WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Bush spread the beaver furs on the platform and looked at Tulik. Tulik’s assessment of things went beyond his skills as a judge. His appraisal of people was most always on the mark; he could size up a man’s drunkenness in a glance, could determine when a child would be born by the way a woman walked, and whether it would be a boy or a girl. He knew the best time to plant a cold-weather garden, and he knew the winters of furs. Except for that of Wolverine, that is, because he, like everyone else, couldn’t remember seeing one, just a hint, a wide head in the shadows of trees.
The furs were heavy and rich, even I could see that. Tulik laid a hand on the thick fur on top. “This one, one like this, would bring fifty dollars.”
“You’re kidding.” Bush looked at him to see if he smiled. This was an extremely high price for the time. It was 1973, and the top cost of a beaver fur was thirty dollars, even with inflation.
But Tulik knew these things because he’d had a hand in them for so long and he had an eye accustomed to weighing and measuring. Beaver furs he knew the best. “It’s a heavy fur. This one was taken in the winter of 1948.”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“It was the year when winter was early. It fell in August. Beaver were few that year,” he said. Exporters had intercepted several traplines the year before and taken all the furs, leaving the native trappers no choice but to overtrap in order to trade for food and supplies at the post.
“You see these longer hairs? And the thickness?”
I leaned forward and looked, touched the dark pelt.
“A skin this size then was equal to that of two lynx.” He looked at the fur beneath it. “This one is 1936, the time when a nearby village grew so hungry and cold they set out for a hunt carrying only rotted meat and sinew to eat. It was all they had.”
Starvation, even now, was not to be spoken except in English or French, as if saying it would bring the skinny ghost of hunger back to the people who feared it. So all Tulik could say was that the hunters had vanished. They had gone far north to the place where beaver built dams of stone, to that spare place where the wolves became so hungry they were forced to eat beaver and sharpen their teeth on rocks. That was the year the dead remained frozen outdoors until late spring, standing, blue and thin and solid, gazing out at where hunger had come from.
IN THE OLD DAYS, according to Tulik, the world was created by Beaver. “Yes,” he said. “There were no other creatures but them. They were the ones.” This was when trees were still in sky reaching down with their roots, looking for a place to take hold. It was when the world was still covered by water. At that time, ice lay down on half of every year. They were the ones. Beaver took down trees from the sky; they brought up pebbles and clay from somewhere beneath the vast waters. They broke the ice that had shaped itself over the water. They swam through it and they made some land. With pebbles and clay. When trees were still in the sky. They laid sticks down across the water. It was like a trail the new creatures and nations and people to come would walk across. In those days the faces of spirits lived on the water and windblown snow. There were no other creatures, none, except beaver who rose out from the darkness beneath waters, out of the lodges and dens and burrows of the world, places the rest of us have never seen, places at the center of earth. The only light was what came from inside the stars, from inside the yellow of trees. There was just freezing and thawing until Beaver took down some of the trees from sky, leaving nothing behind but teeth marks and wood chips. Beaver brought up clay and mud from the deep. Beaver created a pool, then a bog, then living earth. When Beaver shaped the humans, who were strangers to the rest of creation, they made a pact with them. They gave their word. They would help each other, they said. Beaver offered fish and waterfowl and animals. The people, in turn, would take care of the world and speak with the gods and all creation. Back then, the people could hear the beaver singing. Back then they still sang out loud. A song haunting and sweet. Back when there were no lights except in the eyes of animals. This is true. It’s what Tulik said. Like the voices of children coming out of water, so beautiful.
WE LIVED THERE by natural light. Each morning, with the cracks of light coming through the walls of the cabin, we all sat together and drank coffee and ate greasy bread with margarine and sugar on it, a diet which agreed with me. At this time we related our dreams to one another, seriously at some times, and with laughter at others, as when Dora-Rouge dreamed she was a lounge singer. But whatever the dream, the faces of Tulik’s family were open faces, the eyes tender in a way I had not known before, even at Adam’s Rib.
ONE MORNING, just after the arrival of Husk’s letter, I dreamed my mother was dead and that there had been a storm of ice pellets violently crashing to earth.
“What did the place look like where she lay?” Tulik wanted to know.
“It was a small room.” I tried to see it again. “Snowshoes hung on the wall above her bed.”
He fingered his thin mustache.
“The floor sloped,” I told him.
Tulik said, “You better pack your things. You will have to go to her.”
I looked at him for a long time, at his short, thick eyelashes, his narrow bones. Then I got up from the table and went to my corner of the room and packed a few things.
Bush stood up as if to help me, but both Tulik and Dora-Rouge shook their heads. “She should go alone,” Dora-Rouge said.
Bush looked embarrassed.
Tulik pushed back his chair and got up from the table. “I’ll see if I can get a drop-off with the mail carrier.” As he walked out the door, he looked back once at Bush. She had doubts about me going to the place where Hannah lived. But things had changed. My need for protection was gone. If the dream was right, Hannah was harmless now. Bush was, after all, from another land, from the south, from another people. Maybe she didn’t understand this, I thought. The land here might love her, but it did not tell her the things it told the rest of us. It kept secrets from her. It excluded her. At times she even seemed lost.
Bush watched Tulik walk away.
“We’re in luck,” Tulik said when he returned. He was cheerful. He had offered the mail carrier’s son and assistant twenty-six dollars, nearly all he had, to take me to Hardy. “Mikky will take you. But you have to go today,” he said. “Hurry, get your things.” He took the money from behind the coal bin. It would cover a little more than gas.
I bustled around. “I’ll pay you back. I promise.”
But he only laughed in that deep way of his, soft at the same time his manliness would never be in doubt, even at his age. Even in his Eddie Bauer “fashion plate” sweater with blue snowflakes on it, the sleeves were pushed up to reveal his muscular brown arms. “Is that all you’re taking?” he said.
But I had already learned how little to carry, how little I needed. Now how little I wanted.
And when the young man, Mikky, came to take me to the plane, I carried only one small plastic bag of things.
As we walked to the plane, we chatted idly about the weather. Alongside Tulik, Bush followed behind us, trying to stay out of the way. Then, before I knew it, I climbed up into the little two-seater, strapped myself in, waved good-bye to Bush and Tulik, and the plane rattled across the land, over small houses, waters, the broken forests of trees. There was smoke in the air above spare, tired-looking settlements.
We stopped once to pick up mail from a village, and then flew again over waters, canvas tents, shabby villages, and shabbier towns. Once we saw wolves curled up in balls beside the blood-wet rib cage of a deer. Mikky, the mailman’s son with rosy cheeks, flew lower to show me. “See? Right there.” He pointed.
“I see them!” I said, excited.
Finally, the wheels touched down near the remote and quiet Hardy. Mikky let me off at the point where the road to Hannah’s ended. He took out a piece of paper that looked official, scrawled a map for me to walk by, and left me standing at the edge of the dirt road that he’d used as a runway.
I watched the plane leave, the grasses and bushes whipped by its wind. Then it was all quiet. I felt abandoned. I tried to get my bearings. There was no sun, no way of determining which way was which, but I set out to walk the four miles, following the map. I thought of Tulik’s words about strength, and as I walked I felt the land, the way a human being might feel it.
There was an overpowering silence, not even the sound of a bird. Nettles grew between trees, and it seemed the land had overgrown the human worlds that had wandered through. They’d left their marks, however; I passed a rusted bulldozer, a burned-out area, and a place of cut trees where a road had once been planned, started, and then forsaken. Beyond that, away from the trees, was the place where military planes had used Indian land for a bombing range, for target practice.
Woodsmoke came, blue-gray, from a little cluster of buildings that were partway down a small hill. My heart skipped, thinking it was Hannah’s. But according to Mikky’s map, I turned off before reaching those buildings. Wind carried the smoke, passed by me, and then vanished. A dog barked in the distance.
And then I came to my mother’s house. Behind it was a clothesline with a few squares of cloth hanging from the wire, no wind to make them move.
It was a shabby house, unpainted, with tar paper over some of the walls. The door of her house had no lock. Where a lock had been was broken wood, as if the door had been jimmied. I stepped on the wooden box that served as a step, not knowing if I should knock or go inside. I was afraid now that I was at Hannah’s, but before I could turn around, a young man opened the door, and for a moment we stood looking at each other. He didn’t blink. “I heard you coming,” he said. He’d expected me, though he was not prepared for what I looked like. “You look like her.” I nodded. “I heard that one of Hannah’s children was back.” It wasn’t the scars he looked at, I knew, it was the resemblance to Hannah, which I myself found frightening.
He was dark and very thin, with a large chest and legs too long for his short body. He wore a flannel shirt and a dark gray sweater, as if it were autumn, and he opened the door wider, for me to enter.
I went inside.
Another man sat beside the window, reading the weekly news, a little paper of only eight or ten pages. He nodded at me, then followed my gaze to where Hannah slept, pale and drawn up, the way a child might sleep. Above her were the snowshoes of my dream. “It won’t be long now,” he said.
I nodded.
He folded the paper and got up to leave. He put on a red hunter’s jacket. He took my hand in his a moment. “We were waiting for you. We’ll go now.” At the door he turned and said, “You’ll need some food. I’ll bring you some. And milk, of course.”
Again, I nodded. But after he left, I wondered if they were too easy about it, if we could get help to save Hannah.
The house of Hannah had an old, familiar smell to it—of lard, which thickened the air; of strong tea; and of something else I couldn’t name, but that my body remembered. I wondered if it was the sweet smell of what Agnes had called cyanide.
It felt cold. I buttoned my jacket while I looked around. It was a one-room house and, like in my dream, the floor had settled lower on one side than on the other. The bed, too, was lower on one side than on the other, and Hannah was held in it as if contained in a hollow. If she moved, it looked as if she might fall.
I watched her sleep for a few moments. The blanket, pulled up over much of her face, rose and fell with her breathing. I was nervous. I didn’t know what to do. “Hannah?” I said. I sat down at a slant on the chair beside her bed. I felt dizzy. She said nothing. I pulled back the cover and looked at her. There was a wide, bloodstained bandage tied around her middle. One of her hands was curled against her cheek. “Mother?” I said. Still, she did not stir.
Shortly, the man came back with coffee, a thermos of stew, some biscuits, and powdered milk. He put the milk on the table. I watched him, how he moved, catlike and strong. “Thank you,” I said. He ladled stew into a brown plastic cup and handed it to me. “Venison.” He sat down at the table across from me while I ate, but just for company. I ate in silence. When I finished eating, he left, and I heard his boots loud on the wooden box outside the door, and then I was alone with my mother and her demons, if such things existed, and I guess by then I had come to believe they did.
THERE WAS a curtained partition dividing the room. On the walls, true to my dream, hung rope, chains, snowshoes, and pans. Darkness itself seemed to hang there by a nail. The cupboards were nearly bare, and there was no water, except what was in a jug. The floors were damp and smelled moldy from the weather, but the house was clean. Clothes hung neatly on nails. And there was an oil stove.
On the kitchen side, three old brown plastic dishes were in a cabinet. In another were salt and a few slices of dry Wonder bread. Hannah’s house, like her body, even from my beginning, had the same little or nothing to offer.
Her lips were dry, her teeth had what looked like dried blood on them, and her breath was foul. She tried to say something, but she didn’t see me, I was sure. I soaked a rag in water and held it to her lips. “What is it?” I asked, looking at her face that was so like mine.
She looked old and young at the same time. She had white roots to her hair. I thought of Bush saying of my mother that it was not her fault. I wanted to have compassion, but even now I felt the pain of betrayal, abandonment: she was leaving so soon after I’d found her. I didn’t understand that Hannah had died long ago. I looked long and hard at her, trying to memorize her face with my eyes that knew how to turn things upright again.
I looked around for anything that could be of use in caring for her. My eyes also saw, hanging in the corner between walls, fishnets and decoys. Two jackets hung near the door. Beside a bag of sugar, an empty whiskey bottle sat on the table.
There were no herbs or poultices for her, no salves or unguents, no laying on of any hands that would save her, not even a ceremony. I could see this by the set of her eyes. The presence of death was outside the door. Perhaps it had walked along the same trail I had. But I wasn’t afraid of death, I decided. I went over and opened the door for it. I wasn’t afraid of Hannah, either, and for this I was glad.
From the open door, a soft breeze entered the room. The cloth partition moved with it. From outside, I heard the sound of a lid on a trash can, and then there were smaller sounds, like someone talking. That’s when I heard the sound, a cry, that came from behind the waving cloth partition. I thought perhaps it was death speaking. I walked over and pulled the cloth aside.
There, in a wooden box, was a baby girl, about seven months of age. I stood looking at her. She was a thin child, and when I knelt over her, she grasped at my hand as if I might leave. Like me, she was red-haired and I laughed when I saw this. I have a sister, I thought, I have a sister! Already this baby was desperate. Already she had a will to live. She began to suck on my finger.
This explained why the man had brought the milk.
I picked her up. Carrying the child, I set to work. I cleaned the whiskey bottle and mixed water and the powdered milk inside it. It wasn’t the best thing for an infant, but it was all I could do. I chewed some of the meat stew and put it in a spoon and fed her. She was hungry and she was a distraction from Hannah’s death and my feelings of the loss of something vague, something I’d never quite possessed. But still, all the while I cared for her, I could see death and Hannah raging against each other in a fierce battle; Hannah wanted to die and had already submitted to it, but more than one of those who dwelled inside her feared it. What prowled in her, preyed on her from within, had a strong will. So it became a war between death and those whose desire to survive had been stronger than all of them; what inhabited her had no resignation to anything.
THAT EVENING, as Hannah’s life ebbed, two women came to see me.
“You look like her,” one of them said. She was soft-voiced and tall. She opened a package. “Here, feed her this.” She pointed to my mother. It was marrow butter. For them more than for Hannah, I put some on the tip of a spoon and tried to get her to eat it. I knew she wouldn’t take it, but the women, I thought, wanted to be helpful.
The tall woman said, “She wants to die. She needs strength for it.” The tall woman stood by Hannah and pulled her hair back behind her ear. It was a comforting gesture. “Hannah,” she said.
They’d brought fat and tea for the baby. “We’ve been worried about the baby,” the shorter woman said.
“It’s her baby?” I asked.
She looked at me. “She took it with her to see you. We thought you knew.”
I remembered the day Hannah showed up at Two-Town. Dora-Rouge had heard a baby crying out in the trees.
“The man is dead,” the woman told me. “The one that stabbed her. They already took him away.”
I wanted to know what had happened. I listened with great care as the tall woman said, “The beginning of all this is that too many animals are gone.” She said this as if I would understand. I didn’t, not yet. But, I thought once again how all of us kept searching for beginnings.
“That’s what started all this. Otto went to Mill Town to work. He and Hannah needed food and gas. It’s always so hard here.” She stopped talking while a military plane passed overhead, rattling the window and the cups on the shelves. “The planes are one of the reasons the animals are gone. Some of them died of fear. Some drowned, too.”
I nodded. I’d heard what happened there, the caribou running across the flats as the water surged toward them, knocking them over, flooding their world, their migration routes gone now, under water.
I pieced together the story as well as I could. Otto, the trapper, had neither wired money to Hannah nor returned. Months passed. Finally, Hannah took up with another man. She always found a man to feed her and keep her in wine. But this man wasn’t like the others. His name was Eron, and his grandparents raised him in the bush. “They stayed to the old ways, you know, they knew things, they believed things. Eron was their chosen one. He was a strong hunter. The people loved him,” she said. She sat on the chair with her feet tucked under it:
“When he came back from school, that’s when his troubles started. At school they told him everything he had learned was wrong, and with these two knowings, that’s when he got lost. He was lost ever since then.
“After he moved in with Hannah, he began to fear her. He said to us one day, ‘She carried a basket from the water. In it, clear as day, there was a dead child.’ He said she carried a dead child in it.”
The woman got up from the story, as if it made her nervous, and tried once again to feed Hannah some marrow. “She won’t eat. It’s been like this for more than a day now.
“Eron said it always felt like someone else was in the room. Sometimes more than one. Hannah’s house was cold as a winter wind, he said. One night he felt something touch him. ‘She’s a spirit,’ he told his brother. ‘She’s not a real woman at all.’ His brother didn’t think much of it at the time.
“One night, he said he dreamed a woman with long white hair, white as the snow, wearing white robes, her face white, too, with red, bloody hands. She stood at the foot of the slanting bed, her hands bloody with what she’d done.
“There were people all along who thought Hannah should have been sent away. Maybe even killed. People believed she was a danger to others. One of her children ate glass and chewed razor blades. We knew what had happened to you, your face, how, like a dog, she bit your face with her teeth. It was worse for you, maybe because you looked like her. She hated you for that, for coming from her body, being part of her.”
I stared at the woman. She spoke casually. She thought I had already heard what she was telling me, but I hadn’t. The chill in the room entered my spine, rose up my neck. My heart beat quickly. I tried to keep my composure, but all I could think was, it’s true, my mother was a cannibal, a cold thing that hated life. But I said, surprising myself with how calm I sounded, “Did you call the police? About the stabbing.”
“No. She said it was her time to die,” the woman explained, as if I understood, but I didn’t, I didn’t know that by tribal law they were required to permit a person to leave life at their own time, in their own way.
I also didn’t know that whenever the authorities were summoned to these remote areas, they charged the tribal people a fine, which they pocketed just for responding, and even at that help was rarely forthcoming; it was costly and even risky to call for assistance. An ambulance could not have passed through the way I had walked to find Hannah’s. The helicopter pilot demanded cash up front. So did the hospital over in Keeneytown, showing no mercy for the people who lived in small shacks in this place that looked from afar like a cigarette burn on the face of the world. Even if Hannah had wanted to live, there would not have been help from the outside. If she’d wanted to live, they could have called a medicine man or woman, but now all the medicine people but one had gone to the dam north of Two-Town, and the one who remained behind did not work with cases such as these. He was an apprentice, and he was not strong enough to handle demons or restless beings or ice spirits that had gone to live inside a damaged woman.
“Eron stabbed himself,” she said. “Before he died, his cousins arrived. He told them that she herself had begged him to kill her. Hannah dreamed of frozen bodies. ‘Kill me then,’ she told him. ‘It’s the only way.’”
“IT HAPPENED ONCE BEFORE, not so long ago,” Dora-Rouge would tell me later, after we’d returned. “Just before this skin of time, that there was a woman in the grip of ice. It held her in its blue fingers. It froze her heart.”
It was 1936, the starvation year. The woman lived in a house of snow, frozen in, starving, until finally she ate the flesh of those family members who had already died of cold and hunger. Human flesh was the only plentiful thing that winter. Most would sooner starve, but this woman and ice, just as in old stories, became lovers. She rolled naked in snowdrifts like a woman gone mad. A normal person, a human being, could not have survived it. That’s how they knew what she was.
One day two hunters, brothers, found her cabin at the end of a path. The cabin was surrounded by snow clouds in the deep, dark blue of winter. When the two men went inside, they found her naked and laughing. She was alone, so they lit her lanterns, and in the dim light, they watched her. She smiled at them, but they were not fooled. Even in the 1930s, these things happened. Just like in older stories. This woman had slept with winter. She had eaten human flesh. Her heart loved ice. The two men took pity on her. It was not her fault that she had become winter’s mistress. The youngest one said, “Let’s cook her some hot soup.”
While the older man built a strong fire, the other went outside and cut a dark red piece of frozen meat off the deer they’d been carrying, then placed it to cook on the fire. While the meat cooked, they studied the woman. She watched them, too, with a cold eye. She hated deer meat. That was a bad sign already. All she wanted to swallow was the flesh of the two men. That night, she hid a knife beside her and waited for them to fall asleep. She could see how tired they were after days of hunting in the cold. After they ate, she knew they would become drowsy and helpless with sleep. But the younger one saw her sneaking up on him with the knife in her hand. He let her get close. He coaxed her, edging her closer to him. “Give it to me,” he said. “Give me the knife.”
Now that she was found out, she began to cry. “I’m a spirit,” she said. But there was another voice, a small human voice left inside her. It was this little voice, almost gone, that said to the men, “You have to kill me. There’s no other way.”
“It could be winter fever,” the older man said, but even while he talked, she or the spirit picked up the knife and ran to stab the younger brother. Just in time, the younger brother moved aside. Instead of his heart, she cut his arm. But she was strong, he noticed. She was stronger than a human woman and when she grabbed him, the young man couldn’t fend her off by himself, even though he was a strong-muscled man. His brother helped and in the struggle, they killed her. They knew by then that she was no human, so after she died, they poured boiling-hot water into her open mouth and her wounds in order to melt her frozen heart.
A week went by, and then the men were arrested by the police. They pleaded guilty. The white jury was horrified by what they’d done. They’d killed the woman in such a terrible way. They were especially frightened by what the young men said and how they told the story with honest faces. But the domain of gods and spirits and demons was larger than that of humans, even now, and the men were satisfied, even to be locked up, knowing they had returned the world to a kind of balance: they had made the world right for their people, for seasons and thaws.
It was so others could live that they did this, and I’ve thought about it for years. Wars are fought for far less than this.
I HEATED WATER and washed my mother’s face and hands. One of the hands, now so thin and vulnerable, was crooked; it had been broken and had healed wrong. Her skin was chilly, her eyes sunken.
“Why are you following me?” Hannah said. But it wasn’t me she asked—it was air, perhaps a ghost—so I said nothing.
Outside, the breeze strengthened and I felt it enter the house and take some of Hannah’s life with it. It seemed that Hannah and the persons or spirits or demons who followed her about were gathering together in a truce; they were becoming silent now.
I sat thinking of what had happened to my face, what sharp teeth had done to my life. And there was the baby in the corner, in the wooden box, a new life that had formed in this place where some hundred-year-old history was breaking itself apart and trying to reform.
Perhaps there was balance in the world, after all, I thought. Maybe it just needed time.
DEATH STOOD IN Hannah’s eyes, small and forlorn. It didn’t look triumphant. Hannah was still alive, but barely. Her eyes were already set, her breathing rougher. Even death didn’t want her, I could see. Maybe it, too, feared her.
I sat beside her, the still unnamed child on my lap, and whispered again the word “Mother.” It was a word I’d never said. It hung, suspended in air. Like a child, I said, “Mama?” Then, like a child, I said, “Mama. Don’t leave me,” and through the window I saw the moving shadows of wind blow the few clothes on the line outside.
She looked small and vulnerable as she might have been once, back when she was a girl, before she was tortured into this poor shape before me.
Outside, someone passed near the window. I saw a shadow. I was crying, and I was afraid. But also I feared that what lived inside her, whether history, as Bush had said, or spirits the priest believed possessed her, would fill the room. I was afraid that when she left her body, whatever possessed her would open its claws and seize another body, and so at the very last, when the death rattle in her throat sounded like a gourd with seeds inside it, shaking, I took the baby outside and placed her on the ground, safe in her wooden box. I knew by intuition that it was a bad thing for an infant to be in the presence of death, even a kinder death than this one. I wanted nothing to enter the innocent, open-eyed gaze of this child. None of the soul stealers were going to sing this one away or fill her body with emptiness and pain.
As death grew to fit my mother, to fill her, it was like a seed of something that opened and grew inside her, as if it had known the territory for a long time, plotting its way through flesh and bone, waiting for the moment of its unfolding. Its eyes opened inside Hannah’s, then it inhabited the arms, the hands that clutched at air, then, finally, its stopped heart stilled hers. At last, there was only one thing and she was filled with it.
What possessed her was now gone. It was now ordinary as air in a room, no more than dust, and with quiet footsteps. Perhaps what stole inside a person disguised itself, themselves, as everyday things, daylight, ordinary words and common rooms. Now she was humble, her body without its person. No wings to spread. Nothing.
It was death, finally, that allowed me to know my mother, her body, the house of lament and sacrifice that it was. I was no longer a girl. I was a woman, full and alive. After that, I made up my mind to love in whatever ways I could. I would find it in myself to love the woman who had given life to me, the woman a priest had called a miracle in reverse, the one who had opened her legs to men and participated in the same life-creating act as God. Yes, she tried to kill me, swallow me, consume me back into her own body, the way fire burns itself away, uses itself as fuel. But even if she hated me, there had been a moment of something akin to love, back at the creation. Her desperation and loneliness was my beginning. Hannah had been my poison, my life, my sweetness and pain, my beauty and homeliness. And when she died, I knew that I had survived in the best of ways for I was filled with grief and compassion.
BUSH WOULD COME SOON, I knew. The women summoned her on the citizens band. I was uneasy about being in the house with the body, so I looked at Hannah one more time, at the skin of my skin, the face that had given shape to mine, and then I covered her, took the baby, and walked with her to the place where there’d been a cluster of houses around a general store. I was anxious to leave Hardy. Now there were the living to think about. In another day or so, Husk would arrive, and I wanted to go back to Holy String Town to meet him.
I went toward the town, past the closed-down school which was housed in just a Quonset hut. The playground was littered with paper and bottles and cans. A breeze moved the tire-seat swings. Hardy was a little town, of sorts. The store itself had once been a post, but now it sold packaged food, fish bait and tackle, and beer, powdered milk, canned goods, and boxes of cereal. Nothing was fresh; there was not even an apple. Just Jell-O and Levi’s and hard-toed boots.
The baby liked to be walked. She slept while I walked and she cried when I stopped, so I carried her until Bush arrived. In places the land was dried and white-edged, like the alkali flats in Oklahoma. Oil drums sat outside little buildings. Everything looked temporary. Nothing was planned to be permanent, but had become so by accident.
When Bush finally arrived, I met her at the road. With the baby. “My sister,” I said, smiling.
Bush was solemn.
“Hannah’s already gone,” I told her. “Before we go in, let’s go to the store and make arrangements for a burial.”
“So that’s the baby Dora-Rouge heard crying,” Bush said. “We should learn to believe her. She’s never been wrong.”
In spite of the occasion, she fussed over the baby as we walked.
When we asked the storekeeper about burying Hannah, he told us a man, Saul Talese, had a backhoe. “He lives right up at the turn-off,” he said, pointing out the way.
We went to Talese’s place. Bush offered him her last fur; Talese saw the value of it. Without bartering, he went over to Hannah’s and began without delay to dig a hole in the clearing beside the house where Hannah had lived and died.
WHEN WE RETURNED to Hannah, the room, with its smell of tea and fat, was still and quiet. I unbuttoned the green cotton blouse my mother wore, and we began to prepare her body for the burial no one else would attend. I looked for the first time at my mother’s body, her arms so like mine, her bones familiar. She was covered with scars. I remembered Bush’s story about the bathing of Hannah as a child, and my heart broke for her. I leaned over her and unbuttoned her skirt. Hannah was thin, her body already stiffening, her bones jutting out, her pelvis like an empty bowl. She still had on her worn-down boots. She had been lying in bed with them all along and I hadn’t known it. They were the in thing for those years, pink go-go boots with a fake concho button and a fringe. I removed the boots. Inside them, her feet were bare, her toenails painted red, and chipped. And there were burn scars on the tops of her feet.
Bush wanted her arms to shelter Hannah, she said. “She looks so vulnerable now. And you can see how she was tortured.” I knew Bush had loved her. “Sometimes, when Hannah was a girl,” said Bush, “she would talk about the stars and I’d forget all the things she’d done and my fears about what she would do one day.” Bush cried.
Together we bathed Hannah with soapy hot water, more comforting to us than to the dead. There was little cloth and we needed it for wrapping her body, and for the baby, so we first laid Hannah out on newspaper. How appropriate it was to place her on words of war, obituaries, stories of carnage and misery, and true stories that had been changed to lies. It seemed like the right bed for her. Some of the words stuck to her body, dark ink, but we did not wash them off; it was a suitable skin. Then Bush took down the cloth curtain partition and we wrapped my mother inside it. She wound the sheet around that, rolling Hannah from side to side as if she were merely a bolt the fabric had been wrapped around.
THE TWO WOMEN who had visited made fish-and-lard soup and brought it to the house. The tall one looked out the window at the machine. “They didn’t use to bury them in the ground in the old days,” she said. “They were aboveground then. It seems like we’ve got everything all mixed up.”
They said that when Hannah died they had smelled a wolverine pass by. “There are even wolverine tracks all around Hannah’s house,” the tall one said.
“Where?” I said, going down the step.
I went out to look, and it was true.
Some people say Wolverine had things mixed up, too. At times it was said he was a human returned to his animal shape. At other times, he was animal inhabiting a strange, two-legged body, wearing human skin. Whichever he was, Wolverine had come to despise humans and they didn’t feel so good about him either. But he knew them, and he knew everything about them. That’s how he knew to steal the flints and other things of value to human beings and to spoil the things they needed to live by. I wondered if he was the one who stole my mother.
The people there needed the snowshoes and coats. There was little of nothing for us to take away, although when I opened one of Hannah’s drawers I found the piece of amber I had carried, the frog inside it. I hadn’t even missed it. She’d stolen it, taken something else away from me. And she had broken into it, tried to chip the frog out. It must have terrified her, such suspension. I think she wanted to get to the heart of stilled life, to what was held captive in the yellow blood of a tree.
As we left, I knew I was leaving something behind me, perhaps forever, and as we walked away from the house of Hannah, death closed the door, darkened the windows like smoke. The nails of the house, driven through the walls, would rust, the slow fire of oxidation would take place, and finally all of it would fall. No one would ever live near Hannah’s dwelling place. They feared her still, all of them. In eight years it would be under water, the forests rotting beneath the muddy waters, the store and school floating up to the surface in pieces like rafts, the rusted machines at the bottom, unnatural and strange, and the animal bones floating, white, in the dark, cold waters, like ghosts or souls in the hereafter.
ON OUR WAY BACK, curious, I asked Bush, “Where’d you get the money for the plane?” I knew Tulik had none left. Mikky had made a special trip for her, for which she’d paid a hundred dollars.
Bush told me that at Two-Town Post she’d laid two of the prime beaver furs on the counter and asked Mr. Orensen what he’d give for them. She imitated him, telling me, “Well, they don’t look like much. The hairs are uneven.” He showed her what he meant, but she gave him the hard, gritty, angular look I knew so well, her eyes not wavering one bit.
“I’d say they’re worth about, oh, thirty, in trade,” he offered.
Bush knew traders. She wasn’t fooled. “You know that’s the best way for the hairs to be. So I’ll take what you offered, that much for each one. That and more besides. I’ll take three of those cured hams over there. And two pairs of Levi’s.”
When the deal was finished, she’d bargained for needles, thread, cloth for Auntie’s and Luce’s quilts, “and part of the money to get to Hardy, too,” she told me. “And Levi’s. One in size 26-30, one 29-31.” She laughed about how his face changed expression. He could see that she wasn’t a novice. He took the jeans from the shelf and placed them in a bag. He was so surprised, he didn’t even haggle. Like Dora-Rouge, Bush drove a tough bargain.
BY THE TIME we returned to Tulik’s, I’d named the baby, my sister, “Aurora.” I gave her to Dora-Rouge to hold. Beaming, she said,“New skin, straight from mystery. I’m glad I made that deal with water, after all.
“What deal?” Bush said.
It was only then that we learned about Dora-Rouge’s bargain with water. She had told it that if it gave us safe passage down the Se Nay River, she’d give up her so desired death to fight for it. She’d pledged her soul. “But I didn’t know what I was in for.”
I thought, so that was why Dora-Rouge blamed herself for Agnes’ death. She thought there might have been a part of the agreement she had not understood, loopholes in the legality of the arrangement.
We heard the low howl of a wolf, so low it could have been mistaken for the wind. It lay down across the wet earth. Tulik’s dog answered, remembering the wolf blood that still lived inside it, no matter how it had been bred out, no matter how people wanted to make of the animals something they weren’t, as they’d tried to do with the people, as they were doing with the land. And so the events that followed were tribal cries, the old wailing come to new terms.
And then we heard the train from a long ways off. It was how sound traveled there, where sometimes a sound from miles away seemed close at hand, and at other times a person in the same room sounded far away, distant and remote. Its sound drowned out the voices of wolves.