Three Indians stand beside the road. They aren’t selling anything, no baskets and it’s too early for blueberries. They just stand there as if they’ve been doing it for a long time. They’re familiar to me but only as scenery. Do they see me as I stare at them out of the car window? Probably not. I’m a blur to them, one more face in a car that doesn’t stop. I have no claim on them, or on any of this. I sit in the back seat of the car that smells of gasoline and cheese, waiting for my parents, who are buying groceries. The car is beside a wooden general store, saggy and weathered gray, stuck together by the signs nailed all over the outside of it: BLACK CAT CIGARETTES, PLAYERS, COCA-COLA. This isn’t even a village, just a wide place in the highway, beside a bridge beside a river. Once I would have wanted to know the river’s name. Stephen stands on the bridge, dropping pieces of wood upstream, timing how long it takes them to come out the other side, calculating the rate of flow. The blackflies are out. Some of them are in the car, crawling up the window, jumping, crawling up again. I watch them do this: I can see their hunched backs, their abdomens like little black-red bulbs. I squash them against the glass, leaving red smears of my own blood.
I’ve begun to feel not gladness, but relief. My throat is no longer tight, I’ve stopped clenching my teeth, the skin on my feet has begun to grow back, my fingers have healed partially. I can walk without seeing how I look from the back, talk without hearing the way I sound. I go for long periods without saying anything at all. I can be free of words now, I can lapse back into wordlessness, I can sink back into the rhythms of transience as if into bed.
This summer we’re in a rented cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior. There are a few other cottages around, most of them empty; there are no other children. The lake is huge and cold and blue and treacherous. It can sink freighters, drown people. In a wind the waves roll in with the crash of oceans. Swimming in it doesn’t frighten me at all. I wade into the freezing water, watching my feet and then my legs go down into it, long and white and thinner than on land.
There’s a wide beach, and to one end of it a colony of boulders. I spend time among them. They’re rounded, like seals, only hard; they heat up in the sun, and stay warm in the evening when the air cools. I take pictures of them with my Brownie camera. I give them the names of cows. Above the beach, on the dunes, there are beach plants, fuzzy mulleins and vetch with its purple flowers and tiny bitter peapods, and grasses that will cut your legs; and behind that the forest, oak and moose maple and birch and poplar, with balsam and spruce among them. There’s poison ivy sometimes. It’s a secretive, watchful forest, though hard to get lost in, so close to the shore. Walking in the forest I find a dead raven. It’s bigger than they look alive. I poke it with a stick, turning it over, and see the maggots. It smells like rot, like rust, and, more strangely, like some sort of food I’ve eaten once but can’t remember. It’s black, but not like a color; more like a hole. Its beak is dingy, horn-colored, like old toenails. Its eyes are shriveled up.
I’ve seen dead animals before, dead frogs, dead rabbits, but this raven is deader. It looks at me with its shriveled-up eye. I could poke this stick right through it. No matter what I do to it, it won’t feel a thing. No one can get at it.
It’s hard to fish from the shore of this lake. There’s nowhere to stand, no dock. We aren’t allowed out in a boat by ourselves because of the currents; anyway we have no boat. Stephen is doing other things. He makes a collection of the boat funnels from the lake freighters, checking them through binoculars. He sets up chess problems and works them out, or splits kindling, or goes for long walks by himself with a butterfly book. He isn’t interested in catching the butterflies and mounting them on a board with pins; he just wants to see them, identify them, count them. He writes them down in a list at the back of the book. I like looking at the pictures of butterflies in his book. My favorite is the luna moth, huge and pale green, with crescents on the wings. My brother finds one of these, and shows it to me. “Don’t touch it,” he says.
“Or the dust will come off its wings, and then it can’t fly.”
But I don’t play chess with him. I don’t start my own list of boat funnels or butterflies. I’m ceasing to be interested in games I can’t win.