“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Mysteries, she thought with a silent sigh. But maybe, if they were interesting enough, they would keep her father away from the things he wanted to discuss.
Early September. The air thick on the lake and the sky a weighty blue. The weather, he’d been told, was unusual for that time of year so far north. Hot beyond anyone’s memory. Usually by the end of August fall was already solidly in the air. But not this year. The intense heat of the afternoon was bearable only because of the wind generated by the dinghy speeding over smooth water.
Though they were in Canada, Cork knew he could just about throw a stone onto U.S. territory. They were on the Lake of the Woods, a body of water roughly eighty miles long and sixty miles wide, containing over fourteen thousand islands. That’s what he’d been told in Kenora, anyway. The lake straddled the U.S.-Canadian border. Border? Cork shook his head, thinking how easily that international marker was crossed on this lake. There was no line on the water to delineate one nation from the other. Kitchimanidoo, the Creator, had made the land a boundless whole. It was human beings who felt the need for arbitrary divisions and drew the lines. Too often, he thought, in human blood.
He held the tiller of the little Evinrude outboard, guiding the dinghy southwesterly across broad, open water toward a gathering of islands humped along the horizon. In the half hour since they’d left the houseboat, he hadn’t exchanged a word with Jenny. Which, he strongly suspected, was just fine with her.
The lake was beautiful and, like so many things of beauty, deceptive. The water that day was like glass. The vast size of the lake suggested depth, but Cork knew that beneath the tranquil surface lay reefs and rocks that in the blink of an eye could slit a hull or chew the blades off a prop. He’d been using GPS to follow the main channel between the islands and had been keeping a good speed. But south of Big Narrows he swung the boat west out of the channel, slowed to a crawl, and entered an archipelago composed of dozens of islands, large and small. The shorelines were rocky, the interiors covered with tall pine and sturdy spruce and leafy poplar. Cork eased the boat patiently along, studying the screen of the Garmin GPS mounted to the dash, into which he’d downloaded a program for Lake of the Woods. The water was the color of weak green tea, and he told Jenny, who sat in the bow, to keep her eyes peeled for snags that the GPS couldn’t possibly indicate. After fifteen minutes of careful navigation, he guided the dinghy up to the rocky edge of a small island. He eased the bow next to a boulder whose top rose from the water like the head of a bald man, and he cut the engine.
“Grab the bow line and jump ashore,” he told Jenny.
She leaped to the boulder, rope in hand.
“Can you tie us off?”
She slid a few feet down the side of the boulder and leaped nimbly to shore, where she tied the boat to a section of rotting fallen timber.
Cork stepped to the bow, leaped to the boulder, then to shore.
“Got your camera?” he asked.
Jenny patted her belt where her Canon hung in a nylon case.
“Okay,” Cork said. “Let’s take a hike.”
The island was nearly bare of vegetation and was dominated by a rock formation that rose conelike at the center. Cork led the way along the rock slope, following the vague suggestion of a trail that gradually spiraled upward around the cone. All around them lay a gathering of islands so thick that no matter which way Cork looked they appeared to form a solid shoreline. Between the islands ran a confusing maze of narrow channels.
“Where are we?” Jenny asked.
“Someplace not many folks know about. Probably the only ones who do are Shinnob.”
He used the word that was shorthand for the Anishinaabeg, the First People, who were also known as Ojibwe or Chippewa. Anishinaabe blood ran through Cork and, therefore, through his daughter Jenny.
“On a map, this island doesn’t have a name,” Cork said. “But Shinnobs call it Neejawnisug.”
“What does it mean?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.”
They reached the top, which was crowned by a great white stone that looked as if it had been cleaved by an ax. The southern side was rounded and pocked, but the north side was a solid face ten feet tall. It lay in full sunlight, golden, and when Jenny saw that glowing face of rock, her eyes went large.
“Pictographs,” she said. “They’re beautiful, Dad. Do you know what they mean?”
Cork studied the figures painted in ocher that covered the face of the stone.
“Henry Meloux told me they’re a kind of invocation to Kitchimanidoo for safety. He said the Anishinaabeg who drew them were being pursued by Dakota and had come to hide. They left the children here, and that’s why they call it Neejawnisug. It means ‘the children.’ They left the women, too, and went off to fight the enemy. They trusted this place because there are so many islands and so many channels that it’s almost impossible to find your way here.”
“You found it easily enough.”
“When I was sixteen, Henry brought me. Giigiwishimowin,” Cork said.
“Your vision quest,” Jenny interpreted.
“By then it was no longer a common practice among the Ojibwe,” Cork said. “But Henry insisted.”
“Why here?”
“He never told me.”
“Did you receive your vision?”
“I did.”
Jenny didn’t ask about her father’s dream vision, and if she had, he probably wouldn’t have told her.
“Have you been here since?”
“Never.”
“How did you find it so easily? I mean, after so many years?”
“I spent a long afternoon coming here with Henry. He made me memorize every twist and turn.”
“That had to be forty years ago. A long time to remember.”
“You mean for an old man.”
“I couldn’t find my way back here.”
“If it was important, I bet you could.”
Jenny snapped photos of the drawings on the stone and, for a long time, was silent. “And did Kitchimanidoo hide the children successfully?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know. Nor did Henry.”
He could see her mind working, and that was one of the reasons he’d brought her. Unanswered questions were part of what drove her. He was uncertain how to broach the other reason he’d asked her to come.
“God, it’s hot,” Jenny said, looking toward the sun, which baked them. “Not even a breath of wind.”
“Dog days.”
“Not technically,” she said.
“Technically?” He smiled. “So when are dog days? Technically.”
“According to the Farmers’ Almanac, the forty days from July third through August eleventh.”
He shook his head. “You’re way too precise in your thinking. Your mom, she was the same way.”
Jenny brought her gaze to bear on her father. “She was a lawyer. She had to be precise. Legal strictures. I’m a journalist. Lots of the same strictures apply.” She looked away, down at the water a hundred feet below. “Mind if I take a dip before we go on?”
“No. Mind if I join you?”
They descended the cone and retraced their path to the boulder where the boat was secured. They’d worn their bathing suits under their other clothing, and they quickly stripped. Jenny slipped into the water first and Cork followed.
The lake had been warming all summer, but even so it still held a chill that was a wonderful relief to the heat of the day.
“So?” Cork said, in clumsy opening.
His daughter turned her head to the sky and closed her eyes and lay on her back, so that her ears were below the surface and she could pretend not to hear him.
“I just want to know one thing. And I know you can hear me.”
“It starts with one thing,” she said with her eyes still closed. “It ends up everything. That’s how you operate.”
“Old dog, old trick,?
?? he said, waited a moment, then repeated, “So?”
She righted herself, treaded water, and gave in. “All right, what do you want to know?”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“That’s a complicated question.”
“I think the question is fairly simple.”
“Well, I can’t answer it.”
“Because of you or him?”
“It’s a decision we’re both involved in.”
“You’d tell your mother,” he said.
“She wouldn’t put me on the rack.”
“Have I?”
“You will if you don’t get an answer.”
“I suppose you’ve talked to Aunt Rose.”
She didn’t reply, but her silence itself gave him his answer.
“But you won’t talk to me.”
“There are things women understand, Dad.”
“There are things fathers should be let in on. Look, I don’t know why you can’t give me a straightforward answer, and that’s what concerns me.”
“There are issues we need to settle first.”
“Children?”
“Ah, children,” she said, as if she suddenly understood. “That’s why you brought me here to show me those pictographs. This is all about children, isn’t it?”
“Not completely. But you indicated there are issues,” he said. “And I’m betting that’s one. He doesn’t want them, does he?”
“Maybe it’s me who doesn’t.”
“Is it?” Again, her silence was his answer. “You’ve been down this road before, Jenny.”
“See? Right there.” She lifted her arm and pointed an accusing finger at him. Water dripped from the tip in crystal pearls. “That’s why I don’t talk to you.”
“It was only an observation.”
“It was a criticism, and you know it.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I’m finished swimming. Let’s go.”
He’d blown it. In his imagining, the discussion had gone differently, had ended with them understanding each other, touching heart to heart in the way they used to when she was much younger. Instead he watched her breaststroke away from him to the dinghy, leaving him feeling stupid and treading water.
They threaded their way out of the convoluted gathering of islands. Jenny sat rigid in the bow, fiercely giving him her back. As soon as they hit the open water of the main channel, he headed the dinghy again toward the southwest.
When he saw the sky there, he was, for a moment, stunned breathless.
“Dad?” Jenny said from the bow. She’d seen it, too, and she turned back to him, fear huge in her eyes.
“Good God Almighty,” he whispered.
TWO
Rose was in the middle of rolling a piecrust. She’d promised pie for dessert that night, and the kids had volunteered to hunt for blueberries. Though it was late in the season, weeks past the normal time for harvesting berries, at every place the houseboat had anchored so far, they’d had luck with their picking. It had to do with the unusual heat, Rose speculated.
Behind her, Mal came into the galley and encircled her waist with his arms.
“They’re finally gone,” he said.
“Let me wash my hands.” Rose lifted them so that he could see they were covered with flour.
“No time. They’ll be back before you know it.” He turned her, kissed her long but delicately, and said, “And besides, the smell of piecrust is very sexy.”
They made love in their cabin. Afterward, she lay cradled in the crook of Mal’s outstretched arm.
The houseboat was lovely, but there was no privacy. It was a rare pleasure to have the boat to themselves. There was something about this untamed country that stirred the wild in Rose. She smiled, thinking how odd it was to her now that before Mal had come into her life she’d seriously considered joining an order. When she first met him, he’d been a priest, a cleric stumbling in his belief and assigned to a small parish in the great North Woods of Minnesota. Rose had fallen in love with him; terrible events had followed, events not his doing or hers, nor was their love the cause, but in the end, Mal had chosen to leave the priesthood. He hadn’t turned his back on the Church. He’d simply opened his heart to Rose. Something she thanked God for every day.
Mal kissed her shoulder. “They’ll be coming back soon.”
“They’re such good kids,” she said.
“The best.”
“They’re grown now.”
“Not quite, but growing.”
“I remember when they were small. Yesterday, it seems.”
“Nature of the beast. We all grow up.” He spoke softly into her ear. “Do you miss them being small and needing you? Are you thinking we should try again ourselves?”
She smiled. “We just did.”
“You know what I mean.”
She knew. The thermometers. The graphs. And the specialists.
“I’m forty-four years old,” she said. “I think at this point it’s a miracle I’m willing to leave in God’s hands. They’ll be coming back soon. We should get up.”
She moved to rise, but Mal held her down for a moment, gently.
“I love you, Rose,” he said. “I’ll give you anything in the world that I can.”
He looked so deeply, so seriously into her eyes that her heart melted all over again. “You’ve already given me the best thing, sweetheart.” And she kissed him a very long time to let him know how much she appreciated the gift that was his heart.
She dressed and stepped out onto the platform of the bow, looking north across the little bay to the tip of the island where Anne and Stephen had swum to search for blueberries. She didn’t see them. Still hunting, she thought. Her husband came to her side, and they stood together, and then she turned and looked to the southwest.
She gave a little cry and said breathlessly, “Oh, Mal.”
He looked there, too, and uttered in disbelieving horror, “Sweet Jesus.”
The formation stretched from horizon to horizon, a mountain of dark cloud. The leading edge was rounded, like a bow drawn taut. Or, Cork thought later in his recollections, like a great plateau in the sky, shaped by forces so enormous he couldn’t even begin to imagine the scope of their power. The monster rose from the earth itself, straight up tens of thousands of feet in a sheer, curving wall the color of sooted stone. Behind it, there was no sky, only that great unstoppable body of storm. Lightning rippled along the top of the formation and struck deep inside in angry flashes that made the cloud, in moments of brilliance, seem almost translucent. The great plateau of the storm swept toward them with unbelievable speed. Before it, the lake was a swell of turbulent water. Cork understood that in only a few minutes all hell would hit them, hit them there in the open in their flimsy dinghy.
He swung the tiller, and the boat dug a deep, curling trough in the green water. Jenny gripped the bow and bent low as if to make herself more aerodynamic, although it could have been that she was simply cowering in the shadow of what was about to strike. Cork shot back toward the narrow channel where, only a minute before, they’d emerged from the gathering of islands. The outer islands were small and provided little protection. He hoped there was enough time to get well inside the archipelago. Full throttle, he cut along channels where the possibility of submerged rocks had, earlier, made him proceed so carefully. Desperately, he scanned the shorelines ahead, searching for some inlet that might offer the hope of shelter.
The beast struck before he could make them safe.
* * *
They were in one of the wider channels. Jenny was looking frantically forward. Ahead and to the left, she saw a small landing between two outthrusts of stone. Before she could turn to tell her father, the wind hit her as if someone had swung a telephone pole. She flew forward and smacked her head against the prow. She was stunned but still fully aware of the danger and held to the gunwales for dear life. She fought her way back onto her seat, but an instant later the dinghy swung sh
arply right, and again she was almost thrown overboard.
“Dad!” she cried, turning her face into the raging face of the wind.
Her father was no longer at the tiller. The stern of the boat was empty. Without any hand on the throttle, the little kicker engine was winding down, threatening to die. Jenny bent low into the gale and clawed her way to the back of the dinghy. She grasped the tiller of the outboard and gave the engine gas and tried to bring the boat about and find her father. A useless maneuver, she quickly discovered. There was no way she could put the boat crosswind and not be swamped by the waves, enormous even in that channel. And if the waves didn’t get her, the wind was strong enough to lift her, boat and all, and throw her easily against the cliff face that loomed to her right.
Then the rain hit, a downpour pushed horizontal by the fury, threatening to drown her.
She had no time to think. She simply fought to survive. She gave the boat full throttle, shot from the channel, and curled into the lee of the starboard island. A great pine toppled almost directly in her path, and she swerved; the hull scraped wood and the props cut branches. She shot forward, the wind cupped her, and the boat tipped; she swung left, and the wind was again at her back, waves sloshing over the stern. Across the channel where she now found herself, she spotted a beach of small rocks at the base of a tall outcropping capped with cedars. The opening was only slighter wider than the dinghy was long, but she launched the boat straight for it and onto the rocks of the tiny inlet. She heard the rending of the hull and the grind and pop as the propeller blades were sheared off by stone.
She leaped from the boat, and the wind immediately knocked her over. On all fours, she crawled into the shelter of the outcropping. The island was forested with pines bent by the force of the wind, their crowns pushed almost parallel to the ground. She heard an explosion like a shotgun blast very close. A second later, she watched the trunk of a hundred-foot-tall pine snap in two. Rain continued in horizontal sheets. Mixed with it were hailstones that hit the beach like rocks from a slingshot. Jenny pressed against the solid body of the outcropping, grateful for the little haven. Then she heard a deafening crack directly above. In the next instant, a cedar that had crowned the outcrop fell. It hit near her feet. The whipping of its branches lashed her, and she pressed still harder to the wall.