Another day, after one of Bush’s long silences, she laughed out loud at the ignorance of Europeans. Out of the blue, she said, “Beavers. None of them ever considered how beavers change the land.” She was right. Beavers were the true makers of land. It was through their dams that the geographies had been laid, meadows created, through their creation that young trees grew, that deer came, and moose. All things had once depended on them. And on these maps, we could read back to how land told the story of the beaver people. It brought back the words of Dora-Rouge. One day she told me that earth has more than one dimension. The one we see is only the first layer.
WHEN BUSH WASN’T WORKING or inside looking at maps, she dressed up in warm clothing and went out alone to fish. She would go to the hole in the ice, the one cut with an auger, drop in a weighted lure or decoy, and wait. Closer to the mainland, others had set up their icehouses. I remained in the house. I failed to see the pleasure in sitting on ice in a little shack that maybe had a radio inside, a heater, maybe even an old chair sitting on the lake, and a rattle reel on the wall. Or carrying home fish stiff enough to use as sled runners, which some people did.
When she’d come in, it was usually with a frozen walleye or a poutfish. But I remained indoors or, occasionally, I took off on snowshoes from island to island, watching animals and studying their tracks, and when I walked from land to land, or cut wood, or daydreamed at the window, it was always with a head full of knowledge or stories I’d gained from Husk or Bush. Out walking one night, with the full moon in the indigo sky, I thought how the people once believed that birds migrated to the moon for winter. Perhaps out of memory or longing. They thought the moon was an egg and a mother bird, large and white in the sky, and that they were going back to their origins. Agnes had said, “While some people see a man’s face on the moon, we see the shadowy gray outlines of birds.” And it did look as if they were there, stopped in flight before moon’s round face.
And when the birds arrived, it was said, they told pitiful stories about us poor, wingless fools who had no choice but to stay behind and freeze. They were sorry for us. And they were happy, always, to return in spring, to see which of us had lived and which of us had not survived the winter.
WHENEVER BUSH TALKED about my mother, I could feel a tall shadow walk toward us. I felt its presence in the room with us, while beyond our walls, as we talked or sewed, the ice outside talked with the wind, gambling about which of them would one day get the better of us.
One day after Bush spoke of Hannah, it came to me that I was all Hannah had. Not in the way of love. Not to care about. But I was what she could use to barter a place in the world. I was what, when she carried me, other people smiled upon, people who might have feared or hated her before. I was her money. I was her fare. She had needed me for this, if for nothing else. And for this reason I was of use to her.
That day I caught Bush staring at my face. I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, “Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.”
And one day, as I sat close to him in the truck, Tommy touched my face and said, “Tell me about the scars.”
I looked at him. I thought how I’d asked Bush about my scars. I thought of the last time I’d seen myself in the little piece of mirror in my bedroom. I thought how scars were proof of healing. “What scars?” I said.
IN THE SHORT HOURS of daylight the world sparkled like precious stones. One day in late January, when the ice was deepest, and the owls had already begun their mating songs, I wrapped myself in a coat and scarf and went outside to get wood. It was a cold so fierce it hurt to breathe. My breath froze, nearly solid, in air before my face. My nostrils turned to ice. My lungs closed up. It was too cold to snow, but not yet cold enough to stop all human machines, and while I was there with my arms full of wood, there was the brittle noise of Tommy’s old rusted Dodge crossing the lake, along with a sharp cracking of ice. Holding the wood, I watched him arrive and I forgot the cold.
He wore one of my shirts that day beneath his coat and vest, the shirt with the bright green ribbons, and he carried a white-wrapped package of moose meat. While I stood, he parked, jumped down out of the truck, and opened the door of the house for me. While I unloaded the wood, he went back to the woodpile and picked up another armful, breathing a hello, smiling at me on his way. That’s still what we did, smile at each other. The worst thing about love is its passionate foolishness.
Inside, Bush put on a pot of rice while we stood before the heat of the stove, warming ourselves, self-conscious, still smiling.
Then, after we ate, Bush urged Tommy, “Have more rice.” He complied. He worked hard and needed food.
The night before, Bush had called out in her sleep, and now she looked tired and drawn, so she retreated to her room, to rest, she said, leaving us alone to talk about small things.
“What have you been doing?” he asked me. His hair was still mussed from the cap. I smoothed it. He grabbed my hand. He kissed it. More smiling.
“I made ten new shirts.” I showed them to him, all fresh and stiff on hangers. He admired them. I had to admit, they did look beautiful, all fresh new cloth, red and blue ribbons. “I’ll take them all,” he said.
“You wish.”
“How’s Bush?”
This was what we’d say. Then I would ask about his many grandparents. But always beneath the words was something warmer, a happiness at being together. Under the surface of our skins, our words, even young, we were already a woman and a man together.
Tommy was different from the boys I’d known before. They were interested in cars, rock-and-roll music, ball games, and girls; they were children. He was a provider already. He hunted and fished, both with painstaking compassion and respect for the animals, the way it was supposed to be done. Already I loved him, though I didn’t know what he’d think of me if he knew about my life.
Before long, I knocked on the door of Bush’s room. “I’m going to Agnes’. Do you want anything from the store?”
She just said, “No.” She didn’t even think about the question. She sounded sleepy.
I laced my boots and grabbed the shirts to take to Tinselman’s. I liked the freedom of being able to leave without permission. As we were leaving, Bush opened the door and rushed outside without even a coat across her shoulders. “Angel! Tommy!” she called out. “Wait. I just thought of something.” She was breathless from the cold air and her hair was tangled. “Stop at LaRue’s, would you, and see if he’ll send back the old map. He’ll know which one I mean. Just tell him the oldest one.”
“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. I slid over to sit close to Tommy. I put the shirts neatly in the seat by the window. Then we drove off across the blue-gray lake. I looked over at Tommy, then out the window, smiling as we crossed over the slow fish that were beneath us, the waiting weeds.
“What?” he said in that way men do when they want to know if a woman cares for them, sorry they can’t read her mind. There was a crunching sound as tires drove over the snow.
“Nothing. I’m just thinking.”
I had money coming from Tinselman, so after I left the new shirts, I stocked up on flour and some instant coffee. I bought two bottles of Coca-Cola for Bush. She liked Coke but would never buy it for herself. It was still sold there in the machines where the bottle has to be slid outward along a maze, into a slot, and then pulled straight up. And I bought her some Jasmin soap, a new item, and Pet Milk. I was careful not to buy more than I could carry in my pack. I wanted to walk back and I didn’t like to pull a sled. It gave me a shoulder ache.
THAT NIGHT, I stayed with Agnes and Dora-Rouge. From the window I could see there was a circle around the moon; another snow coming in. Such snow-light in February, like the month I was born, with the light behind a grayness.
In the cot that night, I dreamed of islands with moss-covered ruins. The dreams rose up in such a way that I began to believe such places existed
. Dreaming, according to Dora-Rouge, was how decisions were made in older times. That’s what she said that morning when, like a young child, I climbed into bed with her. As tough as I’d once thought myself, I was making up for all the mothers I never had, resting my head on a pillowcase covered with blue flowers, pulling the cover up to my neck. Both of us lay on our backs, warm and comfortable. “I dreamed of stones,” I told her. I looked at the water stains on the ceiling while we talked. Dreams, she said to me, were how animals were tracked and hunted, how human lives were carried out in other times, other places.
As uncomfortable as it was, I had missed my little cot in the living room and the smell of Agnes’ bad coffee and dust. Agnes still slept in the bedroom with John Husk, even though she said he snored something fierce and then said it was her. This made me smile. I believed it was her all along.
“You’re getting hips,” Agnes said at breakfast, looking at my body.
I laughed. “Yeah. Great, huh?”
“How come Bush never comes over anymore?”
I sipped Agnes’ terrible coffee and lied. “She’s busy sewing. She sews all the time. She doesn’t want to work for LaRue any longer.” It wasn’t completely a lie. I didn’t tell her that Bush sat in front of maps and pondered a way up to the territory of the Fat-Eaters. She would think Bush was crazy. I had doubts, too.
Agnes shook her head. “It’s too hard on her eyes to sew that much.”
I had thought this as well, that it strained her eyes to sew and to put the tiny bones together into animals and then, after all that work was done, to squint at the lines on maps. She never gave her eyes a rest. But her vision was sharp and accurate. She could see a snowshoe hare against a background of snow. Like Agnes and me, it was Bush’s back that ached from sleeping on poor mattresses and cots. From bending over work. We were a sisterhood of bad backs.
I DREADED going to LaRue’s. Bush had just dreamed that he’d purchased two mummies, a mother and a child, the child curled up between the mother’s bent knees. And Agnes said it was true. She had seen them arrive in two glass-and-wood containers. She, like Bush, knew that the bones and dry flesh of the dead belong in no human dwelling.
I knocked on his door and was relieved that there was no answer, that I would not have to go inside. Through the door, I could smell the furs and bones and formaldehyde, could see in my mind’s eye the world’s largest beetle; it had a deep-green back. I left a note for LaRue, sliding it under the door.
As I walked back on Poison Road, Tommy drove up beside me and stopped. “Hey.” He opened the door. “Need a lift?”
I jumped up into the truck and rode with him back to Agnes’ house.
“You want me to drive you home?”
Home. It was such a certain word, so sure of itself, so final. But I liked it. “No. I’ll walk.”
“It’s no trouble,” he said.
But I insisted on taking off on foot across the lake. “I need to walk,” I assured him. I cherished my times with him, but for now I wanted to walk and think about my dreams, and whether or not Bush was truly crazy. To my surprise, I was getting used to silence, I found it rich and necessary. Tommy and I would have our time. I knew this. I was patient. “I need to, Tommy. I need to think,” I said. Besides, I knew his grandfather needed him that day. Agnes had told me the man was having trouble seeing.
As I walked across the frozen lake, I went past a few people who were ice-fishing. Some played radios. I heard the music as I passed, each radio telling something about the person who was fishing. The Beatles. Tammy Wynette. The Polka Kings. I waved as I walked past. That’s how it was there. You met someone on the road, you’d wave. You pass them on water, in a boat, you lift a finger. On ice, you nod and smile. They all knew me by now, most of them. It was not a large village.
IT WAS A LONG WALK to Fur Island. As I crossed the lake and heard its voice, I thought of Husk’s words, that the world was alive, as the people there said. The lake was alive. I was sure of it. Not only when it was large-hipped and moving, but even when it was white, contracted, and solid. The Perdition River flowing beneath moving ice was alive. So was the ice itself. And even the winter that sang itself into our bones. The air shimmered around me like the moment before a lightning strike, intricate ice crystals falling from a cloud.
I thought of seeing the northern lights, and that Husk had told me once that there are shining plankton who join together and make a spiral of light in the ocean, that there are many other things in nature that twist around that way, the Milky Way, the double helix of humans. The northern lights were part of this, I was sure.
By the time I returned to Fur Island, the light had already faded. I was warm from exertion, but the moment I entered the house I felt a chill. Bush sat at the green table in the dark. Beside her, a pitcher of water was crusted with ice, and the fire had gone out. She had been crying. She didn’t seem to notice I was there.
“Bush?” I said this tentatively. I lit a lantern.
“The beavers,” was what she said, as if that explained her blue lips, the house it would take hours to reheat.
It was the beavers. I understood. I did. I understood in one word: the beavers were nearly gone, our lives nearly extinguished along with theirs, our world transformed by those who could never have dreamed this continent in all its mystery, in all its life and beauty. It would never recover itself.
I understood, too, that winter could lodge itself into a person’s bones so deep they would forget they were human.
I busied myself. I put wood on the fire. I wrapped a blanket around Bush’s shoulders. As soon as the stove was hot, I heated a can of soup and made her eat. Then I warmed water in the turkey roaster and placed her feet in it. Taking control, I said, “Tomorrow we’re going to visit Dora-Rouge and tell her what you’re up to. John Husk will be glad to drive us back.”
THAT NIGHT I kept my door wide open. I said it was to let in warmth from the main room, but I really wanted to be sure Bush was all right. I woke a few times and checked on her. She slept soundly. With her hair on the pillow she looked vulnerable and soft, her eyes closed peacefully.
The next morning, I put extra wood in the stove, then closed the flue partway to keep it burning slow and steady while we were gone.
“I don’t know,” Bush said. “I don’t think we should tell them about this.”
“We’re going to. This is crazy.” I sounded forceful and more certain than I was, but just as we prepared to leave, LaRue arrived with the ancient map. He smelled of men’s cologne and wore a new, starched shirt. His hair was combed back into a ponytail at the back. He was handsome, I had to admit, in the Tom Jones kind of way, but I knew all the reasons Bush did not want him. His dark house was frightening and smelled of things that should have been buried or thrown into mud or water or the air from which they came. His walls were covered with shelves that held preserved animals. He had bowls of glass eyes that stared out as if taking the measure of all people. He wasn’t careful with fish—he offended them—and I was sure that was what had jeopardized our lives that day on the lake, even though I had paddled with him through the storm begging forgiveness of the water people, the fish people. He didn’t care enough for life.
I looked at Rue. He was too eager for her love. His eyes practically bulged out, despite the way she kept him at a cold distance. But it wasn’t really Bush he wanted, it was a woman, any woman. It was his loneliness he wanted relieved. I eyed him some more, looking for good things, redeeming qualities. She would never give in to him, I could see that. At the same time I thought maybe he had potential, maybe I could get through to him. Bush’s solitude made her, in my opinion, a little crazy. Of course, his presence made her even crazier. As he took the map out of a tube, I thought of all the older men on the mainland, and how none of them could have kept up with the likes of her. Maybe I’d make him my project.
“What sign are you?” I asked him impulsively. “No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. Scorpio.”
“H
ow did you know?” he said.
When he touched the map, the corners turned to dust. He was making a sacrifice to get close to Bush. This, I thought, was optimistic. It was the way men behaved in old stories. They went on a mission, a quest, performed a task, overcame an obstacle. Brought back Golden Fleece. He had probably come right over the Hungry Mouth and survived.
He unrolled the map carefully for her. I stood behind them and looked. The map was truly beautiful. It was undated but very old. The yellowed paper had disintegrated at the edges. It was the most ornate map I’d ever seen. It was painted in a Greek blue that still had, in places, a bit of brightness to it. Cherubs were at the edges, blowing air. There were water monsters, including a horned serpent with a tail. The serpent, or dragon, had once been yellow, maybe even gold. Waving lines with arrows recorded the directions of currents. Mudflats were depicted by paintings of sinking things; in the far-right corner, the hand of a drowning person reached out from the mud. At the top, part of a boat was going down, a boat with Indian people chained together as slaves for the far continent.
“Just look at that,” he said. He held a magnifying glass. He leaned closer, then sat back and let Bush peer through the curved round lens. He was happy just to be in her presence and had a satisfied look on his face, as if he were about to eat a fulfilling meal.