From the first time I saw Bush, I knew she, like myself, understood such loneliness. She, too, had only thin, transient bonds to other people, having grown up on the outskirts of their lives. At first when I saw her, I thought she was a deer, thin and brown, smelling the direction of wind. She was standing at the edge of the island when we arrived, her dark, already graying hair down around her shoulders. She seemed rooted where she stood, at the boundary between land and water. She looked taller than she was. She was sinewy. I could see it was true that she might battle a force no one else would fight, as Dora-Rouge had told me.
She knew we were coming, even though there were no phones, not yet any citizens band radio. She had known I was moving toward her. She’d felt it, she told me later, sometime after I first saw the gap between her front teeth.
As the lake had grown shallow, Fur Island grew larger. What had been covered by water not long before was now mud. Bush stood barefoot in that dark, newly exposed clay, as if she’d just been created by one of the gods who made us out of earth, as if she’d risen up like first woman, still and awed by the creation. Around her were jagged, rough-looking rocks. Next to the harshness of these dark stones, she seemed deceptively soft. She wore a light green dress, the color of water, and I could see her thin legs through the skirt; they were tight and strong. In a slight movement, with sun reaching through clouds, the lake’s reflected light and the moving shadows shimmered across her. She was, in the first moment of my seeing her, equal parts light and water. And she had the closed look people wear when they are too much alone. It seemed that I would interrupt nothing in her life. But even so, seeing her, I was witness to a kind of grace I was hard put to describe; I’ve seen it carried in the stillness of deer and I’ve felt it in the changing power of seasons. It was only a glimpse—that’s all I can say with words—that there was something about her that knew itself.
The world of water, in truth, had claimed her the way it did with people, the way it would one day claim me, although nothing (on that first day) could have convinced me of this. I was afraid of water. I couldn’t even swim. But still, something inside me began to wake up right then and there. It was only a felt thing. It turned over like a wheel. I sensed already that the land on Fur Island, the water, would pull a person in, steal from them, change them, that it would spit them up transformed, like Jonah from the belly of the whale.
As I stepped out of the boat, I nearly lost my balance. It was the land, too, like the water, already trying to take possession of me, to bring me closer. The mud took in my feet and ankles. When Bush offered me her hand, I took it, but I felt like an intruder, awkward and unwanted in this quiet world.
THE PATH up to her house was lined on both sides by stones that were painted white. Green light fell through the trees. On the island it was not yet early fall. That’s how much difference a small angle of light could make, a few miles. It seemed moist there, as if water dripped from leaves. Large snails left shining pathways behind them. With its trees and ferns, its undergrowth, the island was dense with life and the beginnings of life.
As we neared the house, we passed by a large pile of bones. At first I thought these were more painted stones, but Bush said it was the skeleton of a sea turtle that would one day come together again, large as a room. For a living, she assembled things. She put together bones for LaRue, who sold them to museums and schools, and she put them together with devotion, as if the animal would come back down a road of life that had been broken through the felled forests. The island itself was a place of undone, unfinished things and incomplete creations. Not only were there the turtle bones and organ pipes destined for a church that was never built, but even a ship had been left there in parts. Long ago several men had tried to rebuild a new ship from parts of the old wreck, then abandoned it when it was only half-built. Parts of it were still visible behind the house, as were the ruins of an older house, a charred stone chimney.
The house was hard to see from the path, so it seemed that we walked toward a wild, uncertain destination. But then it came into view. It was made of dark gray stones and covered with vines. The Black House, some people called it, because it was so dark. But in its hiding it looked beautiful to me. The soot-colored stones that now made up the walls had been ballast carried by early ships, discarded once the ships were weighted down with the skins and forests they took from the island, thrown overboard like the beluga whale in the Hungry Mouth of Water. The ships vanished and returned, leaving behind a mountain of such stones. Mortared together, the dark, round stones smelled of earth.
The doorway into the Black House was low and small. A tall man would have to bend to pass through. But none of us was tall. We entered upright, which was the best way to step into Bush’s world.
While the house looked heavy and dark from the outside, it was lighter inside than other northern houses. With mosquito season over, Bush left the windows open, so that the vines crept inside and reached across the inner walls. Maybe they, too, were incomplete and searching for a sister vine.
The wooden floor, built from timbers and decks of the same ship that unloaded the ballast, had settled unevenly. The Turin was the name of the ship that had been wrecked there in a terrible storm, leaving the bodies of men to remain preserved in water, while only the wood of the boat washed to land.
It was a thick-walled house with a rounded wooden ceiling, domelike, made of lodgepole pines. There were no curtains at any of the windows, and one large room served as both living area and kitchen. A black-and-gray cookstove sat beside the low sink along one wall, a small light above it, and a potbelly stove was near the green table and benches. There was no bathroom, no electricity, and no mirrors, because, as Bush said, mirrors had cost us our lives. I would come to call her house the House of No. It was defined by what wasn’t there.
Bush cleared a small pile of bones off the table. “Sit down,” she told me. She had a soft, low voice. As she said this, she set the water to boil. As Bush and Husk talked, I looked around. At the shelf of books. At the view from a window. Outside was a garden with cornstalks. The turtle bones were visible from the house. Even as Bush and Husk talked, I could see that nothing about me escaped her vision. I felt her attention, her eyes following me, and all the time she served us coffee and cookies, tomato slices with onions, and butter and Wonder bread, she looked at my hands, at how I sipped the too-hot coffee she placed before me. She saw the scars on my face, even the tattoo I had made on my own arm, the initials of Lonnie Faro, a boy who once lived up a street from me. She saw these, the marks of my life. I didn’t cover them up. I didn’t even lean forward to let my hair fall across my skin. And my eyes, too, were busy. I studied her as she sat across the table, her muscled arms lean and feminine. I saw that she had a largeness, not of build and stature, but of someone who, as Dora-Rouge said, had battled unseen, unnamed forces. Next to her I would always feel ungainly.
At seventeen, a girl thinks mostly of herself, but from what Bush and Husk said, I knew there were larger concerns than mine. Not only was the lake at a record low, but dead fish had been found belly-up on the south shore and a few poisoned otters were found mired in mud. “The fish are dying by the hundreds up at Lake Chin,” he said. Though he hadn’t wanted to burden me, I heard the concern in his voice, the silent dread, still unformed, that comes to people when their world is threatened. It was in the air, stronger than words. It had crossed the water before us in the shape of two young men.
When Husk left, I walked with him to the water, then I stood a long time at the changing edge of lake and watched his boat grow small. The water seemed moody and capable of change at any moment. I had an urge to call after him, to have him turn the faded Raven around and take me back.
MY BEDROOM in the small three-room house made of dark ballast was stone on three sides. “My room.” I liked the sound of those words even as nervous as I felt. It was the first place that was wholly mine. The fourth wall was painted pale yellow, the color of fog on the day I arrived
on the ferry. A blue woolen blanket covered my bed, and there was a small pine chest of drawers. A braided rug lay on the cool floor that was made of ship timbers. One of the vines came through the window like a dark green hand. The first thing I did was to put it out and close the uncurtained window. I did not want the world to sneak in on me. Like the missionaries, I was threatened by its life and the way it resisted human efforts to control it.
On that first day, after Bush showed me my room, she went out to her garden to check the corn and other plants. I saw her from the window. She seemed to know, without my saying so, that I needed time to look around the house. She knew, also, that I would watch her, that I would see her working, slow and patient, always with purpose. I was permitted to spy on her in a way, to know her before I had to give her any part of myself or take anything from her.
REMEMBERING, Bush once said, is like a song. It has a different voice with every singer. On these days of my remembering I see her as she was then, plain as day, bent in the garden clearing among the corn plants and sharp-edged pumpkin vines. I see, too, the altar of that first day. It was on a table in a back corner of the room. It was a shrine of sorts, for me. Bush, neither Catholic nor Protestant, was a person of the land, but she kept statues of saints and crosses alongside eagle feathers, tobacco, and photographs of loved ones. Just in case. So it looked ornate, the altar. Two red candles burned before three pictures of me as an infant.
In one photograph, I was held uncomfortably in the arms of Hannah Wing. She was not a natural mother, I could see. Wrapped tightly in a blanket, I looked at her with frightened eyes and it seemed that, even then, I pulled away from her. In another picture, Agnes, the large, bear-clad woman of her youth, held my hand. In this faded photo, I looked more like a miniature adult than a child. In the last picture, Bush gazed at me, her thin dark arms around the child I had been. I was resting on her hip, my legs about her waist. I looked nothing like the baby pictures I carried around, the ones I found in the twenty-five-cent Take Your Own Photo machine at Woolworth’s where I’d worked for two months, pictures left behind by someone else.
In the photos on Bush’s shelf, there were no scars, and in one, the one with Bush, I was smiling. About what, I could not have said because the smiling stopped long before my memory, as much as I had of it, began. I did not remember her, nor did I remember having been loved. I had an entangled memory, with good parts of it missing. I was returning to the watery places in order to unravel my mind and set straight what I had lost, which seemed like everything to me.
The altar frightened me. The candles and pictures made me feel as if I had died and been wrapped in a saint’s shroud in a European church, nothing but bones and parchment inside yellow cloth, with candles burning to save my soul from children’s Limbo. What I didn’t know was how I had been loved by Bush and fallen through her hands like precious water, as Agnes put it, or how Bush had fought hard for me against the strongest of our enemies, a system, a government run by clerks and bureaucrats. I didn’t know that Bush had held a mourning feast on my behalf. I didn’t know that I had once been in grave danger from the woman of my emergence, Hannah Wing, who had lived with Bush in this place. Hannah, who had disfigured me.
The altar, like the mourning feast Agnes told me about, and like the songs, was something akin to sympathetic magic, designed to bring me back. Who would have thought that an altar, a holy table with two eagle feathers, tobacco, and cornmeal, a shelf in a house on an injured island might have been my protection from all the people and events that had conspired against me. Or that it had summoned me from afar like Agnes’ old song for lost things, and drawn me back to the north.
There was a picture of my mother on the altar. She was still a girl, frail and with a dull-eyed staring. I was larger-boned than she was, and sturdy. As I looked, something in the picture caught my eye. I leaned closer and took the photo of Hannah in hand. Behind her, there was something or someone, a spirit, ghost, another presence who was only a shadow or blur, but distinctly real. I thought I heard a woman’s voice whisper near my ear. With animal fear my hair stood up on my neck and there was an odor suddenly in the air. Almond. Sweet.
It was nothing, I told myself, at most a glare of light or a double exposure, a thumbprint, perhaps, but all the same I went quickly away from the table. The talk about the mouth of the lake had made me edgy. It was only that, I told myself, that along with the daily conversations Dora-Rouge had with her departed husband and the many stories they’d all been feeding me.
But I had truly entered a different world, a tree-shaded place where unaccountable things occurred, where frogs knew to wait beneath dark ground until conditions were right for them to emerge, where water’s voice said things only the oldest of people understood.
SOMETIMES NOW, I see the island as it was then, how the vines indoors grew red that autumn and fell to the floor, and how I swept them away. Those hungry, reaching vines that wanted to turn everything back to its origins—walls, doors, a ladder-back chair, even a woman’s life. They wanted to cover it all and reclaim the island for themselves.
And I remember that on my first night, Bush browned elk meat and made a broth, stirred it together with tomatoes. We ate the elk stew with wild rice, sweet corn, tea with spoons of sugar. The smells in her house were hospitable in a way she was not. It seemed the only sounds in the house were not our voices, but the sound of forks against plates, the sound of the cups as she set them on the white drainboard. I did the dishes in near silence. This would become our unspoken arrangement: she cooked, I cleaned. Now and then one of us would say something, for the sake of politeness, but it was strained. Bush asked me how it had been with Agnes and Dora-Rouge. I said, “Fine,” and nothing more, and I resolved to go back to Adam’s Rib with the next boat.
As evening lay down upon the house, Bush said, “It’s getting dark.” She went outside to put gas in the generator and it hummed and, as God had done in one day, Bush created light. The sound of the generator was nearly deafening in the silence.
When I went to bed that first night, I heard Bush pouring water, moving things into their places, and when the generator went out I lay in bed in darkness, with no mother, no light. Again, I thought, the House of No, and the darkness stared me in the eyes, a wilderness I had never known in any of the three Oklahoma counties where I’d lived, empty and alone even then. It wasn’t true darkness facing me; the moon was large and bright. But it seemed the most full darkness to me, that light. I was as incomplete and unfinished as all the other things on the island. I faced the wall and tried to sleep.
I remembered so little of my life that sometimes I thought I had never really existed, that I was nothing more than emptiness covered with skin.
Now even my illusions began to drop away. I had created a past for myself and now, I knew, it was about to be dismantled, taken apart and rewoven the way spiderwebs on the floating island changed every night. Only a short time before, my life had been one thing. Now it was something altogether different. There was nothing for me to measure it by any longer. There was not even so much as a mirror in Bush’s house for me to recall my image. Only my pocket mirror. So, on the first night, in the bedroom where moonlight fell on the floor, I spoke my made-up story inside myself one last time.
In it, I was born wet and shining and open-eyed in a sunny room. That’s how I imagined my beginning. In the light of sun, with the radiance of dust as it floated through sunlight, the air full of it, and I was one of the chosen. The birthmark of Indians, a blue hand of God, was on my back as if to comfort me. Perhaps God himself had rocked me in his arms, and I was loved. I’d heard once in a Baptist church that God loved me so much he knew the number of hairs on a person’s head. I tried to count mine, lifting one strand at a time. But I gave up on the number of hairs, and that was when I created the story I’d lived by as a child. In it, my mother was beautiful and kind and her love for me went deep. Sorry to leave me, she died in a large bed with a flowered cover and beloved people,
relatives, all about her. I was the last thought on her mind. When I was a child, this mother was the one I talked to in my many sleepless nights, eyes squeezed shut, praying to her as I cried. She was the one whose voice I heard inside myself. She told me wise things. She told me I was bound for happiness. I had long comforted myself in this way, held up in the hands of this story. But now, I knew, my story had worn itself out. The women in the Triangle said Hannah was still alive. I would find her and she would be ice. That night I felt something watching me, the vines perhaps, wanting in, or something animal, come in the night. Night itself, in all its vast and infinite dark space, peered in at me, but nothing took me by the hand.
And the altar was gone the next morning. So was the presence of the child spirit that had come to stand beside Bush’s bed the morning I’d arrived at Adam’s Rib on the ferry.
IT WASN’T LONG before our days, even in the heat, were spent preparing for cold weather. The predicted rain did not materialize, the lake was at a record low. Not a cloud passed over. The sky was clear and mostly blue. Bush went out to her garden late at night, as well as in the earliest parts of the day. She touched her plants as if coaxing them to rise. I would watch her, standing back in the shadows of my room so she couldn’t see me. I became the observer of her, the watcher of all the mystery in that place of large snails, mosses, and stones that had given milk. At times I saw her walking down to the lake. She walked slowly, as if she had all the time in the world. Sometimes she worked on the turtle. From the door and window I saw it begin to come together. So large, it was. I could hardly believe such a thing had lived in any sea. I felt sorry for it, so out of its element, and when I first learned to swim, I imagined myself as the turtle. I was slow and I saw my arms pull back the water from before me. And some nights, as I sat in a chair on the ground or watched from the window, at the misty edges of land and water, Bush became something else, something nearly invisible and silent, as if she were a kind of goddess with a beautiful song and Levi’s and graying hair.