Solar Storms

by Linda Hogan

  SOLAR STORMS

  LINDA HOGAN

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  ALSO BY LINDA HOGAN

  MEAN SPIRIT

  THE BOOK OF MEDICINES

  DWELLINGS: A SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF THE LIVING WORLD

  SEEING THROUGH THE SUN

  SAVINGS

  RED CLAY

  ECLIPSE

  THE STORIES WE HOLD SECRET

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

  Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by Linda Hogan

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 1997

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc. under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  Designed by Songhee Kim

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  11 13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

  Hogan, Linda.

  Solar storms: a novel / Linda Hogan.

  1. Indian women—Minnesota—Fiction. 2. Indian women—Canada—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.034726S58 1995

  813′.54-dc20 95-24563

  CIP

  FOR DANIELLE MARIE. MAY YOU FIND YOUR WAY ALWAYS TO THOSE WHO LOVE YOU.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6848-2539-7

  eISBN-13: 978-1-439-10844-4

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WANT TO THANK Jean Fortier and my other friends who to this story for so long a time; Marilyn Auer, Brenda Peterson, Connie Studer, Patricia Amman, Patrick Hogan, who lived parts of the story; Shelly McIntire, Lee Goerner, and Katherine McNamara, and my assistant, Wonshé. I am also so grateful to Leigh Haber and Beth Vesel for their assistance. And thanks to Michael Evans-Smith for providing information.

  The Guggenheim Foundation provided financial support during the writing of this novel.

  PROLOGUE

  SOMETIMES NOW I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window.

  “The house is crying,” I said to her as steam ran down the walls. The cooking stove heated the house. Windows were frozen over with white feathers and ferns.

  Bush said the house could withstand it. She had black hair then, beautiful and soft. She stepped out into the cold and brought in an armload of wood. I caught the sweet odor of it and a wind of cold air as she brushed by me. She placed a log in the stove. It was still damp and when the flame grabbed it, the wood spat and hissed.

  I didn’t for a minute believe the house could withstand it. I knew already it was going to collapse. It was a wooden house, dark inside, and spare. The floors creaked as she swept about. The branches of trees scraped against the windows like they were trying to get in. Perhaps they protested the fire and what it lived on.

  Bush unjointed the oxtails and browned them in suet. She worked so slowly, you would have thought it was swamp balm, not fat and backbone, that she touched. I thought of the old days when the oxen arrived in black train cars from the dark, flat fields of Kansas, diseased beasts that had been yoked together in burden. All the land, even our lost land, was shaped by them and by the hated thing that held them together as rain and sunlight and snow fell on their toiling backs.

  The shadows of fish floated in the sink. Bush did her own hunting then, and she had a bag of poor, thin winter rabbits. She removed their fur the way you’d take off a stocking. She dredged them in flour. In the kitchen, their lives rose up in steam.

  Day and night she worked. In her nightclothes, she boiled roots that still held the taste of mud. She stirred a black kettle and two pots. In her dark skirt, she cut onions. I didn’t understand, until it was over, what it was she had to do. I didn’t know what had taken hold of her and to what lengths she must go in order to escape its grip.

  She folded blankets and clothing and placed them on the floor in the center of that one dark room. She took down the curtains, shook out the dust, washed them in the sink, and hung them on lines from wall to wall. All the while, bones floated up in broth the way a dream rises to the top of sleep.

  Your mother entered my dreaming once, not floating upward that way, but crashing through, the way deer break through ice, or a stone falls into water, tumbling down to the bottom. In the dream, I was fishing in Lake Grand when the water froze suddenly like when the two winds meet and stop everything in their paths, the way they do in waking life, the way they left a man frozen that time, standing in place at the bank of Spirit River. In the dream I saw your mother beneath ice in the center of the lake. I was afraid of her. We all were. What was wrong with her we couldn’t name and we distrusted such things as had no name. She was like the iron underground that pulls the needle of a compass to false north.

  Whatever your mother was in that dream, whatever she is now, it wasn’t human. It wasn’t animal or fish. It was nothing I could recognize by sight or feel. The thing she was, or that had turned into her, pulled me toward it. I was standing, still and upright, drawn out that way to the terrible and magnetic center of what I feared. I slid across the glaring surf ace of ice, standing like a statue, being pulled, helpless and pale in the ice light. Old stories I’d heard from some of the Cree began to play across my mind, stories about the frozen heart of evil that was hunger, envy, and greed, how it had tricked people into death or illness or made them go insane. In those stories the only thing that could save a soul was to find a way to thaw the person’s heart, to warm it back into water. But we all knew your mother, Hannah Wing, stood at the bottomless passage to an underworld. She was wounded. She was dangerous. And there was no thawing for her heart.

  Bush, the wife of your grandpa, had struggled with your mother’s cold world. She tried to keep you with her, to protect you from the violence that was your mother. There was the time she heard you crying in the house when you were not there. I heard it, too, your voice, crying for help, or I would not have believed her. It was a chilling sound, your soul crying out, and Bush turned desperate as a caged animal. She fought for you.

  In that battle with what amounted to human evil, Bush didn’t win, but she didn’t lose either. It was a tie, a fragile balance that could tip at any time. That was the reason she cooked the mourning feast. That was why she baked the bread and soaked corn in lye and ashes until it became the sweetest hominy, and who would have believed such a caustic thing could sweeten and fatten the corn? That was why she cooked the wild rice we harvested two years earlier, and the rice was the most important thing because you had gone with us that fall day. You were all wrapped in cotton, with netting over your face so that the little bugs and dust wouldn’t bother you as we drifted through the plants, clicking the sticks that knocked rice into the boat.

  The last thing Bush did to prepare her feast in honor of you was to open the jar of swamp tea, and when she did, I smelled it. It smelled like medicine to me. It smelled like healing. It reminded me of the days when the old women put eagle dowm inside wounds and they would heal.

  Bush is a quiet woman, little given to words. She never takes kindly to being told what to do. So while she prepared the feast, I let her be, even when she did a poor job on the rice soup. I knitted and sat in the chair by the window and looked outsid
e, straight at the face of winter. There was a silence so deep it seemed that all things prepared for what would follow, then and for years to come, the year you returned to us, the years when the rest of us would be gone, when the land itself would tremble in fear of drowning.

  The windows were frozen over, so it was through ice that I saw them coming, the people, arriving that cold Sunday of the feast. Across ice, they looked like mere shadows against a darkening winter evening. Wind had blown snow from the surface of the lake, so in places the ice was shining like something old and polished by hands. Maybe it was the hands of wind, but the ice shone beneath their feet. I scraped the window with my fingernails and peered out. It wasn’t quite dark, but jarrell Illinois, gone now, wore a miner’s headlamp and the others walked close to him, as if convinced that night had fallen. As they drew closer, I saw that their shadows and reflections walked alongside them like ghosts, or their own deaths that would rise up one day and meet them. So it looked like they were more. My breath steamed the window, I remember. I wiped it again for a better look.

  Some of the people were wrapped in the hides we used to wear, or had blankets wrapped around them. They walked together like spirits from the thick forest behind winter. They were straight and tall. They were silent.

  “Here they come,” I said. Bush, for a change, was nervous. She stirred the iron pot one last time, then untied her hair. It was long and thick. Hair is a woman’s glory, they say. Her glory fell down her back. The teakettle began to sing as if it remembered old songs some of us had long since forgotten. Its breath rose up in the air as she poured boiling water over the small oval leaves of swamp tea. The house smelled of it and of cedar.

  “Look at that,” I said. “They look beautiful.”

  Bush bent over the table and looked out the window as the people came through a path in the snow. The air shimmered in the light of the miner’s lamp and a lantern one woman carried. Bush wiped her hands on her apron. Then they came through the door and filled up the crying house. Some of them stamped their feet from the habit of deep snow, their cheeks red with cold. They took off their boots and left them by the fire. They greeted us in a polite way. Some of them admired the food or warmed their hands near the stove. All of them looked at the pictures of you that sat on the table. After greeting us, they said very little. They were still uncomfortable around Bush even after all those years. She was a misplaced person. She’d come there to marry my son, Harold. They had never understood her and how love was the one thing that kept her there. To get them to her banquet, she’d told them this was her tradition, that it was the only thing that could help her get over her grief from losing you. There wasn’t one among us who didn’t suspect that she’d invented this ceremony, at least in part, but mourning was our common ground and that’s why they came, not just for her, but out of loyalty for the act of grief.

  Bush put a piece of each of the different foods in her blue bowl for the spirits, wiped her hands on her apron, and took the bowl outside. I could see through the doorway how heat rose from the bowl like a prayer carried to the sky, begging any and all gods in the low clouds to listen. The aching joints of my hands told me it was a bone-chilling, hurting cold, the worst of winters. Bush held up the bowl for sky to see, for the spirit of ice, for what lived inside clouds, for the night-wind people who would soon be present because they lived on Fur Island and returned there each night. I could barely make out her shape in the newly swirling snow, but when she came back in, she smiled. I remember that. She smiled at the people. It was as if a burden was already lifted.

  One by one the people took their places, settling into chairs or on the couch that was covered with a throw I had made, or they sat at the long table. They hadn’t been there before, and so they looked around the small, now-stripped house with curiosity. The wood and wallpaper were stained where rain had seeped through.

  When Bush served up the food, it came to me that I didn’t want to eat. I was a large woman then, I loved my food, but I must have known that eating this meal would change me. I only picked at it.

  At first, we hardly spoke, just small talk, and there were the sounds of forks on plates, spoons in bowls. There were silences when the wind died down, and all you could hear was snow hitting against the wood of the house, dying against the windows, tapping as if it was hungry and wanted in. I remember thinking of the island where she lived, the frozen waters, the other lands with their rising and sloping distances, even the light and dust of solar storms that love our cold, eerie pole.

  We had moose meat, rice, and fish. The room was hot. There were white-haired people, black-haired people, and the mixed-bloods—they wore such colorful clothes. Frenchie was there, dressed in a blue dress. It was low-cut and she wore rhinestones at her neck, and large rubber boots. We were used to her way of dress, so we didn’t think it was strange attire. We just believed she was one kind of woman on top and another below the waist.

  It was so damp and warm inside that the wallpaper, full of leaves, began to loosen from the moist walls. It troubled my mother, Dora-Rouge, who sat with her back against the wall. She was always an orderly woman and accustomed to taking care of things. And she wasn’t as bent as she is now, so when Bush wasn’t looking she tried to stick the wallpaper back up, holding edges and corners with her hands until it became too much for her, and she gave up and went back to taking the fine bones out of her fish.

  Jarrell Illinois—he was a good man—took some tobacco out of the tin and pinched it into his cheek and smiled all around the room.

  In that one day it seemed that the house grew smaller. It settled. The floors sloped as if they knew the place would soon be abandoned, the island quiet and alone with just its memory of all that had happened there, even the shipwreck of long ago.

  I don’t know how to measure love. Not by cup or bowl, not in distance either, but that’s what rose from the iron pot as steam, that was the food taken into our bodies. It was the holy sacrament of you we ate that day, so don’t think you were never loved. It’s just there was no way open between us after the county sent you back to Hannah, and however we tried, we never saw you again after that.

  We ate from evening through to near light, or as light as it gets in winter. The fire cast shadows on the walls as the old men picked the bones, then piled them up like ancient tellers of fortune. They ate the bowls empty, clear to the bottom. By then, people were talking and some even laughing, and there was just something in the air. That night, in front of everyone, Bush cut her long hair. The way we used to do long ago to show we had grief or had lost someone dear. She said it held a memory of you. She said that hair had grown while you were living on the island with her. She said she had to free that memory.

  When the dishes were all piled up, she went to the middle of the room where she had placed her earthly goods, then in a giveaway, she gave each diner present some part of her world. It was only your things she parted with unwillingly, holding them as if she dreaded their absence, and now and then a tear would try to gather in her eye, but she was fierce and determined. She gave away your handmade blanket, T-shirt, shoes, socks—gave one here, one there. Some of the people cried. Not only for her, but for all the children lost to us, taken away.

  She gave away her quilts, and the hawk feathers that had survived both flood and fire. She gave the carved fish decoys my son Harold had made. They were weighted just right to drop through ice and lure many a slow and hungry winter fish. No one else had weights as good as those. She gave away her fishing poles and line, and her rifle. She gave away the silverware. At the end she stood there in her white sleeping gown, for she’d even given what she wore that day, the black skirt, the sweater.

  With all the moisture of cooking and breath, the door froze shut, and when the people were ready to leave, John Husk struggled to open it until finally it gave. When they went through it each person carried away a part of her. She said it was her tradition. No one questioned her out loud or showed a hint of the doubt I knew they felt
.

  They came to love her that night. She’d gone to the old ways, the way we used to live. From the map inside ourselves. Maybe it reminded us that we too had made our own ways here and were ourselves something like outcasts and runaways from other lands and tribes to start with.

  They left through the unstuck, pried-open door. Night had turned over. The white silence of winter was broken by the moaning, cracking sound of the lake.

  I remained, but I watched the others walk away with their arms full. Going back that morning, in the blue northern light, their stomachs were filled, their arms laden with blankets, food, and some of the beaver pelts Bush had stolen and been arrested for—from the trappers who had trespassed the island. Anything that could be carried away, they took. Frenchie pushed a chair before her across the ice, leaving the track of wooden legs in shining lines. Beneath her coat, she wore Bush’s black sweater over the dress and rhinestones. But the most important thing they carried was Bush’s sorrow. It was small now, and child-sized, and it slid its hand inside theirs and walked away with them. We all had it, after that. It became our own. Some of us have since wanted to give it back to her, but once we felt it we knew it was too large for a single person. After that your absence sat at every table, occupied every room, walked through the doors of every house.

  The people walked through the drifts that had formed when the wind blew, then they seemed to merge with the outlines of the trees. I was worried that Frenchie might fall into the warm spot where the lake never freezes. Others had fallen before her.

  Bush went outside to get the bowl. It was empty and there were no tracks. Or maybe the wind had covered them. But a bowl without its soup is such a hopeful thing, and like the bowl, Bush was left with emptiness, a place waiting and ready to be filled, one she could move inside and shape about her. And finally, she was able to sleep.

  The next evening, Bush said it was time for me to leave. “Go on,” she said, handing me my coat and hat. I hesitated. She had little more than a few pieces of firewood and some cooking pots. She had given away even the food. She saw me look about the house at what wasn’t there. I sipped hot tea. We’d slept near each other for warmth the night before, my bear coat over us. Once Bush sat up and said, “This coat is singing.” I told her it was just the sound of ice outside the door. I must have looked worried. “I’ll be fine,” she said, holding up the coat to help me into it.