Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
For the past few weeks in Molly’s American History class they’ve been studying the Wabanaki Indians, a confederacy of five Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Penobscot, that live near the North Atlantic coast. Maine, Mr. Reed tells them, is the only state in the nation that requires schools to teach Native American culture and history. They’ve read Native narratives and contrasting contemporaneous viewpoints and taken a field trip to The Abbe, the Indian museum in Bar Harbor, and now they have to do a research report on the subject worth a third of their final grade.
For this assignment they’re supposed to focus on a concept called “portaging.” In the old days the Wabanakis had to carry their canoes and everything else they possessed across land from one water body to the next, so they had to think carefully about what to keep and what to discard. They learned to travel light. Mr. Reed tells students they have to interview someone—a mother or father or grandparent—about their own portages, the moments in their lives when they’ve had to take a journey, literal or metaphorical. They’ll use tape recorders and conduct what he calls “oral histories,” asking the person questions, transcribing the answers, and putting it together in chronological order as a narrative. The questions on the assignment sheet are: What did you choose to bring with you to the next place? What did you leave behind? What insights did you gain about what’s important?
Molly’s kind of into the idea of the project, but she doesn’t want to interview Ralph or—God forbid—Dina.
Jack? Too young.
Terry? She’d never agree to it.
The social worker, Lori? Ick, no.
So that leaves Vivian. Molly has gleaned some things about her—that she’s adopted, that she grew up in the Midwest and inherited the family business from her well-off parents, that she and her husband expanded it and eventually sold it for the kind of profit that allowed them to retire to a mansion in Maine. Most of all, that she’s really, really old. Maybe it’ll be a stretch to find drama in Vivian’s portage—a happy, stable life does not an interesting story make, right? But even the rich have their problems, or so Molly’s heard. It will be her task to extract them. If, that is, she can convince Vivian to talk to her.
MOLLY’S OWN CHILDHOOD MEMORIES ARE SCANT AND PARTIAL. SHE remembers that the TV in the living room seemed to be on all the time and that the trailer smelled of cigarette smoke and the cat’s litterbox and mildew. She remembers her mother lying on the couch chain-smoking with the shades drawn before she left for her job at the Mini-Mart. She remembers foraging for food—cold hot dogs and toast—when her mother wasn’t home, and sometimes when she was. She remembers the giant puddle of melting snow just outside the door of the trailer, so large that she had to jump across it from the top step to get to dry ground.
And there are other, better, memories: making fried eggs with her dad, turning them over with a large black plastic spatula. “Not so fast, Molly Molasses,” he’d say. “Easy. Otherwise the eggs’ll go splat.” Going to St. Anne’s Church on Easter and choosing a blooming crocus in a green plastic pot covered with foil that was silver on one side, bright yellow on the other. Every Easter she and her mother planted those crocuses near the fence beside the driveway, and soon enough a whole cluster of them, white and purple and pink, sprang annually like magic from the bald April earth.
She remembers third grade at the Indian Island School, where she learned that the name Penobscot is from Panawahpskek, meaning “the place where the rocks spread out” at the head of the tribal river, right where they were. That Wabanaki means “Dawnland,” because the tribes live in the region where the first light of dawn touches the American continent. That the Penobscot people have lived in the territory that became Maine for eleven thousand years, moving around season to season, following food. They trapped and hunted moose, caribou, otters, and beavers; they speared fish and clams and mussels. Indian Island, just above a waterfall, became their gathering place.
She learned about Indian words that have been incorporated into American English, like moose and pecan and squash, and Penobscot words like kwai kwai, a friendly greeting, and woliwoni, thank you. She learned that they lived in wigwams, not teepees, and that they made canoes from the bark of a single white birch tree, removed in one piece so as not to kill it. She learned about the baskets the Penobscots still make out of birch bark, sweet grass, and brown ash, all of which grow in Maine wetlands, and, guided by her teacher, even made a small one herself.
She knows that she was named for Molly Molasses, a famous Penobscot Indian born the year before America declared its independence from England. Molly Molasses lived into her nineties, coming and going from Indian Island, and was said to possess m’teoulin, power given by the Great Spirit to a few for the good of the whole. Those who possess this power, her dad said, could interpret dreams, repel disease or death, inform hunters where to find game, and send a spirit helper to harm their enemies.
But she didn’t learn until this year, in Mr. Reed’s class, that there were over thirty thousand Wabanakis living on the East Coast in 1600 and that 90 percent of them had died by 1620, almost entirely a result of contact with settlers, who brought foreign diseases and alcohol, drained resources, and fought with the tribes for control of the land. She didn’t know that Indian women had more power and authority than white women, a fact detailed in captivity stories. That Indian farmers had greater skill and bounty, and more successful yields, than most Europeans who worked the same land. No, they weren’t “primitive”—their social networks were highly advanced. And though they were called savages, even a prominent English general, Philip Sheridan, had to admit, “We took away their country and their means of support. It was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?”
Molly had always thought the Indians rebelled like guerrillas, scalping and pillaging. Learning that they attempted to negotiate with the settlers, wearing European-style suits and addressing Congress in the assumption of good faith—and were repeatedly lied to and betrayed—enrages her.
In Mr. Reed’s classroom there’s a photo of Molly Molasses taken near the end of her life. In it she sits ramrod straight, wearing a beaded, peaked headdress and two large silver brooches around her neck. Her face is dark and wrinkled and her expression is fierce. Sitting in the empty classroom after school one day, Molly stares at that face for a long time, looking for answers to questions she doesn’t know how to ask.
ON THE NIGHT OF HER EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, AFTER ICE-CREAM SANDWICHES and a Sara Lee cake her mother brought home from the Mini-Mart, after making a fervent wish, eyes squeezed shut as she blew out the tiny pink-striped birthday candles (for a bicycle, she remembers, pink with white and pink streamers like the one the girl across the street got for her birthday several months earlier), Molly sat on the couch waiting for her dad to come home. Her mom paced back and forth, punching redial on the handset, muttering under her breath, how could you forget your only daughter’s birthday? But he didn’t pick up. After a while they gave up and went to bed.
An hour or so later she was woken by a shake on the shoulder. Her father was sitting in the chair beside her bed, swaying a little, holding a plastic grocery bag and whispering, “Hey there, Molly Molasses, you awake?”
She opened her eyes. Blinked.
“You awake?” he said again, reaching over and switching on the princess lamp he’d bought for her at a yard sale.
She nodded.
“Hold out your hand.”
Fumbling with the bag, he pulled out three flat jewelry cards—each gray plastic, covered in gray fuzz on one side, with a small charm wired in place. “Fishy,” he said, handing her the small pearly blue-and-green fish; “raven,” the pewter bird; “bear,” a tiny brown teddy bear. “It’s supposed to be a Maine black bear, but this was all they had,” he says apologetically. “So here’s the dealio; I was trying to think of what I could get for your birthday that would mean something, not just the usual Barbie crap. And I was thinking—you and me are Indian. Your mom’s not, but we are. And I’ve always liked Indian symbols. Know what a symbol is?”
She shook her head.
“Shit that stands for shit. So let’s see if I remember this right.” Sitting on the bed, he plucked the bird card out of her hand, turning it around in his fingers. “Okay, this guy is magic. He’ll protect you from bad spells and other kinds of weirdness you might not even be aware of.” Carefully he detached the small charm from its plastic card, unwinding the wire ties and placing the bird on her bedside table. Then he picked up the teddy bear. “This fierce animal is a protector.”
She laughed.
“No, really. It may not look like it, but appearances can be deceiving. This dude is a fearless spirit. And with that fearless spirit, he signals bravery to those who require it.” He freed the bear from the card and set it on the table next to the bird.
“All right. Now the fish. This one might be the best of all. It gives you the power to resist other people’s magic. How cool is that?”
She thought for a moment. “But how is that different from bad spells?”
He took the wire off the card and set the fish beside the other charms, lining them up carefully with his finger. “Very good question. You’re half asleep and still sharper than most people when they’re wide-awake. Okay, I can see how it sounds the same. But the difference is important, so pay attention.”
She sat up straighter.
“Somebody else’s magic might not be bad spells. It might be stuff that looks real good and sounds real nice. It might be—oh, I don’t know—somebody trying to convince you to do something you know you shouldn’t do. Like smoke cigarettes.”
“Yuck. I’d never do that.”
“Right. But maybe it’s something that’s not so yucky, like taking a candy bar from the Mini-Mart without paying.”
“But Mommy works there.”
“Yeah, she does, but even if she didn’t, you know it’s wrong to steal a candy bar, right? But maybe this person has a lot of magic and is very convincing. ‘Oh, come on, Moll, you won’t get caught,’” he says in a gruff whisper, “‘don’t you love candy, don’t you want some, come on, just one time?’” Picking up the fish, he talks in a stern fishy voice: “‘No, thank you! I know what you’re up to. You are not putting your magic on me, no sir, I will swim right away from you, y’hear? Okay, bye now.’” He turned the charm around and made a wave with his hand, up and down.
Feeling around in the bag, he said, “Aw, shit. I meant to get you a chain to clip these on.” He patted her knee. “Don’t worry about it. That’ll be part two.”
Two weeks later, coming home late one night, he lost control of his car, and that was that. Within six months, Molly was living somewhere else. It was years before she bought herself that chain.
Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011
“Portage.” Vivian wrinkles her nose. “It sounds like—oh, I don’t know—a pie made of sausage.”
A pie made of sausage? Okay, maybe this isn’t going to work.
“Carrying my boat between bodies of water? I’m not so good with metaphors, dear,” Vivian says. “What’s it supposed to mean?”
“Well,” Molly says, “I think the boat represents what you take with you—the essential things—from place to place. And the water—well, I think it’s the place you’re always trying to get to. Does that make sense?”
“Not really. I’m afraid I’m more confused than I was before.”
Molly pulls out a list of questions. “Let’s just get started and see what happens.”
They are sitting in the red wingback chairs in the living room in the waning light of late afternoon. Their work for the day is finished, and Terry has gone home. It was pouring earlier, great sheets of rain, and now the clouds outside the window are crystal tipped, like mountain peaks in the sky, rays emanating downward like an illustration in a children’s bible.
Molly pushes the button on the tiny digital tape recorder she signed out from the school library and checks to see that it’s working. Then she takes a deep breath and runs a finger under the chain around her neck. “My dad gave me these charms, and each one represents something different. The raven protects against black magic. The bear inspires courage. The fish signifies a refusal to recognize other people’s magic.”
“I never knew those charms had meaning.” Absently, Vivian reaches up and touches her own necklace.
Looking closely at the pewter pendant for the first time, Molly asks, “Is your necklace—significant?”
“Well, it is to me. But it doesn’t have any magical qualities.” She smiles.
“Maybe it does,” Molly says. “I think of these qualities as metaphorical, you know? So black magic is whatever leads people to the dark side—their own greed or insecurity that makes them do destructive things. And the warrior spirit of the bear protects us not only from others who might hurt us but our own internal demons. And I think other people’s magic is what we’re vulnerable to—how we’re led astray. So . . . my first question for you is kind of a weird one. I guess you could think of it as metaphorical, too.” She glances at the tape recorder once more and takes a deep breath. “Okay, here goes. Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?”
“My, that is quite a question.” Clasping her frail, veined hands in her lap, Vivian gazes out the window. For a moment Molly thinks she isn’t going to answer. And then, so quietly that she has to lean forward in her chair to hear, Vivian says, “Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts.”
“Do you think they’re . . . present in our lives?”
Vivian fixes her hazel eyes on Molly and nods. “They’re the ones who haunt us,” she says. “The ones who have left us behind.”
Hemingford County, Minnesota, 1930
There’s hardly any food in the house. Mr. Grote has returned from the woods empty-handed for the past three days, and we’re subsisting on eggs and potatoes. It gets so desperate he decides to kill one of the chickens and starts eyeing the goat. He is quiet these days when he comes in. Doesn’t speak to the kids, who clamor for him, holding on to his legs. He bats them off like they’re flies on honey.
On the evening of the third day, I can feel him looking at me. He has a funny expression on his face, like he’s doing math in his head. Finally he says, “So what’s that thing you got around your neck?” and it’s clear what he’s up to.
“There’s no value in it,” I say.
“Looks like silver,” he says, peering at it. “Tarnished.”
My heart thumps in my ears. “It’s tin.”
“Lemme see.”
Mr. Grote comes closer, then touches the raised heart, the clasped hands, with his dirty finger. “What is that, some kind of pagan symbol?”
I don’t know what pagan is, but it sounds wicked. “Probably.”
“Who gave it to you?”
“My gram.” It’s the first time I’ve mentioned my family to him, and I don’t like the feeling. I wish I could take it back. “It was worthless to her. She was throwing it away.”
He frowns. “Sure is strange looking. Doubt I could sell it if I tried.”
Mr. Grote talks to me all the time—when I’m pulling feathers off the chicken, frying potatoes on the woodstove, sitting by the fire in the living room with a child in my lap. He tells me about his family—how there was some kind of dispute, and his brother killed his father when Mr. Grote was sixteen and he ran away from home and never went back. He met Mrs. Grote around that time, and Harold was born when they were eighteen. They never actually tied the knot until they had a houseful of kids. All he wants to do is hunt and fish, he says, but he has to feed and clothe all these babies. God’s honest truth, he didn’t want a single one of ’em. God’s honest truth, he’s afraid he could get mad enough to hurt them.
As the weeks pass and the weather gets warmer, he takes to whittling on the front porch until late in the evening, a bottle of whiskey by his side, and he’s always asking me to join him. In the darkness he tells me more than I want to know. He and Mrs. Grote barely say a word to each other anymore, he says. She hates to talk, but loves sex. But he can’t stand to touch her—she doesn’t bother to clean herself, and there’s always a kid hanging off her. He says, “I should’ve married someone like you, Dorothy. You wouldn’t’ve trapped me like this, would ya?” He likes my red hair. “You know what they say,” he tells me. “If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead.” The first girl he kissed had red hair, but that was a long time ago, he says, back when he was young and good-looking.
“Surprised I was good-looking? I was a boy once, you know. I’m only twenty-four now.”
He has never been in love with his wife, he says.
Call me Gerald, he says.
I know that Mr. Grote shouldn’t be saying all this. I am only ten years old.
THE CHILDREN WHIMPER LIKE WOUNDED DOGS AND CLUSTER TOGETHER for comfort. They don’t play like normal kids, running and jumping. Their noses are always filled with green mucus, and their eyes are runny. I move through the house like an armored beetle, impervious to Mrs. Grote’s sharp tongue, Harold’s whining, the cries of Gerald Jr., who will never in his life satisfy his aching need to be held. I see Mabel turning into a sullen girl, all too aware of the ways she has been burdened, ill-treated, abandoned to this sorry lot. I know how it happened to the children, living this way, but it’s hard for me to love them. Their misery only makes me more aware of my own. It takes all my energy to keep myself clean, to get up and out the door in the morning to school.
Lying on a mattress at night during a rainstorm, metal ribs poking at me from under the thin ticking, water dripping on my face, my stomach hollow and empty, I remember a time on the Agnes Pauline when it was raining and everyone was seasick and my da tried to distract us kids from our misery by getting us to close our eyes and visualize a perfect day. That was three years ago, when I was seven, but the day I imagined is still vivid in my mind. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I am going to visit Gram in her snug home on the outskirts of town. Walking to her house—climbing over stone walls and across fields of wild grass that move in the wind like waves on the sea—I smell the sweet smoke from turf fires and listen to the thrushes and blackbirds practice their wild songs. In the distance I see the thatched-roof house with its whitewashed walls, pots of red geraniums blooming on the window-sill, Gram’s sturdy black bike propped inside the gate, near the hedge where blackberries and sloe fruit hang in dense blue clusters.
Inside, a goose roasts in the oven and the black-and-white dog, Monty, waits under the table for scraps. Granddad’s out fishing for trout in the river with a homemade rod or hunting grouse or partridge across the fields. So it’s just Gram and me, alone for a few hours.
Gram is rolling dough for a rhubarb tart, back and forth with the big rolling pin, dusting the yellow dough with handfuls of flour, stretching it to cover the brimming pie dish. Now and then she takes a puff of her Sweet Afton, wisps of smoke rising above her head. She offers me a bull’s-eye sweet, which she’s stashed in her apron pocket with a half-dozen half-smoked Afton butts—a mix of flavors I’ll never forget. On the front of the yellow cigarette box is a poem by Robert Burns that Gram likes to sing to an old Irish tune:
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes.
Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise.
I sit on a three-legged stool listening to the crackle and spit of goose skin in the oven while she trims a ribbon of dough from around the rim of the pie dish, making a cross with a remnant for the center and brushing it all with a beaten egg, finishing with a flourish of fork pricks and a sprinkle of sugar. When the tart’s safely in the oven we move to the front room, the “good room,” she calls it, just the two of us, for afternoon tea, strong and black with plenty of sugar, and currant bread, sliced and warm. Gram chooses two teacups from her collection of rose-patterned china in the glass-front, along with matching saucers and small plates, and sets each piece carefully on a starched linen placemat. Irish lace, hanging in the windows, filters the afternoon light, softening the lines on her face.
From my perch on the cushioned chair I see the wooden footrest with its floral needlepoint cover in front of her rocker, the small shelf of books—prayer books and poetry, mainly—by the stairs. I see Gram singing and humming as she pours the tea. Her strong hands and kind smile. Her love for me.
Now, tossing and turning on this damp, sour-smelling mattress, I try to focus on my perfect day, but these memories lead to other, darker thoughts. Mrs. Grote, back there moaning in her bedroom, isn’t so different from my own mam. Both of them overburdened and ill-equipped, weak by nature or circumstance, married to strong-willed, selfish men, addicted to the opiate of sleep. Mam expected me to cook and clean and take care of Maisie and the boys, relied on me to hear her troubles, called me naive when I insisted things would get better, that we would be all right. “You don’t know,” she’d say. “You don’t know the half of it.” One time, not long before the fire, she was curled on her bed in the dark and I heard her crying and went in to comfort her. When I put my arms around her, she sprang up, flinging me away. “You don’t care about me,” she snapped. “Don’t pretend you do. You only want your supper.”
I shrank back, my face flaming as if I’d been struck. And in that moment something changed. I didn’t trust her anymore. When she cried, I felt numb. After that, she called me heartless, unfeeling. And maybe I was.
AT THE BEGINNING OF JUNE, WE ALL COME DOWN WITH LICE, EVERY last one of us, even Nettie, who has barely four hairs on her head. I remember lice from the boat—Mam was terrified of us kids getting it, and she checked our heads every day, quarantining us when we heard about outbreaks in other cabins. “Worst thing in the world to get rid of,” she said, and told us about the epidemic at the girls’ school in Kinvara when she was a boarder. They shaved every head. Mam was vain about her thick, dark hair and refused to cut it ever again. We got it on the boat, just the same.
Gerald won’t stop scratching, and when I inspect his scalp I find it’s teeming. I check the other two and find bugs on them as well. Every surface in the house probably has lice on it, the couch and chairs and Mrs. Grote. I know what an ordeal this will be: no more school, my hair gone, hours of labor, washing the bedsheets . . .
I feel an overwhelming urge to flee.
Mrs. Grote is lying in bed with the baby. Propped on two soiled pillows, the blanket pulled up to her chin, she just stares at me when I come in. Her eyes are sunk in their sockets.
“The children have lice.”
She purses her lips. “Do you?”
“Probably, since they do.”
She seems to think about this for a moment. Then she says, “You brung the parasite into this house.”