SEPTEMBER 20, 2011
Vale wakes at dawn. Puts on Lena’s hat. Turns up the gas heater on the wall.
She is drinking too much. Losing track of reality. Is Bonnie back at the swamp, in some woodland cave somewhere, drinking hemlock tea over an open fire?
Last night Vale asked Deb if she has any books about Vermont’s native peoples, and Deb returned from her cabin later with two: one about Abenaki history and a small book that fits in Vale’s palm, called No Word for Time.
This morning Vale makes coffee and opens the books.
How is it she’s lived here for most of her life, went to school here, and knows nothing of Vermont’s native people? Some petroglyphs near the falls where she and Jimmy used to skinny-dip and get high. The place in the river called Indian Love Call where her mother used to take her. Bonnie would make a hooting sound up toward the rock cliffs and when her echo came back, say, “See? Indian ghosts. Yours and mine!” Slip off her dress and leap—naked—into that cold water. Vale eyeing the woods around them, hoping no one was near.
Vale sits at the table, the lamp buzzing above her head, and flips through the books’ pages. In the history book she reads about the Years of the Beaver: colonization, disease, genocide, with fewer than one thousand Abenaki remaining after the Revolutionary War. She reads about the early Years of the Fox—the late 1820s to mid-twentieth century—the time of Marie’s photo—when many fled north into exile. Some chose to stay and merge with French Canadian neighbors. Others chose the Path of the Fox: heading for mountains and rivers, and others, to “pass” into English-American culture. The photo of Marie, according to the writing scrawled on its back, was taken in 1901, likely a few years before Lena’s mother, Jessie, was born. Was Marie trying to pass?
Vale reads about something she’s never known before. In the 1920s, the state’s Commission on Country Life launched the Vermont Eugenics Survey, whose explicit mission was to codify and perpetuate the state’s lily-white reputation. The result: twenty years of institutionalizing Vermont’s poor, uneducated, and people of color. Many of those targeted were the Abenaki. Many had their children taken from them. Many were sterilized. Others went into hiding—the woods, or camps by the river—or denied their native blood.
Vale closes the book. Pours herself another cup of coffee. Drinks it slowly. She looks at Marie’s photo on the wall and thinks how that eugenics movement was still happening when Lena and Hazel were girls. Vale pictures Marie moving to this white house on the hill, unbraiding her dark hair, cinching an apron around her waist, unlearning her mother tongue. No longer going into the swamps to gather sweetgrass. Not telling her granddaughters much of anything, for their own protection, and hers.
Vale puts down the book and goes outside. It’s cold. A bitter, balsam-scented wind rising up from the creek. She wraps her sweater around her, pulls Lena’s hat low over her eyes and ears. Woodsmoke rises from Deb’s cabin on the hill above her; sunlight reflects off Hazel’s kitchen windows.
Vale pisses on the creek side of the camper. The piss makes eddies through the dirt and grass. She rises. Lifts her arms above her head. Feels the sunlight on her face. “Jesus,” she whispers, feeling the landscape unfolding in new ways.
Back inside Vale opens the pages of the smaller book, No Word for Time.
It’s a book about the spirituality of the Algonquin people, of whom, Vale learns, the Abenaki are part.
The author, Pritchard, writes that for the Algonquin peoples, “to do damage to the earth does spiritual damage as well.”
Vale feels that line in her chest. She sets the book down. Thinks of the earth’s warming and the resulting storms. Thinks of oil spills, beach-wrecked birds, landfills full of plastic. She thinks of Bonnie’s spiritual damage, those many books on her shelf—each an attempt to get found.
VALE LACES HER BOOTS, BUTTONS HER SWEATER, AND walks into the woods. They’re ravaged still, the banks of the creek no longer mossy, fern-touched, Japanese-looking in their ancientness, but wrecked—upturned gravel, torn-up trees.
She walked up this part of the creek once with Danny, years ago. Leaping from stone to stone, balancing her way across fallen logs. “You’re a natural-born ballerina, Vale!” he called out as she crossed the log, and she was—her body, in those moments, pure light. She was in love with him then. Danny, her cousin, nine years older than her, playing Leonard Cohen songs in the hayloft of the barn. Danny putting on the Rolling Stones in Deb’s cabin up there on the hillside—turning the volume up, nodding his head, pouting his lips like Mick Jagger.
She wanted to be a dancer then: a ballerina in pink and white. Bruised toes and bobby pins. Not exactly how she’d describe her nights at the club, but not entirely different, either. Her body muscle and lightning. Fully capable. The last time she talked to Bonnie on the phone she told her that she was dancing—enough to pay her bills. She didn’t tell her what kind. Bonnie’s voice reeking pride—“Oh honey. That’s so fine! I’m so proud of you! I always knew you were pure grace. Divine!” Then her voice drifting off into distraction, or exhaustion. Saying she had to go.
Vale continues along the bank, upstream. Farther back, where the creek turns to swamp, the damage lessens. Just fields of flattened bluestem, flattened ferns.
Eerily quiet. Eerily still.
Vale bends down and looks into the mud at the edge of the open water: Deer tracks. Dog or coyote tracks.
No mother tracks.
This might be where I would come, Vale thinks, if the world were ending.
Is it ending? How high do the seas have to rise, how many storms, before the world as they know it is no more?
There are other tracks she doesn’t recognize. Fisher? Weasel? Fox? Animals waking with the dawn and coming to water. I’ll be like them in the apocalyptic near future, Vale thinks—eyes wild, ears pricked, head ever-turning. Living back here near the fertile swamp, relearning all those things that were forgotten.
Vale puts her palm into the murky, mud- and moss-flecked swamp water, and thinks of herself under bright lights at the strip club, undressing. The heat of the lights, sweat pouring out along her spine and under her arms. She thinks of the muscles in her legs, burning, and how she learned, up there, to make the greatest effort appear effortless—how to make the hardest work full of grace.
“We’ve got Gypsy souls,” her mother saying, dancing around the living room in the apartment in an old T-shirt. “Gypsy souls! You and me. Screw the unbelievers who say otherwise. Indian souls! I can feel it in my bones, Vale-love.”
Vale pulls her sweater around her neck, raises her face to the darkening clouds moving in fast from the west, to the drops of rain falling, just now, from those clouds.
“Are you here, Bonnie?” Vale says out loud.
Blue jay in the highest pine. Flash of far-off lightning.
Vale bends and puts her fingers into the print of that dog’s or coyote’s track, lifts her finger and smells it: heady scent of swamp water.