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The scars, I knew, were from my mother. They were all I had of her. For me, she was like air. I breathed her. I had to breathe whether I wanted to or not, and like air, she was invisible, although sometimes I thought I recalled her heartbeat from when I was inside her body. At those times, a distant memory tugged at me in a yearning way, and I felt something deeper than sorrow.
There had once been a covenant between animals and men, he told me. They would care for one another. It was an agreement much like the one between land and water. This pact, too, had been broken, forced by need and hunger.
My ugliness, as I called it, had ruled my life. My need for love had been so great I would offer myself to any boy or man who would take me. This was, according to women who judged me, my major sin.
no mirrors, because, as Bush said, mirrors had cost us our lives. I would come to call her house the House of No. It was defined by what wasn’t there.
In one photograph, I was held uncomfortably in the arms of Hannah Wing. She was not a natural mother, I could see. Wrapped tightly in a blanket, I looked at her with frightened eyes and it seemed that, even then, I pulled away from her.
Perhaps God himself had rocked me in his arms, and I was loved.
My mother, she said, was a storm looking for a place to rage. But there were times, she said, when Hannah was a warmer wind. “We were fooled then. We’d let her near and then she changed into ice and turned against us.”
“Your mother was a skin that others wore. The man your mother lived with kept animals in cages and they would cry at night like humans.”
I’d searched all my life for this older world that was lost to me, this world only my body remembered. In that moment I understood I was part of the same equation as birds and rain.
One day I dropped the mirror and it broke into many pieces. For a while I kept these, looking at only parts of my face at a time. Then I had no choice but to imagine myself, along with the parts and fragments of stories, as if it all was part of a great brokenness moving, trying to move, toward wholeness—a leg, an arm, a putting together, the way Bush put together the animal bones.
Finally, I gave up on the pieces of mirror. I gave up on all surfaces, even the taut skin of water. I knew what it held, what it could hold. As for people, I began to read their eyes to see what kind of souls they had. To look deeper.
“I can smell it,” Old Man said. “I can see them. All of them. She is the house, the meeting place.
there was a moment of silence in which we heard the sound of the northern lights. “Listen,” Bush said, and I heard the shimmering of ice crystals, charged by solar storms.
land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn’t, and I respected it for that.
“Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.”
Spring was a statement of faith, trust that all would be well, that light would return. The faithful earth was swept with the religion of the season. Opening. Rising. Muddy, soft, and renewed. I believed spring entered not only our dreams but those of the moose and wolves. Soon we would all be about, back to our lives.
I would never forget that song, buried or not. I thought, this is the way to keep the song in our memory. By making it forbidden. By burying it. It haunted me. I hear it still, the song of a woman I never met.
I came later to understand that God was everything beneath my feet, everything surrounded by water; it was in the air, and there was no such thing as empty space.
we no longer needed time. We were lost from it, and lost in this way, I came alive. It was as if I’d slept for years, and was now awake. The others felt it, too. Cell by cell, all of us were taken in by water and by land, swallowed a little at a time. What we’d thought of as our lives and being on earth was gone, and now the world was made up of pathways of its own invention. We were only one of the many dreams of earth.
She was as uncontained as she had previously been contained by skin, house, island, and water. Now it seemed there were no borders.
The four of us became like one animal. We heard inside each other in a tribal way. I understood this at once and was easy with it. With my grandmothers, there was no such thing as loneliness. Before, my life had been without all its ears, eyes, without all its knowings. Now we, the four of us, all had the same eyes, and when Dora-Rouge pointed a bony finger and said, “This way,” we instinctively followed that crooked finger. I never felt lost. I felt newly found, opening, like the tiny eggs we found in a pond one day, fertile and transparent.
In that moment, I remembered being fish. I remembered being oxygen and hydrogen, bird and wolverine. It was all there. I felt it in my heart. But I could never think what to call it after that. I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turning of other worlds.
I was relieved when I heard this. It was what Agnes had wanted, to be eaten by wolves and birds, to have her hair woven into bird’s nests in spring, along with twigs, fishline, downy breast feathers, and moltings. After that, on the chance that she had been eaten by wolves, I called every wolf I saw Grandmother.
IT WAS A RAW AND SCARRED place, a land that had learned to survive, even to thrive, on harshness.
I didn’t know what I’d expected to feel, seeing my mother for the first time, maybe happiness or anger. At best a kind of peace, something that might order my life and explain me to myself. Like Bush traveling north, I wanted a map, something fixed, a road in.
I was no longer numb from the water, but I still felt cold. I saw her. For her, I was the accuser, the sign of her guilt. I wore the wounds of Hannah on my face. They were evidence of what had happened.
Hannah glanced again in my direction. “You look fat,” she said, which later made us all laugh because I was much too thin; I had lost all my extra weight, and then some, carrying canoes and supplies and Dora-Rouge. My face was even raw-angled and masculine in its leanness.
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.”
As death grew to fit my mother, to fill her, it was like a seed of something that opened and grew inside her, as if it had known the territory for a long time,
Together we bathed Hannah with soapy hot water, more comforting to us than to the dead. There was little cloth and we needed it for wrapping her body, and for the baby, so we first laid Hannah out on newspaper. How appropriate it was to place her on words of war, obituaries, stories of carnage and misery, and true stories that had been changed to lies. It seemed like the right bed for her. Some of the words stuck to her body, dark ink, but we did not wash them off; it was a suitable skin.
I found the piece of amber I had carried, the frog inside it. I hadn’t even missed it. She’d stolen it, taken something else away from me. And she had broken into it, tried to chip the frog out. It must have terrified her, such suspension. I think she wanted to get to the heart of stilled life, to what was held captive in the yellow blood of a tree.
Standing before mirrors, people looked at themselves as if for the first time, and were disappointed at the lines of age, the marks and scars they’d never noticed or seen clearly before.
By then, I knew what loneliness was. It was larger than the way I missed Tommy. It was the enormous river now gone. It was drowned willows and alders. It was the three dead lynx caught in a reservoir, ten thousand drowned caribou. It was the river traveling out of its raging, swift power and life into such humdrum places as kitchens with stoves and refrigerators. The river became lamps. False gods said, “Let there be light,” and there was alchemy in reverse. What was precious became base metal, defiled and dangerous elements. And yet we would use it. We would believe we needed it. We would
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their language didn’t hold a thought for the life of water, or a regard for the land that sustained people from the beginning of time. They didn’t remember the sacred treaties between humans and animals. Our words were powerless beside their figures, their measurements, and ledgers.
Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy.
The men were shielded inside their machines’ metal armor, certain nothing could touch them, not in any part of themselves, certain that this was progress. They would tear the land apart and break down our lives. It would be done. It would be finished and over. It takes so little, so remarkably little to put an end to a life, even to a people.
Later I wondered how these men, young though they were, did not have a vision large enough to see a life beyond their jobs, beyond orders, beyond the company that would ultimately leave them broke, without benefits, and guilty of the sin of land killing. Their eyes were not strong enough, their hearts not brave enough, their spirits not inside them.
now I know it was a story of people eating, as toothy and sharp and hungry as the cannibal clan was said to be—eating land, eating people, eating tomorrow.
I saw the world new again through her eyes, as if I had grown old, laid down in a common remembering, and returned once again, restored.
We no longer allowed others to call us Fat-Eaters. We were again the Beautiful People.
Old Wolverine is just a mask. There’s a man or a woman underneath the mask, wearing it, you see. That person can walk on all fours, and has learned to be sly. They move so soft, like a whisper, and all you see is a shadow.”
And there was the day, caught in a web of anger and fear, that I walked toward the soldiers, a rock in my hand. Bush laid her hand on me. I turned my head and looked at her in all her quiet strength. I did not throw the rock. I know now what a single thrown rock would have done. Just one rock.
I remembered what Husk had once said about the creation of the moon, how it split off from earth, leaving an ocean behind, salt tears. The moon left the body of its mother, both of them knowing there would be no return.
Perhaps my own return began long ago, in a time before I was born, when I was held inside the bodies of my ancestors. What a fine savagery we had then, in the dark stirrings of first life, long before the notion of civilization. We knew the languages of earth, water, and trees. We knew the rich darkness of creation. For tens of thousands of years we spoke with the animals and they spoke with us.
He cried for the animal, for us, our lives, and for the war he’d endured and never told about. He changed after that, inch by inch. Another person might not have noticed, but I saw it. And so did Bush. She was moved by his new openness, his lack of skin. Tears have a purpose. They are what we carry of ocean, and perhaps we must become sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.
One day, when the light was yellow, I turned to Bush and I said, “Something wonderful lives inside me.” She looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “The early people knew this, that’s why they painted animals on the inside of caves.” Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You will see.
