THE PEOPLE THERE were called the Fat-Eaters, although the original name for themselves had been the Beautiful Ones. Their territory now was the settlement built around a little hill where the church sat, painted white with dark blue trim. Most of the people at the territory’s outermost edges had been resettled after having lost their own lands to the hydroelectric project, lands they’d lived on since before European time was invented. They were despondent. In some cases, they had to be held back from killing themselves. These were Dora-Rouge’s people, and mine. This was why Dora-Rouge’s return to her land was not what she’d hoped or imagined. It was nothing like the place she remembered. She looked around. She said nothing. She didn’t need to. The despair was visible on her face. Her eyes constantly searched for something familiar that was not there. I fell into a gloomy stillness, watching her. Dora-Rouge had gone home to die in a place that existed in her mind as one thing; in reality it was something altogether different. The animals were no longer there, nor were the people or clans, the landmarks, not even the enormous sturgeon they’d called giants; and not the water they once swam in. Most of the trees had become nothing more than large mounds of sawdust.
The few familiar things that remained, Dora-Rouge touched with tenderness: the gnarled trees the loggers thought not worth their trouble and had left behind, the stones, the swamp plants. And it did mean something to her to be where her ancestors had walked, no matter what the land had been turned into.
The resettled people lived in little, fast-made shacks, with candy and Coca-Cola machines every so often between them, and in Quonset huts left behind from the military who had recently used this native land as a bombing range. The better places were inhabited by men who’d come looking for oil, and a few loggers who were after the last of the trees.
The people were in pain, and even if Dora-Rouge had known the people of this last generation or two, she would never have recognized their puffy faces and empty eyes, their unkempt, hollow, appearance. It was murder of the soul that was taking place there. Murder with no consequences to the killers. If anything, they were rewarded. Dora-Rouge saw it and grieved.
One day, Dora-Rouge, in the white wheelchair, said to a young woman, “What has happened here?” The girl looked at the old woman with contempt and quickly moved away.
The young children drank alcohol and sniffed glue and paint. They staggered about and lay down on the streets. Some of them had children of their own, infants who were left untouched, untended by their child-parents. Sometimes they were given beer when they cried. It was the only medicine left for all that pain. Even the healing plants had been destroyed. Those without alcohol were even worse off, and the people wept without end, and tried to cut and burn their own bodies. The older people tied their hands with ropes and held them tight hoping the desire to die would pass. It was a smothering blanket laid down on them. The devastation and ruin that had fallen over the land fell over the people, too. Most were too broken to fight the building of the dams, the moving of waters, and that perhaps had been the intention all along. But I could see Dora-Rouge thinking, wondering: how do conquered people get back their lives? She and others knew the protest against the dams and river diversions was their only hope. Those who protested were the ones who could still believe they might survive as a people.
The pain in Dora-Rouge’s joints worsened from having to see this. Her color was poor, but something or someone had guided her there, she said, and it had drawn me along the full route with her. How else could she have known the way, so twisted and odd as it was?
WE’D BEEN THERE about a week when one afternoon Bush went to a settlement meeting up at the blue-trimmed church. While she was gone, I pushed Dora-Rouge to the post to buy some Hostess chocolate cupcakes, the ones we both craved. An old man, sitting beside the gun cabinet, watched Dora-Rouge as she sat in Mother Jordan’s chair. He frowned and studied her face, looked away and back. Finally, he said, “Say, weren’t you the woman with the corn?” He was dark and slight. Beside him sat a shaggy dog with yellow-tinged fur. The man wore a sweater that read “Eddie Bauer.” I thought that was his name but he introduced himself as Tulik. He had been a tribal judge.
“Yes, that was me.” Dora-Rouge said it in a distant way, in the same past tense he had used, so that it sounded as if it were no longer her but someone else. I suppose, truth be known, she was not the same woman who kept the kernels of corn that came from the place where people had spirits akin to hers. By now, “akin” meant wounded; no one wished for such kinship. Dora-Rouge tried to turn the wheelchair toward him, but her small crippled hands only succeeded in rocking it. A half-eaten chocolate cupcake in hand, I went over and turned the chair for her and moved her toward the small, barrel-chested man. I drank some soda. His skin was dark, his face bones fine and delicate, and he had happy eyes.
“I remember you,” he said. He wore baggy pants and had short hair. “You are Ek’s girl.”
She smiled at him despite the sadness in her eyes. “Yes, I’m that one.”
“Well, I’m her cousin.” He pulled his chair closer to Dora-Rouge. He said a few words in the old language and then they sat in silence, looking straight ahead, as if behind them, or to either side, the world was too painful to see or remember. I felt as if they were speaking with their minds, communicating in a full silence that excluded me. Maybe it was the silence of change witnessed, something too full for words.
He squinted at her as if he, like all the other old men I’d met, had been snow-blinded in the past, and he opened a brown bag of food, took out a sandwich made of Spam and white bread, and handed half of it to Dora-Rouge without speaking. Without speaking, she took it. She loved Spam, and for just a moment I think she forgot there were no happy young people in that place, none at all.
I left them alone. I went outside and walked on the planks that were laid down across the swampy land. I wasn’t sure if it had been a mired bog before the damming, or if it had been a lake. A boardwalk made of old wood floated on mud. It was moist and swollen, and algae grew in the spots where it was rotting. I walked along in the direction of water, to the west. Once, I slipped on the moist wood, and just caught myself from falling into the mud. The dark ground pulled at my foot. It tried to take me in the way it had swallowed that pitiful moose, a slow but firmly held tugging. My shoe was gone and I could see there was no use going after it, so I walked on without it.
A part of me remembered this world, as did all of Dora-Rouge; it seemed to embody us. We were shaped out of this land by the hands of gods. Or maybe it was that we embodied the land. And in some way I could not yet comprehend, it also embodied my mother, both of them stripped and torn.
We’d heard about Hannah from various sources. Word traveled quickly in small towns, even where there were two towns for gossip to visit, hang its hat, and drink coffee. Mrs. Lampier, when learning why I’d come, said nothing, but her eyes betrayed her thoughts. Other people, too, on hearing that I was one of Hannah’s daughters, would say a few words in the older language and then be silent. This made me all the more anxious to find her.
When I finally reached the lake, the water was dark. At first, I wanted to wash my muddy leg, but it was quiet and no one else was there, so I hid behind a rock and some trees at the edge of the lake and removed my clothing. In spite of water’s hungry desire and its cold temperature, I entered the near-black lake and immersed myself. My skin tightened. Such a cold baptism; it took my breath away. It was colder than any water I’d entered before. I didn’t count the seconds that would pass before I was in danger of dying from exposure. Hypothermia was commonplace in these waters, I knew, but I had stepped out of my rational mind along with my sweater and jeans, as if it were just another article of clothing. In the cold water, my feet hurt. I hoped the water would cleanse all the pasts, remove griefs. Inside it, naked and alone, I held my breath past my own limit. I saw my body as from a distance; it was an unwavering flame in the dark room of water, a wick of warmth holding fire in a cold chill, holding light in the vast, immense darkness. I floated in what wanted freedom, in what white men wanted changed.
I saw my arms, strong from the paddling, my legs, naked and thin, and my face with the hair flowing back with the current. I thought how Dora-Rouge had told me once about Eho, the old woman keeper of the animals. She had been sent down to the mother of water to bargain for all life, nearly swimming to her death. She was the woman who fell in love with a whale in the heart of water and did not want to return to the human worlds. She knew and could command water. She drifted to where the world was composed long ago in dark creation. Because of her, the animals and other lives were spared, but in the end, Eho could not remain in water or with the whale of her loving. Soon, back on land, she died. Now men and women were to be the caretakers of the animals, that was what the Great Spirit said, according to Dora-Rouge.
When I came up gasping for breath, I saw Dora-Rouge and Tulik walking down the little planked incline to the shore. Tulik with his funny walk, with his dog beside him, was pushing Dora-Rouge in the white chair. A redheaded woman with dark skin walked beside them. It was my mother. I knew it at once. I fell into a cold stillness made worse by the water’s temperature. Quickly, I jumped out of water, and without drying off, dressed, shivering, my fingers blue.
“What do you think you’re doing!” scolded Dora-Rouge when she saw me. “It’s too cold for that. Look at the water. It’s even black.” She waved her thin arm and shook her fist at me. “And showing off your bare fanny, too!”
IT WAS ON A SUN DAY when Hannah came to see us, when I surfaced to see them walking toward me. Someone had sent word to her at the settlement of Hardy that her great-grandmother and her daughter had been at the Two-Town Post and wanted to see her. Bush was at one of the settlement meetings and it was a good thing, we all knew, for Bush was still vulnerable, still caught in the between of good-and-evil forces that were Hannah. Whatever she’d fought in Hannah was still waiting to wage the same war, break the tie, and settle old debts. Dora-Rouge and I both could see in a glance that Hannah still resided in a dangerous world, or maybe it was that a dangerous world lived inside her.
“Let’s go to my home. It’s more private,” Tulik said. We all walked together past the store and on to his cabin.
Dora-Rouge continued to scold me. “Where’s your shoe?”
I pretended not to be cold. “I lost it,” I said, but while we walked, I searched Hannah’s face for signs of myself. Hannah was heavily made up and she didn’t like to be looked at. Now and then she turned her eyes toward a place where nothing was, but she never once looked at me with those eyes outlined in black. I didn’t know what I’d expected to feel, seeing my mother for the first time, maybe happiness or anger. At best a kind of peace, something that might order my life and explain me to myself. Like Bush traveling north, I wanted a map, something fixed, a road in. I wanted to see what was between this woman and me, a landmark, a bond. I had imagined this meeting so many times, but none of them was like this. Any path between us had long since been closed. She was, as Bush said, a wall, a place to go with no foundation.
Tulik’s house was named Lynx House, from the days before houses were numbered. It was surrounded by a fence made of whalebone, and as soon as we went indoors, a woman with protruding teeth and glasses—Auntie was her name—and a young boy looked at us, saw that this was not a social call, and went out the door. Tulik himself went to the far corner of the room and sat near an old wooden radio, mending his fishing nets. He pretended he was not listening. They were small, close quarters, and anything but private.
Hannah was quiet for a long while, and in that waiting, as I looked at the floor, I realized that she feared me more than I had ever feared her.
Finally, she said, “I never hit you.” Only that.
I looked at her for a long time. I was no longer numb from the water, but I still felt cold. I saw her. For her, I was the accuser, the sign of her guilt. I wore the wounds of Hannah on my face. They were evidence of what had happened.
Still, she had come to see me.
“I never laid a hand on you,” she said to me. “I think you ought to know that.”
I could only look at her, and what I saw was more ruined than the land. My hopes for this reunion were gone.
Dora-Rouge said, “What’s that? I hear a baby crying. Do you hear it? It sounds like it’s just over in the trees.”
Hannah glanced again in my direction. “You look fat,” she said, which later made us all laugh because I was much too thin; I had lost all my extra weight, and then some, carrying canoes and supplies and Dora-Rouge. My face was even raw-angled and masculine in its leanness.
“Can’t you hear that?” Dora-Rouge said again.
“Maybe it’s a cat,” Tulik said. He, too, went outside.
What Hannah said, that she’d never hit me, was almost true. She hadn’t laid a hand on me. She had used weapons against me, I learned later—hot wire, her teeth. Once she’d even burned me with fire. And it was only later that I felt a rage uncoiling inside me at her words, but even that was a rage built on sadness and loss. It was not the rage of a directed hatred, not the cleansing fire of heat, not a sharpened-to-a-point rage, not even a seeking-justice rage. It was a futile anger that had no practical use in the world, and so I had no choice but to contain it; it had nowhere to go.
The others kept their eyes averted, as if my heart would break under their gaze, but I felt their pity. And I knew by then how badly I’d been hurt by her. I could see that there was no love inside her, nothing that could love me, nothing that could ever have loved. She tapped her finger impatiently on the table a moment, looked as if about to speak, then stood up and went out the door.
“Wait,” I called out. I tried to follow. I wanted more than that. “Wait,” I said, but she continued walking, and finally I stopped.
As she left, the mail plane flew over. It shook the walls. Mr. Tulik, as was his daily custom, went to greet it. Hannah, seeing him follow behind her, began to walk faster, as if he, too, were chasing her. I watched her vanish. She looked back again at Tulik, then ran down the road to get away and soon she simply slipped out of view.
I went inside, weeping, and when Bush returned, she came to me and said, “I’m so sorry, Angel. But I hope you believe me; it’s not her fault.”
“But I came all this way.”
“I know,” said Bush. She took me on her lap like the mother I never had.
ALTHOUGH I TRIED AGAIN to contact Hannah, I didn’t see her again until two weeks later, when she was dying. By then, we’d been forced out of the room at Mrs. Lampier’s. The policemen had come by with an order to evict us. Too many people, it read, were inhabiting too small a space. The fire department wouldn’t permit us to remain. But we knew it was because Bush had been going to the meetings and had fierce opinions about the dams, and she’d been speaking out.
We made an attempt at finding a new place, one we could afford. But nothing was available. No one would rent to us. So, with nowhere else to go, Tulik insisted we move into his house, the house surrounded with the whalebone fence, the pieces of which looked like teeth though they were ribs. “Ena, you’re practically family, anyway,” he said. He called her by her real name.
Even so, Tulik had little room. Or what we called room, anyway. We could help keep up the house, he told us, though no one could ever keep up with him. He had mighty energy and he needed little rest. Worse, he was more orderly, even in a small, crowded place, than Dora-Rouge had ever dreamed of being. The only person he allowed to be messy was the dog, Mika, who left fur in her wake. Mika was the offspring of two of his favored onetime sled dogs.
Indoors it was dark. It was a house where, in summers, outside light came in through cracks in the walls, and in winter, the light from inside fell out across snow and ice, looking like fracture lines in the earth where inner light and fire were opening, breaking out. Like Pangaea.
The house itself was brown wood, stained from the weather, and some of the wood was beginning to rot. It had once, long ago, been painted white.
A small globe of the world sat in one of the windows. Tulik used it when he read the news, which he did daily, and when earthquakes occurred, he looked always at the other side of the world to determine where aftershocks might strike. Always there was balance, he said.
He was a tribal judge, one of the elders. Despite the fact that he’d gone snow-blind once while out with his dog team, and still squinted in bright light, he was a good hunter. With Tulik, it seemed as if the world had conferred something special on him. People recognized it and valued him.
He lived with his daughter, Auntie. She was called that not because she was an aunt, which she was, but because the word sounded comforting and so like the language of her mother, like some other gentle words from the north. So it was a name, not just a title.
The young people all called Tulik Grandfather, and all of us in the household called his grandson just by the name Grandson. I didn’t even know his Christian name, Calvin, until years later, in court.
As neat and orderly as Tulik was, that was how sloppy his daughter, Auntie, was. She balanced him out, she said, like aftershocks around the globe from a recent quake. Then she laughed. Auntie, one of the few people at the Fat-Eaters who wore glasses, had been a star trapper. She was a wide-boned, rugged woman who laughed often and deeply, told off-color stories and sang. She wore tight jeans and she was taller than most. She was a woman who lost things, left her keys in the car, left her glasses in places she could never see. She was trying to quit smoking the first day I met her, and when we moved in she was working on a dark blue quilt in order to occupy her hands. I remember her, always, as I saw her that first time. She sat in a little slant of light from a lantern, a light that fell across her face and touched the edge of her glasses. And she wore a red cotton sweater.
Bush and Auntie hit it off like old friends. They were change-minded in the same fierce ways, but they had different ideas about how it should come about and they argued incessantly until their voices were little more than background noise. They were both so idealistic that they seemed younger than they were, and neither of them was tolerant of injustice of any kind. The two of them balanced each other as well, not in the realms of order and chaos, as with Tulik, but like day and night, summer and winter, two parts of the same thing. Bush was quiet in her ways, while Auntie was loud and often mistaken for aggressive. She would rise to any occasion as long as there was conflict; the rest she left alone. And she carried her medicine with her always. Not in the kind of bag made out of the tail of a beaver—those were considered improper and offensive to the animals—but she carried her help in soft white doeskin. And in both women, no matter how they tried to hide it, there was a softness that shone through. Together, I thought, as I listened to them talking outside at night, they formed the one woman I wanted to be someday, with a large portion of Dora-Rouge added to the recipe like flour or leavening, the thing that held it all together.
Another woman lived there but only from time to time, a tiny woman named Luce. She came from a reservation down South. She had come to be with her family; they were protesting the diversion of the rivers, which ultimately would affect their own waters down below. Luce, proud of her intellect and her ability to read, looked at the weekly papers through a magnifying glass. She, on reading what was happening in the world, would always say, “It’s time we stop this.” And, “This must end.”
“NO MORE COTS,” I declared to Bush, on moving into Tulik’s house. I looked him, too, in the eye with courage and said my back hurt.
“Okay. No problem,” Tulik said. He smiled what I came to call his no-problem smile. “We’ll fix up the sleeping platform.” It was a wide shelf, the thing people with large families and frequent guests used to house others who traveled from place to place fishing or hunting. Entire families slept together on them, the many children tossing and turning, and parents snoring. Seeing it, I was sorry I’d spoken. By contrast, a cot now looked like a room at the Hilton. Plus, a cot would have been too small for Grandson and the cousins who visited now and then, curling up beside me, and stealing my blankets. I felt shunned, relegated to the world of sleeping children, and was sorry that I’d ever complained. But I kept silent about this. I had pride, but I began to sleep with Agnes’ coat over me.
AT FIRST I hated having no privacy in Tulik’s crowded space, but then I learned that privacy, like beauty, was skin-deep. Also, I claimed a corner of Tulik’s for my own in daylight hours, a fraction of the little room on the side of his house where the cabinet radio stood with no electricity to fire it. I placed my amber there, in the corner the room slanted toward, a pillow to sit on, my hairbrush and pencils. I wrote my dreams there. Sleeping with the blue fur coat, I had many.
I grew accustomed to our closeness. And to our silences. We had ourselves more strongly than I’d ever had in any private room. There were never invasions into thought or dream. The others knew the secret of dwelling inside their bodies, remaining there. They knew the secret peace of silence. And I grew to love Tulik. We were close, he and I. When I woke in the intimate space of morning, Tulik was already awake. At the break of day I heard his movement, his footsteps on the floor, the sound of the door opening and closing, the morning smell of smoke. After he went outside, when the door closed, I’d get up and pull on my jeans and go join him outdoors, my hair still tangled. Together we were quiet as we prepared for the day, him praying, me being silent, looking toward the marshes to the east. Then, when we were done, I’d go back inside, splash water on my face, wake Dora-Rouge and give her a warm washrag to clean herself. She had begun to fail since losing Agnes. Daily, as I combed her hair, she seemed weaker.
One morning outside, Tulik looked across the land and said to me, “You know, Angel, here a person is only strong when they feel the land. Until then a person is not a human being.”
I looked at him, not certain of what he meant. But it occupied me, this thought, and soon I saw that Tulik was right. On this land, a person had to live by feeling. There was no other choice. Dreaming, too, could be counted on; the best hunters still found their prey by dreaming the maps to the dark eyes of deer. There was a deep intelligence in this, and I, too, was feeling the rhythm of it inside myself. My heart and the beat of the land, the land I should have come from, were becoming the same thing.
One day while I was out, Tulik returned from the mail plane with a letter from John Husk. It was addressed to Agnes. DoraRouge told me to open it. It was written neatly. It said:
Dear One,
LaRue bought The Raven for $125 and I’m using the money to come see you. I hear there’s a way to get there. We’re worried here because we haven’t heard from you. How is your mother? Did Angel find Hannah? We had a strange ice storm, and so close to summer, too. The fish are still dying. I’m worried about you. Should be there about the 5th.
Love everlasting.
So Husk had not received the letter telling of Agnes’ death, after all. Now it was too late to get word to him. We were certain the mail was being intercepted. I looked forward to his visit both with happiness, because I’d missed him, and with apprehension for the grief he would discover, finding Agnes gone.