I was the only one I knew of who could see inside water. No one else could do this, not even Bush. She approved of my gift. She said I could see to the bottom of things. She was good at fishing, but I was the lucky one.
ONE NIGHT I dreamed of a woman in a white-walled cave sewing together pieces of humans, an arm to a trunk, a foot to a leg.
When I told her this, Bush said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could piece together a new human, a new kind of woman and man? Yes, we should make some new ones. Start with bones, put a little meat on them, skin, and set them to breathing. We’d do it right this time. They’d be love-filled, the way we were meant to be all along.”
I thought about how things on the island were all in parts like my mirror. Even the land there was broken. Perhaps that is what I went there to do, to put together all the pieces of history, of my life, and my mother’s, to make something whole.
ONE NIGHT I heard music coming from the island, as if the land itself were singing. It was an eerie sound, like wind blowing through a flute. It was the first time I’d heard the organ pipes behind Bush’s house. The pipes were not far from the ruins of the older house, and not far from the shed which stored the animal pelts Bush had taken from trespassers years back.
The immigrants had believed wilderness was full of demons, and that only their church and their god could drive the demons away. They feared the voices of animals singing at night. They had forgotten wild. It was gone already from their world, a world according to Dora-Rouge that, having lost wilderness, no longer had the power to create itself anew.
Bush called them the reverse people. Backward. Even now they destroyed all that could save them, the plants, the water. And Dora-Rouge said, “They were the ones who invented hell.”
For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them, hell was this world in all its plentitude. That’s why they cleared space to build a church on the mainland and sent for the pipe organ, as if a church would transform this world into a place with title and gold.
At the time the organ pipes were being carried to Adam’s Rib there had been a massacre. For the first time native people had declared war on the newcomers. This was the result of a misunderstanding. Only one year before, to the south, cannons and guns had been carried into the interior, and now the poor tribes, already diminished and desperate from disease and starvation, believed that a shipment of stovepipes was new weapons. The uprising that followed, created by fear, left two hundred settlers dead. When word of this carried, the bishop ordered all of the organ pipes to be hidden on an island out in the lake so no one would see them and misinterpret their meaning. The pipes were left on Fur Island amid old beaver teeth, broken pots, piles of fish bone, the bones of swans, and pieces of copper.
The men who unloaded them thought it was god who had directed them to the copper. He must have wanted them to find it, to have it, they reasoned, or he wouldn’t have arranged this war against the settlers.
We sat at the window, in the last light of autumn.
“An old man on one of the islands tricked the men who were after copper,” Bush said. “They came to him and asked if he knew where it could be found. ‘Over there, on a far island,’ said the old man. He made a map and pointed them toward the west. ‘You have to cross the deepest lake,’ he told them. ‘If you go right away, you can miss the ice. If you wait, it will all be covered by snow. Then you will have to wait for spring thaw.’
“All night they were busy. They packed dried fish and flour. They packed lanterns and tools and at daybreak they set out on their journey, following the map that would lead them into the inland waterways and to islands.
In that way, the old man rid his people of the outsiders who dreamed of wealth, those who wanted to turn copper into gold, who built castles of ice and watched the little bit of light dance across them as they thawed and once again became water.
“Keep these tricks in mind. Someday you may need them,” Bush said.
I THINK sometimes of the colors of the many worlds. The colors of the four directions. For us those colors were red, black, white, and yellow. Fur Island was the golden world, I came to think, the world of yellow light, pale copper, sun, and corn.
The corn that grew there grew in no other place. They were small plants, with tiny cobs and sweet yellow and milky-white kernels. It was the oldest corn on earth, having originated in South America centuries ago. It had been given to one of the Fat-Eaters of the north when they had navigated their way around the tip of the southern world in one of the many unacknowledged journeys Indians made before the advent of Columbus. It was the same journey, according to Dora-Rouge, that brought the frog in amber to the north. Corn and amber alike were passed down from generation to generation.
Although the Fat-Eaters, my ancestors, ate mostly meat and fat, Dora-Rouge, as a girl, became one of the keepers of the corn. The kernels were preserved in large dry leaves, the likes of which no one in the north had ever seen. Always they were watched over carefully. In the past they were stored in a cool dry hole beneath encampment tents the people used as they followed animals and fish. After the Fat-Eaters were confined by the government, the corn was hidden and protected beneath the dark floorboards of their houses, in little clay holes that were dug out in permafrost and insulated. Everyone thought there might come a day when the lives of the people would depend on corn.
One day, Dora-Rouge had given Bush a little handful of the corn mothers and said, “If anyone can grow these, it is you.”
Bush worked hard for results. Even though the growing season was only ninety-four days, she grew graceful, tall plants. They grew rapidly in Fur Island’s black soil. She was a slow, careful gardener, happy when she worked. Through the labor of her hands, ripening pumpkins hung from trees, tomatoes grew, staked up and tall, and tender squash spread along the ground.
Whenever I helped Bush in the garden, removing the last corn from the stalks, I walked between the rows and listened to the rustling sounds of the plants. They were extremely sweet, those little ears of corn the island yielded, as if the inner milk of the land, the healing milk the bishop had dynamited, expressed itself through the plants.
And from Bush, I also learned water. A little at a time. I learned the crossing to the mainland, the ways and distances to the other islands where we went to gather wood. Little by little I learned to paddle and steer. I learned the route well, so it wasn’t long before I knew the shortest distance from the island to the hook of mainland, knew where the warm spot was and how to circle around it. I hardly noticed how I grew strong, my hands rough, my arms filled out. It happened gradually. I don’t know how it is that people change, or what is required, or how it moves. I know only what it feels like to change; it’s in the body, in the stomach, in the heart. They ache and then they open. I felt it then; Dora-Rouge said it happens all our lives. She said that we are cocoons who consume our own bodies and at death we fly away transformed and beautiful.
ONE SUNDAY, Bush and I filled the canoe with corn, pumpkins, and squash to deliver to the mainland. Bush pulled it out into the water, sat down in it quickly, and waited for me. She always wore a dress for canoeing. It was easier. I saw the logic of it, too, after a time. No wet pant legs. Nothing to bind. We could better form ourselves to the boat. And Bush wore her shoes on a lace over her shoulders, so in case we capsized, they would not be lost. On this Sunday, she wore the same green dress she’d worn the day I first arrived on the island. Then, I’d thought it homely, but now it seemed attractive.
Bush had learned to paddle from John Husk and some of the older men who now lived along the Hundred-Year-Old Road. It was an old style of paddling that, for some reason, white men could not duplicate. It was rare for anyone to use it at all in these days, especially a woman, no less a mixed-blood from the South. It had been used before, in a deeper past. It was a silent steering, a slow, steady stroke that pulled us easily forward. Bush found water easy. She knew its rhythm well, its movements and currents. In a
canoe she could slip away, glide through and between shadows, be hidden in dim light. Water was her element, I thought. Me, I was more the element of air, light and invisible, moving from place to place.
As the canoe moved naturally, the way earth does in space, there was a certain light low across trees. I could smell and feel the change of season.
TO MY HAPPINESS, at Tinselman’s store where we went for supplies, I met Tommy once again. I stood at the counter with Bush as she paid for a canned ham and a bag of flour. I could tell he liked me because he tried too hard to look at other things and he swallowed as if he were guilty, the way they do on television when Barbara Walters has their number.
And I knew I liked him, too, because when I first spotted him, all I did in the store was put my hands in my pockets and look at the cans of Pet Milk, the shelf with hooks, lines, and sinkers, all things whose names sounded something like love.
He tried to appear confident. “Let me show you around,” he said.
I smiled and looked around the room as if he meant to show me the store.
“Go ahead,” said Bush. She nudged me a little.
I looked at her. “You sure?”
“Just meet me back at Agnes’ house.” Her eyes were bright.
As we left she said, “Oh, Tommy. We’ve got food for you. Don’t let me forget.”
Tommy took me to the Hundred-Year-Old Road, where a tired-looking old woman was bent over a plot of garden, staking up pumpkins, and a man sat on the porch in an old couch.
“This is where I live,” he said. “Come in.”
I shook my head no. “I’ll wait out here.”
“Be right back.” He ran inside. I watched the woman move slowly, a kerchief on her head. Her body leaned forward, pulled by gravity and weight. The houses were faded out by years of weather. A few broken windows were replaced with cardboard. I was uncomfortable there. I thought the traditionals, the old people, knew things about me. I was afraid of them, of the people who’d witnessed the near death of our world. I thought then that old wisdom and tradition did not have to pass through the human layers, the first filters of humor and business and love. But later, I found that just by walking along this road, I grew calmer.
The people along the Hundred-Year-Old Road lived at the edge of a once forest, now stump and branch. Farther in, beyond the stump forests, was a thick forest, the only thing that remained from the logging days of tough, bristling blond-headed men with large hands. What wasn’t cut was saved, not by the loggers’ satisfied needs, but by a war which required men. So these woods did not become matches or toothpicks or the whirling sands that blow where forests no longer stand.
When Tommy and I returned to Agnes’, we sat in the truck and talked awhile. Then I said, “Do you want to come in? Just for a minute?” He got out of the truck, came to open my door. We walked up the path slowly in each other’s company, the way couples do. Tommy had such dark eyes, crow wings could have been in them. Or night. That’s what I kept thinking as I tried not to look at him.
The first thing Agnes said to me was, “You’re filling out.” She looked me up and down. And in the presence of Tommy, I turned red.
It hadn’t been that long since I’d last seen Agnes and Dora-Rouge, but the first thing I noticed was that Agnes’ clothes had grown too large for her. Dora-Rouge didn’t look like herself either. The dentist had arrived the day before with her new teeth. They were overly white. Light caught on them like the teeth of Tony Curtis in The Great Race. She smiled widely at Tommy. She’d always called him a hunk of a man. She said, “The hunk is in our living room.”
Wearing her new dentures, Dora-Rouge thought she looked young again. And it was a day when she felt close to Luther. So after greeting us, she just smiled radiantly as if no one else were present, just she and Luther. I wondered sometimes what the inside of her mind looked like, if it was furnished with old clothing, furniture from the past, the memory of forests and wolves and Luther’s first kiss.
Husk, after greeting us, sat reading at the table. He didn’t need a magnifying glass, like Agnes did. “Just what I thought,” he said, absorbed in the magazine.
“What’s that?” Agnes wanted to know.
“Now they’re finding out that insects are intelligent.”
Agnes’ bones were more visible under the skin of her face. She was quiet, tired, and she’d not turned her garden yet that autumn, had already let it fall to the weeds that had been imported from France and Britain, weeds that she’d painstakingly pulled every year before, alien weeds that took over the land. She was colder, too, I could see. In addition to her open coat, she wore a heavy scarf about her neck.
Dora-Rouge said to me, later, in the privacy of her bedroom, that Agnes sometimes threw out a pan or silverware by accident and forgot where she was. Just that morning, according to Dora-Rouge, she had lost the teakettle, then found it in the bath.
Agnes herself admitted to this later that day as we drank Watkins Kool-Aid.
“It’s probably just the change,” Dora-Rouge said, as Agnes trimmed the older woman’s whiskers. “You forget things that way.”
“The way she forgets my age,” Agnes said to me. “She forgets how old I am. And she’s my mother, too.”
“You can talk straight to me, Ag,” Dora-Rouge complained. “I’m here in the flesh, you know.”
I MADE many trips back to Adam’s Rib before the freeze. Often I paddled alone to the mainland, sometimes taking corn for Agnes, or to visit with Dora-Rouge. At times I put lotion on her bony back. She said it reminded her of bear fat. And each time I returned, I saw Tommy. Always, I looked for him.
By then I was learning to swim, even in the cold lake, even though I was still afraid of its depths and sank like lead. When I told Bush I wanted to swim, she said, “Are you crazy?” But she, too, thought it was necessary for anyone living in the center of water the way we did.
She instructed me from shore, sitting on the black, craggy stones.
“Come on in,” I’d yell at her. “It’s great.”
“Are you crazy?” she’d say again. She hunched her shoulders and shivered. “Swim like your arms are long. Smoother. That’s it.”
It was hard for me to keep from sinking. I shivered.
“Pretend you’re a turtle.”
I gasped for air. I thought turtle. And that was the key. Suddenly I was clear, old and strong, a turtle, like the one on the island, moving through sea. My hands pushed water away. It was this I held to in my mind. I could swim. I imagined myself moving through oceans.
Then, at times, Bush was quiet. There were times she had a look on her face, nervous and edgy, and I knew she was thinking about the dams and the northern people and I knew, even then, that she would go north, travel whatever course was necessary; I knew where it would take her.
AUTUMNS were noisy events. Animals prepared for winter. The snowshoe hare lost its summer fur and went white, and the last of the birds ate what they could to prepare for flight. Chain saws cut wood. Everything turned red as fire. The inside of the world was rust, the slow fire of oxidation, as Husk called it. A patient fire that burned through metal, as with all the old ships rusting out there in the lake.
On Fur Island a person could feel and hear where the faraway and ancient began. As seasons changed, I thought I heard voices in the wind, the wind which returned there each night, the wind that lived on the island and sometimes talked to us through the organ pipes. I felt and heard the first voice of winter already singing, trying to insinuate itself into our bones. Even air seemed fire red, with its sharp chill against skin, and the leaves falling.
It was during this change of seasons that I began to see. To see that there were three women and myself, all of us on some kind of journey out from that narrowed circle of our history the way rays of light grow from the sun. Only a month earlier I knew none of these women, or even that they existed, and now our lives were bound together (in truth as they had been already) by blood and history, love and hate.
We busied ourselves with chores, Bush and I. Nights lengthened. By then I had learned to use the wedge and ax. My arms grew strong. It was a constant labor, preparing for winter. We still traveled the other islands to get wood, and the stack grew. I was surprised at how much we needed. With moss and caulk, Bush and I chinked holes around the windows. Fruits that grew on the island we dried and canned. Some of them, apricots, peaches, felt like the soft skin of Dora-Rouge. We filled jars with tomatoes. I stepped back to admire our work: the glass-contained red fruits of the island; to look at the woodpile, the golden and ash colors of bark, with rings that told years of drought and flood. It was the first time I had ever seen my own work before my eyes.
“WOLVERINE is a fierce mother, they say.” Bush was running a cord through the bones. While she spoke, her hands assembled the skeleton of the small wolverine. From time to time she offered a pinch of cornmeal and fat to the skinless, sharp-toothed jaw, feeding its spirit. Things depended on this, on respect. The order of the world did.
If I could watch Bush long enough, I thought, I would see the meat and skin and fur return to the bones. I would see an animal begin at a bony center and grow. The wolverine eyes would start to shine. It would breathe. It would move. It would run into the shadows of brush. It would be an act of new creation. Like first woman, first man, from clay.
People say that in the beginning was the word. But they have forgotten the loneliness of God, the yearning for something that shaped itself into the words, Let there be. Out of that loneliness, light was conceived, water opened across a new world, and people rose up from clay, there were dreamers of plants and deer. It was this same desire in me, this same longing for creation, and Bush’s spare words were creation itself. I had been empty space, and now I was finding a language, a story, to shape myself by. I had been alone and now there were others. I was suspended there on the island of snails and mosses, snow and windstorms, and I was quiet for days on end, but like Bush’s wolverine bones, I was partaking of sacred meal and being put back together.