He couldn’t bring the body home.
Using his knife as sparingly as he could, he worked steadily to release him, trying to block thoughts of the dead man’s wife, and focusing on his own instead. If it were he who had drowned in the lake, Berit would want to have his body. “Buried, not out there adrift,” she’d say. “Not left with the hope that you’d return.” But Berit knew, she knew. The lake’s a killer. She’d lived her entire life on its shores. She knew the water temperature didn’t bend toward hope.
The dead man’s wife was not his concern. He had a live one with enough sorrow as it was. He would not bring the dead man home. God forgive him. He couldn’t do it.
The sunlight shone innocently on the water, but the gulls, they were watching him closely. The net was damaged, though not beyond fixing. First, he decided, he’d take care of the body, then after come back and finish picking the nets. He’d tie him to the skiff and tow him further out.
When he reached down to get the rope around the man, he half expected his bones to poke through, but he was as solid as a cold side of meat. Gunnar tied the rope under the man’s arms, let out a length, and secured it to the skiff. There was no real reasoning to where he was going, just out deeper, one mile or four, he wasn’t sure when he’d stop.
A black head plying the waves. The body turning, showing the white face. Staring at the man was a danger to himself. He should have been watching the sky and the water, but putting himself in danger felt only right. He vowed to the dead man—or to God, he wasn’t sure—that from that day forward his life would change. He would coax his Mrs., his marriage, back to life.
Gunnar skis on as the sun lifts from the lake and is swallowed into a bank of clouds. He’d made good on his promise; their life has turned around. But still, he thinks of the man he left out there. His grieving wife. Maybe a passel of children. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t come to mind.
When the morning is well established, Gunnar stops to rest. He plants his poles in the snow and slides the pack off his back. He circles his shoulders and pops his neck, looking back toward the ridge he’d helped log, the sheared stumps and the bramble of brush. They’ll come through and burn what’s left.
Gunnar unscrews the cap to his canteen. As he drinks, the sun pokes out for a moment, causing a patch of water to brighten and then dim. He wipes his mouth across his sleeve, feeling small and fragile.
At fourteen, I crossed the ocean. The unpath’d waters. The deep salt sea. My feet solid on the ship’s deck, I imagined beneath the water surface. The fishes. The mammals. The corals. The algae. All the hidden dangers below. My face to the wind, I imagined exotic lands. Tried to grasp the great distances, and the endless horizon.
But the ocean was incomprehensible.
Too vast. Too far. Too deep, my mind said.
I had the luxury of giving up and turning my attention to other things.
As a man I worked the great Gichigami. Lake Superior. The sweet-water sea. I knew its waters touched no exotic lands. That its creatures were few. Dull colored. Benign. Still, like the ocean, its horizon is endless. I grappled as I stood on her shore, as I rode her waves in each morning’s light. But always I was left uncertain.
It is a fact that Superior is easily measured. In length. In width. In hundreds of miles.
Superior should be comprehensible.
It is not.
And that discord is readily felt.
The Great Lake is movement at peripheral vision. It is sound at the limit of audible frequency. It is the illusion of the ability to understand.
2000
Nora stands on the blackened threshold, keys in hand. There is no door. It’s cold and wet and everything stinks like fire, though it’s not the smell of a fireplace. It’s the smell of things you’re not supposed to burn, vinyl and plastic; the stench is bad. Her heart beats in her ears as she takes a step forward, uncertain whether the floor will hold.
Weak light angles down from a large patch of sky framed in stumps of charred wood. What’s left of the bar is largely unrecognizable, mounds of blackened and soggy debris. She lifts a metal pole and pokes through a pile. A broken picture frame. Part of a drawer. It could be her stuff, it could be Rose’s—it’s hard to tell since there’s no floor keeping their things separated.
She always imagined firemen putting out fires as if that were that, but it’s impossible to say which caused more damage, the fire itself or their water hoses. She pulls her sweater up over her nose, but it’s no match for the acrid smell. She pokes at broken glass and table legs, water soaking through her shoes.
Edging herself behind the bar, she peers into the long mirror. It’s broken and sooty. Her face doesn’t show.
Nora stands unmoving where she’d stood so many years, as a sensation of heaviness sinks through her body, anchoring her feet to the floor. She should simply get out. She knows it’s dangerous.
A plane passes overhead, leaving a vapor trail like a zipper in the sky. She’s chilled right through. It looks like a boxcar came down on her pool table. It’s Rose’s refrigerator. There are dark recesses and unrecognizable shapes, tiny sounds that she can’t discern.
Nora lifts one foot just to know that she can, then tries the other but the toe of her shoe is caught. With her pole she uncovers a piece of netting to find it’s holding a glass float. Fist sized and bottle green, it’s filthy and dripping, but somehow intact. A feeling wells in her chest. She can’t even tell whether it’s happiness or sadness.
She should walk away.
She doesn’t have the strength.
If she leaves, there will be no going back.
She’s knows that she’s not making sense.
There’s a rumbling train, and the metal-on-metal shriek.
She can’t leave, and it’s starting to scare her.
She doesn’t expect a miracle—the cigarette machine to blink on, or the bottles to reconstruct and line up on the riser.
Something else is in the room. She senses its presence in the shadows.
She can’t even move her arms.
Slap. She feels the sound in her chest. A pigeon bolts from the kitchen, and Nora flies.
Burt Schnell slips a free fifth of vodka into Nora’s bag.
“Thanks,” she manages. “That’s nice of you.” She doesn’t realize her fingers are sooty until she holds out her hand for change.
“What a loss,” he says, “a crying shame. I remember when we were kids, my dad would bring us in for burgers. Me and my sister used to practically kill each other trying to get the bar stool across from Josephine.”
Nora nods and feels her throat tighten. She hadn’t thought of Josephine, her carved figurehead behind the bar.
“And the thing is,” Burt continues, “the Schooner hadn’t changed a bit. It was timeless, you know, like real places are.” He shakes his head. “Irreplaceable. So what are you going to do now? It’s hard to imagine you anywhere else.”
“I know.” She slides her bag off the counter. “I can’t think that far ahead yet.”
Nora puts the liquor in the front seat and drives to the supermarket at the other end of the lot.
She’s standing in a row of detergents and fabric softeners, flanked by orange and pink plastic bottles. Everything is absurd. The bright swirling labels. The moms wheeling their kids in shopping carts. The “everyday low prices.” The bulk peanuts.
Water douses the produce, but no one seems to notice.
1622
“And the birds rose up all together, laughing and talking and congratulating themselves.” Bullhead lifts her hands in the air. “And each and every one flew away.”
“What happened next?” Little Cedar asks. “What happened to the man?”
Bullhead reaches over and pinches his leg. She laughs and adds a piece of wood to the fire, causing shadows to bounce higher on the wall. “He was flung into the night sky. I’ll show him to you at Sugarbush.”
The sound of Bullhead’s laughter meant more to their survival than Grey Rabbit had realized. Once more, she thanks the animals who had offered their lives to feed her family. At first the meat felt bad in their stomachs, like hard balls of clay slow to dissolve. Now its good effects are evident. Standing Bird stares at the flames, his arrow-sharp focus back. And Little Cedar is playing again.
Warm light wavers on Night Cloud’s face. The tightness in his jaw has relaxed as well. He’s no longer stony eyed and quick with gruff words. His feelings come through his eyes so strongly. The morning he awakened from the dream where he was shown the echo rock wall in the woods, his eyes were filled with such gratitude and relief that she knew of the gift before he had spoken.
“Are we going to hear another one?” Standing Bird asks his grandmother without looking up from the space between two pieces of wood where the flames appear and disappear, creating an eye, a row of teeth, or two tall twirling dancers. He reaches over and pinches his little brother’s knee, and mouths the words, “Windigo, windigo, windigo.”
Grey Rabbit silences her oldest with a look as Little Cedar squirms and covers his eyes. She, too, would rather not hear of the windigos, the horrible winter specters with man-eating ways. She puts her arm around Little Cedar, feeling the thinness of his shoulder. She tilts his face and feels his cheeks for warmth, but he twists his head free of her.
Even though they have food enough, the dreams of endangered children have continued. In the last there’d been a lost boy who wandered into a clearing full of bad medicine. Girl or boy and whatever the age—somehow the dreams seem to point to her youngest. She can’t explain why this is. She has never been known as a powerful dreamer. She knows she should ask Bullhead to help her interpret, yet each time she means to, she falls silent.
“We’ll leave for Sugarbush as soon as the time is right,” Night Cloud announces. Grey Rabbit meets Bullhead’s eyes across the fire. Most of the preparations are already finished. What’s left can’t be done until the end.
“And when we get there, we can open the cache,” Little Cedar pipes up. “Tell us everything that’s buried in it?” he asks, but then he recites the list himself. “Rice, and fish, and beaver, and maple sugar, sugar, sugar.” His eyes squint shut with pleasure. Again, Grey Rabbit puts her hand to his cheek.
Bullhead sucks her teeth and then clears her throat with a short cough. “The time has come for me to tell a story that happened as a small party of canoes were on the way to their Sugarbush.”
Bullhead’s dark eyes travel around the circle, and everyone settles in to listen.
Despite the mood of caution and the respect that’s necessary when journeying on Gichigami, everyone was happy and excited. The winds of winter were growing tired, and soon the fisher would swing up in the night sky, followed by the songbirds winging back to the trees. Everyone was anxious to see friends and relatives, and to hear how the winter had passed for them.
It was a mild grey morning when the party launched their boats, but the day turned cold and bright and Gichigami was rolling beneath their canoes.
Among them was a girl named Hole-in-the-Rain; she was young, only about this high, and cold. She was always cold. It happened that she was one of two, and her tiny sister, who was much weaker, didn’t survive the long cold winter of their birth.
Ever since, and even in the summer, Hole-in-the-Rain would wear a fur in order to keep the cold away. She especially didn’t like being on the water. Not only were the water spirits frightening, but she wasn’t allowed to move around in the boat, and the cold went straight to her bones.
Hole-in-the-Rain tried to amuse herself as the small party paddled across the bays, their boats moving in a line like ants. She peered down into the water, though she couldn’t see below the surface. “Stay low and sit still,” her mother warned, but the girl kept glancing over the side.
It was at the hollow-rock river, where they had stopped to rest and eat, that Hole-in-the-Rain first heard the voice. It was clear and sweet, and it called her by name. She pulled her fur tight around her, and followed the voice around the rocky point. There she found the very small cove. “Come play with me,” called the voice. “I’ve been waiting for you all morning.”
No one was on the beach or back in the trees. Hole-in-the-Rain turned in circles. She looked low to the ground for the little people, but there were none. “Where are you?” she called into the cold clear air.
“Here, here,” the voice came again. “Now we can go exploring together.” Hole-in-the-Rain looked over the water, and there she saw her between the waves. A watergirl.
She had long dark hair that floated out around her and a beautiful face. But her eyes were strange; completely round like those of a fish.
“I saw you,” the girl continued, “looking down at me from your boat. Come on now. We have so much to do.” She reached her hand to Hole-in-the-Rain. “There are lots of places I want to show you.”
Hole-in-the-Rain could not believe that a girl was swimming in the water when the rocks along the shore were still held in a rim of ice. Even in the summer, Gichigami was freezing. “How can you swim in that cold water? You must be like ice through and through.”
“I’m not cold at all. It always feels good here.” The girl in the water observed Hole-in-the-Rain closely, looking her up and down with her strange round eyes. “I can see that you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Come, you’ll be fine. I promise. The water will feel like a warm breeze, and there are so many things to see. There are caves to explore, treasures to find.”
Hole-in-the-Rain considered the invitation. After all, it would be nicer to play with a new friend than to sit still all day in the cold boat.
“Come along.” The beautiful girl held out her hand. “What are you waiting for?”
Hole-in-the-Rain was tempted to go, but she was also afraid. Gichigami was the coldest thing she knew. The last time she’d waded in, the water grabbed her ankles so tight that it hurt. “I’m afraid I’ll be cold. I’m always cold.”
“Do I look cold to you? The girl reached again for Hole-in-the-Rain. “Look at my arm. Do you see any bumps? Now give me your hand. I’m getting impatient.”
It was true, she didn’t look cold at all. Hole-in-the-Rain took a step toward the water and was just reaching out her hand when her mother came around the point and saw what was happening. “Get back,” she yelled, and quickly scooped up a rock and hurled it at the watergirl. The rock struck her hard on the side of the head, and her round eyes bulged.
“Mother, stop!” screamed Hole-in-the-Rain. Her new friend was bleeding at the temple, but her mother bent for another stone, and again hit the watergirl in the head. The second rock stunned her and she sunk below the surface, where she lay floating motionless.
Hole-in-the-Rain began to cry. “You’ve killed her, Mother. You’ve killed my new friend.” But just then the beautiful girl came to. She rolled and slapped her tail angrily, then sped away beneath the waves. She had lost her chance to steal Hole-in-the-Rain down to the watery underworld.