The Long-Shining Waters (18 page)
Read The Long-Shining Waters Online
Authors: Danielle Sosin
She peruses the pages she’d added to while driving, making sure that the entries are legible. “Plaster arm.” Someone stuck it up in the nets as a joke, but it never got taken down. “Antique railroad lantern.” Remembering it had brought to mind her first trip to California. Joannie, everyone said she was crazy not to fly, but she grew up in a town crossed with railroad tracks and she always wondered what it would be like to ride out on one. By then, all the traffic was freight. Passenger service to the Twin Ports was defunct. So she rode a train west from St. Paul. Once was enough. She’s flown every time since.
“You’re not taking notes for the Health Department, I hope.” The man puts a glass of wine on her white paper place mat.
“No. God no. I’m writing . . . it’s hard to explain, really. Lists of stuff.”
“Groceries? Laundry? I usually do mine on the backs of envelopes.” He smiles. A smoker. She can tell by his teeth. “But hey, maybe you save yours or something. Keep them all together in a book for posterity.”
“How long have you been psychic?” Nora tastes her wine. “Do you want to know what I bought at the drugstore in February?” She flips to a page and starts reciting. “One bottle of citrus fingernail-polish remover. Kleenex, pocket-size.” She keeps a straight face, but the man is chuckling.
“No, really. What are you writing about?”
“They’re lists. I told you. You see, I had a fire.”
“Ah,” he says, holding his hand up for her to stop. “I’m truly sorry to hear that. Are they the insurance lists, or the ones for yourself?”
“You know?”
He nods sympathetically. “My apartment. I lost everything but my guns and the clothes I was wearing. And just when you think you’re settled, something comes at you out of the blue. Once—and this was several months after the fire—I was shaving, not thinking of anything special, when I remembered this photograph of me and my kid sister. Well, I hadn’t looked at it since who knows. It was just sitting in a desk drawer with a lot of papers, but still, you see, it can’t be replaced. I hope you didn’t lose your photographs.”
Nora feels her heart soften, and pressure well behind her eyes. She’s glad for the dinging counter bell, calling him away from her table.
He passes her carrying salad plates, then clears and wipes an empty booth. Nora drops her gaze whenever he looks her way. Sit down and tell me everything, she wants to say. She imagines him drawing her a map on the place mat. “It’s easy,” he’d tell her, “just follow these lines.” But when has anyone ever shown her what to do? She’s always made do for herself. When he comes to clear her plate, she doesn’t bring up the fire.
“Do you mind if I give you a little advice?” asks the waiter, holding a plate with a piece of strawberry pie.
“Absolutely.” Nora straightens, grateful before he speaks.
“Forget the lists.”
“What? Why do you say that?”
He smiles sadly but doesn’t answer. “On me,” he says, placing the pie in front of her.
1622
The sun is high and bright after three days of steady rain had cast a hush over the camp. Grey Rabbit squints against the wood smoke, lifted from her fire by the wind. The fire is warm and also the sun. It seeps into her skin and scalp as it does only when winter has truly fled. She stirs the hot pitch and adds a bit of the powder she’d pounded from burnt cedar chips. She has not dreamt of children, her dreams have been vague. She feels like a hollow log.
“Look at my deer,” calls Little Cedar. He has his deer sticks under his arms and is walking four-legged in a large circle. He has more energy these days, though he’s still not himself. She hopes he’ll feel well enough to join in the gaming when they move to the long rapids at Bawating. The pitch bubbles. Grey Rabbit checks the bottom of the container.
“Look,” calls Little Cedar again, pointing his lips to the sky. An arrow of geese is flying over, honking and clamoring, flapping their huge wings. “Look at those two, trying to catch up.”
She turns around. Her son stands head back, face to the sky, one hand shielding his eye. Grey Rabbit’s stomach drops. She worries for his sight constantly, for the difficulties he could meet if left with one eye.
“The geese return.”
Grey Rabbit whirls.
Bullhead lowers her load of fresh birch-bark rolls. “The stand by the island in the river was ready. The trees shed their bark as quickly as young husbands dropping clothes.” Laughing, she loosens the tie around the rolls.
Grey Rabbit smiles faintly, then turns to rake a hot rock toward the pitch. Bullhead searches the side of her face, noticing the dark half-moons below her eyes. The loss of laughter is not a good sign. If need be she’ll arrange for a medicine man at Bawating.
2000
Nora twirls the postcard rack in the Stop and Shop in Calumet. At least the sun had come out after lunch, the light glowing through her glass float as she drove. She chooses a pink sunset over the lake, and one of a house that’s so piled with snow it looks like three mattresses are stacked on the roof. Nora pays for the postcards and asks the cashier if she has any ideas about where on the Keweenaw she might go.
“Well, it depends what you’re interested in. Lighthouses. Waterfalls. Ghost towns.” The woman behind the counter looks at Nora over her glasses. “You’re between snow season and summer, so you won’t find much open. The site of the old Cliff Mine and stamp mill aren’t far, and Eagle River is a popular destination. From there, 26 is a nice drive along the water.”
Nora sits on a bench in the sun between an ice machine and a free air pump, looking at the pamphlets the woman gave her. A sheet with information about the copper booms and busts. A glossy pamphlet from a historical society with pictures—a parlor with a Victrola, crosscut saws, and other logging memorabilia, a cluster of roughly hewn miner’s cabins, the blue water of the lake beyond.
The road winds like a serpent through blink-of-an-eye towns: Kearsarge, Allouez, Ahmeek, Cliff. There’s a boarded-up church, and everything is quiet. Welcome to Copper Country, a sign reads, but there’s nothing around that looks like copper. Nor do there seem to be any people.
She’s alone in the bubble of her car. Nora pulls onto the shoulder and stops. She picks up the map. She’s not lost. If she had a loaf of bread she’d be dropping crumbs. It’s as if she were journeying backward in time, making her way up the hard spine of some creature long ago turned to stone. She holds the notebook against the steering wheel and writes, “Everything around this lake is about the past.”
The plaque on the main street in Eagle River reads Founded in 1843. The town’s so tiny she can drive every street in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Some of the buildings are nondescript and some have historic clapboard storefronts, but the only sign of life that she has seen is laundry hanging in a backyard.
The lake is down at the end of the street. She can hear its faint hiss like radio static. She drives the couple of blocks and parks on the shoulder, then walks down to the shore. It’s water as far as she can see, and nothing on the horizon but long low clouds. There is no one in either direction, not a single soul along the beach. The waves fan and sink back, hissing in clear sheets over long ridges of sand.
It’s empty. Eerie. The lake slides up and down. Behind her the silent town. The houses. The Victorian inn. The water hisses and goose bumps rise on her arms. She could be the last person on earth. The water rises, folds, and drains back, and she feels everything soften and slide with it, as if all the solidity were seeping away, leaving everything boneless and mutable.
Nora turns away from the lake. Her neck is warm and she feels short of breath. Even the tree that she parked beneath, the sunlight on its spring leaves, looks fragile and unreal. Vague, more like a memory of a tree. The only thing that appears to have any weight is her car, and she heads straight for it, starts the engine, and gets out of there.
1902
Berit sits on the bench at the end of the point, her skin chilled and the sky paling orange. Her blouse, she sees, is rumpled, her skirt, filthy. She’s in the calm dull space after crying, where nothing exists but unanswerable questions. How can the water be orange-skinned and beautiful even while there is no second chance?
A gull sits on the water in the orange light, its white wings folded, its beauty undeniable. And she feels her innards stretch, her heart, her lungs pressing against her ribs, as both pain and beauty try to claim the space. Either she’ll stretch large enough to hold both, or she’ll rip in a way that will be beyond mending. Neither feels like a choice.
The sky is in its last glow, and the surface of the lake is rolling. Berit makes her way in from the point. She’s rubbing the cold out of her arms and watching where she steps when something red catches her eye. She climbs down onto the slanting lower ledge, where a small birch-bark dish filled with tiny red strawberries is placed in the rocks near the lapping water. John must have left them the other day. She bends down and fingers a berry. Some kind of Indian offering. To Gunnar, maybe. Or maybe the lake. In light of where he placed them, they’re certainly not meant for her.
“You don’t know,” she had accused him. But he does. She saw it in his eyes. Most people must. Of course everything dies. Given that, it’s beyond belief that anyone or anything functions at all. Seeds get sown. Lumber cut. Horses shoed. Children washed. She picks a red berry from the dish, turns it in her fingers, and puts in her mouth.
2000
Nora drives all the way from Eagle River to Marquette, chainsmoking with the radio on, trying to shake the sensation she felt, and questioning her mental health. She finds a motel just past town, goes straight to her room, and lies down shoes and all. The highway and the lake sound through her closed window, her body buzzing from the road. She lifts the phone onto the bed.
“Nanny, you’re in Marquette? Let me get the map. Oh, you’re getting close to the Shipwreck Museum. I can’t wait.” Nikki’s excitement hums across the line. “Will you bring me a souvenir? Pleeeease?”
“You know I will, Bun.” She’d agree to anything as happy as she is to be hearing Nikki’s voice, connecting and grounding her to something real.
“Guess what? I already got two postcards. I never got mail before.”
“Well you keep checking, ’cause there’s more on the way. Tell me everything you did today.”
Nora’s hoping her mood won’t come through with Janelle, but Janelle asks straight off whether she is okay.
“I’m fine,” Nora assures her, “a little tired.”
“This just isn’t like you. Are you talking to anyone? Rose, or Aunt Joan?”
“Listen, you don’t have to worry about me.”
Nora feels the severed connection as soon as the receiver clicks down. She looks around the unfamiliar room. It’s white. Still. The ceiling is water stained. Nora lifts the receiver again.
“Hi, you’ve reached Joan. I can’t get to the phone right now . . .”
1622
It’s no longer night, but not yet day. Grey Rabbit stands alone, listening. At first she’d thought her sons were awake. Then that someone was whispering outside the lodge. There are no signs of morning activity, no smoke rising, no sound of gathering wood. Still, she hears the murmuring. It seems to be coming from the big fire ring, but as she walks toward it, the sound subsides. She stands over the charred logs and ashes.
A stubby log trembles and lifts from the others. Grey Rabbit drops to a crouch. Murmuring, it inches out of the ring, dragging something flat on the ground behind it. It’s a tail. It’s a beaver. Murmuring. She has never heard a beaver make such a sound.
Keeping a distance, she follows its path, a dark line of turned dirt and pine needles. The animal leads her toward the river, but then it changes course and heads for Gichigami. Its murmur carries an urgent tone, and Grey Rabbit can feel the worry. Something is very wrong.
She is running, shielding her face with her arm as she pushes through branches that fling back behind her. The murmuring is everywhere, winding and winding around her head. Grey Rabbit spills out at the forest’s edge, on a rock that slopes steeply to the water. Gichigami’s surface is roiling and murmuring, as if a wind wider than she’d ever imagined is agitating its entire skin. The beaver’s haunches roll as it moves, its tail waddling over the rock, and then its lumbering movements transform as it glides into its element.
In the lifting light, she can see their hunched shapes crossing the rocks all along the shore. She jumps as one brushes against her leg. It stops and looks at her, then scurries on.
Clouds like a village to the east flush red. In the growing light she can see what’s happening. The agitated waters are filled with beaver. The dark tops of their heads and their furrowed wakes, their wide, dark tails lapping. From all directions, they stream toward to the water. The sound is anger. The beavers are leaving, swimming into the rising red sun.
Grey Rabbit drops to her knees and presses her hands over her ears. Beavers brush past her on either side. The beavers are angry. The beavers are leaving. The water churns. They are leaving, swimming into the sun.
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