I WAS SEVENTEEN when I returned to Adam’s Rib on Tinselman’s Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken.
The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me. When they were frozen, moose crossed over, pursued by wolves. There were the French trappers and traders who emptied the land of beaver and fox. Their boats carried precious tons of fur to the trading post at old LeDoux. There were iceboats, cutters and fishers, and the boat that carried the pipe organ for the never-built church. The British passed through this north, as did the Norwegians and Swedes, and there had been logjams, some of them so high and thick they’d stanched the flow of water out from the lake and down the Otter River as it grew too thin for its fish to survive.
It was this same north where, years earlier, a woman named Bush had taken my mother, Hannah Wing, to one of the old men who lived along the Hundred-Year-Old Road. In dim lantern light he shook his head. With sorrow he told her, “I’ve only heard of these things. It’s not in my power to help her.” Nor was it in the power of anyone else, for my mother had been taken over by some terrible and violent force. It inhabited her, flesh, bone, and spirit.
The morning air was damp. From the ferry, as fog moved, I saw Fur Island, the place old people still call the navel of the world. It sat above the mirror of water like a land just emerged, created for the first time that morning.
As the ferry passed two islands several miles out from the mainland, I saw a woman adrift in a canoe. I leaned against the railing of the ferry and watched her. She, the floating woman, was very still, but I thought she watched me. The water that held her could have carried her toward tree-shaded places, toward a maze of lakes and islands that were doors to another wilderness, a deeper, wilder north we would one day enter together, that woman named Bush and myself.
She was the sole inhabitant of Fur Island, a solitary place, and she was one of the women who had loved me. Between us there had once been a bond, something like the ancient pact land had made with water, or the agreement humans once made with animals. But like those other bonds, this bond, too, lay broken, and that morning I paid little attention to Bush except to note how the canoe rose and fell with the waves of water and how, behind her, the islands looked like they floated above water.
As the ferry neared land, the ghostly shapes of fishing boats disappeared into the sky across water, and a soft mist rose up from the lake and the warming earth. Through fog, the pale trunks of birch trees stood straight; I was certain the dark eyes on their trunks looked at me. It was silent except for the call of a loon and the voices of other passengers as they called out to each other and prepared to disembark. I felt a last-minute panic, wondering if I should float on past this unfamiliar place that once held my life.
The ferry was early. As soon as it docked, the few passengers stepped off the boat into the rolling fog and soon, though I heard them talking, they were invisible.
I was among the last to leave. When I touched ground, my legs still held the rocking motions of water. It seemed to move beneath my feet. In every curve and fold of myself, I knew that even land was not stable.
It was Agnes Iron I was going to meet. She was my link to my mother, a blood relative who lived on the narrow finger of land called Adam’s Rib. I’d found her name in a court record only weeks earlier and written her, saying, “Dear Mrs. Iron, I am Angela Jensen, the daughter of Hannah Wing, and I believe you are my great-grandmother.” I wrote the letter several times to get it right, though it still looked like a child’s handwriting.
In a shaky hand, Agnes wrote back, “Come at once.” Along with her note, she sent fifty-five dollars in old one-dollar bills. They were soft as cloth and looked for all the world as if they’d been rolled, folded, counted, and counted again. When I opened the envelope, the smell of an old woman’s cologne floated up from the bills. It was clear they’d been hard come by, those dollars, and that they must have been nearly all she had. But in the first few moments of my life in the north, with the sound of a loon breaking through fog, I had little courage. As I waited, all my worldly goods sitting near me in two plastic bags, I pushed my nervous hands into the pockets of my jeans jacket to wait for Agnes to arrive, for fog to rise or drift so I could see the stark place that held my people.
A cloud of fog lifted and I saw buildings, a sign that said, “Auto Parts, Boat Repairs.” And then Agnes walked out of the mist toward me, a woman old and dark. I knew who she was by the way my heart felt in my chest. It recognized its own blood. She had a rocking gait. One of her legs was slightly shorter than the other. And she was stiff. She wore a blue-gray fur coat, worn in places, sloppy, and unbuttoned. It made her look like a hungry animal just stepped out of a cave of winter. It would have seemed a natural thing if leaves and twigs were tangled in it.
I watched her walk toward me, but my own legs refused to move. They were afraid. So was my heart, having entered this strange and foreign territory with the hope of finding something not yet known to me, not yet dreamed or loved. And Agnes, in her old bear coat, was part of it.
I wanted to turn back but she held out a cool, moist hand to me, then changed her mind and took me in both her fur-covered arms and held me, rocking me a little like the boat. She smelled like the dollar bills she’d mailed. I patted her back, wanting the embrace to end. She held me away from her to get a good look at me and I heard songbirds in the trees. I didn’t meet her eyes, but I saw her smile. She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped her eyes, then bent over and lifted both my bags.
“I can carry those,” I said. Because of her age, I reached for them. But she did not give them up. “They’re light,” she lied, already walking away up the road. “And you are probably tired.”
I looked sideways now and then at her face, which was starting to sweat, and looked all around me at the foreign world I’d entered by way of a letter, an envelope, and a stamp.
It was a poor place, with the scent of long, wet grasses and the stronger smell of all towns that live by fish and by seasons. Walking uphill, we went past smokers and racks for drying fish. Rusted-out cars, American-made, wide and heavy, sat parked outside houses. It was called Poison Road, the road we walked. The French had named it “Poisson,” after fish, because once it had rained tiny fish onto the earth along this road. They’d fallen from the sky. It was said they’d hatched in a cloud. But a few years later the road came to be one of the places where the remaining stray wolves and fox were poisoned to make more room for the European settlers and the pigs and cattle they’d brought with them, tragic animals that never had a chance of surviving the harsh winters of the north. Now it was called Poison and it was the only connecting passage on the hilly peninsula. Weary houses were strung along it in a line, and all of them looked dark brown and dreary to me. In a glance I was sorry I’d come.
The houses themselves were small, some patched with tar paper, pieces of metal, packing crates, or whatever else had been available. They had originally been built by missionaries some years ago and put together for the sole purpose of warmth. Inside them, in the long, deep winters, men went silent for months while lonely women, surrounded by ice and glacial winds, stood at windows staring out at the vast white and frozen world, watching for signs of spring: a single bud, a stem of green, as if spring were a lover come to rescue them from winter’s bleak captivity.
As we walked with the warm sun on our shoulders and back, penned huskies and old sled dogs panted and barked in September’s warmth behind makeshift fences.
Agnes had the face of a good-hearted woman, but she was sloppy about her appearance. A safety pin held her glasses together. Her gray hair was tied back but it was not neat even though it had been combed wet. In my memory I see, too, how on her dress, between her womanly breasts, she wore a silver brooch in the shape of a bear. It wasn’t an expensive piece of jewelry. It was the Walgreen’s kind, but it was pretty, with a black stone for an eye.
I wanted to talk to her but I didn’t know what to say. I was full of words inside myself; there were even questions in me I hadn’t yet thought to form, things not yet come to words. But I remained quiet. And Agnes was quiet, too, that day I returned to Adam’s Rib on Tinselman’s Ferry. She cried a little, and when her eyes filled up with tears, she’d stop walking, put my bags down, and wipe her eyes with an old, wadded-up hankie while I looked away, pretending not to see.
What a picture we would have made on that warm September day, Agnes and I, if any of those men and women had peered out through the little, streaked panes of glass. They would have seen a dark old woman in her blue-gray tattered fur, wearing practical black shoes and carrying the two plastic bags of my things, and me, barely able to keep up with her, a rootless teenager in a jeans jacket and tight pants, a curtain of dark red hair falling straight down over the right side of my dark face. Like a waterfall, I imagined, and I hoped it covered the scars I believed would heal, maybe even vanish, if only I could remember where they’d come from. Scars had shaped my life. I was marked and I knew the marks had something to do with my mother, who was said to be still in the north. While I never knew how I got the scars, I knew they were the reason I’d been taken from my mother so many years before.
But that day nobody peered out the windows. No one at all turned out to look at us. My return was uneventful, dull and common. And, unknown to me, it was my first step into a silence, into what I feared. I could have turned back. I wanted to. But I felt that I was at the end of something. Not just my fear and anger, not even forgetfulness, but at the end of a way of living in the world. I was at the end of my life in one America, and a secret part of me knew this end was also a beginning, as if something had shifted right then and there, turned over in me. It was a felt thing, that I was traveling toward myself like rain falling into a lake, going home to a place I’d lived, still inside my mother, returning to people I’d never met. I didn’t know their ways or what they would think of me. I didn’t know what I’d think of them.
And all I carried with me into this beginning was the tough look I’d cultivated over the years, a big brown purse that contained the remaining one-dollar bills Agnes had mailed me, the makeup I used, along with my hair, to hide my face, and a picture of an unknown baby, a picture I’d found in a one-dollar photo machine at Woolworth’s. I used the picture to show other people how lovely I’d been as a child, how happy. I used it to feel less lost, because there were no snapshots of me, nothing to say I’d been born, had kin, been loved. All I had was a life on paper stored in file cabinets, a series of foster homes. I’d been lost from my own people, taken from my mother. One of the houses I’d lived in sloped as if it would fall off the very face of earth. Another was upright, staunch, and puritan. There was a house with cement stairs leading to the front door, tangled brambles all around it. There was one I loved, a yellow house in the middle of a dry prairie with two slanted trees that made it seem off-center. I’d sat for hours there listening to the long dry grasses as wind brushed through them. But so far in my life, I had never lighted anywhere long enough to call it home. I was the girl who ran away, the girl who never cried, the girl who was strong enough to tattoo her own arm and hand. An ink-blue cross on one knuckle, the initials of Lonnie Faro on my upper left arm. A cross on my thigh. And no one had ever wanted me for good.
In my life this far, there had been two places, two things that shaped and moved me, two things that were my very own, that I did not ever leave behind or allow to have taken from me. They were like rooms I inhabited, rooms owned, not rented. One, the darkest, was a room of fear, fear of everything—silence, closeness, motionlessness and how it made me think and feel. Fear was what made me run, from homes, from people. Moving made me feel as if I left that fear behind, shed it like a skin, but always, slowly, a piece at a time, it would find me again; and then I would remember things that had never quite shaped themselves whole. And there was the fire-red room of anger I inhabited permanently, with walls that couldn’t shelter or contain my quiet rages. Now I could feel another room being built, but without knowing it, I was entering silence more deeply than I had entered anything before. I was entering my fears head-on. I was about to stare my rage and history in the face. My hardness, my anger would not hold or carry me in that northern place called Adam’s Rib.
I’d told myself before arriving, before constructing and inhabiting that new room, that whatever happened, whatever truth I uncovered, I would not run this time, not from these people. I would try to salvage what I could find inside me. As young as I was, I felt I had already worn out all the possibilities in my life. Now this woman, these people, were all I had left. They were blood kin. I had searched with religious fervor to find Agnes Iron, thinking she would help me, would be my salvation, that she would know me and remember all that had fallen away from my own mind, all that had been kept secret by the county workers, that had been contained in their lost records: my story, my life.
WE CAME to a worn path. “Here we are,” said Agnes. At the end of the path was another boxlike house, dark brown and square, with nothing to distinguish it from the others except for a torn screen and a large, red-covered chair that sat outside the door. Like the other squat places, it was designed and built by Christian-minded, sky-worshiping people who did not want to look out windows at the threatening miles of frozen lake on one side of them and, on the other, at the dense, dark forest with its wolves.
Old smells were in the air of Agnes’ house. The odor of fire smoke had settled in every corner, and there was a kind of stuffiness that dwells inside northern houses even in summer, the smell of human living, the smell of winter containment.
“You’ll sleep here,” Agnes said. She put my bags down next to a small cot. It was a narrow, dark living room. She hit the cot a few times with the palm of her hand as if to soften it, a useless gesture, I could already see. I could feel every lump in the mattress with my eyes. Already, my back ached.
I stood awkwardly for a moment. I felt large and clumsy. Then I sat down on the cot, as if testing it the way I’d seen people do in furniture stores. With a bend in the middle and terrible springs, it had been shaped by other bodies. Like my life, nothing at all formed by me, not skin, not shape.
THE FIRST WOMEN at Adam’s Rib had called themselves the Abandoned Ones. Born of the fur trade, they were an ill-sorted group. Some had Cree ancestors, some were Anishnabe, a few came from the Fat-Eaters farther north. Bush, the woman who floated in the canoe near Fur Island on the day I returned, was a Chickasaw from Oklahoma. Others were from the white world; these, the white people, hadn’t cared enough for their own kind to stay on with them.
The first generation of the Abandoned Ones traveled down with French fur trappers who were seeking their fortunes from the land. When the land was worn out, the beaver and wolf gone, mostly dead, the men moved on to what hadn’t yet been destroyed, leaving their women and children behind, as if they too were used-up animals.
The women eked out their livings in whatever ways they could, fishing or sewing. They brought in their own wood, and with their homely, work-worn hands they patched their own houses to keep sleet, snow, and winds at bay. They were accustomed to hard work and they were familiar with loneliness; it lived in the set of their jaws, in the way their eyes gazed off into the distance.
When I arrived, there were but a few men, and you could count them on the fingers of two hands. There were a few fishers and boatmakers, and a man named LaRue Marks Time who lived at Old Fish Hook, a nearby settlement on another finger of land that curved like a hook into water and pointed accusingly at Adam’s Rib, as if it had sinned. Rue, as we called him, was a taxidermist and a dealer in bones, pinned butterflies, hides, traps, and firearms. A man my heart would not like. He was a mixed-blood from the south, a Dakota, I think, and had only recently returned from Vietnam. He’d come in search of a refuge away from crowded towns or places that minded the business of strangers. What men were capable of, he hated, and his hatred included himself.
Three old men lived quietly along the Hundred-Year-Old Road with seven old women, all of them modest and solitary as bears. The women and the men were the oldest people, older even than Dora-Rouge. But they were rarely seen. They had been alive at the time of the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee. They remembered, and they wanted nothing to do with the new world. Some said these people were keeping the Ghost Dance alive. Most everyone doubted this, but I came to believe it in a way, because in spite of the tragedies they’d witnessed, they all had the peaceful look of those who still had hope, those who still believed that their people and the buffalo would return. For them, time held no sway. Except for one man, that is. Wiley was his name and he had a very young wife. He rubbed his face with ice each morning to look good for his younger woman.
With the Hundred-Year-Old Road people lived a young man named Tommy Grove. He was a graceful young man with large, beautiful hands. There was no noise about him. He hunted and fished to provide the old people with food. Tommy was a year younger than I was, but in many ways, he was more like one of the elders. He spoke three languages, and because he lived with old people in death’s territory, he did not fear it, which gave him a powerful strength.
The houses along the damp Hundred-Year-Old Road were even more decrepit and shabby than the others. These houses had not been built by missionaries. The old people would live in no construction of the Christians, neither physical nor spiritual.
All the rest of the people were women, mighty women, and it was to them that I returned when summer was walking away into the arms of autumn. It was 1972 and I was traveling toward myself, coming home to a place where I’d lived as an infant, returning to people I’d never met. I didn’t know my own ways or what they’d think of me, but I was something back in place. I was one of the absences filled that autumn when the trees gave off a golden haze and smell, something back in place at Agnes’ little dark, small-windowed house that had been designed by a missionary who did not want to see what surrounded him.
AGNES’ HOUSE was cluttered and already crowded. It seemed there wasn’t much room for one more. The kitchen was stained by leaks and had not been repainted. The table wobbled. Boots, waiting for winter, were lined up neatly against the wall, as if cold feet had just stepped out of them right into summer.
Agnes was a woman who stoked the fire and wore her coat even on warm summer days. Chilblains, she called it, complaining that her hands were like ice. But the day I came back, she removed her coat. “I’m warm,” she said. I watched her as she absentmindedly ran her fingers through the blue-gray fur, touching it in the ancient, animal act of grooming that women’s hands remember from long ago. She picked a piece of tree bark from it, a few wet grasses, then hung the worn-out coat on a hook beside other coats near the door, and suddenly she was as small as everything else in the brown house, a woman shrunk under the weight of a life the way a stone is made smaller by a river. Except that stones grow smooth, and you couldn’t say that of Agnes.
Dora-Rouge, the mother of Agnes, lived in a small room off the side of the kitchen with its peeling linoleum, old and worn yellow. She was my great-great-grandmother by blood. She had a thin, old voice. She was the beloved old woman, the old and luminous elder of the house. All along, she had been the one who’d said I would return, and no one had believed her, but when she saw me on that first day, she called me by my mother’s name. “Hannah?” she said. She spoke it as a question. It was only later, when I saw my mother, that I understood the mistake. I was the image of her, the woman I’d never seen, the woman who had scarred me. I had the same walnut skin and red hair as Hannah.
Dora-Rouge looked confused. It was this way with her. Some days her memory lived in a distant past, a time more alive and clear than the worn-out, fading present.
Agnes spoke loudly, “No, Mother. It’s Angel, Hannah’s girl.”
Dora-Rouge fixed Agnes with her gaze. “I’m not deaf, you know.” It wasn’t that Dora-Rouge was hard-of-hearing. Her ears were fine. It was just that she had already begun to step over the boundaries of this world into the next. It was an intelligent world, she said, the next one. It was full of the makings of life, and it was where she conversed with her gone husband, Luther. From time to time it was difficult to bring her back the long distance from that world to ours. There was no map of the territory between the worlds, but I could tell something wonderful lived there, in that span we call “between.” At times I could see it in her eyes. But Agnes was afraid. She feared her mother would get caught in a snare along the way and never return. That’s why she yelled. She didn’t want to lose her mother. She wanted to call her back to the world at Adam’s Rib.
Dora-Rouge was the oldest person I’d ever seen, a white-haired creation thin as a key, who sat as if she had become bone already, with sunken cheeks and a confusion of snowy hair. Her eyes were joyous, dark and radiantly clear. When she turned her face toward me, I felt her light. When she laughed, both the house and I opened up a little. It frightened me to feel that way, as if now that I found her I’d have something to lose. She reached out for me. “Angel, is it? Come over here.”
I hesitated, then took her thin, bony hand.
Dora-Rouge had no teeth and her toothless grin lent her an infant sweetness, in spite of the fact that her skin was old copper, her hands knotted with veins and human tributaries, intricacies a young woman like myself could not imagine. A red blanket stretched across her lap and her bony knees were sharp enough to cut their way through the wool.
And that first day as I sat on the edge of the springy bed, I studied her face, searched for traces of my own features, feeling like a small child. Dora-Rouge had an owl beak of a nose like mine. The same eyebrows, white and longer, though hers turned up a little at the edges, winglike. Her mouth might once have been full like mine, except that hers had eaten other foods, spoken another language, and kissed people who’d lived and died long before I was born.
“I always called you the girl who would return.” Her eyes rested on me. “And here you are.”
I tried to smile at her. I felt like a small child.
Antlers lay on a table in Dora-Rouge’s room, and a grass rope, burned at one end. While the rest of the house was dusty and cluttered, her room was in order. She could not tolerate disorder.
“Open the window,” she said to Agnes. “It’s dark.”
“It’s open, Mother,” Agnes said. “They are all open.”
“Then you’d better close the door. The darkness must be getting in.”
“I’m going to get her up,” Agnes said. She lifted the red blanket from Dora-Rouge’s lap.
“We’re going to take her outside. She likes the morning sun. You take hold of her legs. I’ll get the rest.”
“I hate it, Agnes, when you talk about me as if I’m not here,” Dora-Rouge said in a dry voice. She wore small, beaded moccasins, and her knees were drawn up and stiff. There was a yeasty smell to her skin, an odor of fermenting. She was tiny. She’d looked larger than she was, but her body seemed too light to contain a living soul. I think it was because her radiance was bigger than her body. Like the light of fox fire, it was the fire of life burning itself beautifully away. She was not a bit embarrassed at being carried. She smiled into my eyes as we picked her up. She said, with triumph, “I am gloriously old. I am ripening.”
Agnes said nothing, as was her long-standing habit with her mother. Over the years, the two women had learned to tune out what they didn’t want to hear from each other. In that way, they kept peace in the household, though not in their hearts.
Dora-Rouge leaned toward me. “Don’t you know I remember when people lived below ground and were buried above?”
“Mother. You’re not that old.”
We carried her through the kitchen where the bear coat hung on its hook. She said, “That bear clutches at my heart every time I see it. I still don’t know how you can wear it.” This, too, had been said many times, I could tell.
With a movement of her hip, Agnes pushed the screen door open and backed out, her face red with exertion. Even her dress seemed strained. She was getting too old to lift and carry her mother, I could see that. And in that, too, I saw my opportunity. I was a strapping large girl. This is what I can do here, I thought, if I stay. If I stay, I can care for the old woman to earn my keep. I was sturdy. I could carry the delicate old woman by myself. In that moment I began to figure out my place in the house of old women with its worn-out linoleum and leaking roof. I wasn’t sure they could afford me, but I plotted out the chores I could do even though up to that time I’d avoided work as much as possible. I thought I might even repair the torn screen. Me, the girl who would return. But I didn’t know if I could hold myself there, tie myself to that place of dogs and fish and old people.
Outside, the sunlight rested on Dora-Rouge’s hair like flame on a candle. She settled herself down in the chair and raised her face to the sky. “It is so good to sit in front of the fire this way.” The insects were noisy around us. With her bony hand she took hold of my wrist and leaned toward me. “Don’t you know I remember when we had to break the bones of the dead to let the souls take their leave.”
“She’s not that old,” Agnes said. “You’re not that old,” she said to her mom, louder than she spoke to me.
Agnes straightened back Dora-Rouge’s hair. “She’s a character all right. And she’s the source of both of us. We came from the Fat-Eaters of the north. Before cholesterol.” She said this with a hearty laugh I wouldn’t have suspected of her until that moment as she adjusted the cover about her mother’s lap. When we went back inside, I felt a little more of the stuffy air in the house open up. It was cool inside. I swear that something almost happy walked toward me. In spite of myself, I smiled. It wasn’t a wide smile; my happiness opened only a bit at a time, the way my story did.
THE BATHROOM SINK was stained red with the iron-rich water that made everything on Adam’s Rib look and smell like blood. As I ran water, I looked at my face in the mirror. Half of it, from below the eye to the jawline, looked something like the cratered moon. I hated that half. The other side was perfect and I could have been beautiful in the light of earth and sun. I’d tried desperately all my life to keep the scars in shadows. Even then, before the mirror, I tried not to see them, and I wondered what Agnes saw, or Dora-Rouge, when they looked at my angular cheekbones and large eyes, the red hair so unusual above dark skin, and when they saw the scars. Maybe they felt the same surprise and fear I did when I looked at my face. Of what, I didn’t know. My scars had no memory, were from unknown origin. There were others, as well, on my body.
The scars, I knew, were from my mother. They were all I had of her. For me, she was like air. I breathed her. I had to breathe whether I wanted to or not, and like air, she was invisible, although sometimes I thought I recalled her heartbeat from when I was inside her body. At those times, a distant memory tugged at me in a yearning way, and I felt something deeper than sorrow.
I looked like her, they said, that girl who’d washed up from stormy waters in 1949, washed in from a storm so fierce it blew fish onto the land. At that time she was ten years old and icy cold, the only thing blown in that had a spark of life remaining inside of it.
IT WAS STILL LIGHT when John Husk came in the back door that evening and placed two large fish on the counter and smiled broadly. I liked him from the first. Husk removed his hat. He had a fine face, skinny legs, no hips to speak of. The years of weather had eroded and etched stories on his face, all except for his forehead, which remained baby-smooth and pale from the constant wearing of a cap. He wasn’t much over five feet five, and he smelled of soap.
Dora-Rouge was seated at the table, propped up by several pillows. “It’s sweltering in here,” she said, wiping her forehead. She complained about the heat from the woodstove. But I could see that she was concerned for Agnes.
Agnes was cold and tired. She not only tended to Dora-Rouge, whose skin had become thin as the parchment of birch trees and bruised easily, but there was also this man, John Husk, the man she cooked for. He was older than Agnes. He was closer to seventy, I believe, though I never knew for sure, and he was devoted to Agnes. The neighbors called him “her old man,” but never to her face, because after many years, they were still curious about the relationship between the two. John Husk and Agnes hadn’t married and they were seldom seen together in public, two things that cast doubt on their neighbors’ speculations. Physically, Husk was young for his age and he was still sharp enough to fish and hunt, to play cards on cold nights and to tell people that “hell is cold, not hot.” He knew this firsthand from the many long, fierce winters he’d endured, including two he’d survived in the near-arctic north when he’d once been forced to give up his values and trap for money. All these years later, he still felt guilt for having done this. There had once been a covenant between animals and men, he told me. They would care for one another. It was an agreement much like the one between land and water. This pact, too, had been broken, forced by need and hunger.
Husk fished and delivered groceries to people who lived out on islands, and he loved science. He kept stacks of magazines and books that divulged the secret worlds of atoms and galaxies, of particles and quarks. He’d read about the way bees communicate by dancing. His main desire in life was to prove that the world was alive and that animals felt pain, as if he could make up for being part of the broken contract with animals.
Agnes stirred the kettle with a wooden spoon. Without looking at Husk, she said, “What are you so happy about?”
He didn’t answer, but there was a spark between them, I could tell. I was sensitive to sparks. But Husk said only, “Say, where’s the iron? I need to press my shirt.”
Agnes didn’t remember where she’d last seen it. “They have permanent-press clothes now,” was all she said. “Maybe you should get some.”
Agnes, at the stove, wore thick hose and the heavy black shoes of an old woman. The kitchen smelled of stew. Dora-Rouge, propped up, was birdlike sitting there, but still she reigned over the table like a matriarch. Husk touched her hand. “How are you tonight, Miss Iron?” he asked.
“I want to go home to die,” she said.
Agnes waved flies away as she cooked.
Husk nodded at Dora-Rouge as if he understood. She’d said it often enough. It was her hope, her one desire, to go back to the Fat-Eaters.
Husk rubbed his hand over his shaved chin, smiling broadly. His eyes followed Agnes as she placed dishes on the table. He was politely interested in me, kind to Dora-Rouge, but it was Agnes he watched with lively eyes, and in spite of his own careful grooming, he never seemed to notice her messiness, the safety pin she wore in her glasses, the slip that hung out from beneath her dress. He was that taken with her. It was clear that he adored her. Enough so that every day he showered at the docks before he came home, washed away the smell of fish that accompanied the other men up Poison Road. Husk’s shoes were always clean and dry, without a sign that he had spent any part of the day walking in the skins, scales, blood, and innards of fish.
He was what they might have once called dashing, handsome, with a pencil-thin mustache, a full head of brushed-back gray hair, an ironed jeans jacket. He took pride in his appearance and was immaculate in his grooming. He was one for whom cleanliness was next to godliness. He did this for Agnes, who never noticed.
Husk and I made small talk, the where-do-you-live kind. I told him, Tulsa, mostly, and when I spoke, the trees and red dirt of Oklahoma entered the little kitchen at Adam’s Rib. For a moment, I smelled the richness of nut trees and the thick-aired Oklahoma evenings. I felt a pang of loneliness for that land.
“Have you seen the salt?” Agnes asked. Then to me, she said, “See how he squints?” Meaning Husk. “It’s because he had snow blindness once. In 1929.” I could hear in her voice that she cared for him.
Husk was a light eater. He ate only a little bread and stew and a piece of the fried fish. Once, during dinner, while I savored the hot bread, Agnes looked at Husk, took off her glasses and cleaned them on her sleeve, then looked at him more closely. It wasn’t until later, when I went to bed and tried, without success, to sleep, that I realized I had taken Husk’s cot. It smelled of his soap.
That night, I lay down on the place his body had formed, and it came to me that maybe this was the first night they’d shared a bed in the old thin-walled house, and then from behind the wall I heard her tell him, “So, old man, you’ve got your way at last.” He laughed out loud and so did she. Like they were kids. Already my presence there was doing some good, I thought.
Sleepless as always, I went outside and sat in Dora-Rouge’s chair, listening to the insects and the wail of a loon.
The next morning, Dora-Rouge said, “You look much better, Agnes. It agrees with you to sleep with Mr. Husk.”
BEGINNINGS WERE IMPORTANT to my people, as I would one day call them. It was why Agnes, on a warm, damp night a few days after my return, said, “Nobody knows where it began, your story.” Behind her, white-winged moths and June bugs clung to the screens. “I’ve thought of it for years, where the beginning was.” She turned toward the window, as if answers lived in the wings of moths and the snapping sound of bugs. “What happened to you started long ago. It began around the time of the killing of the wolves. When people were starving.” In spite of the warmth, she pulled the coat tight around her and shivered. “I think and I think and still I don’t know.”
Dora-Rouge pointed her crooked finger at the cloud-colored coat. “It might have been that bear’s revenge on humans.”
“No. It was long before then.”
She searched for words. As in Genesis, the first word shaped what would follow. It was of utmost importance. It determined the kind of world that would be created.
“There wasn’t a single beaver that year. They’d killed them all. And they’d just logged the last of the pine forests.”
I tried to make sense of what she said, but it was hard at first to put it all together. Harold, her son—my grandfather—was married to the woman named Bush, the woman of the island, the one I’d seen drifting in the canoe. But Harold left Bush, a slip of a girl, to go off with a woman named Loretta Wing, my blood grandmother, the mother of Hannah. Harold later vanished off the face of earth, Agnes said.
It was 1938. Loretta was older than Harold. You could see it. It showed on her face. She had dark circles and lines. Something, I think now, that might have been pain or secret sorrow.
She came here so suddenly, we thought she grew out of the land. Some people even say they saw her rise up all cold and blue from the water. But she arrived on a boat with a man and the very next morning he snuck off without her, and her hair was the only spot of color there was on that dark day when I first saw her. The birds were loud that day. They were migrating, so thick they looked like salt poured from a shaker all across the water and land and sky. But the country was dry. We’d had a drought and there was a windstorm; leaves blew about and the waves were high, so we knew, hoped, a great storm was coming at us from out on the lake. We needed rain in the worst of ways. We had not even a morning of it. Forests were what called down the water, the rain, but by then the forests were gone, and the clouds went away from us.
Harold and Bush were young. He brought her home from Oklahoma with him. He met her when he went to work there in an oil field. No one here accepted her. She was quiet and us women here are talkers. Now, I think we talk because what lives inside silence scares us. Maybe silence is where trees start to freeze and shatter, or where darkness and ice begin, and Bush seemed all of a piece with silence. She was timid and small and not very pretty, either, until you got to know her. Then she’d look beautiful.
The young men had a habit of getting together for beer at night. They would say to Harold, “You’ve had better women than that.” I heard them say it. Harold, my son, was a weak man. I never knew why. He had a good father. But Harold listened to his friends. In his eyes, Bush began to fade and dim.
I COULD SEE the vision of my grandmother, Loretta, the catlike quality, the way men stared at her. Even women could not help themselves but to watch her. I could see this in Agnes’ words. Loretta had long brown fingers and red lips, a too-tight blue dress.
Loretta smelled of something sweet, an almond odor that I couldn’t place until years later. Her skin, even her dress, was thick with it. When I finally placed the odor, when I knew it was cyanide, I knew who she was, what people she came from. She was from the Elk Islanders, the people who became so hungry they ate the poisoned carcasses of deer that the settlers left out for the wolves. The starving people ate that bait.
Her people lived on Elk Island. About thirty miles to the east of here. Only a few remained.
Some said she was haunted. They said something terrible had come along with her. You could almost see it. But it was that very strangeness that attracted Harold and the other men. It made her more appealing to them, or maybe it was her sleepy way and the scar beneath her eye.
Overnight, my boy changed. He started to oil his hair with Wild Root and comb it back. Some men rubbed balm on their hands and faces. They wore their best shirts whenever they went out. But Harold was the only fool who followed her away. Like a hungry dog chasing a bone.
Some people said that what came with her was a bad spirit. Some said an enemy had thrown tobacco into the lake at midnight and laid a curse on her. But I’ve seen bad medicine. This was something else. It wasn’t like any shadow under rocks or anything hiding from the face of light. The curse on that poor girl’s life came from watching the desperate people of her tribe die. I saw the same thing once in a dog, retching and jerking from that same poison. How she’d lived, I didn’t know. But after that, when she was still a girl, she’d been taken and used by men who fed her and beat her and forced her. That was how one day she became the one who hurt others. It was passed down. I could almost hear their voices when she talked, babbling behind hers, men’s voices speaking English. Something scary lived behind her voice. I still feel bad about her. We judged her, you know. We wanted to blame someone like her. We wanted to hate her. But Loretta wasn’t the original sin. It was just that something inside her had up and walked away and left the rest behind. There was no love left in her. There was no belief. Not a bit of conscience. There wasn’t anything left in her.
I fought with Harold to keep him from going off with her. But he couldn’t see it. None of them could. I guess he couldn’t help it. “What about your wife?” I said to him, but Loretta gave me such a look, a chill came over me. It was a taste of ice I’ve never lost and just before they left I saw her through the window, near my house lighting a fire to some bunched-up old papers. It was dry outside, everything was kindling. I ran out screaming, first at her, then at Harold about what he was running away with. “You’re my son!” I yelled after him. “Are you crazy?” I screamed at him about the fire, but the wind blew my voice away from his ears and the fire reached up the wall all at the same time, so I had no choice but to let them go while I tried to douse the flames.
The last I ever saw of them they were running to catch the ferry. Harold carried an armload of his things. I saw the sweat on the back of his shirt, even with all that wind. She ran on ahead of him, urging him on. I can still hear her voice saying, “Hurry. Hurry.”
That was all I saw of them until I saw Harold’s face and Loretta’s red hair on your mother that day she came out of the water. She smelled of the same bitter almonds. It was a fainter odor, but it was still there all the same. We guessed her to be about ten years old. She had empty eyes I’ll never forget.
No matter how we scrubbed, the smell never came off that poor girl. It was deeper than skin. It was blood-deep. It was history-deep, Old Man said.
By the time the shivering girl of your mother came out of the storm, Bush was a grown woman, strong but alone. Maybe she thought Hannah was a little bit of Harold come back to her. She loved Hannah, poison and all.
AGNES WENT to the sink. She was barefoot and her feet made a soft sound on the floor. I watched her back, memorizing it as if it were my own.
“I don’t know where the beginning was, your story, ours. Maybe it came down in the milk of the mothers. Old Man said it was in the train tracks that went through the land and came out of the iron mines. I’ve thought of this for years. It might have started when the crying children were taken away from their mothers or when the logging camps started and cities were built from our woods, or when they cut the rest of the trees to raise cattle.”
She looked out the window. I followed her gaze, half expecting to see the herds, but instead there were only the white-winged moths pressed against the screen, listening.
Dora-Rouge laughed out loud.
“What?” Agnes looked at her mother, brought back to the present.
“Luther says you’d have to creosote cattle to keep them in this weather. That’s what Luther just said.” Luther, my dead great-grandfather.
“What’s creosote?” I asked.
Agnes was offended. “I don’t believe Papa would say something like that.”
Dora-Rouge, I thought, was something like the white-winged moths and June bugs that grasped the screen, held to the doorway of the next world with open wings and tiny fingers. She spoke this world to us. In it, in Luther’s world, they took life less seriously than those of us in this world. Like they were Buddhists, Husk once told me, as if they realized life was pain and suffering and so they gave up all their resistance and started to enjoy themselves instead.
Agnes was disturbed by her parents’ insensitivity and she finished clearing the table with quick, noisy movements. She hadn’t appreciated her father’s humor when he was alive either. Dora-Rouge confided this later. In fact, Agnes thought her mother spoke her own opinions and pretended they were Luther’s. That way, she could say what she wanted without recrimination.