by Linda Hogan
And then I came to my mother’s house. Behind it was a clothesline with a few squares of cloth hanging from the wire, no wind to make them move.
It was a shabby house, unpainted, with tar paper over some of the walls. The door of her house had no lock. Where a lock had been was broken wood, as if the door had been jimmied. I stepped on the wooden box that served as a step, not knowing if I should knock or go inside. I was afraid now that I was at Hannah’s, but before I could turn around, a young man opened the door, and for a moment we stood looking at each other. He didn’t blink. “I heard you coming,” he said. He’d expected me, though he was not prepared for what I looked like. “You look like her.” I nodded. “I heard that one of Hannah’s children was back.” It wasn’t the scars he looked at, I knew, it was the resemblance to Hannah, which I myself found frightening.
He was dark and very thin, with a large chest and legs too long for his short body. He wore a flannel shirt and a dark gray sweater, as if it were autumn, and he opened the door wider, for me to enter.
I went inside.
Another man sat beside the window, reading the weekly news, a little paper of only eight or ten pages. He nodded at me, then followed my gaze to where Hannah slept, pale and drawn up, the way a child might sleep. Above her were the snowshoes of my dream. “It won’t be long now,” he said.
I nodded.
He folded the paper and got up to leave. He put on a red hunter’s jacket. He took my hand in his a moment. “We were waiting for you. We’ll go now.” At the door he turned and said, “You’ll need some food. I’ll bring you some. And milk, of course.”
Again, I nodded. But after he left, I wondered if they were too easy about it, if we could get help to save Hannah.
The house of Hannah had an old, familiar smell to it—of lard, which thickened the air; of strong tea; and of something else I couldn’t name, but that my body remembered. I wondered if it was the sweet smell of what Agnes had called cyanide.
It felt cold. I buttoned my jacket while I looked around. It was a one-room house and, like in my dream, the floor had settled lower on one side than on the other. The bed, too, was lower on one side than on the other, and Hannah was held in it as if contained in a hollow. If she moved, it looked as if she might fall.
I watched her sleep for a few moments. The blanket, pulled up over much of her face, rose and fell with her breathing. I was nervous. I didn’t know what to do. “Hannah?” I said. I sat down at a slant on the chair beside her bed. I felt dizzy. She said nothing. I pulled back the cover and looked at her. There was a wide, bloodstained bandage tied around her middle. One of her hands was curled against her cheek. “Mother?” I said. Still, she did not stir.
Shortly, the man came back with coffee, a thermos of stew, some biscuits, and powdered milk. He put the milk on the table. I watched him, how he moved, catlike and strong. “Thank you,” I said. He ladled stew into a brown plastic cup and handed it to me. “Venison.” He sat down at the table across from me while I ate, but just for company. I ate in silence. When I finished eating, he left, and I heard his boots loud on the wooden box outside the door, and then I was alone with my mother and her demons, if such things existed, and I guess by then I had come to believe they did.
THERE WAS a curtained partition dividing the room. On the walls, true to my dream, hung rope, chains, snowshoes, and pans. Darkness itself seemed to hang there by a nail. The cupboards were nearly bare, and there was no water, except what was in a jug. The floors were damp and smelled moldy from the weather, but the house was clean. Clothes hung neatly on nails. And there was an oil stove.
On the kitchen side, three old brown plastic dishes were in a cabinet. In another were salt and a few slices of dry Wonder bread. Hannah’s house, like her body, even from my beginning, had the same little or nothing to offer.
Her lips were dry, her teeth had what looked like dried blood on them, and her breath was foul. She tried to say something, but she didn’t see me, I was sure. I soaked a rag in water and held it to her lips. “What is it?” I asked, looking at her face that was so like mine.
She looked old and young at the same time. She had white roots to her hair. I thought of Bush saying of my mother that it was not her fault. I wanted to have compassion, but even now I felt the pain of betrayal, abandonment: she was leaving so soon after I’d found her. I didn’t understand that Hannah had died long ago. I looked long and hard at her, trying to memorize her face with my eyes that knew how to turn things upright again.
I looked around for anything that could be of use in caring for her. My eyes also saw, hanging in the corner between walls, fishnets and decoys. Two jackets hung near the door. Beside a bag of sugar, an empty whiskey bottle sat on the table.
There were no herbs or poultices for her, no salves or unguents, no laying on of any hands that would save her, not even a ceremony. I could see this by the set of her eyes. The presence of death was outside the door. Perhaps it had walked along the same trail I had. But I wasn’t afraid of death, I decided. I went over and opened the door for it. I wasn’t afraid of Hannah, either, and for this I was glad.
From the open door, a soft breeze entered the room. The cloth partition moved with it. From outside, I heard the sound of a lid on a trash can, and then there were smaller sounds, like someone talking. That’s when I heard the sound, a cry, that came from behind the waving cloth partition. I thought perhaps it was death speaking. I walked over and pulled the cloth aside.
There, in a wooden box, was a baby girl, about seven months of age. I stood looking at her. She was a thin child, and when I knelt over her, she grasped at my hand as if I might leave. Like me, she was red-haired and I laughed when I saw this. I have a sister, I thought, I have a sister! Already this baby was desperate. Already she had a will to live. She began to suck on my finger.
This explained why the man had brought the milk.
I picked her up. Carrying the child, I set to work. I cleaned the whiskey bottle and mixed water and the powdered milk inside it. It wasn’t the best thing for an infant, but it was all I could do. I chewed some of the meat stew and put it in a spoon and fed her. She was hungry and she was a distraction from Hannah’s death and my feelings of the loss of something vague, something I’d never quite possessed. But still, all the while I cared for her, I could see death and Hannah raging against each other in a fierce battle; Hannah wanted to die and had already submitted to it, but more than one of those who dwelled inside her feared it. What prowled in her, preyed on her from within, had a strong will. So it became a war between death and those whose desire to survive had been stronger than all of them; what inhabited her had no resignation to anything.
THAT EVENING, as Hannah’s life ebbed, two women came to see me.
“You look like her,” one of them said. She was soft-voiced and tall. She opened a package. “Here, feed her this.” She pointed to my mother. It was marrow butter. For them more than for Hannah, I put some on the tip of a spoon and tried to get her to eat it. I knew she wouldn’t take it, but the women, I thought, wanted to be helpful.
The tall woman said, “She wants to die. She needs strength for it.” The tall woman stood by Hannah and pulled her hair back behind her ear. It was a comforting gesture. “Hannah,” she said.
They’d brought fat and tea for the baby. “We’ve been worried about the baby,” the shorter woman said.
“It’s her baby?” I asked.
She looked at me. “She took it with her to see you. We thought you knew.”
I remembered the day Hannah showed up at Two-Town. Dora-Rouge had heard a baby crying out in the trees.
“The man is dead,” the woman told me. “The one that stabbed her. They already took him away.”
I wanted to know what had happened. I listened with great care as the tall woman said, “The beginning of all this is that too many animals are gone.” She said this as if I would understand. I didn’t, not yet. But, I thought once again how all of us kept searching for beg
innings.
“That’s what started all this. Otto went to Mill Town to work. He and Hannah needed food and gas. It’s always so hard here.” She stopped talking while a military plane passed overhead, rattling the window and the cups on the shelves. “The planes are one of the reasons the animals are gone. Some of them died of fear. Some drowned, too.”
I nodded. I’d heard what happened there, the caribou running across the flats as the water surged toward them, knocking them over, flooding their world, their migration routes gone now, under water.
I pieced together the story as well as I could. Otto, the trapper, had neither wired money to Hannah nor returned. Months passed. Finally, Hannah took up with another man. She always found a man to feed her and keep her in wine. But this man wasn’t like the others. His name was Eron, and his grandparents raised him in the bush. “They stayed to the old ways, you know, they knew things, they believed things. Eron was their chosen one. He was a strong hunter. The people loved him,” she said. She sat on the chair with her feet tucked under it:
“When he came back from school, that’s when his troubles started. At school they told him everything he had learned was wrong, and with these two knowings, that’s when he got lost. He was lost ever since then.
“After he moved in with Hannah, he began to fear her. He said to us one day, ‘She carried a basket from the water. In it, clear as day, there was a dead child.’ He said she carried a dead child in it.”
The woman got up from the story, as if it made her nervous, and tried once again to feed Hannah some marrow. “She won’t eat. It’s been like this for more than a day now.
“Eron said it always felt like someone else was in the room. Sometimes more than one. Hannah’s house was cold as a winter wind, he said. One night he felt something touch him. ‘She’s a spirit,’ he told his brother. ‘She’s not a real woman at all.’ His brother didn’t think much of it at the time.
“One night, he said he dreamed a woman with long white hair, white as the snow, wearing white robes, her face white, too, with red, bloody hands. She stood at the foot of the slanting bed, her hands bloody with what she’d done.
“There were people all along who thought Hannah should have been sent away. Maybe even killed. People believed she was a danger to others. One of her children ate glass and chewed razor blades. We knew what had happened to you, your face, how, like a dog, she bit your face with her teeth. It was worse for you, maybe because you looked like her. She hated you for that, for coming from her body, being part of her.”
I stared at the woman. She spoke casually. She thought I had already heard what she was telling me, but I hadn’t. The chill in the room entered my spine, rose up my neck. My heart beat quickly. I tried to keep my composure, but all I could think was, it’s true, my mother was a cannibal, a cold thing that hated life. But I said, surprising myself with how calm I sounded, “Did you call the police? About the stabbing.”
“No. She said it was her time to die,” the woman explained, as if I understood, but I didn’t, I didn’t know that by tribal law they were required to permit a person to leave life at their own time, in their own way.
I also didn’t know that whenever the authorities were summoned to these remote areas, they charged the tribal people a fine, which they pocketed just for responding, and even at that help was rarely forthcoming; it was costly and even risky to call for assistance. An ambulance could not have passed through the way I had walked to find Hannah’s. The helicopter pilot demanded cash up front. So did the hospital over in Keeneytown, showing no mercy for the people who lived in small shacks in this place that looked from afar like a cigarette burn on the face of the world. Even if Hannah had wanted to live, there would not have been help from the outside. If she’d wanted to live, they could have called a medicine man or woman, but now all the medicine people but one had gone to the dam north of Two-Town, and the one who remained behind did not work with cases such as these. He was an apprentice, and he was not strong enough to handle demons or restless beings or ice spirits that had gone to live inside a damaged woman.
“Eron stabbed himself,” she said. “Before he died, his cousins arrived. He told them that she herself had begged him to kill her. Hannah dreamed of frozen bodies. ‘Kill me then,’ she told him. ‘It’s the only way.’”
“IT HAPPENED ONCE BEFORE, not so long ago,” Dora-Rouge would tell me later, after we’d returned. “Just before this skin of time, that there was a woman in the grip of ice. It held her in its blue fingers. It froze her heart.”
It was 1936, the starvation year. The woman lived in a house of snow, frozen in, starving, until finally she ate the flesh of those family members who had already died of cold and hunger. Human flesh was the only plentiful thing that winter. Most would sooner starve, but this woman and ice, just as in old stories, became lovers. She rolled naked in snowdrifts like a woman gone mad. A normal person, a human being, could not have survived it. That’s how they knew what she was.
One day two hunters, brothers, found her cabin at the end of a path. The cabin was surrounded by snow clouds in the deep, dark blue of winter. When the two men went inside, they found her naked and laughing. She was alone, so they lit her lanterns, and in the dim light, they watched her. She smiled at them, but they were not fooled. Even in the 1930s, these things happened. Just like in older stories. This woman had slept with winter. She had eaten human flesh. Her heart loved ice. The two men took pity on her. It was not her fault that she had become winter’s mistress. The youngest one said, “Let’s cook her some hot soup.”
While the older man built a strong fire, the other went outside and cut a dark red piece of frozen meat off the deer they’d been carrying, then placed it to cook on the fire. While the meat cooked, they studied the woman. She watched them, too, with a cold eye. She hated deer meat. That was a bad sign already. All she wanted to swallow was the flesh of the two men. That night, she hid a knife beside her and waited for them to fall asleep. She could see how tired they were after days of hunting in the cold. After they ate, she knew they would become drowsy and helpless with sleep. But the younger one saw her sneaking up on him with the knife in her hand. He let her get close. He coaxed her, edging her closer to him. “Give it to me,” he said. “Give me the knife.”
Now that she was found out, she began to cry. “I’m a spirit,” she said. But there was another voice, a small human voice left inside her. It was this little voice, almost gone, that said to the men, “You have to kill me. There’s no other way.”
“It could be winter fever,” the older man said, but even while he talked, she or the spirit picked up the knife and ran to stab the younger brother. Just in time, the younger brother moved aside. Instead of his heart, she cut his arm. But she was strong, he noticed. She was stronger than a human woman and when she grabbed him, the young man couldn’t fend her off by himself, even though he was a strong-muscled man. His brother helped and in the struggle, they killed her. They knew by then that she was no human, so after she died, they poured boiling-hot water into her open mouth and her wounds in order to melt her frozen heart.
A week went by, and then the men were arrested by the police. They pleaded guilty. The white jury was horrified by what they’d done. They’d killed the woman in such a terrible way. They were especially frightened by what the young men said and how they told the story with honest faces. But the domain of gods and spirits and demons was larger than that of humans, even now, and the men were satisfied, even to be locked up, knowing they had returned the world to a kind of balance: they had made the world right for their people, for seasons and thaws.
It was so others could live that they did this, and I’ve thought about it for years. Wars are fought for far less than this.
I HEATED WATER and washed my mother’s face and hands. One of the hands, now so thin and vulnerable, was crooked; it had been broken and had healed wrong. Her skin was chilly, her eyes sunken.
“Why are you following me?” Hannah said.
But it wasn’t me she asked—it was air, perhaps a ghost—so I said nothing.
Outside, the breeze strengthened and I felt it enter the house and take some of Hannah’s life with it. It seemed that Hannah and the persons or spirits or demons who followed her about were gathering together in a truce; they were becoming silent now.
I sat thinking of what had happened to my face, what sharp teeth had done to my life. And there was the baby in the corner, in the wooden box, a new life that had formed in this place where some hundred-year-old history was breaking itself apart and trying to reform.
Perhaps there was balance in the world, after all, I thought. Maybe it just needed time.
DEATH STOOD IN Hannah’s eyes, small and forlorn. It didn’t look triumphant. Hannah was still alive, but barely. Her eyes were already set, her breathing rougher. Even death didn’t want her, I could see. Maybe it, too, feared her.
I sat beside her, the still unnamed child on my lap, and whispered again the word “Mother.” It was a word I’d never said. It hung, suspended in air. Like a child, I said, “Mama?” Then, like a child, I said, “Mama. Don’t leave me,” and through the window I saw the moving shadows of wind blow the few clothes on the line outside.
She looked small and vulnerable as she might have been once, back when she was a girl, before she was tortured into this poor shape before me.
Outside, someone passed near the window. I saw a shadow. I was crying, and I was afraid. But also I feared that what lived inside her, whether history, as Bush had said, or spirits the priest believed possessed her, would fill the room. I was afraid that when she left her body, whatever possessed her would open its claws and seize another body, and so at the very last, when the death rattle in her throat sounded like a gourd with seeds inside it, shaking, I took the baby outside and placed her on the ground, safe in her wooden box. I knew by intuition that it was a bad thing for an infant to be in the presence of death, even a kinder death than this one. I wanted nothing to enter the innocent, open-eyed gaze of this child. None of the soul stealers were going to sing this one away or fill her body with emptiness and pain.
