IN WINTER, when living stood still, it was easy to forget that seeds lived in the ground, dark and preparing for spring. There was a fresh smell to winter, clean and moist, and snow drifted over the turtle bones and whirled around us. The other seasons might have been only imagined by need or desire, because when winter occupies the land, it makes its camp everywhere. You cannot step through its territory without knowing that what has fallen over the land has a stronger will than ours, and that tragedy is sometimes held in both its hands.
That winter was no different. Joppa Ryan, Tommy’s cousin at Old Fish Hook, was killed in a freak accident when the jack he was using to change a flat tire slipped on the ice and hit him. Then Frenchie’s visiting daughter, Helene, a woman I’d never met, walked off drunk one night across the lake and disappeared. Her footprints in a new layer of snow led to the Hungry Mouth, but no one was courageous enough to go retrieve her body. None of us wanted to risk being swallowed by the lake. It made me sad to think of her, but the healing outpouring of tears comes slowly in winter, if at all. Like everything else, like water stopped in the rivers, tears wait for spring. Grief is forced to a halt. Frenchie, held in this grip of winter, did not cry. She went pale and quiet beneath the rouge. By then, I’d forgiven her for asking about my face.
Several times, Dora-Rouge said she should have been the one who died. She grew even more insistent about going home to die.
But if tears and human lives were stopped, the wolves were not. Their cries of raw nerve made up for the lack of human mourning. “Look,” Bush said one day.
I went to the window where she stood and looked out.
“They do this every winter. They know the skins of their ancestors are stored in there.”
A few of the wolves, not quite a whole pack, circled the shed that contained the furs and traps. They looked at the wood as if they could see or smell the trapping gear through the walls. It made them restless, their breathing visible as they paced. If we understood their language, their cries might tell us all that had happened on the island.
There were many voices of winter, not just the wolves and crows. There was the wind against out sheltering walls, the wind that sang across swirling snow. Never silent, the ice of the lake pushed against itself and cried out. It broke and healed, groaned and gave off green light. From a spot at the window I would think of all the things lost in Lake Grand—jewelry, wedding rings thrown in by hurt and estranged people, boats, fishermen from the storms, and now Helene.
Even silence was loud on Fur Island. There were soundless walkings. The quiet flying of owls. The absent voices of flown-south birds.
Sometimes, as we sewed, and the trees creaked or the gales of wind howled around us, Bush took a straight pin from beneath her teeth and in a quiet voice she spoke of my mother. Firelight moved across her face. “You see how powerless we are against the wind.” As if to confirm something while cold crept under the door, Bush took a piece of cloth, got up, and filled the gap beneath it. She didn’t have to tell me more to say, “Hannah was like that.” By then I knew what she meant. Indifferent elements, and cold. She meant that a person can’t blame the wind for how it blows and Hannah was like that. She wanted me to know that what possessed my mother was a force as real as wind, as strong as ice, as common as winter.
Occasionally we had the noise of a visitor. Now and then, Husk drove his enormous truck over the ice with groceries and heating oil and cans of gas for the generator and always with wood, our utmost necessity. He brought Archway cookies for me. At these times, after he stamped the snow from his feet, there would be talking and laughing. And Tommy came over, sometimes at the urging of Agnes. She worried about me. It wasnt good for me, she said, to be isolated on the island, not with Bush and her long, brooding silences. Tommy always brought deer or moose meat and we smiled stupidly at each other as we sat at the table or walked through the snow on our hand-crafted snowshoes. Sometimes I went back with him to the mainland.
But for the most part, Bush and I were quiet for hours—sometimes it seemed like days—at a stretch. It was a full and caring silence, and in it we were all that existed, the dark gray stones of the house moving through howling, boundless space, the planet traveling around a weakened sun, the windblown ice glaring up at sun’s diminished power. In those days even the wolves seemed remote and far away. Darkness came early and nights were long. At times I put my sewing down, stationed myself at one of the windows, and stared out at the stark white land where rabbits were burrowed beneath heavy trees.
The tracks of animals wrote stories I couldn’t yet decipher, being new to this place. There were places on snow where a set of tracks vanished in mid-path, next to a snow-embossed fan of wings, a rabbit or mouse lifted up in the claws of a hungry god.
Soon I barely remembered the vines that crept inside the windows, or that this world was capable of heat and growing corn, green moss.
THROUGH THE WINDOW one January afternoon, like something glimpsed from the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a dark shape being shadowed by smaller ones. I squinted into the glare. It was a solitary cow moose, thin-legged, with winter fur. She was dark and great, stranded on slick ice, unable to move without falling, while the wolves walked toward her with their heads down, their muzzles frozen. They spoke to one another from inside themselves and slowly they circled her.
She was defenseless on ice. She would fall. She was old and alone. She had no calf, no mate, no protection. The wolves had selected wisely.
I heard the stranded moose cry out. I turned away and put my hands over my ears.
It was an ancient ritual of hunger, but the laws of winter were a justice foreign to my nature. At times I could not bear this world. At times I was sorry I’d gone there. Bush said winter was like a wound healing because of the way everything closes in, grows over itself. But winter was too large for me.
That night I swallowed the potion Dora-Rouge had prescribed for my sleeplessness. In the dark, chilled room, I undressed and slid into bed, covering my face with blankets, feeling the safety and warmth of my own breath. But I could not block out the helpless vision of the moose.
Bush, too, looked out the window some days. By now the wind was blowing snow under the door and knocking at the window. It sounded like someone wanting to come inside. As she stood there I smelled and sensed that there were things Bush did not say. What wasn’t spoken was as cold as what was said. Ice heart. That was Hannah.
But I had my secrets, too. For a long time I kept to myself a missing part of my own story. In the early part of my search for kin, I’d found a sister in South Dakota, my blood sister, Henriet, younger than me. I never told anyone how I’d stolen the money to find someone to track her down, had walked into a neighboring house one night and taken the money off a nightstand while the people slept. It wasn’t really like stealing, I thought. It was dire necessity. Fifty dollars was what I paid a man to find her, and I had slept with him, too. No one could ever prove who’d stolen the money, though everyone suspected me. I’d had such hope when first I found my sister. It was like finding my true name. That’s how it felt. I hitched rides across the plains to get there. Finally, I found my way with a truck driver, delivering cattle to a feedlot in a silver truck that smelled of the animals, was weighted with them.
Henriet wasn’t related to Agnes. She had a different father, so I told myself it was all right to keep her secret. But the truth was, I didn’t speak about her because her existence both horrified me and filled me with despair. She was lovely and quiet, but she was a girl who cut herself, cut her own skin, every chance she had. Her eyes were innocent and trusting, but her skin was full of scars. She cut herself with scissors and razor blades, as if she could not feel pain. Perhaps it was more than just wounds. Perhaps it was a language. She spoke through blades, translated her life through knives. I took a bracelet to her, but when I saw its sharp edges I pretended I’d gone empty-handed and gave her instead some of the cash I’d stolen. She never spoke. We just looked at each other. We sat and smoked one cigarette after another. Only she put hers out by pinching the end with her fingers. She could not be hurt. That’s what she wanted to show. Not by anything outside her, that is, not anymore.
AT NIGHT, as the wind blew against the Black House, I lay in bed and thought of Hannah. Some cold nights I felt myself close, come together in the way ice grew across water, at the edges first, then suddenly, all at once, in the same way Bush said winter fills in the world, like a scar. At first the ice could be broken easily, then only with an ax, then it could not be broken at all. It locked in whatever was there—boat, fisherman, floating wood, all stopped in place. A cold firmament, beautiful and frightening, solid and alive. I could hear it, the tribe of water speaking.
Winter was such a place of shifting boundaries that I remembered, heard, and felt things that had not been there before. I began to understand Dora-Rouge’s memory, especially on nights when I heard the sound of drumming inside the lake. It came from the frozen water. I believed what the old people said, that fish were a kind of people, like the wolves, and that they wanted to live as much as we did, those of us who had been born to a destiny of death and survived, passing through like small fish through a hole in a net.
During the long dark nights, I remembered or dreamed of the animals taken, marten, beaver, wolverine. I saw their skinless corpses. I heard their cries and felt their pain. I saw their shadows cross snow, ice, and cloud. We Indian people had always lived from them and in some way we were kin, even now. Behind my eyelids were the high loads of furs on freighter canoes going down a river, and thin, tall men in dark clothing walked toward me. There were women who looked like me and carried pictures of Mary and Jesus. They wore mirrors as if they were gold, on their belts, around their necks, pinned to dresses. The light caught on them and threw a glare on me, my face in every one. The people wore rags by then. There was nothing to warm them. Then the mixed-bloods turned against the others the way dogs will turn against their own ancestors, the wolves, in order to eat, to live. Loretta was sold into sickness and prostitution, and those things followed Hannah into dark, dark places.
IN THE SHORT HOURS of day light we were busy. Now Bush and I made skirts. Our time was spent gathering cloth. The table was covered with patterns made of newspapers, folded fabric, and ribbons on spools.
Time vanished when we were frozen inside. As we pieced together cloth, it snowed. Wind opened the door of the shed and banged it closed again. Together we went outside and as the wind inhaled there was a moment of silence in which we heard the sound of the northern lights. “Listen,” Bush said, and I heard the shimmering of ice crystals, charged by solar storms.
One below-zero night, as streams of light moved through the sky, and the solar winds were strong enough to blow snow, I dreamed that the wolves of the island, torn out of their deaths, were stirring about and holding counsel and looking for their human children. Another night I dreamed a plant. I drew the plant on paper and the next time I went across ice and cold to the mainland, I took the drawing to Dora-Rouge. “Oh, I know that one,” she said, when she saw it. “That one grows up above us.” She looked at me thoughtfully, as if it weren’t at all unusual that I had dreamed such a plant.
Those dreams of mine, if that’s what they were, lived inside the land. Maybe dreams are earth’s visions, I thought, earth’s expressions that pass through us. Although sometimes, to make myself seem larger than I was, I liked to think I had visions.
“There were always plant dreamers,” Dora-Rouge said, picking a thread off my sweater.
In bed at night there were times I could see in the dark. My fingers grew longer, more sensitive. My eyes saw new and other things. My ears heard everything that moved beyond the walls. I could see with my skin, touch with my eyes.
ON THE MAINLAND when I visited, while Agnes pared potatoes, Husk told me and Tommy the news—that in a magazine he’d read he learned how we are made from stars. He said maybe visions, dreams, or memories existed because time, as Einstein thought, was not a straight line. He said it explained why I saw things, like the ancestors glittering with mirrors and carrying iron kettles. I lived in more than one time, in more than one way, all at once. “That explains Dora-Rouge, too,” he said. “How she talks with Luther.”
Yes, I thought. I understood. I saw yesterday and sometimes it looked the same as tomorrow. That’s why Bush was dreaming her way north in the short hours of daylight, dreaming the way a bird studies the stars and waits for spring, for a certain moment, agreed upon, when all the birds would fly away. That’s why the words of the two men from the north had created a need in her, I think now, a feeling that she should go there, up to the far land of the Fat-Eaters. It was that time in our history when the past became the present. There was the death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, the old Lakota man who was tortured and killed in a VFW lodge in Nebraska by God-fearing, God-loving men and their wives. There was the formation of the American Indian Movement. Red women and men all coming to new life. But Bush’s determination rested on other things as well. She was a woman of heart, of land. She and the world were all of a piece. She would not permit any more worlds to be gone or taken. The dams would not be built. It was simple, her feeling. “The river cannot be moved,” she said out loud one day, as she looked at maps of the north.
Because roadblocks would again be put up in the spring, she decided to travel there by canoe. Since my mother was thought to be up there at a town called Ohete, or New Hardy, I would go along.
FOR HOURS, when she wasn’t sewing or reconstructing a badger for LaRue, Bush bent over maps. Then she squinted out the window as if she, too, had once been snow-blinded, or could see in the darkness around us the labyrinth of waterways that went all the way north. She called her plan “our secret.” She spoke about which ways the currents ran and wondered aloud where side currents were likely to be. She sat close to the heat of the fire and plotted first one route, then checked it against another, working us through a maze, gauging distance, time, and space with the precision of a mathematician. This was no simple operation we were undertaking, I could see.
Sometimes I called her Marco Polo as she kept a list, writing down what we would need to take with us that next spring when thaw came rushing over the land. We would need an ax, she said, a little saw, and cooking pans that fit one into another. We would carry a small amount of dry wood in the canoes and take Sterno to cook on, in case it rained, and in case the wood along our way was also wet. We would have to find our way around obstacles, maybe the floating logjams of foresters, possibly dangerous rapids. According to “our secret,” we would leave early in the year, because that was when the fish would still be hungry and food plentiful. But it also meant we would encounter swarms of mosquitoes and blackflies. If we waited until later, she said, who could predict if the dam would already be built or not?
It seemed to me that the weight of our journey increased tenfold each day. From inside the house made of dark gray ballast, I felt us sinking, the way a weighted boat drops down water, falling to the bottom, resting there like the Skidoos and bodies and skinned animals in the Hungry Mouth of Water.
It was my fear all along that we would be lost and that there would be no way to get our bearings. And from everything Bush said, from all the maps with their different topographies, I knew we were going, however much she planned, into strange waters, a geography that was whimsical at times, frightening at others.
Obsessed with the faded squares of paper that represented land, she tried to unravel all earth’s secrets. I saw that she searched for something not yet charted. Besides, like a compass in this northern place of underground iron, the maps were not reliable.
Outside our windows, the icicles looked like teeth, as if we lived in the open mouth of winter. There were white passages of animals, and the drifting, changing boundaries of winter.
ONE DAY Bush looked up at me where I stood before the blue-gray light of the window. “Look at this,” she said. She sat at the green table, a map in front of her, a cup of tea beside it. “These are almost all connecting.”
It was true. The waters were linked together like a string of beads connected by a single thread. The rivers and streams all looked wide enough, according to her, to be passable by canoe. It was a replica of an ancient map. Bush turned the blue map over and examined it for a date. There was none. “This had to be made sometime between 1660 and 1720.”
I stared at her. “How can you tell?”
“Because those years there were no northern lights. There are stories about it. It tells how the people were deserted by the lights from the sky. At the same time the lights abandoned the people, the tribes came down with the breathing illness, the spotted disease, and were invaded by French fur traders.”
I looked at her. I didn’t understand the connection. Maybe it was the spell of winter that had come over her, I thought.
“Don’t you see? There would have been more thaw without the protection of the solar dust. See the difference in the amount of water?”
She opened another map to show me the discrepancy. I studied it as if I understood, but the only thing I knew for certain was that Bush could put together things far and beyond shirt patterns and the bones of animals and the stories of lost children. With my own eyes I saw that none of the maps were the same; they were only as accurate as the minds of their makers and those had been men possessed with the spoils of this land, men who believed California was an island. Bush said those years also showed up in the rings of trees.
I was intrigued by the fact that history could be told by looking at paper. I’d wondered before what it was about the maps that occupied Bush’s time, and now I, too, became interested. I could see it myself. Just as I saw sleds with frozen animals. A deeper map. At times I would pore over them beside her, the lantern lighting the table in front of us. They were incredible topographies, the territories and tricks and lies of history. But of course they were not true, they were not the people or animal lives or the clay of land, the water, the carnage. They didn’t tell those parts of the story. What I liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn’t, and I respected it for that. Change was the one thing not accounted for. On the other hand, it gave me no confidence in the safety of our journey that we were venturing into such a vast unknown terrain that might mislead us, a terrain that had destroyed other human missions and desires. It was a defiant land. It had been loved, and even admired, by the government’s surveyors, for its mischief and trickiness and for the way it made it difficult for them to claim title. Its wildness, its stubborn passion to remain outside their sense of order made them want it even more.
Another day, after one of Bush’s long silences, she laughed out loud at the ignorance of Europeans. Out of the blue, she said, “Beavers. None of them ever considered how beavers change the land.” She was right. Beavers were the true makers of land. It was through their dams that the geographies had been laid, meadows created, through their creation that young trees grew, that deer came, and moose. All things had once depended on them. And on these maps, we could read back to how land told the story of the beaver people. It brought back the words of Dora-Rouge. One day she told me that earth has more than one dimension. The one we see is only the first layer.
WHEN BUSH WASN’T WORKING or inside looking at maps, she dressed up in warm clothing and went out alone to fish. She would go to the hole in the ice, the one cut with an auger, drop in a weighted lure or decoy, and wait. Closer to the mainland, others had set up their icehouses. I remained in the house. I failed to see the pleasure in sitting on ice in a little shack that maybe had a radio inside, a heater, maybe even an old chair sitting on the lake, and a rattle reel on the wall. Or carrying home fish stiff enough to use as sled runners, which some people did.
When she’d come in, it was usually with a frozen walleye or a poutfish. But I remained indoors or, occasionally, I took off on snowshoes from island to island, watching animals and studying their tracks, and when I walked from land to land, or cut wood, or daydreamed at the window, it was always with a head full of knowledge or stories I’d gained from Husk or Bush. Out walking one night, with the full moon in the indigo sky, I thought how the people once believed that birds migrated to the moon for winter. Perhaps out of memory or longing. They thought the moon was an egg and a mother bird, large and white in the sky, and that they were going back to their origins. Agnes had said, “While some people see a man’s face on the moon, we see the shadowy gray outlines of birds.” And it did look as if they were there, stopped in flight before moon’s round face.
And when the birds arrived, it was said, they told pitiful stories about us poor, wingless fools who had no choice but to stay behind and freeze. They were sorry for us. And they were happy, always, to return in spring, to see which of us had lived and which of us had not survived the winter.
WHENEVER BUSH TALKED about my mother, I could feel a tall shadow walk toward us. I felt its presence in the room with us, while beyond our walls, as we talked or sewed, the ice outside talked with the wind, gambling about which of them would one day get the better of us.
One day after Bush spoke of Hannah, it came to me that I was all Hannah had. Not in the way of love. Not to care about. But I was what she could use to barter a place in the world. I was what, when she carried me, other people smiled upon, people who might have feared or hated her before. I was her money. I was her fare. She had needed me for this, if for nothing else. And for this reason I was of use to her.
That day I caught Bush staring at my face. I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, “Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.”
And one day, as I sat close to him in the truck, Tommy touched my face and said, “Tell me about the scars.”
I looked at him. I thought how I’d asked Bush about my scars. I thought of the last time I’d seen myself in the little piece of mirror in my bedroom. I thought how scars were proof of healing. “What scars?” I said.
IN THE SHORT HOURS of daylight the world sparkled like precious stones. One day in late January, when the ice was deepest, and the owls had already begun their mating songs, I wrapped myself in a coat and scarf and went outside to get wood. It was a cold so fierce it hurt to breathe. My breath froze, nearly solid, in air before my face. My nostrils turned to ice. My lungs closed up. It was too cold to snow, but not yet cold enough to stop all human machines, and while I was there with my arms full of wood, there was the brittle noise of Tommy’s old rusted Dodge crossing the lake, along with a sharp cracking of ice. Holding the wood, I watched him arrive and I forgot the cold.
He wore one of my shirts that day beneath his coat and vest, the shirt with the bright green ribbons, and he carried a white-wrapped package of moose meat. While I stood, he parked, jumped down out of the truck, and opened the door of the house for me. While I unloaded the wood, he went back to the woodpile and picked up another armful, breathing a hello, smiling at me on his way. That’s still what we did, smile at each other. The worst thing about love is its passionate foolishness.
Inside, Bush put on a pot of rice while we stood before the heat of the stove, warming ourselves, self-conscious, still smiling.
Then, after we ate, Bush urged Tommy, “Have more rice.” He complied. He worked hard and needed food.
The night before, Bush had called out in her sleep, and now she looked tired and drawn, so she retreated to her room, to rest, she said, leaving us alone to talk about small things.
“What have you been doing?” he asked me. His hair was still mussed from the cap. I smoothed it. He grabbed my hand. He kissed it. More smiling.
“I made ten new shirts.” I showed them to him, all fresh and stiff on hangers. He admired them. I had to admit, they did look beautiful, all fresh new cloth, red and blue ribbons. “I’ll take them all,” he said.
“You wish.”
“How’s Bush?”
This was what we’d say. Then I would ask about his many grandparents. But always beneath the words was something warmer, a happiness at being together. Under the surface of our skins, our words, even young, we were already a woman and a man together.
Tommy was different from the boys I’d known before. They were interested in cars, rock-and-roll music, ball games, and girls; they were children. He was a provider already. He hunted and fished, both with painstaking compassion and respect for the animals, the way it was supposed to be done. Already I loved him, though I didn’t know what he’d think of me if he knew about my life.
Before long, I knocked on the door of Bush’s room. “I’m going to Agnes’. Do you want anything from the store?”
She just said, “No.” She didn’t even think about the question. She sounded sleepy.
I laced my boots and grabbed the shirts to take to Tinselman’s. I liked the freedom of being able to leave without permission. As we were leaving, Bush opened the door and rushed outside without even a coat across her shoulders. “Angel! Tommy!” she called out. “Wait. I just thought of something.” She was breathless from the cold air and her hair was tangled. “Stop at LaRue’s, would you, and see if he’ll send back the old map. He’ll know which one I mean. Just tell him the oldest one.”
“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. I slid over to sit close to Tommy. I put the shirts neatly in the seat by the window. Then we drove off across the blue-gray lake. I looked over at Tommy, then out the window, smiling as we crossed over the slow fish that were beneath us, the waiting weeds.
“What?” he said in that way men do when they want to know if a woman cares for them, sorry they can’t read her mind. There was a crunching sound as tires drove over the snow.
“Nothing. I’m just thinking.”
I had money coming from Tinselman, so after I left the new shirts, I stocked up on flour and some instant coffee. I bought two bottles of Coca-Cola for Bush. She liked Coke but would never buy it for herself. It was still sold there in the machines where the bottle has to be slid outward along a maze, into a slot, and then pulled straight up. And I bought her some Jasmin soap, a new item, and Pet Milk. I was careful not to buy more than I could carry in my pack. I wanted to walk back and I didn’t like to pull a sled. It gave me a shoulder ache.
THAT NIGHT, I stayed with Agnes and Dora-Rouge. From the window I could see there was a circle around the moon; another snow coming in. Such snow-light in February, like the month I was born, with the light behind a grayness.
In the cot that night, I dreamed of islands with moss-covered ruins. The dreams rose up in such a way that I began to believe such places existed. Dreaming, according to Dora-Rouge, was how decisions were made in older times. That’s what she said that morning when, like a young child, I climbed into bed with her. As tough as I’d once thought myself, I was making up for all the mothers I never had, resting my head on a pillowcase covered with blue flowers, pulling the cover up to my neck. Both of us lay on our backs, warm and comfortable. “I dreamed of stones,” I told her. I looked at the water stains on the ceiling while we talked. Dreams, she said to me, were how animals were tracked and hunted, how human lives were carried out in other times, other places.
As uncomfortable as it was, I had missed my little cot in the living room and the smell of Agnes’ bad coffee and dust. Agnes still slept in the bedroom with John Husk, even though she said he snored something fierce and then said it was her. This made me smile. I believed it was her all along.
“You’re getting hips,” Agnes said at breakfast, looking at my body.
I laughed. “Yeah. Great, huh?”
“How come Bush never comes over anymore?”
I sipped Agnes’ terrible coffee and lied. “She’s busy sewing. She sews all the time. She doesn’t want to work for LaRue any longer.” It wasn’t completely a lie. I didn’t tell her that Bush sat in front of maps and pondered a way up to the territory of the Fat-Eaters. She would think Bush was crazy. I had doubts, too.
Agnes shook her head. “It’s too hard on her eyes to sew that much.”
I had thought this as well, that it strained her eyes to sew and to put the tiny bones together into animals and then, after all that work was done, to squint at the lines on maps. She never gave her eyes a rest. But her vision was sharp and accurate. She could see a snowshoe hare against a background of snow. Like Agnes and me, it was Bush’s back that ached from sleeping on poor mattresses and cots. From bending over work. We were a sisterhood of bad backs.
I DREADED going to LaRue’s. Bush had just dreamed that he’d purchased two mummies, a mother and a child, the child curled up between the mother’s bent knees. And Agnes said it was true. She had seen them arrive in two glass-and-wood containers. She, like Bush, knew that the bones and dry flesh of the dead belong in no human dwelling.
I knocked on his door and was relieved that there was no answer, that I would not have to go inside. Through the door, I could smell the furs and bones and formaldehyde, could see in my mind’s eye the world’s largest beetle; it had a deep-green back. I left a note for LaRue, sliding it under the door.
As I walked back on Poison Road, Tommy drove up beside me and stopped. “Hey.” He opened the door. “Need a lift?”
I jumped up into the truck and rode with him back to Agnes’ house.
“You want me to drive you home?”
Home. It was such a certain word, so sure of itself, so final. But I liked it. “No. I’ll walk.”
But I insisted on taking off on foot across the lake. “I need to walk,” I assured him. I cherished my times with him, but for now I wanted to walk and think about my dreams, and whether or not Bush was truly crazy. To my surprise, I was getting used to silence, I found it rich and necessary. Tommy and I would have our time. I knew this. I was patient. “I need to, Tommy. I need to think,” I said. Besides, I knew his grandfather needed him that day. Agnes had told me the man was having trouble seeing.
As I walked across the frozen lake, I went past a few people who were ice-fishing. Some played radios. I heard the music as I passed, each radio telling something about the person who was fishing. The Beatles. Tammy Wynette. The Polka Kings. I waved as I walked past. That’s how it was there. You met someone on the road, you’d wave. You pass them on water, in a boat, you lift a finger. On ice, you nod and smile. They all knew me by now, most of them. It was not a large village.
IT WAS A LONG WALK to Fur Island. As I crossed the lake and heard its voice, I thought of Husk’s words, that the world was alive, as the people there said. The lake was alive. I was sure of it. Not only when it was large-hipped and moving, but even when it was white, contracted, and solid. The Perdition River flowing beneath moving ice was alive. So was the ice itself. And even the winter that sang itself into our bones. The air shimmered around me like the moment before a lightning strike, intricate ice crystals falling from a cloud.
I thought of seeing the northern lights, and that Husk had told me once that there are shining plankton who join together and make a spiral of light in the ocean, that there are many other things in nature that twist around that way, the Milky Way, the double helix of humans. The northern lights were part of this, I was sure.
By the time I returned to Fur Island, the light had already faded. I was warm from exertion, but the moment I entered the house I felt a chill. Bush sat at the green table in the dark. Beside her, a pitcher of water was crusted with ice, and the fire had gone out. She had been crying. She didn’t seem to notice I was there.
“Bush?” I said this tentatively. I lit a lantern.
“The beavers,” was what she said, as if that explained her blue lips, the house it would take hours to reheat.
It was the beavers. I understood. I did. I understood in one word: the beavers were nearly gone, our lives nearly extinguished along with theirs, our world transformed by those who could never have dreamed this continent in all its mystery, in all its life and beauty. It would never recover itself.
I understood, too, that winter could lodge itself into a person’s bones so deep they would forget they were human.
I busied myself. I put wood on the fire. I wrapped a blanket around Bush’s shoulders. As soon as the stove was hot, I heated a can of soup and made her eat. Then I warmed water in the turkey roaster and placed her feet in it. Taking control, I said, “Tomorrow we’re going to visit Dora-Rouge and tell her what you’re up to. John Husk will be glad to drive us back.”
THAT NIGHT I kept my door wide open. I said it was to let in warmth from the main room, but I really wanted to be sure Bush was all right. I woke a few times and checked on her. She slept soundly. With her hair on the pillow she looked vulnerable and soft, her eyes closed peacefully.
The next morning, I put extra wood in the stove, then closed the flue partway to keep it burning slow and steady while we were gone.
“I don’t know,” Bush said. “I don’t think we should tell them about this.”
“We’re going to. This is crazy.” I sounded forceful and more certain than I was, but just as we prepared to leave, LaRue arrived with the ancient map. He smelled of men’s cologne and wore a new, starched shirt. His hair was combed back into a ponytail at the back. He was handsome, I had to admit, in the Tom Jones kind of way, but I knew all the reasons Bush did not want him. His dark house was frightening and smelled of things that should have been buried or thrown into mud or water or the air from which they came. His walls were covered with shelves that held preserved animals. He had bowls of glass eyes that stared out as if taking the measure of all people. He wasn’t careful with fish—he offended them—and I was sure that was what had jeopardized our lives that day on the lake, even though I had paddled with him through the storm begging forgiveness of the water people, the fish people. He didn’t care enough for life.
I looked at Rue. He was too eager for her love. His eyes practically bulged out, despite the way she kept him at a cold distance. But it wasn’t really Bush he wanted, it was a woman, any woman. It was his loneliness he wanted relieved. I eyed him some more, looking for good things, redeeming qualities. She would never give in to him, I could see that. At the same time I thought maybe he had potential, maybe I could get through to him. Bush’s solitude made her, in my opinion, a little crazy. Of course, his presence made her even crazier. As he took the map out of a tube, I thought of all the older men on the mainland, and how none of them could have kept up with the likes of her. Maybe I’d make him my project.
“What sign are you?” I asked him impulsively. “No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. Scorpio.”
“How did you know?” he said.
When he touched the map, the corners turned to dust. He was making a sacrifice to get close to Bush. This, I thought, was optimistic. It was the way men behaved in old stories. They went on a mission, a quest, performed a task, overcame an obstacle. Brought back Golden Fleece. He had probably come right over the Hungry Mouth and survived.
He unrolled the map carefully for her. I stood behind them and looked. The map was truly beautiful. It was undated but very old. The yellowed paper had disintegrated at the edges. It was the most ornate map I’d ever seen. It was painted in a Greek blue that still had, in places, a bit of brightness to it. Cherubs were at the edges, blowing air. There were water monsters, including a horned serpent with a tail. The serpent, or dragon, had once been yellow, maybe even gold. Waving lines with arrows recorded the directions of currents. Mudflats were depicted by paintings of sinking things; in the far-right corner, the hand of a drowning person reached out from the mud. At the top, part of a boat was going down, a boat with Indian people chained together as slaves for the far continent.
“Just look at that,” he said. He held a magnifying glass. He leaned closer, then sat back and let Bush peer through the curved round lens. He was happy just to be in her presence and had a satisfied look on his face, as if he were about to eat a fulfilling meal.
Bush said, “I dreamed you bought two mummies.”
“What? How did you know? I want to start a museum someday. They were a good trade.”
I thought quickly. “Do you want some coffee?” I asked them.
“Well,” she said, “I dreamed them, LaRue. I heard them say they want to go back to clay.” She sounded businesslike, the way she did around LaRue.
“No,” he said, looking at her, surprised.
“I heard them.” She said this louder, as if it would make a difference to him.
I heated the water, my back to them. LaRue took advantage of my absence. Certain I was out of earshot, I heard him say, “But why not? You might even like me.”
He was ruining my plans for him.
I heard her chair scrape the floor. “That’s it, LaRue. I don’t work for you any longer! I quit. Now.” She tried to sound calm. She got up and began to pack bones back into the clean white boxes, even bones she’d already put together.
Before more damage could be done, I poured the water quickly and hurried back with coffee that, like LaRue, wasn’t warm or strong enough.
Bush pretended, for my sake, that nothing had happened, but her face was red. She sat back down.
“Here’s the coffee,” I said. It barely had an odor.
After only a moment, she got up again and bustled around the room. She took apart the wolverine bones, put them in a white box, and put them on the table for LaRue.
I thought quickly. I decided to go back with LaRue and the bones. I said I had errands.
Bush was relieved not to be forced to tell our secret to Agnes and Dora-Rouge.
“I’ll be back tonight,” I said. I wouldn’t leave Bush alone again. “I promised Agnes I’d help paper some shelves.”
Bush, still mad, raised an eyebrow. “Agnes? Paper shelves?”
I thought of Agnes and her messiness. It was a poor excuse. “Well, really I want to see Tommy. You know.”
She had doubts, I could see that, but there was no reason for her to keep me there and she did know Tommy and I were sweet on each other.
I felt guilty, and sneaky. I was doing the unthinkable. I was going to manipulate her life. I was going to manipulate LaRue, the only man there in her age range. Whether she liked him or not, her world was too secluded. Sometimes, accustomed to her aloneness, she’d speak as she cooked. She’d say, “Kettle. Onion.” When she brought in sweet-smelling wood, she spoke it by name, “Spruce. Birch.” And at times her eyes would get a faraway look to them. I wondered how it must have been before I was there, when she was alone in cold, deep solitude, in winter darkness.
As I went out the door with LaRue, I called over my shoulder, “I’ll see you tonight.”
Almost as soon as we were on the lake, I looked square at LaRue and said, “You will never get her like that. Or any other woman either.”
“What?” His eyes opened wide. He skidded sideways on ice as he looked at me, then straightened out the wheel. He said nothing. Silence by then was familiar to me, so I didn’t mind. I let it be for a while. Then I said, “Your approach is all wrong. Turn on your car lights.”
He stared straight ahead, and when he finally spoke, he looked at me and said, “You know what? Your problem is you think you know everything.”
“Well, what about your problems?” I emphasized the plural. “If I were her I wouldn’t want you either. Hey. Watch where you’re going.”
We lapsed again into silence. He swallowed, I noticed, and his face was somewhat flushed. After a while, I said, “I have some suggestions. Do you want me to tell you?”
“What? No.” As if offended.
But I went on anyway. “No woman would want a man who kept mummies. Those things have got to go, LaRue.”