whitefish. Herring. Cooking on sticks near a crackling fire. She would turn them slowly until they were done just right.
For two days they’ve eaten soup cooked from pieces of hide, lichen, and the stringy inner layers of bark. Night Cloud snared a rabbit, but it was small and shared mostly with Little Cedar. How proud Bullhead was of Standing Bird as he sat solemnly with his broth, the smell of cooked rabbit thick in the air, cramping her own stomach over and over with a desire more insistent than any passion she’d known.
A wind moves through the pines and they toss and creak, dropping small bits of snow to the ground. Little Cedar grows vulnerable. She has seen it many times before, the slowed response to what usually excites, and the dullness that settles over the eyes, like a snake as it begins to molt. She made a decoction of dried ox-eye root to give strength to the boy’s limbs, but its effect was mild. If only she’d had the root newly pulled, not dried. She could’ve chewed it and spit the softened bits directly onto his arms and legs.
The rock and water make a gurgling music, and the faint light plays in the streaming bubbles. Bullhead can hear Grey Rabbit working in the woods, her bone rasping against the high rock wall as she scrapes lichen to add to the soup. How quickly the soup leaves her stomach feeling empty, without even pumpkin blossom left for thickening.
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