“You go and turn the bath on, young lady.”
“But it’s not bath time.”
“Now. And I want you to shampoo your hair.”
“What were you thinking,” Janelle says through tight lips, her neck turning red and blotchy. “You want to raise my kid in a bar, too?”
At dinner, no one talks and the silence is loud. Nora looks at their reflection in the window: Janelle’s blurred profile and Nikki’s little face hanging sullenly over her plate.
“I’m not very hungry, Mom.” Nikki rests her chin on her hand.
“You can finish your ham.”
“Am I being punished?”
“Of course not. Your mommy and Nanny just had a disagreement.”
Nora is in the bathroom when Nikki knocks. “Nanny, the phone’s for you. Do you want me to hand it in?” Nora sets down her tweezers and opens the door.
“Hello?” she says, but there’s no reply. “Hello?” She’s about to hang up when she hears music coming over the line. It’s Rose playing a waltz on her new Casio. She’d know her playing anywhere. Nora sits on the edge of the bathtub and cradles the phone against her ear.
When Nora rounds the house she can’t see the picnic table, or even where the yard ends. A wave dashes against the rocks below the ledge. The spray leaps and showers back. Then a moment of silence. No moon. No stars. The sky and the lake are a wall of blackness. Another wave hits and showers. Nora edges back to the rectangle of light cast on the lawn by the picture window. The sidelights of a freighter are visible in the distance. It looks like a long string of diamonds, and it’s heading toward the Twin Ports. Home.
Behind the big glass pane, Janelle is gesturing to someone on the phone. Nora taps a cigarette from her pack. Who knows who she’s talking to. What she’s saying isn’t hard to guess. It’s amazing, the cruelty in her lightning-bolt temper, and then her thunder can roll on for days.
A wave strikes. Nora can feel the vibration in her feet. Up and down the shoreline it’s darker than dark. And yet she doesn’t want to go inside and explain again about Nikki’s hunger and the closed restaurant.
The shoreline is pitch black.
Nikki is already asleep on the floor, her mouth open, breathing in rushes of air. Nora lies back on the small bed. It’s not even ten o’clock. She reaches down and smoothes Nikki’s soft hair behind her ear. It’s dark. No streetlight shining in. It is darker than any darkness she’s used to, but she doesn’t want to wake Nikki with the lamplight. The lake out the window hits the ledge and falls back, and Nikki’s breath sounds in and out.
1902
There’s a low hum, a faint song. And a warm wind playing at the hem of Berit’s skirt. It lifts the loosened hair at her temples. The song, low-throated, is in her ears. Its muscled underbeat inside her ribs. The wind presses her skirt against her calves, gusts hot in her face. Her eyelids flutter. The singing grows louder. The air churns. The hot wind pushing her. Roiling currents overhead. The song. The rhythmic stroking. The sharp smell of sweat. The hot vortex of wind pulling her from the bench, upward toward the tumult in the air, working at her grip, prying her away. Lifting her upright, awake and gasping.
Her hands are cold and stiff, and her bad leg aches. The lake is dim and the stars fading, and then the flooding nightmare of where she is, and why. She’d slept. How could she, for even one moment? She stands. Sits. Stands again. She can’t have this. She won’t. The cabin windows no longer glow, but look flat and tepid in the grey light. Maybe he’s there, sick, wounded, not knowing where she’d gone. Berit races up the path, and flings open the cabin door. The bed is empty, the room is still, the bean pot sitting on the stove. She sinks into a chair, the stove blurring through her tears. Pushing at the table, she’s up again. No. She won’t have it. She stomps out the door.
An edge of orange sun is lifting out of the lake, and the air holds the first hint of a quickening breeze. She walks behind the house and into the woods, climbing up the birch-covered slope, the orange light on their white trunks. She looks over her shoulder as she climbs, her breath hard, her feet determined.
Berit stands panting on top of the ridge, the long empty horizon before her. Water. Sunlight. The small crescent of their cove. There’s no sign of Gunnar anywhere.
What of a heart within a chest. Beat. Beat. Perpetually beating. Never smelled. Never seen or touched. A small tenacious drum. Preceding breath. Enduring throughout every minute, month, year.
But still, the heart.
Fragile fist.
What of this place of timeless eddies. These keepsake waters. Where I am. I am not. This slow dissolve of my every quirk and feature. Yet the stilled beat still echoes.
The silky cold’s caress is its own fierce intimacy.
This place of holding. The common waters.
This place of circling.
The shores perceived.
My vision expands with every dark fathom.
I strain toward the rumble. The thin-skinned pulse.
1622
The last of the sap is on its final fire and still looking good enough to be grained in the troughs. It ran well, and there’s sugar in plenty, and syrup hardening in birch-bark cones.
Little Cedar stands at the open end of the lodge, watching the wind whirl the leaves in circles as it chases the last of winter away. The lodge is a flurry of preparation for the last pour and the cleanup, the women brushing past him, coming and going like swallows.
“Stay to the side.” Three Winds shoos him from the entrance.
Grey Rabbit observes Three Winds’s scowl, then adds another piece of tallow to the boil. Let the others gossip behind their hands, or hint subtly that the boil is no place for young children. She smiles at Little Cedar, who stands sullenly against the wall. She had no choice but to keep him with her, though even Night Cloud had been of a different mind. “He should watch as we lay the beaver traps,” he said. Of course this was true, but after her terrifying dream—she can still see the one-eyed giant on the cliff, tossing handfuls of children to the big water—and then the owl that had followed her in the woods, she felt most fiercely that he shouldn’t go.
Grey Rabbit beckons to Little Cedar with a sooty hand. “Stay here by me, and don’t stray.” She gives him some gum sugar cradled in bark.
It’s hot standing so near the fire, and the smell of burnt sugar is in his nose. Little Cedar can see the places where the sap has spilled over and burned to black in the hot coals. He bites off a small piece of the gum sugar, and holds the rest closed in his fist.
“Make sure you scrub everything out entirely.” He listens as Three Winds instructs the girls for the washing. “If they’re not cleaned well enough, next year’s sugar will be off color. If anything needs repair, set it aside. If it’s beyond use, it can be burned.”
Little Cedar rolls the sweet gum in his mouth, and pushes it along the back of his teeth. He likes to let it dissolve slowly, not chew and swallow fast like Standing Bird. His shins are too hot where his leggings touch against them, and the black smoke is getting in his eyes.
The call goes out and the lodge swings into motion. A line of women forms to fill their containers and whisk them quickly out to the troughs where others wait, paddles in hand, ready for the fast work of graining.
The smoke is going right in his face. Little Cedar tries breathing through his mouth, and looking through his lashes with his eyes half closed. His legs are too hot and his eyes sting. He squeezes them shut and twists away, stumbling into the current of women.
Everything stops at the sound of his scream, with no one even seeing exactly what happened, or whose container the scalding sap sloshed out of when Little Cedar got tangled in all the legs.
2000
Nora tamps a pack of cigarettes against the dash, and opens the cellophane with her teeth. The lake is breaking hard, spray flinging in the air, looking about how she feels inside. So she’d brought enough clothes to last two weeks and only stayed a couple of days. Even as a little girl, Janelle had a way of acting as if she were the one in charge, approving or disapproving of her actions.
Everything out the windshield looks cold, the birch trees and the dark rock they’d blasted through to build the road. Nora, driving slowly, edges over to let an encroaching car pass. She lights a cigarette off the glowing orange coil. If there’s anything she’d learned in her years behind the bar, it’s that there’s never only one way to look at something; there’s always the other side to hear, and even that may not be the whole of it. She raps the lighter against the ashtray. What cuts deepest is the accusation that she’s a danger to her own granddaughter.
The Caribou River. The sign for the Manitou. It swirls and tumbles toward the lake. Manitou, she considers the word. Manitou, Caribou, possibly related.
“Nanny, it’s not fair that you’re leaving.” Nikki sat sullenly as they waited for the bus. “We hardly got to do anything, or go anywhere, or even color the horses.” That part too, she feels terrible about. Nora steers onto the shoulder of the road to avoid a large black flap of truck-tire rubber. She slows and stops, turns the car off, stares at the rubber in her rearview mirror. Wind rocks her car and the tall pines circle. She’d dreamt about a dead crow.
She’s on a residential street after a rain. There’s the sound of rushing water under the sewer grates, and raindrops blowing down from the trees. It’s her street, but it’s not really her street. She steps over a puddle on the sidewalk. There are lots of puddles and the grass is wet, though she’s not wet, not even her shoes. She stops when she sees it ahead on the sidewalk: a large piece of black rubber, or a black plastic bag. A crow with a twig in its beak stands near the dark shape. It lays the twig beside it on the sidewalk, caws and flies to the tree on the boulevard. She walks closer and another bird lands. The tree on the boulevard has huge black leaves. Not leaves, there are hundreds of crows in its branches. The shape on the ground is also a crow. It’s dead, she sees this, and it’s enormous, nearly covering the sidewalk square.
No one on the street seems to notice, not the boys down the block tossing a football, or the people passing by in cars. But there’s a dog sitting close in the grass. It looks at her and then back to the birds. It’s watching like she is, just she and the dog.
She’s on a porch, in an old painted chair. The crows leave the tree to lay twigs on the sidewalk. They caw and then fly up again. There’s a window screen with rain caught in its squares. There’s a damp sky, and puffs of wind on the puddles. The dog is lying across her feet; she feels its warm furry weight. It sighs. Its breath rises and falls. She reaches down to pet its soft fur. And just at that moment she feels its heart break.
Her car takes another gust of wind and the sign she just passed for Split Rock Lighthouse shutters. She has an image of the lighthouse in her mind—perched high on a cliff, the water below—but it must be from postcards and photographs; she doesn’t recall ever being there. She could drive in and take a look. She has time. If nothing else, she has that. Nora starts her engine and pulls off the shoulder, her glass float swinging as she makes a U-turn.
The size of the lighthouse operation is surprising. There’s a sleek information center with a gift shop, exhibits, even a small movie theater. She’d expected only the lighthouse and a historic plaque. She has no idea where all the people came from, though it feels good being in the midst of something, so when a loudspeaker announces the start of a tour, Nora joins the rear of a group that’s already gathered at the door.
The guide, a young scrubbed-faced blonde, leads them to the guardrail at the top of the cliff. “A hundred and thirty feet down,” she shouts, as the wind beats everyone’s hair around. “The ore in these cliffs reeked havoc with ship’s compasses, spinning them off of magnetic north. It wasn’t until after the gale of 1905, in which twenty-nine ships were damaged, that Congress appropriated money for the light. Two of those ships foundered right out here,” she sweeps her arm along the shore.
“Wasn’t it the steamship companies who pushed through the legislation after having lost so many ships?” asks a man with thick glasses and a battered red jacket. Nora rolls her eyes. He’s telling, not asking. She holds fast to the guardrail and looks down. The cliff is splotched with orange lichen, and the lake below is crashing against it. Her heart flutters, but it’s not falling she fears; it’s the welling urge to attempt flight.
A man in a navy blue uniform greets them at the steps to the lighthouse. He has grey wisps of hair sticking out of his cap, and he’s acting as if he were back in time, and actually the real lighthouse keeper. He ushers them into the sudden stillness and warmth, where they wait like school children for the group to assemble. It never occurred to her, though now it makes sense, that no two lighthouses would be built the same shape, and that each would have its own flashing sequence to help lost boats figure out where they are. Nora wonders if Ralph ever toured the lighthouse. He must have. He’d love it. She can’t recall.