THE WOMAN named Bush, the one who tried to scrub the cyanide odor off my mother, the one who had taken Hannah to Old Man on the Hundred-Year-Old Road, the woman of the island five miles out in the lake, knew that I’d come back. That’s what she told me after I moved into her house on Fur Island. It’s why she was on the lake that morning of my return, the floating woman, still and watchful in her canoe.
On that first morning I arrived, she’d slept badly. It wasn’t much more than the sound of water that she heard, or the loon, but something called out to her, and there was the familiar presence of a young child standing beside her bed in the first light of morning. It was a girl, about five years of age, wearing hand-sewn deerskin boots and a soft dress. The child looked like me. She had visited Bush all the years I’d been gone, but that morning the girl raised her hand in a wave of good-bye. That was how Bush knew I had come home after all her years of patient waiting. Twelve years had passed. Now was the time she had waited for.
ON THE DAY they sent me to Bush, Dora-Rouge called me into her room. “Hand me that box,” she said. It was the one I’d snooped in while she slept on the porch. I thought at first she’d found me out. My face grew warm.
When she opened it, it smelled of cedar. She took out the amber I had already seen, the frog so small, so perfectly formed inside it, and she held it up and let the light shine into it.
“This is for you,” she said. “It was found in water.” Her old hands turned it over. Then she wrapped it in tissue and pressed it into my hand. “Those people from the south told our ancestors, ‘Remember us when we are gone,’ and they placed this into the hands of an old woman named Luri, one of my ancestors, one of yours.
“I know an animal-calling song,” Dora-Rouge said. “I’m going to teach it to you. You might need it out on that island of Bush’s.” And then she sang.
Soon there were deer on the road walking toward the house in the first musky smell of autumn. Husk and I drove past them on our way to Tinselman’s store to stock up on goods for Bush and for another person on his grocery-delivery route, then we drove to the dock. For a Saturday, it was quieter than usual. In autumn, when the fish were full of food, the fishermen were forced to travel longer distances, so when we reached the lake, it was still. There was no longer the drone of the boats, only of hungry bees in their last hold on life and the sound of crows cawing above the smooth water. The lake looked as if nothing had ever disturbed it except the reflections of the black birds.
Husk parked the old blue truck, then went to the truck bed and lifted out the black, half-full suitcase Agnes insisted I carry. It was more self-respecting, she’d told me, than a garbage bag full of my clothes.
I helped Husk carry the bags of groceries down the pier to the worn-out black boat he called The Raven. I took sticks of firewood out of the truck bed and helped load them. Winter would soon reach us. It was never too early to begin preparations. The wood smelled sweet and dry, the scent of what had been clear light through forests, and there was sap on my palms and the cool touch of changing seasons. All this along with the smell of leaves and firesmoke.
The engine made an urgent cutting sound that broke silence in half. Husk squinted through the gray cloud of exhaust. It was the way he had of looking at times. A squint something like Justin’s, but from that winter of 1929 when he’d been stranded in minus-eight-degree weather with a dog team suddenly overwhelmed by a virus. Unlike Justin, who, according to Frenchie, had gotten hung up on a mass of ice, the squint made Husk look deep. I liked the look. Now, as the boat pitched forward, he looked as if he’d fixed his mind on unraveling some knotted tangle of thought and would find a way to pull it straight and clear as fishline. Even his lips were tight, concentrated. I liked to look at him, the man who used theories of science to confirm what he knew was true. On land, he wasn’t much over five feet five, but in water Husk became large. It was his place, the swaying water. It was what he knew.
In the distance before us, several islands looked like rocky planets in a watery sky, and the world stretched wide open. Soon, the musky smell of autumn air gave way to the smell of fish and coolness, even a possibility of coming rain.
Behind us, in the wake of the boat, glaring water closed, hiding our path, and returned to stillness and secrecy. The houses on Adam’s Rib vanished from sight, leaving only the thick shapes of trees, and then the trees, too, became nothing more than a dark blue line. Below us, I knew, fish swam in the awake darkness, green weeds bent with the currents.
HALFWAY BETWEEN ADAM’S RIB and Fur Island was the Hungry Mouth of Water. It was a circle in the lake where winter ice never froze. Young people, with their new and shiny beliefs, called this place the Warm Spot, and thought it was a geological oddity, a spring perhaps, or bad currents. But the older ones, whose gods still lived on earth, called it the Hungry Mouth of Water, because if water wasn’t a spirit, if water wasn’t a god that ruled their lives, nothing was. For centuries they had lived by nets and hooks, spears and ropes, by distances and depths. They’d lived on the rocking skin of water and the groaning ice it became. They swallowed it. It swallowed them. But whatever it was, none of them, young or old, would go near this one place. They all gave it a wide berth.
Every winter the Hungry Mouth laid its trap of thin ice and awaited whatever crossed above it. Young deer, not knowing the weaknesses of ice, fell through the thin roof of this trap, as did drunks who wandered away from their lives on land, forgot what they knew, and unwittingly offered themselves to this god. Once, a showman transported a sleek white beluga down from the mouth of Hudson Bay, taking it over the dry, rocky, and long portages with the help of logrollers. He even went so far as to hire Indian boys to keep the whale moist as it traveled. He showed it to people for a fee, calling out, “Come see the ugly beast!” And when it began to fail, he hoisted it up on chains and cast it outside his boat to die, into that hungry place, until finally it sank into the open mouth where it remained, an apparition from another world, in the warm circle of water. No one ever claimed to have seen the whale; no one dared to venture that close.
Alongside it were many thousand skinned carcasses of fur-bearing animals discarded by trappers. Without their pelts, it was said, they looked like human children, perfectly preserved, their eyes still open, dark and shining in water, peering through it. Two Skidoos had come to rest inside that mouth, as well as a shipwreck, hunters, and lost men who had believed they knew the waters. One of the faults of men, Husk always said, was that they believed they were smarter than they were. Nothing ever surfaced from that place, but some people said that if you dared close enough, you could see it all floating in there, each thing just as it had been the day it broke through or fell, the antlers of deer like roots unmoored.
I studied this place as we went around it. It looked no different from the rest of the lake, which made it all the more dangerous. Near this place was a current that would carry a boat north into the system of lakes, islands, and portages, all the way to places where remnants of old settlements and villages were now in ruins, and beyond that to rivers winding their way north. Islands in that far north held vestiges of an older people now only remembered. There were places wild rice grew, bonelike trees, and other plants that grew like hands reaching toward sky, and the cleared places of cattle. A person could go from water to water, land to land in that broken country. To keep the Hungry Mouth content while we passed it, Husk took a bag of tobacco from his pocket and fed it to the water, then he added cornmeal and bread.
AND THEN Fur Island came toward us. It was a dark island a little over two miles across, with rocks and trees. Behind it, other pieces of land floated in the distance.
It seems to me now that as we neared the island, we went into another kind of time, one that floated down through history, and like the lake we traveled, was unsounded and bottomless in places. Bush would say there were those who believed oceans from one side of earth entered oceans of the other, and perhaps the lake was like that, maybe it had a sister lake on the other side of the world—because it was said that the whales of one hemisphere sang the same songs as those of other whales far around the circle of the planet. They spoke the same language. They knew what had happened to water, to their sisters. Husk said Einstein believed time would bend and circle back to itself, maybe in the way that planets orbit. And I think he was right because I remember clear as yesterday how it felt to go there, to Fur Island, that day. As if time were nothing at all.
Whatever it was, I was traveling backward in time toward myself at the same time I journeyed forward, like the new star astronomers found that traveled in two directions at once.
I opened my handbag and took out the gift Dora-Rouge had pressed into my hand, the frog of my snooping. It was so small, so intricate and perfect, a life stopped in its living, trapped inside the ancient pitch of a tree. It was warm to the touch, and beautiful and sad at the same time. I hid it deep in my bag. Already I believed in the power of water. I believed water might leap up, open my palm, and take Dora-Rouge’s gift from me. Or perhaps it was that I did not trust my own grip on things and I feared losing more of myself than had already closed behind me, like the water behind us that gave no hint of our passage. I put the amber in the only safe place I knew, inside my bag at the bottom of a closed-in darkness, and I thought, it’s shining in there, casting its light.
The island we traveled toward had a history. Over the noise of the boat, Husk told me about the frogs on Fur Island, how thick they were, how people had once heard them from miles away. He said at times they sounded like drums, and that they were conceived by rain. They slept through years of drought, buried in the ground, until the time was right for their emergence, and then, on that island, gleaming in mud, frogs would come out of the darkness, bronze-eyed, golden, and eating their own skins. On rainy nights they appeared and were plentiful. They were sacred beings. One year they would again rise from the mud of the island, he said, the place they called the Navel of the World.
The names, Husk said, were like layers of time.
IT WAS A SMALL ISLAND, one of immense beauty. It had been hostage to that beauty, to its own plentitude, because it was inviting to animals and men alike. Rich, fertile, hilly in places, it was once populated with marten, otter, and beaver, a large concentration of animals in so small a place. When the water wasn’t frozen, animals were stranded by their solitude on this island, where Europeans sought their skins and other wealth. This place of trade and barter was a meeting place, a crossing ground. But after all that, it became an isolated parcel of land; now Bush was the only one who was there and she lived there year-round, during both the mosquito season and the near-arctic cold of winter, two facts that by themselves said much about her stamina and persistence.
There was more to Fur Island, I would learn. In the summer of 1924, two wolf children were found there. They’d been left behind by their parents—no one knew what happened to them—and gone wild. The children were raised by a pack of wolves. From wolves they’d learned how to evade explorers and priests, even in so small a space, how to cross ice in winter, how to avoid the Hungry Mouth. When finally they were captured—it had been accomplished through the killing of the wolf pack—they had night-shining eyes, dark and astonished to see human beings, creatures vaguely familiar and shadowy, but remembered by the children in a bad light and as ruthless beings, never to be trusted. They didn’t survive, that boy and girl. Dora-Rouge told me this. After being found they fell into a state of despair. The captive lives that held most humans could not hold them. They saw through the savagery of civilization. They grieved something fierce for their lost kin, the murdered wolves. Dora-Rouge remembered these two light-skinned, dark-eyed, tangle-haired children. Their wary eyes were the standard against which she measured all other wild things, including Hannah Wing, my mother, whose own fierceness and danger made the feral children seem tame by comparison.
It was on this island, too, where once a Briton declared himself king and strutted about like a foolish rooster until he was deposed by French trappers. And where a milkstone, flowing with healing mineral waters, was dynamited at the order of a bishop who wanted to spite the superstitious natives who said, and even worse, believed, that they’d been healed by those milky waters. One of his own priests had been cured of smallpox by these white, bubbling waters that came from stone, but even so, the bishop maintained that any healing in that place must have come from the devil, who lived under the land. Because of the killing of the waters, the Indians who journeyed there for healing let Christianity pass them by; they didn’t want a god that made them sick and took away the remedy.
Fur Island endured all of this, and somewhere, beneath it, the healing milk still flowed, frogs remained buried and waiting, and the wild children were still remembered by the trees.
STRAIGHT AHEAD OF US a yellow shaft of sunlight cut through a rolling mist. In it, I saw the smaller island beside Fur Island. It was a broken-off raft of land populated by spiders. In sunlight, the webs looked like a craziness, slow and silver, one which was taken apart and rewoven nightly as if to capture whatever came close. It was a peat island and it would have floated here and there, except that Bush kept it tethered to Fur Island by rope. The spiders, she said, kept the insect population down. They needed that in the north. Another reason she kept it tied was that this region, known as the Triangle, had long been in dispute between Canada, the United States, and tribal nations. Bush didn’t want the island of spiders to be part of the conflict between governments who had fought territorial battles over even smaller pieces of land. But most important, the two pieces of land had been one in the past, like Pangaea, a continent of puzzle pieces now separated by water. They were kindred spirits, one male and one female. Bush thought it would be too lonely for those pieces of land to drift far from one another.
From the first time I saw Bush, I knew she, like myself, understood such loneliness. She, too, had only thin, transient bonds to other people, having grown up on the outskirts of their lives. At first when I saw her, I thought she was a deer, thin and brown, smelling the direction of wind. She was standing at the edge of the island when we arrived, her dark, already graying hair down around her shoulders. She seemed rooted where she stood, at the boundary between land and water. She looked taller than she was. She was sinewy. I could see it was true that she might battle a force no one else would fight, as Dora-Rouge had told me.
She knew we were coming, even though there were no phones, not yet any citizens band radio. She had known I was moving toward her. She’d felt it, she told me later, sometime after I first saw the gap between her front teeth.
As the lake had grown shallow, Fur Island grew larger. What had been covered by water not long before was now mud. Bush stood barefoot in that dark, newly exposed clay, as if she’d just been created by one of the gods who made us out of earth, as if she’d risen up like first woman, still and awed by the creation. Around her were jagged, rough-looking rocks. Next to the harshness of these dark stones, she seemed deceptively soft. She wore a light green dress, the color of water, and I could see her thin legs through the skirt; they were tight and strong. In a slight movement, with sun reaching through clouds, the lake’s reflected light and the moving shadows shimmered across her. She was, in the first moment of my seeing her, equal parts light and water. And she had the closed look people wear when they are too much alone. It seemed that I would interrupt nothing in her life. But even so, seeing her, I was witness to a kind of grace I was hard put to describe; I’ve seen it carried in the stillness of deer and I’ve felt it in the changing power of seasons. It was only a glimpse—that’s all I can say with words—that there was something about her that knew itself.
The world of water, in truth, had claimed her the way it did with people, the way it would one day claim me, although nothing (on that first day) could have convinced me of this. I was afraid of water. I couldn’t even swim. But still, something inside me began to wake up right then and there. It was only a felt thing. It turned over like a wheel. I sensed already that the land on Fur Island, the water, would pull a person in, steal from them, change them, that it would spit them up transformed, like Jonah from the belly of the whale.
As I stepped out of the boat, I nearly lost my balance. It was the land, too, like the water, already trying to take possession of me, to bring me closer. The mud took in my feet and ankles. When Bush offered me her hand, I took it, but I felt like an intruder, awkward and unwanted in this quiet world.
THE PATH up to her house was lined on both sides by stones that were painted white. Green light fell through the trees. On the island it was not yet early fall. That’s how much difference a small angle of light could make, a few miles. It seemed moist there, as if water dripped from leaves. Large snails left shining pathways behind them. With its trees and ferns, its undergrowth, the island was dense with life and the beginnings of life.
As we neared the house, we passed by a large pile of bones. At first I thought these were more painted stones, but Bush said it was the skeleton of a sea turtle that would one day come together again, large as a room. For a living, she assembled things. She put together bones for LaRue, who sold them to museums and schools, and she put them together with devotion, as if the animal would come back down a road of life that had been broken through the felled forests. The island itself was a place of undone, unfinished things and incomplete creations. Not only were there the turtle bones and organ pipes destined for a church that was never built, but even a ship had been left there in parts. Long ago several men had tried to rebuild a new ship from parts of the old wreck, then abandoned it when it was only half-built. Parts of it were still visible behind the house, as were the ruins of an older house, a charred stone chimney.
The house was hard to see from the path, so it seemed that we walked toward a wild, uncertain destination. But then it came into view. It was made of dark gray stones and covered with vines. The Black House, some people called it, because it was so dark. But in its hiding it looked beautiful to me. The soot-colored stones that now made up the walls had been ballast carried by early ships, discarded once the ships were weighted down with the skins and forests they took from the island, thrown overboard like the beluga whale in the Hungry Mouth of Water. The ships vanished and returned, leaving behind a mountain of such stones. Mortared together, the dark, round stones smelled of earth.
The doorway into the Black House was low and small. A tall man would have to bend to pass through. But none of us was tall. We entered upright, which was the best way to step into Bush’s world.
While the house looked heavy and dark from the outside, it was lighter inside than other northern houses. With mosquito season over, Bush left the windows open, so that the vines crept inside and reached across the inner walls. Maybe they, too, were incomplete and searching for a sister vine.
The wooden floor, built from timbers and decks of the same ship that unloaded the ballast, had settled unevenly. The Turin was the name of the ship that had been wrecked there in a terrible storm, leaving the bodies of men to remain preserved in water, while only the wood of the boat washed to land.
It was a thick-walled house with a rounded wooden ceiling, domelike, made of lodgepole pines. There were no curtains at any of the windows, and one large room served as both living area and kitchen. A black-and-gray cookstove sat beside the low sink along one wall, a small light above it, and a potbelly stove was near the green table and benches. There was no bathroom, no electricity, and no mirrors, because, as Bush said, mirrors had cost us our lives. I would come to call her house the House of No. It was defined by what wasn’t there.
Bush cleared a small pile of bones off the table. “Sit down,” she told me. She had a soft, low voice. As she said this, she set the water to boil. As Bush and Husk talked, I looked around. At the shelf of books. At the view from a window. Outside was a garden with cornstalks. The turtle bones were visible from the house. Even as Bush and Husk talked, I could see that nothing about me escaped her vision. I felt her attention, her eyes following me, and all the time she served us coffee and cookies, tomato slices with onions, and butter and Wonder bread, she looked at my hands, at how I sipped the too-hot coffee she placed before me. She saw the scars on my face, even the tattoo I had made on my own arm, the initials of Lonnie Faro, a boy who once lived up a street from me. She saw these, the marks of my life. I didn’t cover them up. I didn’t even lean forward to let my hair fall across my skin. And my eyes, too, were busy. I studied her as she sat across the table, her muscled arms lean and feminine. I saw that she had a largeness, not of build and stature, but of someone who, as Dora-Rouge said, had battled unseen, unnamed forces. Next to her I would always feel ungainly.
At seventeen, a girl thinks mostly of herself, but from what Bush and Husk said, I knew there were larger concerns than mine. Not only was the lake at a record low, but dead fish had been found belly-up on the south shore and a few poisoned otters were found mired in mud. “The fish are dying by the hundreds up at Lake Chin,” he said. Though he hadn’t wanted to burden me, I heard the concern in his voice, the silent dread, still unformed, that comes to people when their world is threatened. It was in the air, stronger than words. It had crossed the water before us in the shape of two young men.
When Husk left, I walked with him to the water, then I stood a long time at the changing edge of lake and watched his boat grow small. The water seemed moody and capable of change at any moment. I had an urge to call after him, to have him turn the faded Raven around and take me back.
MY BEDROOM in the small three-room house made of dark ballast was stone on three sides. “My room.” I liked the sound of those words even as nervous as I felt. It was the first place that was wholly mine. The fourth wall was painted pale yellow, the color of fog on the day I arrived on the ferry. A blue woolen blanket covered my bed, and there was a small pine chest of drawers. A braided rug lay on the cool floor that was made of ship timbers. One of the vines came through the window like a dark green hand. The first thing I did was to put it out and close the uncurtained window. I did not want the world to sneak in on me. Like the missionaries, I was threatened by its life and the way it resisted human efforts to control it.
On that first day, after Bush showed me my room, she went out to her garden to check the corn and other plants. I saw her from the window. She seemed to know, without my saying so, that I needed time to look around the house. She knew, also, that I would watch her, that I would see her working, slow and patient, always with purpose. I was permitted to spy on her in a way, to know her before I had to give her any part of myself or take anything from her.
REMEMBERING, Bush once said, is like a song. It has a different voice with every singer. On these days of my remembering I see her as she was then, plain as day, bent in the garden clearing among the corn plants and sharp-edged pumpkin vines. I see, too, the altar of that first day. It was on a table in a back corner of the room. It was a shrine of sorts, for me. Bush, neither Catholic nor Protestant, was a person of the land, but she kept statues of saints and crosses alongside eagle feathers, tobacco, and photographs of loved ones. Just in case. So it looked ornate, the altar. Two red candles burned before three pictures of me as an infant.
In one photograph, I was held uncomfortably in the arms of Hannah Wing. She was not a natural mother, I could see. Wrapped tightly in a blanket, I looked at her with frightened eyes and it seemed that, even then, I pulled away from her. In another picture, Agnes, the large, bear-clad woman of her youth, held my hand. In this faded photo, I looked more like a miniature adult than a child. In the last picture, Bush gazed at me, her thin dark arms around the child I had been. I was resting on her hip, my legs about her waist. I looked nothing like the baby pictures I carried around, the ones I found in the twenty-five-cent Take Your Own Photo machine at Woolworth’s where I’d worked for two months, pictures left behind by someone else.
In the photos on Bush’s shelf, there were no scars, and in one, the one with Bush, I was smiling. About what, I could not have said because the smiling stopped long before my memory, as much as I had of it, began. I did not remember her, nor did I remember having been loved. I had an entangled memory, with good parts of it missing. I was returning to the watery places in order to unravel my mind and set straight what I had lost, which seemed like everything to me.
The altar frightened me. The candles and pictures made me feel as if I had died and been wrapped in a saint’s shroud in a European church, nothing but bones and parchment inside yellow cloth, with candles burning to save my soul from children’s Limbo. What I didn’t know was how I had been loved by Bush and fallen through her hands like precious water, as Agnes put it, or how Bush had fought hard for me against the strongest of our enemies, a system, a government run by clerks and bureaucrats. I didn’t know that Bush had held a mourning feast on my behalf. I didn’t know that I had once been in grave danger from the woman of my emergence, Hannah Wing, who had lived with Bush in this place. Hannah, who had disfigured me.
The altar, like the mourning feast Agnes told me about, and like the songs, was something akin to sympathetic magic, designed to bring me back. Who would have thought that an altar, a holy table with two eagle feathers, tobacco, and cornmeal, a shelf in a house on an injured island might have been my protection from all the people and events that had conspired against me. Or that it had summoned me from afar like Agnes’ old song for lost things, and drawn me back to the north.
There was a picture of my mother on the altar. She was still a girl, frail and with a dull-eyed staring. I was larger-boned than she was, and sturdy. As I looked, something in the picture caught my eye. I leaned closer and took the photo of Hannah in hand. Behind her, there was something or someone, a spirit, ghost, another presence who was only a shadow or blur, but distinctly real. I thought I heard a woman’s voice whisper near my ear. With animal fear my hair stood up on my neck and there was an odor suddenly in the air. Almond. Sweet.
It was nothing, I told myself, at most a glare of light or a double exposure, a thumbprint, perhaps, but all the same I went quickly away from the table. The talk about the mouth of the lake had made me edgy. It was only that, I told myself, that along with the daily conversations Dora-Rouge had with her departed husband and the many stories they’d all been feeding me.
But I had truly entered a different world, a tree-shaded place where unaccountable things occurred, where frogs knew to wait beneath dark ground until conditions were right for them to emerge, where water’s voice said things only the oldest of people understood.
SOMETIMES NOW, I see the island as it was then, how the vines indoors grew red that autumn and fell to the floor, and how I swept them away. Those hungry, reaching vines that wanted to turn everything back to its origins—walls, doors, a ladder-back chair, even a woman’s life. They wanted to cover it all and reclaim the island for themselves.
And I remember that on my first night, Bush browned elk meat and made a broth, stirred it together with tomatoes. We ate the elk stew with wild rice, sweet corn, tea with spoons of sugar. The smells in her house were hospitable in a way she was not. It seemed the only sounds in the house were not our voices, but the sound of forks against plates, the sound of the cups as she set them on the white drainboard. I did the dishes in near silence. This would become our unspoken arrangement: she cooked, I cleaned. Now and then one of us would say something, for the sake of politeness, but it was strained. Bush asked me how it had been with Agnes and Dora-Rouge. I said, “Fine,” and nothing more, and I resolved to go back to Adam’s Rib with the next boat.
As evening lay down upon the house, Bush said, “It’s getting dark.” She went outside to put gas in the generator and it hummed and, as God had done in one day, Bush created light. The sound of the generator was nearly deafening in the silence.
When I went to bed that first night, I heard Bush pouring water, moving things into their places, and when the generator went out I lay in bed in darkness, with no mother, no light. Again, I thought, the House of No, and the darkness stared me in the eyes, a wilderness I had never known in any of the three Oklahoma counties where I’d lived, empty and alone even then. It wasn’t true darkness facing me; the moon was large and bright. But it seemed the most full darkness to me, that light. I was as incomplete and unfinished as all the other things on the island. I faced the wall and tried to sleep.
I remembered so little of my life that sometimes I thought I had never really existed, that I was nothing more than emptiness covered with skin.
Now even my illusions began to drop away. I had created a past for myself and now, I knew, it was about to be dismantled, taken apart and rewoven the way spiderwebs on the floating island changed every night. Only a short time before, my life had been one thing. Now it was something altogether different. There was nothing for me to measure it by any longer. There was not even so much as a mirror in Bush’s house for me to recall my image. Only my pocket mirror. So, on the first night, in the bedroom where moonlight fell on the floor, I spoke my made-up story inside myself one last time.
In it, I was born wet and shining and open-eyed in a sunny room. That’s how I imagined my beginning. In the light of sun, with the radiance of dust as it floated through sunlight, the air full of it, and I was one of the chosen. The birthmark of Indians, a blue hand of God, was on my back as if to comfort me. Perhaps God himself had rocked me in his arms, and I was loved. I’d heard once in a Baptist church that God loved me so much he knew the number of hairs on a person’s head. I tried to count mine, lifting one strand at a time. But I gave up on the number of hairs, and that was when I created the story I’d lived by as a child. In it, my mother was beautiful and kind and her love for me went deep. Sorry to leave me, she died in a large bed with a flowered cover and beloved people, relatives, all about her. I was the last thought on her mind. When I was a child, this mother was the one I talked to in my many sleepless nights, eyes squeezed shut, praying to her as I cried. She was the one whose voice I heard inside myself. She told me wise things. She told me I was bound for happiness. I had long comforted myself in this way, held up in the hands of this story. But now, I knew, my story had worn itself out. The women in the Triangle said Hannah was still alive. I would find her and she would be ice. That night I felt something watching me, the vines perhaps, wanting in, or something animal, come in the night. Night itself, in all its vast and infinite dark space, peered in at me, but nothing took me by the hand.
And the altar was gone the next morning. So was the presence of the child spirit that had come to stand beside Bush’s bed the morning I’d arrived at Adam’s Rib on the ferry.
IT WASN’T LONG before our days, even in the heat, were spent preparing for cold weather. The predicted rain did not materialize, the lake was at a record low. Not a cloud passed over. The sky was clear and mostly blue. Bush went out to her garden late at night, as well as in the earliest parts of the day. She touched her plants as if coaxing them to rise. I would watch her, standing back in the shadows of my room so she couldn’t see me. I became the observer of her, the watcher of all the mystery in that place of large snails, mosses, and stones that had given milk. At times I saw her walking down to the lake. She walked slowly, as if she had all the time in the world. Sometimes she worked on the turtle. From the door and window I saw it begin to come together. So large, it was. I could hardly believe such a thing had lived in any sea. I felt sorry for it, so out of its element, and when I first learned to swim, I imagined myself as the turtle. I was slow and I saw my arms pull back the water from before me. And some nights, as I sat in a chair on the ground or watched from the window, at the misty edges of land and water, Bush became something else, something nearly invisible and silent, as if she were a kind of goddess with a beautiful song and Levi’s and graying hair.
BUSH WAS a brooding type of woman. She was, most always, exactly as she appeared to be. She had no need or use for social graces. Complex and simple at the same time, she was the right woman for the island of frogs, the island of feral children and wolves, of healing milk.
I don’t remember what it was about her I most disliked, but even in all the beauty, the discomfort of my being on the island with her was like a claw in my chest. It nearly hurt, her silence. Something in her, I felt, was unreachable. She carried a bit of darkness about her eyes. It wasn’t the kind of darkness that grows when someone is sick, but a deeper kind, the kind a well of water holds. I didn’t like her, but why should I have been different from anyone else? Surely not just because she had once loved me. And not because she was the one who knew my story, because she was in no hurry to tell me anything she knew about my life.
For a long time, I did not unpack the suitcase. I was convinced for days, then for weeks, that I would return to the mainland soon with Husk. I watched to see when our supplies were low, sending a psychic message across the lake, closing my eyes, praying to water and whatever else might reach him. Seeing him in my mind’s eye.
But just before he came each time, with Archway cookies for me, Bush divulged a part of the story I’d wanted and searched for. Once in a while, as the wind came up and the leaves blew from the trees, Bush would say, “Your mother was like the wind. Sometimes she was the winter wind and she chilled our bones and snapped frozen branches off the trees.” My mother, she said, was a storm looking for a place to rage. But there were times, she said, when Hannah was a warmer wind. “We were fooled then. We’d let her near and then she changed into ice and turned against us.”
With Bush, I didn’t feel as soft as I had on Adam’s Rib. I said what I thought, as if to fill the great silence. Once, frustrated with these tales, I looked at her and said, “You’re just saying that to keep me here. You just want me here to do all your work.”
And she laughed.
Taking offense at her, I went to my room and slammed the door. Sheepish, I came out in time for supper.
But it was true; she said just enough to keep me there. And I had to earn each word. I helped her prepare for cold weather. I sealed the gaps around windows, brought in wood. Bush disappeared at times, taking a canoe out into the water, returning with fish. I helped where I could, in spite of my anger and frustration. Some days I worked beside her in the garden, or at the stove or sink. At times, she put the bones for LaRue in place and told me another piece of history. Once, waiting for water to boil, she told me about the two trappers everyone called Ding and Dong. Each had accused the other of trespassing his traplines, springing the other’s traps and stealing the animals from the trap. The conflict grew. Finally one of them shot the other, then set out for the far north, where no one would bother searching.
She put a pin in a vertebrae. “You know who it was? Who stole from the traps?” She looked at me.
I resented the quiz. “What’s your point?” I said.
“It was Wolverine; they do this.”
I looked at her. “What’s that? Wolverine?”
“That’s what everyone wants to know.” She laughed. Not a hostile laugh. An easy one.
“Is that all? You’re just telling me that?”
Later, out stacking wood for the coming winter, I said, “You are too strange.” I was surprised at my own honesty, but who could lie on such an island?
And she said, “Your mother was a skin that others wore. The man your mother lived with kept animals in cages and they would cry at night like humans.”
I stacked the wood, washed dishes, used Pine Sol in the outhouse, and thought, always, about her few words. Sometimes they made sense. But still there were times I was determined to leave the island. I didn’t like it there and I wasn’t comfortable with Bush. I didn’t know then that what I really wanted none of us would ever have. I wanted an unbroken line between me and the past. I wanted not to be fragments and pieces left behind by fur traders, soldiers, priests, and schools. But so many nights, when it began to get dark, Bush would go outside and fill the generator with gas and create warm light and a room full of intimacy and she would say one more thing, just enough to keep me there, just enough to tie me to her and the island as if I were staked to it like the little floating raft of land with spiders.
And so I remained.
One day I unpacked the suitcase and put my clothing in drawers. Husk came and went many times. I swept the floors that had been at sea and I began to like them, and the stones, and the still-open windows. I grew accustomed to the green reaches of the vines and the floors that creaked at night when Bush walked over them.
WHEN RAIN FINALLY CAME, it started at night. I’d carried a lamp to my room and sat on my bed until late, thinking, trying to remember Dora-Rouge’s animal song. By then I had given up closing the window and one of the vine’s leaves had turned red. Green dragonflies floated in on the last of warm breezes, and drifted around the room.
A light rain fell at first, but soon it grew stronger, then fell in great torrents. It had the force of a sea behind it. There was roaring thunder. The sound of water lashing down filled me with such a longing, an ache in my chest I could not yet fathom, but now know as the animal heart yearning its way into being, pulled out of a song. I was drawn to the window, magnetized. Outside, the white stones of the footpath were shining beacons. In a flash of lightning, the trunks of trees were straight and pale, and downhill the island of spiders was visible. The sky broke, pieces of earth and mud flew up against the house and the water shining on the turtle bones made the skeleton look whole and alive, a pale turtle wanting to swim in the falling sea of a wet darkness.
With the window wide open, I lived inside water. There was no separation between us. I knew in a moment what water was. It was what had been snow. It had passed through old forests, now gone. It was the sweetness of milk and corn and it had journeyed through human lives. It was blood spilled on the ground. Some of it was the blood of my ancestors.
When I slept it was deeply, finally. I slept into another light as the sound of occasional thunder jarred the floor of the house.
At the first light of morning I sat up in bed. The storm by then was dark green and there was still a rhythmic song of falling water, but a larger noise was behind the rain, a great disturbance of air. I went to the window and looked up. In the first spread of light above us was a cloud, a great cloud of flesh and feather so thick the sky itself appeared to be moving as the wings of tundra swans clattered together, as they pulled themselves south. Their voices seemed to wake the land itself, which at that moment lived only for the great, beautiful birds, the sky full and moving. I wasn’t dreaming. I had no need to dream. This world I’d entered, however strange, was dream enough with its dark roots, its instinctual light and full sky. I had traveled long and hard to be there. I’d searched all my life for this older world that was lost to me, this world only my body remembered. In that moment I understood I was part of the same equation as birds and rain.