“Where are we going to get a canoe?” I asked, but I knew we would steal one. Our list of crimes was growing.
At the dock, there was a rack with several canoes. Charles took out a large one. Then he broke into a boathouse and found paddles, and with haste we went to the edge of water and set off. Between us there was only one life jacket. For Aurora, I thought, in case something happened to us. She’d live. She’d come in from water like Loretta, Hannah, and me.
While Bush wrapped Aurora tight against the chill and held her, Charles and I paddled quickly across the muddy waters. Aurora was silent. We were swift. I didn’t know a canoe could move so quickly. It frightened me, as if we’d leave water and enter sky. My breathing was loud.
Then Bush took over and I held Aurora close to my heart, praying. Hurry! I kept thinking. Hurry! as if the words themselves, like traditional people know, were supernatural beings and would speed us along like light or cloud.
It must have been several hours to land. When we reached it, Charles told us to wait by a stone road. The heel had come off my shoe, and tiny nails poked up into my foot. I put some leaves in the shoe. Before long, Charles returned in a wreck of a car, another man beside him.
“My cousin,” was all he said by way of explanation. “Hurry.” In no time the cousin left and we were in the car. A window was missing; it was covered with taped plastic. Duct tape. It was a rattling machine and I didn’t hold out much hope that it would get us to Chinobe, but at least the radio worked. At first it was a diversion. Then, I could hardly believe my ears, there was Loretta telling Tony to come home. I turned it off.
Bush slept in the back seat with Aurora on her stomach. I touched Aurora’s face. She was burning up. My own arms were shaking with fatigue.
It was still a few hours to Chinobe, to the nearest hospital. Rain fell. It was my turn to drive. I drove quickly over the dirt road and once, when we hit pavement, the car hydroplaned, spinning around. Bush sat up, covered Aurora, protecting her. Charles yelled, “Lift your foot.” I did as he said and the car came to rest in a ditch, then I drove out of the ditch and went on as if nothing had happened. It was only later that I realized the danger we had been in. I thanked Fortune, the one who had changed clothing for us.
After that, the road was straight and flat. We headed south in silence with only the hypnotic movement of the car, the road, the sound of tires, and Aurora’s breathing. There was an occasional animal at the side of the road, a coyote or a rabbit.
We were low on gas, uncertain how many miles to Chinobe. I reassured myself, thinking maybe there was a gas can in the trunk.
Even through my fear, I saw beautiful meadows.
When we came to Chinobe, we were all relieved to see the sign: “Indian Health Service Hospital.” They would help us; they had no choice.
Charles and I took Aurora inside like her parents, with Bush following. It was a sterile white place with its smells of alcohol, bandages. I watched the doctor’s every move.
“She’s going to be fine,” the woman said after the IVs were in place.
I breathed then.
THAT NIGHT we slept in the car in the hospital parking lot. Once or twice a security guard drove by and shone his light on us but he didn’t make us leave. Before I fell asleep, I watched the quick movements of bats in the sky. It seemed so peaceful—the trees, the silence, the round white moon—so comforting.
I was stiff the next morning. I went into the hospital to see Aurora.
She slept peacefully in the little crib. Her fever was gone.
We drove into town. We stopped for coffee in a little restaurant with red tables and the smell of pancakes and bacon, and as we sipped a terrible excuse for coffee, the Indian waitress asked us, “Where did you come from?” She was young. She wore a heart on a chain around her neck.
“String Town,” I said.
“Oh, is that right?” she said mostly to Charles, not to me. It was the first time I’d noticed he was good-looking. “What’s going on up there?”
I didn’t hear all that Charles said to her. Instead, I went into the bathroom and washed my hair in the sink with hand soap. Outside the bathroom door, in the dingy hallway, there were notes on the bulletin board: “Massage Therapy.” “Canoe for Sale.” “Used Fur.” How far away all this seemed to me now, having traveled down from the north, a child folded inside my life, my heart. As I stood there it seemed like seeds and chaff swirled away to a future far away from the mother plant. Which future, I couldn’t yet know.
When we left, the waitress said, “I hope they win. The Indians, I mean.” She fingered the heart absentmindedly, smiling at Charles and then at Bush.
“Me, too,” Bush said.
TWENTY
BEGINNINGS, I know now, are everything. And when Bush and I returned to Adam’s Rib, I knew we walked into another day of creation, a beginning. Perhaps my own return began long ago, in a time before I was born, when I was held inside the bodies of my ancestors. What a fine savagery we had then, in the dark stirrings of first life, long before the notion of civilization. We knew the languages of earth, water, and trees. We knew the rich darkness of creation. For tens of thousands of years we spoke with the animals and they spoke with us.
And perhaps it was flood from the start of my first going there, or maybe there has always been something coming toward us that sweeps away things both familiar and strange, swallows them in its path. Whatever it was, when Bush, Aurora, and I returned to Adam’s Rib on Tinselman’s Ferry, the place seemed unfamiliar. Little by little, the land had been sinking, diminishing. Before we’d left for the far north, the water level had been low, but now, because of the diversion of rivers, the closing of floodgates, now it was high. While we’d been at Two-Town, caught up in the battle over water at its source, the flooding of this place had already begun. It was the result of the damming we’d witnessed at the Fat-Eaters’, the result of the stopped rivers to the north. It was the result of our failure to end the first phase of the project.
As we stepped off the ferry, the sign that read “Auto Parts, Boat Repair” was just above water, the wooden building half-submerged, the water still rising slowly. Of the houses that sat next to the lake, only the tops and roofs were still dry. Levees were breached, overtopped. One river that had emptied into Lake Grand had flooded the surrounding land. A red plastic tablecloth from some water-filled kitchen had floated off a table or out of a drawer and risen to the surface of the water. It was opened, as if welcoming guests to a meal. Dead fish lapped against the walls of buildings, and I could see drying racks, hoists, and old cars beneath the water, and the water was still rising and going to rise.
Soon the four remaining white pines trees would turn slowly into white skeleton trees, half under water, and graves would be covered. All this from the destroyed lands above us. In this flood, there would be no animals escaping two by two, no one to reach out for those who wander gracefully and far on four legs, to take hold of the wading birds with their golden claws at the bottom of water, to carry to safety the yellow-eyed lynx, the swift dark marten.
Bush carried Aurora as we walked toward Agnes’ house. And Aurora was about all we carried. We’d left everything but our cash at the Fat-Eaters’. Aurora slept peacefully, her head against Bush’s shoulder. A few inches of water covered the lower part of Poison Road, that first road I’d walked on over a year ago, returning to Agnes and Bush and Dora-Rouge. Now water spread out through the grasses and brush and it neared the doors of low-lying houses.
We were silent, looking around us, our shoes wet.
When we reached Agnes’ worn brown house, the door was as wide open as if it had never been closed since the time we left. I half expected to see Agnes standing waiting there in welcome, her glasses with light on the edge of them. Or to hear her voice saying, “Look at you, you are a woman.”
When Bush and I entered her house was when I missed her the most. I looked at the cot, the table, the stove. All were dusty. Leaves and mouse droppings
were on the cot. Bush brushed it off, then laid Aurora on a blanket. We looked around. John Husk was not there. He hadn’t been there for some time, I could see. Inside the house a layer of dust was laid down on everything, as if no one had inhabited the place in all the time we’d been gone.
“Where do you think he is?” I asked Bush, half afraid he was dead.
Bush said nothing.
I went outside and sat quietly in the red chair for a few moments, remembering Agnes. I wanted to call out her name and see her come toward me, walking in from the lake.
After a while, Bush came to stand beside me. “It’s terribly lonely here, don’t you think?”
“Yes. We should go find Husk.” I was half afraid that he had died of grief, having lost Agnes.
“Aurora’s sleeping. I’ll wait here,” Bush said. “I’m tired.”
But as tired as she was, Bush tied back her hair and began dusting the stove and table as if we would move into this little house. She cried as she cleaned.
I knew that she wanted to be alone, and I was anxious to go to the Hundred-Year-Old Road to see Tommy and Husk, so I left Aurora and Bush.
As I walked uphill toward the Hundred-Year-Old Road, Tommy stood inside my inner eye and I could see him clearly—dark eyes, compassionate face. Slowly and without words I moved toward him. I felt his presence as if he walked beside me, smelled the odor of his skin. When I reached Wiley’s place, Tommy was standing just outside the door as if he’d known I was coming, standing just like the image of him inside my eye. Lean, large-handed, he stepped toward me. I went to him, nearly floating as if I had no feet, and we held each other. I felt my heart grow large. We were quiet, breathing, loving, holding each other in the silence of deep love.
We walked into the trees and sat on the ground in the thin shade of two birches.
Later I told him all that I’d done, how I’d stolen food and almost thrown a rock at the men with guns.
“Do you still love me?” I asked him.
He said, “I love you even more,” and took my hand.
We are small, I thought, touching Tommy’s forehead, neck, chest with its few brown hairs. We are awake in the gone forest, stepping out of clay. We are precious as earth, as diatoms shaped like mystery itself in the blooming seas.
WHEN WE WENT INDOORS, I asked for Husk. He beamed when he saw me. “Angel,” he cried out, but he looked poorly, his pants baggy, his shirt wrinkled, and one eye drooped. He had moved in along the Hundred-Year-Old Road and he, along with the others, had put up a long fight against the flooding. They had fought their own battle in Adam’s Rib, and lost, and now the water was rising and the people were simply tired. The fatigue showed on all of them.
A FEW DAYS LATER, as the water continued to rise, Bush and Husk gathered up Agnes’ things—the kettles, the boxes Dora-Rouge had left behind, the blankets folded on the cot.
Husk looked better on this day. He even wore permanent-press slacks, as Agnes had suggested. “We should let it all go,” said Husk, as we prepared to pack the back of his truck with the toaster and pans and dishes. He sat down, tired. We would take everything up the rise to the Hundred-Year-Old Road, hoping that place at least, as the engineers had promised, would be spared.
Bush waxed the old, dirty linoleum.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m making this place presentable for water.”
I said to Bush and Husk, “What Agnes wanted all along was to be eaten by the animals. Did you know that?”
“Yes, she told me that when no one was listening,” Husk answered.
THE NEXT DAY we crossed from Adam’s Rib to Fur Island. Water was still rising and motorboats moved across it, seeking out confused animals, some trying to swim. Many had already drowned. A wooden ironing board floated up. We saw all this while Bush and I paddled. The waters looked suddenly vast.
Fur Island, like all the other broken pieces of land, had begun to shrink. We wanted to salvage the plants, the corn, whatever could be taken away. As we set to work in what was already mud, we saw the water level rise. It wasn’t long before the white stones of the path were nearly invisible, jutting out of water like small icebergs in a line. The turtle bones, somewhat higher, were not yet covered.
And then LaRue barged through it all in the dark gray Raven, cutting through the reflection of sun as if he’d crossed sky instead of water, loud and urgent. In spite of herself, Bush was happy to see him. He had come to help us. She wanted to know where he’d gone after we’d seen him float away from the place of the Beautiful People on the new, muddy island of land, but she didn’t ask. Nor did she accuse. This, I thought, was a good sign.
Soon the water would approach Bush’s house, enter the door as lightly and easily as if it were an invited guest. We saw it coming, the slow rise of it, as we worked hard, muddy and wet, trying to save the plants Bush had cultivated, taking the seeds of some, digging others up by the roots and wrapping them in cloth to replant later, at the Hundred-Year-Old Road.
We worked for days, and were still hard at work when Tommy arrived with his traps. Some of the animals that couldn’t swim he trapped or snared, carried off to Adam’s Rib, and let go. From water’s edge I watched as he and LaRue roped a deer that couldn’t swim and, with the rope around its neck, took it across water to the mainland. It was a stranded deer that had come across on ice and been unable to return.
We worked ourselves into exhaustion, the rich loamy-smelling soil on us, wanting not to be claimed by water. But water, I thought, wanted all things equal, level, contained.
LaRue and The Raven towed the island of spiders, with its silken weavings and shimmering strands, to the mainland and secured it there. We didn’t want to lose that little broken-off raft of land in all the greedy, hungry water that was, through the acts of men, laying claim to everything it once created.
The next day, the house of black stones, the House of No, filled up with frogs and mud. We watched the water continue to rise, and in spite of our heartache, it looked peaceful, all the water laying itself down across our world. From The Raven we watched the turtle bones that Bush had assembled. Water was taking back the turtle. And as the four of us left Fur Island for good, we sat in The Raven and watched. The turtle was lifted. First the water came over it slowly, like a lover, then it rose a little at a time, until finally the turtle came loose and began to float. For a moment I saw it whole, the bones of a great thing returning to water, where it would move once again inside water’s darkness. Bush turned to LaRue with a look of defiance, but he, too, looked jubilant and she said nothing.
The Hungry Mouth of Water closed. It took in nothing else. Instead, it was taken in, like the turtle, along with the beluga, the snowmobiles, skinned animals, and Frenchie’s Helene.
Then, even the floorboards of the house rose, a few at a time, and Fur Island, with its house made of ballast, fell to the bottom of water as if by design. So did the organ pipes and the blasted milk-stone and the shed filled with old rusted traps.
ONE DAY I went to see LaRue. He’d been crying. He tried to hide this from me, but I said, “What gives?” I looked about that place of scorpions, snake spines, and pinned butterflies in cases.
He looked at me. To gauge my seriousness. “Come here,” he said.
I followed him into the smelly dark basement of bones and hides and glass eyes. There, on a table, was an animal with nearly green fur. Beautiful beyond anything I had seen: large dark eyes shaped like almonds; a face soft as velvet with thin whiskers; a thin, lithe body; a long tail. It lay there like a tendril, the first rise of a fern, that’s how delicate and beautiful it was.
“What is it?” I asked.
I pieced together what he said. The animal had been killed by a hunter in a far forest. One of his regular customers. It was the last of this kind of creature, according to the man who’d shot it, and he was proud for taking it. Take, I thought then, what a strange word it is. To conquer, to possess, to win, to swallow.
By
then I knew so much about crying that I held Rue’s hand. “Talk to me,” I said. He cried for the animal, for us, our lives, and for the war he’d endured and never told about. He changed after that, inch by inch. Another person might not have noticed, but I saw it. And so did Bush. She was moved by his new openness, his lack of skin. Tears have a purpose. They are what we carry of ocean, and perhaps we must become sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.
TWENTY-ONE
IT WAS NEARLY A YEAR later when I saw Tulik. A hot city day. I was standing on a corner thinking how pavement was only a thin shell on earth, that the plants would outlast it and grow over it again, and then I saw him. He was asking directions of a tall man in a suit. He looked tiny, vulnerable, and very old there in the city with the traffic racing about, the large buildings rising up behind him. The passing people were dressed mostly in dark, trim clothing. Although I knew he was a strong man, Tulik looked nearly feeble in the city. He wore a light blue shirt and his sharp bones showed through it. It looked as if the walls of buildings, the street signs, the electric lights, the markets could have swallowed him, the way they had swallowed land. People stared with curiosity, as if he’d walked out of an ancient history they’d all but forgotten. It seemed now that his wisdom was nothing more than a worn-out belief that had no place in this new world where the walls themselves came from the lost lives and worlds of men like Tulik.
I was happy to see him. “Tulik!” I yelled, running to catch up.
He’d been growing his hair; now it was tied in a ponytail down his back, and it was still black as crow wings.
“Tulik!” I hurried toward him.
He stopped as though no one had ever spoken his name before. The streetlight changed to yellow. A man behind Tulik bumped into him, then stepped around him, quickly passing. Tulik turned and looked straight at me. “Angel!” he cried out. “Maniki! Look at you! You’re so good!”