I followed her orders. I rushed home. As I left I heard her singing a bear song no one had sung since I was a girl. An old, old song.
I did as she said. I went and got another knife and the bouncing wagon and when I went back, I helped pull the fur away from the flesh. I still remember the bones of the foot in a pool of blood.
Four wagonloads we brought back, bumping all the way.
That night, after dark, the Frenchman and his friend came knocking at our door. They knocked loud. They wanted the meat. Those men pushed their way into the house. “Get out!” I yelled at them. But I was scared of them. I fell back against the table. We were just women there. We had no men to protect us. They wanted the fur, too. It was a rare color for a bear. It would catch them a good price. Agnes had already pinned it. “Give me that,” Beauregard said. He took it from her.
Agnes stood up to him. I couldn’t believe my own eyes and ears. There were times I thought she was so stubborn, that girl, but this time I was proud of her. She stood up to him. She said, “It’s all right. This fur belongs to me, but you go ahead and take it. I’ll wait for you to die. You won’t last long, but me, I have time”.
Not even a year later, he died. While his woman grieved, Agnes stole into his house through a window and she threw the coat out onto the snow. I picked it up. She’d conned me into it, her crime, you see. I was under the window waiting. Even though I was afraid of what might happen if we got caught.
Agnes wore the nightmare. That’s what I called the coat. First thing every morning Agnes brushed the fur, rocking it in the chair, her dark hair around her plump shoulders. Like it was a baby. And talking and singing things—to this day I don’t know where she got it all.
By then, the land was settled. No bears were there to disturb the people. But at night in the woods, settlers heard branches snap. They heard the breathing in the forest. The bear lived there still, and it lived inside their own skin and bones. Everything they feared moved right inside them.
Agnes wanted to know, always, why some men will do what they do. She believed wearing its skin would show her these things.
Sometimes it happens that, at twilight, I see those eyes and that large paw brushing Agnes’ back and I hear her sing and I get a feeling, just a feeling, Agnes is becoming something. Maybe the bear. Maybe she knows her way back to something.
DORA-ROUGE, I think now, was a root and we were like a tree family, aspens or birch, connected to one another underground, the older trees feeding the young, sending off shoots, growing. I watched and listened. It was an old world in which I began to bloom. Their stories called me home, but this home was not at all what I’d expected. I don’t know exactly what it was I thought I was entering, but never would I have imagined a bear of a woman in an old, heavy coat, with bear-scratched trees outside her house, a woman who bent her creaking knees in a dance when she thought no one was looking, and boiled a kettle of the same stew nearly every night for a week, except Fridays, when she fixed macaroni and cheese in case a Catholic might stop by. Nor could I have dreamed Dora-Rouge with her handhold on the spirit world, saying grace each night by saying, “Give us our daily stew.” Or the mixed-blood Cree named Frenchie who lived next door and had mincing steps when she entered the house at dinnertime, uninvited but always welcome, and sat down to dinner with us.
Each Thursday, several of the town’s men played cards. The Thursday before they sent me to Bush and Fur Island, the men came to Agnes’ house. Everyone knew Frenchie would show up. As she herself put it, she “had a thing” for Justin LeBlanc, an older fisherman and a regular at cards.
On that Thursday evening, Agnes looked at the clock and said, “Frenchie’s late.” But as Agnes pounded some tough meat into tenderness, the door opened and Frenchie sailed into the stuffy, hot kitchen, wearing a pink chiffon scarf and carrying a platter of Russian tea cookies. “What’s all the racket?” she said. “You building something?”
“Supper,” was all Agnes said.
Frenchie was dressed for dinner, wearing a red dress and too much color on her cheeks. She smelled of face powder and wore a strand of pearls around her withered neck. Without bothering to untie her tennis shoes, she pushed them off her feet, then walked barefoot to the stove and peered inside the kettle. “Stew,” she said, as if we didn’t know.
Agnes’ efforts to soften the meat had been in vain—the gristly meat was a failure and later, as Dora-Rouge sipped broth and marrow, she watched us trying to chew and said, “You make me grateful I don’t have any teeth.”
And just before the dishes were stacked and washed, Justin pulled up. Seeing his car, Frenchie ran to the bathroom to check her hair and spray lilac cologne on her neck.
The men all smoked pipes that year and before long the pipe smoke filled the house in a comforting sort of way. I was still uneasy there but I liked the men’s voices as they talked and drank glasses of cola and ate peanuts. And I liked the smoke better than the perfume. I’d never heard men talk that way before, like friends. All the places I’d been, men didn’t have friends.
For the first time—I met LaRue. LaRue Marks Time was his name, although some people called him “Done Time” behind his back. At other times, people shunned him, but he was a good hand at cards. He wore a gray shirt and his hair long, in a thin ponytail down his back. He was handsome, his hair beginning to gray at the temples, but for some reason I was uncomfortable in his presence. He, on the other hand, was eager to befriend me. “How about I take you fishing tomorrow,” he volunteered.
“Okay. Sure,” I sounded nervous. He didn’t seem quite sincere. I didn’t know then that he wanted to befriend me so he could get close to Bush. I didn’t yet know I would soon live with Bush, the woman of Fur Island.
“Here, I have something for you.” He reached into his pocket and brought out an arrowhead, warm with his body heat.
I studied his face. I looked at the arrowhead, then slipped it into my pocket.
“When are you going to the island?” he asked.
“What island?” This was the first I heard.
“You know, to Bush’s.” He straightened his collar, hitched up his jeans.
I was hurt, thinking that Agnes and Dora-Rouge were sending me away.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” Agnes said, seeing my discomfort.
Later that night the women retreated into the living room, but we could hear the sound of pennies sliding across the table, the shuffling of cards, and the warm sound of men’s voices. Now and then Frenchie would walk through the door and offer cookies to the men, who never accepted. I could see her through the doorway. She smiled too much at Justin. He would pretend to be cranky and disturbed by her. “Are you telling them my hand?” he accused her.
“You know me better than that,” she said with a gleam in her eye.
I listened, but still I thought of what LaRue had said, that I would leave the Rib. For the first time in my life I didn’t want to go.
The men spoke in different ways from the women. Their conversations went something like this: “Have you ever caught bluefish? Those are something else. They go out, oh, about a hundred yards and you have to bring them back. They’ve got a lot of teeth. They look like tuna or something.”
“Yeah, they give you a good battle.”
Fish stories. And they talked loud.
“I fished until four in the morning,” one would say. “And I couldn’t catch a thing.”
Now, I know this probably meant he’d caught so many he wanted to keep the place a secret. That’s how they talked, in a circular fashion.
“Next time let’s take some bacon. I heard they really strike at that.”
“Yeah. Or salmon eggs. They like them, too.”
“Where is Devil’s Lake, anyway?”
“My uncle went there. He did real good.”
“Red hots. I hear they bite at those, too.”
“Is that the uncle that got struck by lightning three times?”
In the living room
, which doubled as my bedroom, the teapot sat on the old gold-painted sewing machine and the women talked with one another. They talked about the deepest things, the most meaningful of subjects, about love and tragedy. Frenchie said she’d once loved a younger man. Agnes said she still thought of her son Harold and what had come of him. Dora-Rouge, propped up next to me on the cot, said, “I want to go home to die. It’s my dream. It is so beautiful there. When I was young, the northern lights would dance, really dance across the sky. They were so close to us. When we saw them we’d say, ‘Here comes sky on its many trails.’
“When I met Luther, he was just a boy. He came to sit with us. That’s how it was done in those days. He’d just sit. A girl would ignore the boy who was coming to court her. She had to hide her smile. So would her family. And Luther’d come and sit. Then one day, I looked at him and smiled. After that, he started bringing meat to the house.”
I cut a piece of cheese and handed it to her. She kept it in her mouth until it was soft enough to swallow. “Is that Wisconsin cheese?” she said. And that’s how the talk went with the women. That is, until Frenchie pushed the plate of cookies toward me and said, “What happened to your face, anyway, dear?” She said it straight out. The forbidden question. No one had asked it in a long time. I had hit people for asking that question when I was younger. I had left schools for people’s curiosity. I’d moved out of houses, run away as if I were running from ugliness or pain. It was what no one was allowed to say. Even I had stopped asking about it. At first I’d tried to find out what had caused the scars, but eventually I gave up. Now I was stopped dead cold, but it seemed I was the only one who heard Frenchie. Not even a moment of silence elapsed—the women kept chatting—but my heart raced with fear. I felt the color drain from my face. I sat stunned.
“Well?” Frenchie looked at me briefly, ignorant of her transgression, then said, “Maybe I should take some cookies to Justin.” She rose from the chair to peer anxiously into the next room. Justin’s back was toward her.
To hide my feelings, I tried to cut another piece of cheese for Dora-Rouge, but my hands shook and it slipped and I cut my finger, a deep bite off the tip.
Agnes stood up. “Come, let’s fix that up.” She was anxious. I think she noticed how my heart had fallen.
I pulled away from her. “It’s okay,” I said. I wrapped a napkin around it. “Really. It’s fine.” My eyes were beginning to tear.
“No, that’s a worthless, rusty knife. Let’s clean that wound.”
I said, “No,” but Agnes guided me into the washroom. Finally I let her. I nearly collapsed against her, as if the cut had been deeper, but it was the words that had hurt me, not the knife.
Agnes knew this.
She opened the medicine cabinet and took out gauze and adhesive tape and when I smelled that odor, something inside me began to move around, the memory of wounds, the days and weeks of hospitals, the bandages across my face, the surgeries. Or maybe it was the look of blood in the sink that hit me, the red, iron-filled water that had stained everything, even the insides of cooking pots. Whatever it was, I felt weak, my chest tight. I saw myself in the mirror, and suddenly, without warning, I hit the mirror with my hand, hit the face of myself, horrified even as I did it by my own action, that I would go so far as to break the mirror, the cabinet containing iodine, Mercurochrome, Merthiolate, Wild Root Oil. Glass shattered down into the sink and broken pieces spread across the floor, settling in corners. I heard a voice yelling “Damn it!” and it was me, my own voice, raging and hurt. There was an anger in it, a deep pain, and the smell of hospitals of the past, the grafts that left my thigh gouged, the skin stolen from there to put my face back together. That was all part of it, of what lay broken and sharp in the sink and on the floor. And I felt sick. I leaned over the toilet.
“What’s going on?” yelled Dora-Rouge. And Frenchie was right outside the closed door. “Are you girls okay in there?”
Agnes called me honey and sweetheart and child. “Shhhh. It’s okay.” She held me. I sobbed helplessly. Me, the girl who never cried. When I stood up and looked, I saw that the sink was filled with cut, broken reflections of my face. I tried to clean up the glass, to pull myself together. “We’ll get it later,” Agnes said. “Let’s go out and get some air.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I held on to her, my wet face in her shoulder. I didn’t want to leave that little bathroom with its iron-stained sink and pieces of glass. I didn’t want to face the others.
Then I said, “You don’t want me. You’re sending me to an island.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “You’ll be able to come back anytime you want.”
“You didn’t even tell me.”
Agnes’ voice was comforting, but it took all my courage to be willing to leave the room. I was still shaken and sobbing when Agnes opened the bathroom door and all the men stood outside it with their arms hanging lifeless at their sides, Husk in his white shirt and black suspenders. All of them looked at me, LaRue with his mouth open. Finally the silence was broken when Husk smiled and said, “Way to go!” He chewed on some peanuts, nodded at me, and laughed, then picked up a bottle of Coke from the table and toasted me. “Thatta girl, Angel. Those things are the source of vanity.”
His words saved me from embarrassment. They were generous, quick-thinking words. The men smiled and turned and sat down to cards again, as if nothing had happened. “I’ll raise you thirty cents,” Justin said, hunched over like an old dark bird, squinting from the year when he’d been snow-blinded, 1942, when he was out on a trapline and injured his ankle.
Agnes and I stepped out of the bathroom and walked into the first of autumn darkness, together.
We sat side by side on a rock near the place where the river entered the lake, and I who had not cried as a child, not even at the taunting of other children, wept.
“She’s like that, Frenchie is. It’s her way. You get used to it.”
Down on the lake, the light of a fisherman opened through darkness like an eye that peered at me and caught me without my face of toughness. I turned away, so nothing or no one could see me. Agnes put the bear coat over my shoulders, her arm about me, folding me in. “When I wear this coat, Angel, I see the old forests, the northern lights, the nights that belong to something large that we don’t know.”
That night after the card game, after the silent walk back up the road with Agnes, I was both relieved and heavy with weariness; I felt freed of something I couldn’t name. Later, I undressed in the dark, close room of the house that breathed with the sleep of others and when I slept I dreamed I fell over the edge of land, fell out of order and knowing into a world dark and primal, seething, and alive as creation, like the beginning of life.
I BEGAN to form a kind of knowing at Adam’s Rib. I began to feel that if we had no separate words for inside and out and there were no boundaries between them, no walls, no skin, you would see me. What would meet your eyes would not be the mask of what had happened to me, not the evidence of violence, not even how I closed the doors to the rooms of anger and fear. Some days you would see fire; other days, water. Or earth. You would see how I am like the night sky with its stars that fall through time and space and arrive here as wolves and fish and people, all of us fed by them. You would see the dust of sun, the turning of creation taking place. But the night I broke my face there were still boundaries and I didn’t yet know I was beautiful as the wolf, or that I was a new order of atoms. Even with my own eyes I could not see deeper than my skin or pain in the way you cannot see yourself with closed eyes no matter how powerful the mirror.
My ugliness, as I called it, had ruled my life. My need for love had been so great I would offer myself to any boy or man who would take me. This was, according to women who judged me, my major sin. There was really no love in it, but I believed any kind of touch was a kind of love. Any human hand. Any chest to lean my head against. It would heal me, I thought. It would mend my heart. It would show my
face back to me, unscarred. Or that love would be blind and ignore my face. But the truth remained that I was wounded and cut and no one could, or would, tell me how it happened and no man or boy offered what I needed. And deep down I dreaded knowing what had happened to me and the dread was equal to my urgent desire to learn the truth. Once, asking a foster mother what had happened to my face, there was silence. She and her husband looked at each other. “You fell,” she said, and I knew she lied.
BUT I WAS LIKE Agnes had said: Water going back to itself. I was water falling into a lake and these women were that lake, Agnes, with her bear coat, traveling backward in time, walking along the shore, remembering stories and fragments of songs she had heard when she was younger and hearing also the old songs no one else remembered. And Dora-Rouge, on her way to the other world, already seeing what we could not see, answering those we could not hear, and, without legs, walking through clouds and waters of an afterlife.
THREE
IT WAS A WARM DAY when two young men appeared at Adam’s Rib in their canoe. When I saw them, I was at the water. They came from the south out of clear sky and the first autumn leaves floating on water. The sun was strong and it looked as if the shadow of the moon had never passed between it and earth.
Their canoe was yellow and they moved swiftly, as if they’d always lived on water, in canoes. They were lean. When they came to land, one of them jumped out of the canoe, pulled it forward a little, and held it for the other. They unloaded a few small packs, talking to each other. They seemed foreign here; they had different bodies, not American, not Canadian, but bodies still in touch with themselves and easy. They didn’t rush. They appeared to know their place in the world.
They stood and talked a minute, undecided about what to do, then dragged the canoe out of water and turned it on its side in a grassy bank, putting some of their belongings under it.
One of them saw me. “Miss. Wait, please,” he called. They were dark and slight, with intelligent faces. Both had straight black hair and beautiful eyes slightly slanted.