But I said, “What about me? It’s getting close to dark.” She wasn’t fooled. She knew I walked late at night just to hear the sounds of winter and see the sky and snow. I was always a great walker. She handed me my gloves and hat. I left unwillingly. It was all I could do to go out the door. I felt terrible leaving her in all that emptiness. I guess it was her sadness already come over me. I wanted to cry but I knew the wind, on its way to the island where it lived, would freeze my tears.
I took my time getting home. Above me there were shimmering hints of light. I remember thinking how the sky itself looked like a bowl of milk.
Then one night, worry got the best of me. I laced up my boots and went back over the frozen water. She was thinner, but she looked happy, and she didn’t argue when I opened this bear coat I’ve always worn and wrapped it around the two of us and walked her back to the mainland. The only sound was our feet on ice, the snap and groan of the lake. We were two people inside the fur of this bear. She said she could see the cubs that had lived inside and been born from this skin, and I said, “Yes.”
ONE
I WAS SEVENTEEN when I returned to Adam’s Rib on Tinselman’s Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken.
The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me. When they were frozen, moose crossed over, pursued by wolves. There were the French trappers and traders who emptied the land of beaver and fox. Their boats carried precious tons of fur to the trading post at old LeDoux. There were iceboats, cutters and fishers, and the boat that carried the pipe organ for the never-built church. The British passed through this north, as did the Norwegians and Swedes, and there had been logjams, some of them so high and thick they’d stanched the flow of water out from the lake and down the Otter River as it grew too thin for its fish to survive.
It was this same north where, years earlier, a woman named Bush had taken my mother, Hannah Wing, to one of the old men who lived along the Hundred-Year-Old Road. In dim lantern light he shook his head. With sorrow he told her, “I’ve only heard of these things. It’s not in my power to help her.” Nor was it in the power of anyone else, for my mother had been taken over by some terrible and violent force. It inhabited her, flesh, bone, and spirit.
The morning air was damp. From the ferry, as fog moved, I saw Fur Island, the place old people still call the navel of the world. It sat above the mirror of water like a land just emerged, created for the first time that morning.
As the ferry passed two islands several miles out from the mainland, I saw a woman adrift in a canoe. I leaned against the railing of the ferry and watched her. She, the floating woman, was very still, but I thought she watched me. The water that held her could have carried her toward tree-shaded places, toward a maze of lakes and islands that were doors to another wilderness, a deeper, wilder north we would one day enter together, that woman named Bush and myself.
She was the sole inhabitant of Fur Island, a solitary place, and she was one of the women who had loved me. Between us there had once been a bond, something like the ancient pact land had made with water, or the agreement humans once made with animals. But like those other bonds, this bond, too, lay broken, and that morning I paid little attention to Bush except to note how the canoe rose and fell with the waves of water and how, behind her, the islands looked like they floated above water.
As the ferry neared land, the ghostly shapes of fishing boats disappeared into the sky across water, and a soft mist rose up from the lake and the warming earth. Through fog, the pale trunks of birch trees stood straight; I was certain the dark eyes on their trunks looked at me. It was silent except for the call of a loon and the voices of other passengers as they called out to each other and prepared to disembark. I felt a last-minute panic, wondering if I should float on past this unfamiliar place that once held my life.
The ferry was early. As soon as it docked, the few passengers stepped off the boat into the rolling fog and soon, though I heard them talking, they were invisible.
I was among the last to leave. When I touched ground, my legs still held the rocking motions of water. It seemed to move beneath my feet. In every curve and fold of myself, I knew that even land was not stable.
It was Agnes Iron I was going to meet. She was my link to my mother, a blood relative who lived on the narrow finger of land called Adam’s Rib. I’d found her name in a court record only weeks earlier and written her, saying, “Dear Mrs. Iron, I am Angela Jensen, the daughter of Hannah Wing, and I believe you are my great-grandmother.” I wrote the letter several times to get it right, though it still looked like a child’s handwriting.
In a shaky hand, Agnes wrote back, “Come at once.” Along with her note, she sent fifty-five dollars in old one-dollar bills. They were soft as cloth and looked for all the world as if they’d been rolled, folded, counted, and counted again. When I opened the envelope, the smell of an old woman’s cologne floated up from the bills. It was clear they’d been hard come by, those dollars, and that they must have been nearly all she had. But in the first few moments of my life in the north, with the sound of a loon breaking through fog, I had little courage. As I waited, all my worldly goods sitting near me in two plastic bags, I pushed my nervous hands into the pockets of my jeans jacket to wait for Agnes to arrive, for fog to rise or drift so I could see the stark place that held my people.
A cloud of fog lifted and I saw buildings, a sign that said, “Auto Parts, Boat Repairs.” And then Agnes walked out of the mist toward me, a woman old and dark. I knew who she was by the way my heart felt in my chest. It recognized its own blood. She had a rocking gait. One of her legs was slightly shorter than the other. And she was stiff. She wore a blue-gray fur coat, worn in places, sloppy, and unbuttoned. It made her look like a hungry animal just stepped out of a cave of winter. It would have seemed a natural thing if leaves and twigs were tangled in it.
I watched her walk toward me, but my own legs refused to move. They were afraid. So was my heart, having entered this strange and foreign territory with the hope of finding something not yet known to me, not yet dreamed or loved. And Agnes, in her old bear coat, was part of it.
I wanted to turn back but she held out a cool, moist hand to me, then changed her mind and took me in both her fur-covered arms and held me, rocking me a little like the boat. She smelled like the dollar bills she’d mailed. I patted her back, wanting the embrace to end. She held me away from her to get a good look at me and I heard songbirds in the trees. I didn’t meet her eyes, but I saw her smile. She took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped her eyes, then bent over and lifted both my bags.
“I can carry those,” I said. Because of her age, I reached for them. But she did not give them up. “They’re light,” she lied, already walking away up the road. “And you are probably tired.”
I looked sideways now and then at her face, which was starting to sweat, and looked all around me at the foreign world I’d entered by way of a letter, an envelope, and a stamp.
It was a poor place, with the scent of long, wet grasses and the stronger smell of all towns that live by fish and by seasons. Walking uphill, we went past smokers and racks for drying fish. Rusted-out cars, American-made, wide and heavy, sat parked outside houses. It was called Poison Road, the road we walked. The French had named it “Poisson,” after fish, because once it had rained tiny fish onto the earth along this road. They’d fallen from the sky. It was said they’d hatched in a cloud. But a few years later the road came to be one of the places where the remaining stray wolves and fox were poisoned to make more room for the European settlers and the pigs and cattle they’d brought with them, tragic animals that never had a chance of surviving the harsh winters of the north. Now it was called Poison and it was the only connecting passage on the
hilly peninsula. Weary houses were strung along it in a line, and all of them looked dark brown and dreary to me. In a glance I was sorry I’d come.
The houses themselves were small, some patched with tar paper, pieces of metal, packing crates, or whatever else had been available. They had originally been built by missionaries some years ago and put together for the sole purpose of warmth. Inside them, in the long, deep winters, men went silent for months while lonely women, surrounded by ice and glacial winds, stood at windows staring out at the vast white and frozen world, watching for signs of spring: a single bud, a stem of green, as if spring were a lover come to rescue them from winter’s bleak captivity.
As we walked with the warm sun on our shoulders and back, penned huskies and old sled dogs panted and barked in September’s warmth behind makeshift fences.
Agnes had the face of a good-hearted woman, but she was sloppy about her appearance. A safety pin held her glasses together. Her gray hair was tied back but it was not neat even though it had been combed wet. In my memory I see, too, how on her dress, between her womanly breasts, she wore a silver brooch in the shape of a bear. It wasn’t an expensive piece of jewelry. It was the Walgreen’s kind, but it was pretty, with a black stone for an eye.
I wanted to talk to her but I didn’t know what to say. I was full of words inside myself; there were even questions in me I hadn’t yet thought to form, things not yet come to words. But I remained quiet. And Agnes was quiet, too, that day I returned to Adam’s Rib on Tinselman’s Ferry. She cried a little, and when her eyes filled up with tears, she’d stop walking, put my bags down, and wipe her eyes with an old, wadded-up hankie while I looked away, pretending not to see.
What a picture we would have made on that warm September day, Agnes and I, if any of those men and women had peered out through the little, streaked panes of glass. They would have seen a dark old woman in her blue-gray tattered fur, wearing practical black shoes and carrying the two plastic bags of my things, and me, barely able to keep up with her, a rootless teenager in a jeans jacket and tight pants, a curtain of dark red hair falling straight down over the right side of my dark face. Like a waterfall, I imagined, and I hoped it covered the scars I believed would heal, maybe even vanish, if only I could remember where they’d come from. Scars had shaped my life. I was marked and I knew the marks had something to do with my mother, who was said to be still in the north. While I never knew how I got the scars, I knew they were the reason I’d been taken from my mother so many years before.
But that day nobody peered out the windows. No one at all turned out to look at us. My return was uneventful, dull and common. And, unknown to me, it was my first step into a silence, into what I feared. I could have turned back. I wanted to. But I felt that I was at the end of something. Not just my fear and anger, not even forgetfulness, but at the end of a way of living in the world. I was at the end of my life in one America, and a secret part of me knew this end was also a beginning, as if something had shifted right then and there, turned over in me. It was a felt thing, that I was traveling toward myself like rain falling into a lake, going home to a place I’d lived, still inside my mother, returning to people I’d never met. I didn’t know their ways or what they would think of me. I didn’t know what I’d think of them.
And all I carried with me into this beginning was the tough look I’d cultivated over the years, a big brown purse that contained the remaining one-dollar bills Agnes had mailed me, the makeup I used, along with my hair, to hide my face, and a picture of an unknown baby, a picture I’d found in a one-dollar photo machine at Woolworth’s. I used the picture to show other people how lovely I’d been as a child, how happy. I used it to feel less lost, because there were no snapshots of me, nothing to say I’d been born, had kin, been loved. All I had was a life on paper stored in file cabinets, a series of foster homes. I’d been lost from my own people, taken from my mother. One of the houses I’d lived in sloped as if it would fall off the very face of earth. Another was upright, staunch, and puritan. There was a house with cement stairs leading to the front door, tangled brambles all around it. There was one I loved, a yellow house in the middle of a dry prairie with two slanted trees that made it seem off-center. I’d sat for hours there listening to the long dry grasses as wind brushed through them. But so far in my life, I had never lighted anywhere long enough to call it home. I was the girl who ran away, the girl who never cried, the girl who was strong enough to tattoo her own arm and hand. An ink-blue cross on one knuckle, the initials of Lonnie Faro on my upper left arm. A cross on my thigh. And no one had ever wanted me for good.
In my life this far, there had been two places, two things that shaped and moved me, two things that were my very own, that I did not ever leave behind or allow to have taken from me. They were like rooms I inhabited, rooms owned, not rented. One, the darkest, was a room of fear, fear of everything—silence, closeness, motionlessness and how it made me think and feel. Fear was what made me run, from homes, from people. Moving made me feel as if I left that fear behind, shed it like a skin, but always, slowly, a piece at a time, it would find me again; and then I would remember things that had never quite shaped themselves whole. And there was the fire-red room of anger I inhabited permanently, with walls that couldn’t shelter or contain my quiet rages. Now I could feel another room being built, but without knowing it, I was entering silence more deeply than I had entered anything before. I was entering my fears head-on. I was about to stare my rage and history in the face. My hardness, my anger would not hold or carry me in that northern place called Adam’s Rib.
I’d told myself before arriving, before constructing and inhabiting that new room, that whatever happened, whatever truth I uncovered, I would not run this time, not from these people. I would try to salvage what I could find inside me. As young as I was, I felt I had already worn out all the possibilities in my life. Now this woman, these people, were all I had left. They were blood kin. I had searched with religious fervor to find Agnes Iron, thinking she would help me, would be my salvation, that she would know me and remember all that had fallen away from my own mind, all that had been kept secret by the county workers, that had been contained in their lost records: my story, my life.
WE CAME to a worn path. “Here we are,” said Agnes. At the end of the path was another boxlike house, dark brown and square, with nothing to distinguish it from the others except for a torn screen and a large, red-covered chair that sat outside the door. Like the other squat places, it was designed and built by Christian-minded, sky-worshiping people who did not want to look out windows at the threatening miles of frozen lake on one side of them and, on the other, at the dense, dark forest with its wolves.
Old smells were in the air of Agnes’ house. The odor of fire smoke had settled in every corner, and there was a kind of stuffiness that dwells inside northern houses even in summer, the smell of human living, the smell of winter containment.
“You’ll sleep here,” Agnes said. She put my bags down next to a small cot. It was a narrow, dark living room. She hit the cot a few times with the palm of her hand as if to soften it, a useless gesture, I could already see. I could feel every lump in the mattress with my eyes. Already, my back ached.
I stood awkwardly for a moment. I felt large and clumsy. Then I sat down on the cot, as if testing it the way I’d seen people do in furniture stores. With a bend in the middle and terrible springs, it had been shaped by other bodies. Like my life, nothing at all formed by me, not skin, not shape.
THE FIRST WOMEN at Adam’s Rib had called themselves the Abandoned Ones. Born of the fur trade, they were an ill-sorted group. Some had Cree ancestors, some were Anishnabe, a few came from the Fat-Eaters farther north. Bush, the woman who floated in the canoe near Fur Island on the day I returned, was a Chickasaw from Oklahoma. Others were from the white world; these, the white people, hadn’t cared enough for their own kind to stay on with them.
The first generation of the Abandoned Ones traveled down with Fre
nch fur trappers who were seeking their fortunes from the land. When the land was worn out, the beaver and wolf gone, mostly dead, the men moved on to what hadn’t yet been destroyed, leaving their women and children behind, as if they too were used-up animals.
The women eked out their livings in whatever ways they could, fishing or sewing. They brought in their own wood, and with their homely, work-worn hands they patched their own houses to keep sleet, snow, and winds at bay. They were accustomed to hard work and they were familiar with loneliness; it lived in the set of their jaws, in the way their eyes gazed off into the distance.
When I arrived, there were but a few men, and you could count them on the fingers of two hands. There were a few fishers and boatmakers, and a man named LaRue Marks Time who lived at Old Fish Hook, a nearby settlement on another finger of land that curved like a hook into water and pointed accusingly at Adam’s Rib, as if it had sinned. Rue, as we called him, was a taxidermist and a dealer in bones, pinned butterflies, hides, traps, and firearms. A man my heart would not like. He was a mixed-blood from the south, a Dakota, I think, and had only recently returned from Vietnam. He’d come in search of a refuge away from crowded towns or places that minded the business of strangers. What men were capable of, he hated, and his hatred included himself.
Three old men lived quietly along the Hundred-Year-Old Road with seven old women, all of them modest and solitary as bears. The women and the men were the oldest people, older even than Dora-Rouge. But they were rarely seen. They had been alive at the time of the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee. They remembered, and they wanted nothing to do with the new world. Some said these people were keeping the Ghost Dance alive. Most everyone doubted this, but I came to believe it in a way, because in spite of the tragedies they’d witnessed, they all had the peaceful look of those who still had hope, those who still believed that their people and the buffalo would return. For them, time held no sway. Except for one man, that is. Wiley was his name and he had a very young wife. He rubbed his face with ice each morning to look good for his younger woman.