Shelter (20 page)

Even though the darkness outside seemed something alive to stumble through, come bedtime it was preferable to brave it, along with a short row over black water to the island to sleep in the tent rather than the boxy little cabin bedroom with its rickety aluminum bunks and tiny window and Dad snoring like a mower just a chipboard wall away.

On the big island, Dad had cleared a space and built a platform on which he set up a roomy green army tent. The tent had screened windows with roll-down shades and a wide door flap
that was roped to the trees, making a little covered porch. It was big enough for real beds, a dresser, and our own kerosene lamp. On sunny mornings, the air inside was olive hued, the branches and leaves outside scrawling their shapes on the walls. On a rainy day, there was no better place to curl up with a volume of condensed books, hopefully one with a mystery or near-death cliff-hanger. When rain thwapped overhead, the smell of wet canvas grew musty, pages rippled, and plots thickened.

Over the decades since, I would think back to reading in that tent whenever I found a new addition for my haphazard cabin library (now in boxes in the Mayflower trailer) of stories chosen for summer reading. The library includes the adventure classics I’d always meant to read, like
The Last of the Mohicans, Heart of Darkness, White Fang, Moby-Dick, Kidnapped, The Red Badge of Courage, The Red Pony,
and the girl books I intend to reread:
Anne of Green Gables, Kristin Lavransdatter, Little Women,
and all of Jane Austen. There are books specific to the region, some recently reread, like the Sig Olson books and my freshly scored first editions of Helen Hoover. There’s a pile of field guides and natural history books:
Ferns of Minnesota, Mosses and Lichens, Trees of North America, Woodland Flowers of the North,
a half-dozen bird guides, how-to books on log building and stone building, vintage cabin plans, and stacks of
National Geographic
magazines so old they don’t have pictures on the front, only contents.

There’s an abundance of the book genre my sister Valerie and I shared an appetite for as kids: true stories of near-death experiences and tales of survival and deprivation—accounts of people folded into avalanches, mauled by rogue animals, adrift in dinghies and surviving by drinking puddle water or their own pee, shivering
under a fuselage lean-to they’d built with their one remaining arm. We speed-read books with the specter of death looming, scrabbling over pages to reach the brink. True crime books were usually on a reserve list but worth the wait; a wacko slow roasting his victim or stitching one to a tree could make a bullying boy or vicious nun seem nearly pleasant by comparison. My middle-school vocabulary expanded to include such words as “vivisection” and “flense.”

Eager for stories of childhoods more grim than our own, we devoured books that made life in Proctor, Minnesota, seem like a romp despite our proximity to the rail yards, or that mother sold food stamps for cash, or that our parish priest was a repeat offender pedophile. The town library had a few dusty volumes of Dickens, whose descriptions of hovels and chilblains made our box of a house feel downright cozy. Drafts that lashed at ankle height didn’t seem so bad after reading about Victorian cold-water slum flats with only smoky coal fires for heat and reeking privies for toilets. Being banished to our rooms had nothing over Little Dorrit, born in a debtors’ prison. Accounts of hunger made our mother’s meals (fried bricks of hamburger and boiled bricks of frozen vegetables glued together over stretchers of tepid boiled potatoes) seem feastly.

I sought stories representing the polar opposite of whatever the current season or situation was. Hot nights at the lake were made more tolerable by reading about Arctic and Antarctic exploration, a sort of hyper-deprivation genre featuring the likes of Thierry, Amundsen, or Shackleton trekking to places where chances were, if you did survive, you might leave behind bits of your face. My favorite cooling-off books were
The White Dawn,
Kabloona,
and the prize for the you-think-you’ve-got-it-tough Arctic chronicle,
Book of the Eskimos.
For cold nights there were
The Jungle Book, Kim, Kon-Tiki,
and dog-eared Westerns.

The old cookbooks are crammed in with the collection:
Herter’s,
of course, but also
Campfire Girls Cook!
and
One Pot Meals,
with recipes like Mushers Mash and other meals that could only taste good eaten outside by famished campers. Together, the collection comprises a library meant to be read in aluminum lawn chairs, porch swings, and hammocks.

On nights Sam and I played Cabin!, we would tuck in with Jack London or Bret Harte, and when Sam grew droopy, we’d end with something more upbeat so that the sometimes tense plots didn’t trail into his dreams. He loved bits of
Hiawatha’s Childhood,
so I tried to keep up Longfellow’s over-the-top singsong cadence: “Wah-wah-taysee, little firefly, little flitting white-fire insect, little dancing white-fire creature, light me with your little candle, ere upon my bed I lay me, ere in sleep I close my eyelids.” By the time I’d gotten to “little candle,” he’d be out himself, like a thwapped bug.

Outside the green tent were green woods and more woods, with countless crannies and solitary niches and alcoves to explore. Half a mile away behind an old hunting shack was a bog and a deep glade that smelled of church incense, the spongy earth hosting a neat copse of cedar, some trunks so curved they made shapes like pipes under a sink. The best spot was a piney corridor that led to the hobbity hollowed trunk of a great burnt pine, big enough to stand in. Not far was a creek as narrow as a run of Glad Wrap and bridged by a corduroy path of cedar logs. Close to the cabin was a place I visited most often, a birch grove
with a peculiar double-humped rock that fit my bottom as if I’d sat down just as the lava was cooling.

The Lake hadn’t always been a lake. It had once been a river valley with houses and old farms, and Dad said maybe even Indian camps. But the power company needed a dam, so the trees were logged out, the buildings abandoned, and the valley flooded. Intrigued by the idea there’d once been people living just under where we fished, I constantly hung over the bow of the boat, squinting in hopes of seeing remnants—a chimney, a windmill, a silo—but the lake water was tinted and clouded with iron and gave up nothing. I could only imagine people coming and going between their underwater teepees, farming their underwater farms. I supposed they climbed the islands that were once hills in their landscapes, but as thoroughly as I combed them hoping for an arrowhead or old tool or bottle, I never found so much as a rusty nail.

This is where Dad brought us. It was somewhere good. Parents couldn’t always be relied on, but the hollow tree would always take me in, saying just the right thing—nothing. This place wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t going to disappear or frighten or worry me, and during the long squall that was our parents’ divorce, it was sometimes the best and only harbor.

After Dad died, the cabin stood neglected for years, barely used. I rarely visited, and the older I got, the smaller and grubbier it seemed. After a time it didn’t even have beds; the fridge was hauled away; the well dried up. The tent collapsed onto its platform, and the platform collapsed into compost.

Dad’s will stipulated that the cabin and lease could not be sold unless all of us kids agreed, knowing that since we’d never agreed
on anything, chances were it would stay in the family. Half my siblings walked away from it. I hung on to my share out of nostalgia, eventually selling it to my sister Mary. The little cabin is gone now, but before it was torn down, the pine paneling was salvaged to make kitchen cabinets for the new cabin, a three-bedroom, two-bath summer home with a laundry room and heated floors. Mary stripped the heavy dining table we learned to play poker on, and the junky thing we’d never really noticed turned into a glossy antique.

Dad’s fishing hat hangs in roughly the same spot by the door, and nearby is a framed photo of him holding a stringer heavy with at least a dozen fish, captioned “Matt with six walleyes” (the legal limit). The new porch overlooks the cement slab of the old cabin, now only a shape.

J
ulia Stonich died in the summer of 1987, just before Ely celebrated its centennial. Had she hung on a few months, she’d have turned one hundred along with the town and been coiffed and powdered and propped up to ride in a float. Maybe anticipating that parade she may have intended her final nap be intentionally deep.

At the funeral, I was many months pregnant with Sam. As if by some feat of synchronized ovulation, two of my sisters were also pregnant, all of us due to give birth within weeks of each other.

I don’t remember the service, only the gathering in the church basement, a sticky July affair made more humid by gallons of boiling coffee. Sandwich loaves frosted with cream cheese swagged in the heat while the windows wept, and my sisters and I tucked bits of food into our purses. I drove back to Grandma’s house, a signature old-lady white two-story clapboard with dark green trim and lace and violets at the windows. Walking in, I wasn’t terribly sad. Julia had simply finished with a long life while I had an impending lapful of it pressing my ribs and boxing my bladder. Life, at least the cyclical aspect, was starting to make sad sense. Since I was no longer a daughter or granddaughter to anyone, it seemed appropriate I was about to become someone’s mother.

I stood at the sink and looked out Julia’s window to the brick building next door where the spinster Janko sisters had lived since time immemorial. The first floor housed their beauty parlor, with Garbo-vintage perm machines that looked like they could get you to confess anything. The salon walls were covered with faded posters of women with Joan Crawford waves, their once–bright red lips faded into pairs of bloodless slugs. As kind as the Jankos had been to our grandmother over the years, we didn’t want them anywhere near our hair.

Dad told a tall tale about the sisters both being in love with the same soldier who died in a war (he didn’t say which war, and looking at the sisters, you couldn’t imagine). This was a common enough story, which Dad then made ridiculous by adding that after the body was returned home for military burial, the sisters waited a proper few years before digging him up, when they split the pile of bones in a macabre one-for-you, one-for-me divvy wherein each got a hand, foot, femur, ribs, toe bones. Splitting his skull wasn’t an option, so they took turns, a week on, a week off. This was around 1967 when
Psycho
was finally going to be aired on television. Since our mother thought us too impressionable to watch it (she’d obviously never checked our stacks of library books), Dad must’ve felt compelled to supply his own dose of horror. Eventually the sisters began bickering over the skull so bitterly that one night the skeleton had had enough of their hairsplitting and hitched itself back together, grabbed its own skull, and huffed off in the direction of the cemetery, where it buried itself and finally got a decent night’s sleep.

The sisters then went back to being just the old ladies we knew. Of course, not much of anything ever happened to the
Janko sisters, though they did go on to invent the Ely Bikini, which consisted of a red railroad kerchief and two safety pins. The kerchief was tucked into the bottom of a bra, and the top corners were pinned onto each strap. From behind, the Ely Bikini looked just like what it was, a grungy brassiere, and since “the girls” only ever donned these costumes to garden, they were usually bent over anyway, looking just like two biddies weeding in their underwear.

The rooms in Julia’s house were neat pods. She’d accomplished an admirable feat at her very advanced age, to live clutter-free. Her spare house contained a bit of furniture, a few watercolors and oils painted by my aunts, and remarkably few other possessions for someone nearing one hundred. Still, the house had never felt bare until that afternoon. The silence echoed: no Julia mumbling back at the radio, no slurp of tea from saucers held by hands too shaky to hold cups, no squawk from the kitchen announcing supper, no more rogue farts preceded by her warning, “Eruption!”

She’d been a great cook of simple cuisine. Her chicken paprika and warm potica were all the more appreciated when compared to our mother’s wild stabs in the kitchen. Staring into Julia’s fridge, emptied save a can of ARCO coffee and a box of baking soda, I said a silent good-bye to her strudel, her milky coffee, and the cider-vinegar dressing she made to splash over fresh lettuce and onions still warm from her garden.

Julia’s punctured-tire voice and manner of speech might’ve been called wise-croaking. She’d been agile minded and witty, as were
her children. I did not understand until I was old enough to have spent time with other families that not everyone appreciated irony, that not all family gatherings crackled with sarcasm, that not everyone was comfortable with jabs or got the joke.

Julia had been the very last of her generation, had outlived her siblings, husband, and all but one of her sons. Then she slipped off the log like the frog in the song, her spot about to be filled with the baby I was not so much carrying as lugging and the two babies my sisters were about to drop. And while it might have appeared that our family baby boom was planned, it was accidental; fitting though, that there would be three new beings to replace Julia, who in spite of her size had been a big presence.