The Long-Shining Waters

The cold wind off the lake sets the pines in motion, sets their needled tops drawing circles in the sky. It cuts through boughs and they rise and fall, dropping snow that pits the white surface below. The hardened leaves rattle and sail, and the limbs of the paper birch sway, holding the sky in heavy wedges.

The dark bundle, like the nest of a squirrel. Dark bundle, tiny corpse, lurching with the branches against the sky as the big water, Gichigami, slings against the shore. Spray over icecovered rocks.

In long dark lines, the waves advance, crowding together as they near the shore, mounting and breaking over themselves, leaping at the rocks like wolves. The wind keens, causing branches to knock and deadfall to creak in the frozen forks of trees. The dark bundle rocks on its limb, in the dark sky, above trackless snow.

The waves like wolves leap over each other, toss sea foam from their open mouths. They hit the rocks and fall back again, only to rise howling and leaping, hitting and falling back again, until one after another they paw over the rocks, escape from the churning water, pads icing up in the snow, yellow eyes and patches of grey fur blowing.

Surging, they leap into the woods, dark lips curled over bared white teeth, toward the tree where the bundle churns in the sky. Yellow eyes and blowing grey fur, cracking branches, cold dry wind in their teeth.

Her hand. The woven mat. Night Cloud’s sleeping back. Dreaming. Another dream. Grey Rabbit’s eyes dart like tiny fish as crouched wolves shift shape around her, expanding in edgeless and rolling shadows. The wigwam is full of the heavy sounds of sleep: her two sons, her husband, his mother.

Grey Rabbit blows at the fire, causing the embers to sparkle orange and ash to lift like feathers from the coals. Again, and the new wood crackles into flame. Her family lies undisturbed, their feet pointing toward the warmth. The air is close. Night Cloud’s low snore. All the bodies softly rising and falling as if she were rocking in a sea of breath. Breath and shadow moving the bark walls. The fire whistles, but no one stirs.

Since the first snow of winter she’s seen children in her dreams. In danger and in death they come to her, taking the place of rest and worrying her days. She crouches near her two sleeping boys. Standing Bird looks strong and defiant, the jut of his chin set toward manhood even as his spirit journeys. But Little Cedar, limbs askew beneath the furs, looks vulnerable and warm cheeked. His eyelids flutter and then stop moving. She searches his face for traces of hunger. Again, Night Cloud returned without game.

The corpse, abandoned, sways on a limb. The heavy sky. The sharp-toothed wolves.

She won’t speak of the things she’s shown at night. She won’t tell anyone about the children of her dreams. She smoothes the hair off Little Cedar’s forehead. Her family needs her, especially now, with the food cache dwindling and no fresh meat to replace what they take. She’ll walk steady as the sun for them, even as the specters of winter sweep down.

Quietly, Grey Rabbit feels through her pouch, clasps for a moment the banded red agate that Little Cedar gave her. She draws a heavy fur around her shoulders and ducks out into the darkness.

Bullhead rolls over to see the door flap close, feels the cold air sweeping in. Again, her son’s wife leaves in the night.

Grey Rabbit stands motionless until the fire pit emerges, and then the first ring of pines with their high jagged tops that point like arrows to the sky. Her path cuts through low spruce, then rises along the birch-covered slope that protects their camp from the north’s killing winds. She tries to make her way in silence, to draw no attention in her direction, but her skins swish against the snow as she moves through the vertical weave of white trunks.

The ridge is home to massive old pines. She can feel their reaching boughs above her, feel the thinness of her skin. The grove possesses a frightful strength, yet she has always sensed goodness in its spirit. She rests a moment against the rough trunk of a tree, her heart drumming in her ears, then makes her way to the windswept ledge.

The shore below is ice locked and still, strewn with boulders cleaved from the cliff. The last time she’d come, Gichigami was raging. She’d made her offering despite her fear, there, in the presence of the underwater spirits and the one who churned the waters with his serpentine tail. The waves were smashing against the rocks, wild like hair, swirling white, whipping strands, and the water leapt and pounded, shattering the moon.

Grey Rabbit kneels and digs down through the snow. She places tobacco on the cold rock and a birch-bark dish that holds a small bit of the good berry. She opens herself to Gichi-Manitou, the Great Mystery, as the wind blows cold against her face, and her nose stiffens with the smell of frozen waves. She asks for favor for her family, and that Little Cedar be protected. She asks to understand her dreams.

The ice cracks and pings down the shoreline, echoing off the high cliff. There’s no moon on the water, just shadows of ice. Just sharp cold air against her forehead, and clouds of breath in front of her face.

2000

Nora reaches for the nail that holds the Christmas lights, her breath fogging against the mirror behind the bar, when something from her dream takes form, a feeling almost as much as an image, causing an empty swirling inside. She kneels on the bar stool and closes her eyes, hoping her mind might retrieve a scrap. But no. Nothing. It is usually like that, just a little sliver of something when she’s awake that had been part of something bigger. She moves her stool against the double-door cooler, bumping the new calendar that slides down on its magnet. January, again, already. The string of Christmas lights sags low—green, pink, yellow, blue—doubled and swinging in the barroom mirror as she lowers them from the nail.

There. She tugs her sweater down, her mood deflating at the sight of the mirror without the lights. They add a bright touch to the Schooner’s atmosphere, given the cold short days of a northern Wisconsin winter. Nora stands before the mirror, winding the string of lights. Her roots are starting to show again. She’s going to stick with the new copper color. It gives her more oomph than the brownish red. Reaching for her cigarette, she finds just a long piece of ash in the ashtray. It seems to always go like that, light one and get distracted or stuck at the other end of the bar. The clock reads 3:40 AM, bar time. Len won’t come to clean for a couple more hours.

There’s something about taking down Christmas decorations that always makes her feel empty. It’s like after the movies when the lights come on, the story’s done, and there she is, sitting with her coat in her lap. Sometimes she even gets the feeling at home in the silence of her apartment, after the TV twangs off.

Two by two Nora pulls bottles off the back bar to get at the strings of lights taped to the riser. The idea for the riser lights came years before, when her mirror swag fell in the middle of a rush. At the time, she was too busy to care, so she kept on working with the lights back in the bottles, and she grew to like the way they shone through. Pink in the vodka. A warm glow behind the brandy.

Well, it can’t be Christmas all the time, and cleaning’s the best way she knows to start over. The sharp smell of vinegar rises as it mixes with the steaming tap water. Nora pours herself a vodka, and with timing that is second nature, rights the bottle and reaches back, turning off the faucet.

Footsteps cross overhead, followed by the sound of a bench scraping across the floor. She smiles as she wrings the rag, then wipes the riser with long strokes, her attention on the ceiling, listening. Rose’s piano music drops down through the floor, slightly muffled and otherworldly. Angelic—the firm piano chords and the tinkly upper notes. The softest, sweetest sounds come from that tough old girl.

Nora hums and eyes the ornaments as she wipes the bottles and stands them back in place. The ornaments are everywhere—hooked into the netting that drapes from the ceiling with the glass floats and corks and the life preservers, hung from the rigging of the model schooner that’s displayed on its own shelf by the pool table. All around her, pieces of her history are dangling from thin threads. Nora swishes her rag in the bucket of water, wrings it, and wipes down the bottle of Crown.

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