JUNE 18, 2000
FATHER’S DAY. HOW IRONIC. A holiday her father had showed no interest in and they never celebrated. Van took off her watch and released herself from being a slave to clock-time. She drove the paved road through mesmerizing acres of corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn. In the late afternoon, she pulled into Black Hawk State Park and campground, and even though she had already paid for the room at the motel, she forked over five dollars for a tent space near the east side of the lake, far away from families in campers. She was eager for a swim. Maybe she would camp; the tent and sleeping bag were stuffed in the back of her trunk.
Martin wasn’t the only man on her mind. Len was still tailing her. She had dreamed of him again, or a shadowy figure that might have been him. Black Hawk Park provoked thoughts of him. She could hear Len saying, “It’s pretty strange, isn’t it? How those Indians got shoved off their land and massacred when they put up resistance, and then they become American icons, and everything gets named after them.”
He had used Chief Black Hawk as a case in point. Once hated and pursued back and forth across the Mississippi River, Black Hawk was an American symbol—a fierce warrior, a noble savage that Americans celebrated with statues and memorials because, brave as he was, they had defeated him. After he died in the mid-1830s, his grave had been vandalized and his bones displayed in a museum. Shortly thereafter, his bones disappeared when the museum mysteriously went up in flames.
Other Indian bones had been dug up by archaeologists and given to museums, where they sat for years in dusty boxes. What were people thinking when they wanted those bones to begin with?Talismans? Relics? Like pieces of the true cross or fingers of the martyred saints? Or did they just want to make sure Black Hawk was dead and accounted for and that he had been vanquished?
“The whole prairie is a boneyard,” Len had declared. “Bones buried high on the cliffs above the great rivers are at peace, they have sung their death song and are on their spirit journeys. But other bones are scattered, left where they fell from starvation, disease, or massacre and those bones are not peaceful, their spirits are deeply disturbed, and destined to wander restlessly until given proper burial.”
Van was reminded of recent legislation to repatriate stolen Indian bones back to the tribes. Repatriation. Was that what this trip was all about, retrieving her ancestors’ stories and bringing them back, restoring them. For whom? What tribe? Or was she a grave robber herself, disturbing the Reinhardts by digging into their lives after they had died? Maybe she had offended their spirits. Maybe she should leave them buried with their secrets and silences.
From day one of this trip, her own history closed in on her like a pack of hungry ghosts. She recalled the night before she and Len had left for the Boundary Waters. They had a big fight—Len always grousing about injustice, Van always on the defensive. After jamming her thumb hard while pushing gear into the trunk of the car, she finally broke down.
“What if somewhere, sometime, your people and my people not only killed and stole from each other, what if they actually fell in love? We know that must have happened—Mary Jemison lived her whole life with the Seneca. They say she was captive, but she stayed with them because she wanted to, even when she could have left. Those Native women married to the French fur traders, some of them must have loved each other. Look at us—aren’t we history, too, doesn’t our tiny story live inside a larger one?” She held her thumb. She was crying. “These perpetual wars between white people and Indians, good and evil, men and women, humans and animals, are what break us.”
Unused to letting anyone see her cry, she was mad. “Hard edges hurt, Len. I want the in-between, the borderland, where there is warmth and love, where blood is mixed and we are all a part of everything.”
It was the last time she used the word love. What a romantic idealist she had been. She was young. She was pregnant and didn’t know it. Now she felt sorry for that younger self, for how terribly alone she had been. Then her mother had probably overdosed. Her father became a drunk. And Len had disappeared. She always expected Len to reappear someday, but he never did, except in unwanted memories and dreams. He had left a small splinter of pain in her heart and she felt it festering. What was she supposed to do about that? It had been thirty years. And why in hell was all this past misery chasing her down the cornfields in Iowa of all places—somewhere she had never been in her life?
Water. She needed to get into the water to clear her mind. Brown with leaf tannin, the sweet lake water beckoned like a bowl of root beer. Back in the car, Van slipped out of her cutoffs and changed into a black tank suit. She pushed off from the rocky bottom and with cupped palms separated the water’s coolness with the warmth of her body. She parted the lake’s gleaming skin by fanning her arms open and pressing the water toward her body. She was a strong swimmer, unafraid but respectful of water’s elemental nature. The water caressed like a cool swath of silk. She rolled onto her back and let her floating body rise and fall with the rhythm of her breath. The blue ceiling of sky was decorated with puffs of white clouds. She let her body open, her bones disarticulate, and then she rolled over and reached arm over arm in a vigorous crawl. She grabbed a sideways breath and blew it back through her nose, syncing her arm stroke and percussive kick with the melodious sound of bubbles. Back on shore, she felt clarified, light as air, transparent as water.
The campsite had a small fire grill. Van gathered twigs and birch bark and lit a match to them to ward off mosquitoes, then toweled off and changed back into her cut-offs. The scrape on her leg from the Dumpster fall a week ago was a faded swatch of pink. She pulled her get-away gear out of the trunk. That canoe trip with Len was the last time she had used the equipment, but she never got rid of it.
“Transitional objects,” her psychologist friend, Pam, once told her when Van showed up at her office with a ratty stuffed tiger cat from her childhood. “We hold on to those things that give us comfort.”
Well, the camping gear had not given much comfort at the time it was used, nor buried for years in the back of her closet. After Len, she had never slept in the tent. What was a transition, anyway?
At the last minute Vanhad thought to buy a can of black bean soup at a convenience store. She emptied it into the blue enamelware pot and set it on the fire grill. She ate the soup out of a chipped enameled mug while the fire burned down to embers.
On a flat spot she shook the tent open. It was musty and moldy from years of disuse, so she decided against sleeping in it. A pack of American Spirit cigarettes had fallen out, a leftover from the Boundary Waters trip. She lit one on the embers. The aromatic smoke was sweet, not offensive in the open air. She inhaled the smoke and blew it out. “Here’s a blessing for you, Len, wherever you are. I hope you are alive and if not, I hope your bones are at peace.” She tossed the tobacco into the fire where it flared and went out.
When the sun set, Van poured water on the twig fire, rinsed her pot and mug in the lake, put the moldy tent in the stuff sack and tossed it along with the old sleeping bag into the large trash barrel outside the campground. She drove back to the motel, took a long hot shower and slid between cool clean sheets and slept.