It was 1938. Loretta was older than Harold. You could see it. It showed on her face. She had dark circles and lines. Something, I think now, that might have been pain or secret sorrow.
She came here so suddenly, we thought she grew out of the land. Some people even say they saw her rise up all cold and blue from the water. But she arrived on a boat with a man and the very next morning he snuck off without her, and her hair was the only spot of color there was on that dark day when I first saw her. The birds were loud that day. They were migrating, so thick they looked like salt poured from a shaker all across the water and land and sky. But the country was dry. We’d had a drought and there was a windstorm; leaves blew about and the waves were high, so we knew, hoped, a great storm was coming at us from out on the lake. We needed rain in the worst of ways. We had not even a morning of it. Forests were what called down the water, the rain, but by then the forests were gone, and the clouds went away from us.
Harold and Bush were young. He brought her home from Oklahoma with him. He met her when he went to work there in an oil field. No one here accepted her. She was quiet and us women here are talkers. Now, I think we talk because what lives inside silence scares us. Maybe silence is where trees start to freeze and shatter, or where darkness and ice begin, and Bush seemed all of a piece with silence. She was timid and small and not very pretty, either, until you got to know her. Then she’d look beautiful.
The young men had a habit of getting together for beer at night. They would say to Harold, “You’ve had better women than that.” I heard them say it. Harold, my son, was a weak man. I never knew why. He had a good father. But Harold listened to his friends. In his eyes, Bush began to fade and dim.
I COULD SEE the vision of my grandmother, Loretta, the catlike quality, the way men stared at her. Even women could not help themselves but to watch her. I could see this in Agnes’ words. Loretta had long brown fingers and red lips, a too-tight blue dress.
Loretta smelled of something sweet, an almond odor that I couldn’t place until years later. Her skin, even her dress, was thick with it. When I finally placed the odor, when I knew it was cyanide, I knew who she was, what people she came from. She was from the Elk Islanders, the people who became so hungry they ate the poisoned carcasses of deer that the settlers left out for the wolves. The starving people ate that bait.
Her people lived on Elk Island. About thirty miles to the east of here. Only a few remained.
Some said she was haunted. They said something terrible had come along with her. You could almost see it. But it was that very strangeness that attracted Harold and the other men. It made her more appealing to them, or maybe it was her sleepy way and the scar beneath her eye.
Overnight, my boy changed. He started to oil his hair with Wild Root and comb it back. Some men rubbed balm on their hands and faces. They wore their best shirts whenever they went out. But Harold was the only fool who followed her away. Like a hungry dog chasing a bone.
Some people said that what came with her was a bad spirit. Some said an enemy had thrown tobacco into the lake at midnight and laid a curse on her. But I’ve seen bad medicine. This was something else. It wasn’t like any shadow under rocks or anything hiding from the face of light. The curse on that poor girl’s life came from watching the desperate people of her tribe die. I saw the same thing once in a dog, retching and jerking from that same poison. How she’d lived, I didn’t know. But after that, when she was still a girl, she’d been taken and used by men who fed her and beat her and forced her. That was how one day she became the one who hurt others. It was passed down. I could almost hear their voices when she talked, babbling behind hers, men’s voices speaking English. Something scary lived behind her voice. I still feel bad about her. We judged her, you know. We wanted to blame someone like her. We wanted to hate her. But Loretta wasn’t the original sin. It was just that something inside her had up and walked away and left the rest behind. There was no love left in her. There was no belief. Not a bit of conscience. There wasn’t anything left in her.
I fought with Harold to keep him from going off with her. But he couldn’t see it. None of them could. I guess he couldn’t help it. “What about your wife?” I said to him, but Loretta gave me such a look, a chill came over me. It was a taste of ice I’ve never lost and just before they left I saw her through the window, near my house lighting a fire to some bunched-up old papers. It was dry outside, everything was kindling. I ran out screaming, first at her, then at Harold about what he was running away with. “You’re my son!” I yelled after him. “Are you crazy?” I screamed at him about the fire, but the wind blew my voice away from his ears and the fire reached up the wall all at the same time, so I had no choice but to let them go while I tried to douse the flames.
The last I ever saw of them they were running to catch the ferry. Harold carried an armload of his things. I saw the sweat on the back of his shirt, even with all that wind. She ran on ahead of him, urging him on. I can still hear her voice saying, “Hurry. Hurry.”
That was all I saw of them until I saw Harold’s face and Loretta’s red hair on your mother that day she came out of the water. She smelled of the same bitter almonds. It was a fainter odor, but it was still there all the same. We guessed her to be about ten years old. She had empty eyes I’ll never forget.
No matter how we scrubbed, the smell never came off that poor girl. It was deeper than skin. It was blood-deep. It was history-deep, Old Man said.
By the time the shivering girl of your mother came out of the storm, Bush was a grown woman, strong but alone. Maybe she thought Hannah was a little bit of Harold come back to her. She loved Hannah, poison and all.
AGNES WENT to the sink. She was barefoot and her feet made a soft sound on the floor. I watched her back, memorizing it as if it were my own.
“I don’t know where the beginning was, your story, ours. Maybe it came down in the milk of the mothers. Old Man said it was in the train tracks that went through the land and came out of the iron mines. I’ve thought of this for years. It might have started when the crying children were taken away from their mothers or when the logging camps started and cities were built from our woods, or when they cut the rest of the trees to raise cattle.”
She looked out the window. I followed her gaze, half expecting to see the herds, but instead there were only the white-winged moths pressed against the screen, listening.
Dora-Rouge laughed out loud.
“What?” Agnes looked at her mother, brought back to the present.
“Luther says you’d have to creosote cattle to keep them in this weather. That’s what Luther just said.” Luther, my dead great-grandfather.
“What’s creosote?” I asked.
Agnes was offended. “I don’t believe Papa would say something like that.”
Dora-Rouge, I thought, was something like the white-winged moths and June bugs that grasped the screen, held to the doorway of the next world with open wings and tiny fingers. She spoke this world to us. In it, in Luther’s world, they took life less seriously than those of us in this world. Like they were Buddhists, Husk once told me, as if they realized life was pain and suffering and so they gave up all their resistance and started to enjoy themselves instead.
Agnes was disturbed by her parents’ insensitivity and she finished clearing the table with quick, noisy movements. She hadn’t appreciated her father’s humor when he was alive either. Dora-Rouge confided this later. In fact, Agnes thought her mother spoke her own opinions and pretended they were Luther’s. That way, she could say what she wanted without recrimination.
“What’s creosote?” I said again.
TWO
DORA-ROUGE’S BONES were all sharp angles and she slept deeply and for long hours. I looked after her. I made it my work. At times I took her food while she was still in bed or as she sat outside in the morning sunlight. I carried her from table to bed, presented her to the sun. I felt protective of her fragile bones and thin skin. She seemed vulnerable.
She became, in a way, my ward. But in spite of all this seeming frailty, the truth was that Dora-Rouge had fought gravity and won. It no longer held her as it held the rest of us. That was why she weighed so little and why she heard what no human heard and saw what none of us could see.
“Why is it you hardly ever sleep?” she asked me one day.
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t tell her I was afraid to be held by night.
“Hand me the box under the bed.”
I bent and pulled up the cover and saw the box.
“That’s the one. Open it.”
I did. It was full of small paper bags. In them were roots and dried leaves.
“How long has that been going on? Insomnia.”
“As long as I can remember.” I shrugged. I placed the box beside her. She reached inside and took out three bags. “Here, give this to Agnes. She’ll cook them. It’ll make you sleep.”
The concoction was a mixture of roots, bark, and flowers. I was curious about the plants. There were unguents—ointments and balms—at their house, but it was the plants I wanted to know about.
“When you were a baby,” Agnes told me, “all you wanted to do was look at plants. You watched the trees move when the wind blew. You listened to them and they leaned forward to tell you things.”
I liked hearing this. It was the first time anyone had told me something about myself when I was a child.
One day while Dora-Rouge sat outside in the sun, and Agnes was gone to the lake, I opened one of the boxes in Dora-Rouge’s room to see what it contained. It was a birch-bark box that had designs bitten into it by an ancestor’s teeth. In it were some little bags, a few dried plants, and a piece of amber sitting in a bird’s nest. In the amber was a frog, perfectly formed, stopped in time, its life caught in the tears of a tree. I quickly put the box back the way I’d found it. I was not going to steal out of this house. That’s what they called it when I was forced to leave the yellow house for taking things. The social worker said, “Isn’t this the same as running away? Isn’t this another escape?”
No, I would try not to steal away from this house, dark and dreary as it was.
AT NIGHT, when I rested, I would smell the fresh air, feel cool breezes on my skin, and listen to the loons and the sound of water. All these things comforted me. And with Dora-Rouge’s bitter sleeping potion, I slept. Mornings, I lay awake, thinking of the words of the women, Agnes and Dora-Rouge, and wondered what I was doing there in a life so different from what I’d known. At times I felt the old fear return, the need to shed skin, to leave everything behind and run, to keep these women out of my skin. But already they were my skin, so I willed myself to remain. I tried to figure out how I could earn some money. I didn’t want to live off the old people. I’d asked at Tinselman’s store for work and he said there was none. I asked at the Auto Shop, Boat Repair. They, too, needed no help. There were few options.
EACH EVENING AFTER SUPPER, Agnes walked to the place where the Perdition River flowed into Lake Grand. She went alone, to think, she said, and to be silent. Always she returned, refreshed and clear-eyed, as if the place where two waters met was a juncture where fatigue yielded to comfort, where a woman renewed herself.
One night, from the porch, I watched her coming back through the first shade of night. She didn’t see me as she came up the road. She was half a world away in the first evening dimness. She wore the fur coat wide open and she walked with something like a dance step, even in her heavy black shoes, turning a little this way and a little that. I still remember how strong and wide her thighs appeared that night, her awkward movement. She was singing, too. On her upturned face, she wore a look—half-rapture, half-pain. She was singing. I felt the song and I wanted to stay there and listen, but it was a private act, I knew. I didn’t want to intrude upon Agnes’ inner world, so I slipped indoors quietly, before she saw me, put water in the kettle and waited for it to heat. But all the time I smiled at her passion, her rocking movement, her bent knees.
She was still singing when she came in.
“Oh, hi,” I said. Sounding stupid. And guilty. I faced the stove, waiting for the water to heat.
But Dora-Rouge, from the next room, called out, “Say, where did you hear that song?”
“I heard it inside this coat.”
“I’ve heard it before,” said Dora-Rouge. “I remember it. It’s the one that calls lost things out of hiding and brings them back. But it’s from before your time.”
“It’s the coat, Mother. I’ve told you that.” Still humming, Agnes put a tea bag in one of the cracked cups.
“It must have been the song that called Angel back to us.”
I believed Agnes about the coat. I came to think of it as something alive. When no one looked I would touch the fur and put my ear against it and listen. It was old, with no shining left to it, and silent. At least with me, when I listened.
There were mornings I sat with Dora-Rouge in her little room with the antlers and turtle-shell rattles and the box I’d snooped in. We would breathe together the way wolves do with their kith and kin, the way they nurture relations by breathing. This breath was alive. It joined us as we were joined in so many other ways. One morning as I did this, Dora-Rouge looked directly into my eyes and said, “Agnes killed that bear, you know.” She sat back against the pillow with a smile. Her thin hand touched her chest, fumbling at the button of her gown. “The one she wears, it was a glacier bear.”
Then I brushed her hair while she talked. The brush was old, made of ancient tortoiseshell and boar bristles. I liked the feel of her hair.
The bear was the color of ice. It was the last of its kind. It still makes me sad. It wandered down to California. No one knew why it was so far from home. But it hid out and it lived. It was the mother, they said, of twin cubs.
There were tribes of bears in those days. They were around for thousands of years, clear back to when we lived by the laws of nature. A bear could only be killed at a certain time of the year and that was for meat and medicine and fur. Even then it was a rare thing when an Indian killed a bear, because bears resemble men.
There was a Frenchman. Beauregard. He went out west to find the last of the beaver. They were mostly gone here. But it was too late. Even in California they were gone. When he saw the bear he trapped it and took it captive. At first he used it to fight dogs. The men made bets on who would win. They kept it awake all year. That’s against bear nature. Its poor mind was no longer sane. And its diet was bad, so it went weak, its teeth rotted out, and some of its fur fell out in patches. Then they tried to make money by letting men wrestle the poor creature. Finally, they charged people money just to come and see it. The last one. The last glacier bear. The last. They always loved the last of anything, those men, even the last people. I guess they felt safe then, when it was all gone.
Agnes was only twelve when they brought the blue bear here. She was plump and beautiful, my girl. She was round as fruit on a tree, and from the first minute she saw that bear, she loved it. It was a special thing, her and that bear. Every day she went to look at it. For a penny, they’d let her see it. A minute a penny. Some days she took thirty pennies.
When Beauregard saw how good she was with it, he hired her to feed it. He was afraid of it, you know. The other men, too. Afraid of that poor broken thing. When they went in the small cage, they kicked it away and pushed at it with their rifles. But Agnes was not afraid. She was a gentle girl. The bear liked this. It knew her, in a way. Through her eyes, I think. She stole good food for it, too, and its fur grew back.
In the afternoons, young boys would go around and poke sticks through the cage and Agnes would fight with the boys and come home crying.
Looking back on it, the boys, I think they were jealous of what’s wild and strong. If the bear fought back, it was hated; if it didn’t, they hated it for being weak. The bear was ruined in its heart. Even with Agnes’ love. It sat with its back to the boys and let them poke it and call it names. Finally, they cam
e to it with guns full of corn and they shot that poor bear to see if it had any fight left in its thick skin. Antagonizing it that way. Agnes cried and kicked at them. She chased after them. They called her crazy. “I’ll shoot you,” she said. “That’s how crazy I am.” She took a gun one day to keep them away. It was really just for show, the gun, but I really had to get after her for taking it. I hid it after that.
One chilly day alone, she went to the bear. She lifted her shirt and showed the bear her round, full breasts. Oh, it understood already. It knew she was a woman. It knew she had compassion.
Before she left the house that day I saw her crying. I had a bad feeling. I followed her. I watched how she entered the cage. She didn’t even fear for her own life. She didn’t have the gun. She only had a knife, so all the poor girl could do was cut the bear’s neck and let it bleed. She did it fast, before I saw what was happening, before I could stop her.
The warm blood poured into the ground. It was a chilly day. You could see the steam rise from the wounds. Its eyes were grateful. I saw that. She stroked the big animal I saw it with my own eyes. That bear put a paw on Agnes and stroked her in return. It touched her. It comforted her. I have never seen such a thing as that. I cried, too.
When all the life had flowed out of it, Agnes took the knife and slid it under the skin. I went to her. “What are you doing?” I said, but she didn’t answer me. She knew I’d been there all along, and that I was crying. It was hard work to skin and quarter the bear. She removed the liver, the heart. She knew that bear inch by inch, where every muscle joined bone. “Don’t just stand there,” she told me. “Help me out.” She was bossy like that, even when she was sad. “Go get the wagon,” she said. “Hurry. Before they get back.” The men, she meant.