How the Mormon Wives Stole the Gold from James Jesse Strang, King of the Mormons
Through November, the sky had the grey paunch so common among the northern islands, forebodingly heavy with winter. Daniel Ben Long climbed aboard the Queen of the Great Lakes to attend the legislature downstate.
Six times the steamship thrust full throttle before the expanding ice round the dock let it go. He held to his chest the documents of his Mormon faith and leaned over the railing toward the women. But they had turned from the squalling wind, lifting their maroon shawls to cover their faces, and scurried along the dock to the shore. He thought he saw a snowball go back and forth between one or another.
But there’s no indication here why he might have thought that.
* * *
By January, snow squalls crossed the great ice in zigzag bursts, slamming against the women’s cabin with a whomp! The one-room dwelling shifted, lifted in the wind, leaned out toward the ice, whistled back down. At night, for warmth, 17-year-old Samantha shared a bed with two of Elecmantha and Marguerite’s six children, and Melissa Alyssa Victoria.
With soft wispy hair, delicate voice and fragile skin, Melissa Alyssa smelled of daisies entwined in lialces. Left by her father and brothers on board the Queen of the Lakes in contract marriage to Long, Melissa was a teacher. Not six months wedded to him, she was eighteen years old when he married Samantha. Melissa became, not the first wife with timeworn devotion, nor the second with the passion and punishment of Eve, nor even the fourth newest untempered and curious artist expected in time to heel to. In body and voice, she paled to a hollow shell and became . . . nothing.
At night, a child cradled against her arm, Samantha whispered her belated instructions: “You should have fought like a wolverine and locked yourself in the ship’s head like I did.”
But Melissa just lay on her back and with the slenderest sense of humor replied: “It didn’t seem to work for you,” she smiled. “In my mind,” she glanced up at the ceiling, “I’m in a convent with many kind nuns and God is my only husband.”
“Why didn’t you get off the boat?”
But Melissa just turned over and touched Samantha’s red curls in the dark, saying quietly, “God doesn’t pay dowry.”
In the silent opening of February, Marguerite and Elecmantha hauled out the last twenty-pound bag of flour. Dragging it inside, they leaned it against the wall and, together, banged open the back door, strode out and popped the lid off a barrel. A raccoon’s foot marks were visible on the last thin layer of molasses. “We’ll starve,” Elecmantha raised her large hands over her head and moaned. Golden hair fell in thin dry strands down her back.
Marguerite, who in figure and voice resembled a tiny cuckoo bird, pulled her russet shawl up against the wind, then paused and pointed across to the next hill.
“See that strange man walking above the tree line?”
“He’s a hermit, I guess. Harmless, I’m sure.”
“Harmless to who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that a wolf following him?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“‘You don’t know a lot, Elecmantha.”
“I thought we were the only ones here.”
Marguerite trudged back inside. “We’ll have to send someone across the ice to Leelanau to ship supplies back by horse and sled. It’ll be April before the boat can get back.”
The ice sparkled on the lake.
“So who . . . “”
The eldest pointed to Melissa.
“Not Samantha?”
“She’s strong. We need her.”
Inside, Melissa walked quietly to the front door and flung it open. The air stood frigid as a sentinel, too cold to breathe. From the dock below the hill out into the spectral distance, the ice twinkled and beckoned, but on the gaunt arm of a black branch in front of her, resplendent yellow, a chickadee cocked its head sideways from under its dark cap. Melissa held out her hand; the drop of an icicle plopped into it. Snow fell from the roof with a whumph. Early February, and the whole world seemed to be melting.
Melissa took a chair from the wall. She placed it next to Marguerite and Elecmantha who picked up their darning needles and spoke quietly, intensely and for a long time. At the hearth, at the word “Leelanau,” Smantha looked up from her reading to the children and frowned.
Marguerite and Elecmantha glanced at Melissa then down at the table. Thumbing their fingers into the grooves where the wood had cracked, each felt in the stab of a splinter the sore pains of recent childbirth. A faint throb of shame rose in their minds that the weakest of them should do this. Who knew how far across the ice she would have to go? Newcomers, they didn’t know how far. But Melissa insisted, as if she knew this to be her calling. As if there can BE a true calling.
Her fragrant breath grown thin as frost on Samantha’s cheek, she lowered her eyes from Samantha’s questioning eyes.
“Why can’t I go with you?!” Samantha spoke hotly. She cast an odious look at Elecmantha and Marguerite, then flung herself into a corner by the wood box. The children, startled, leapt up, and wrapped themselves around her.
Melissa rose. She was eighteen years old, delicate in bone, thin in face, yet a determination had thrown itself onto her slight frame. Feverish to the touch, anxious to get on, she pulled the string tight through the button hole of one of their husband’s old coats, took a long harsh breath and walked out into the pale morning sun.
Stuffing dried venison into their lovely sister’s pockets, Marguerite and Elecmantha trundled to the dock with Melissa, hugged her and prayed for her.
And let her go.
The cabin door banged open. Marguerite turned from Melissa and looked back as Samantha tore down the steep path, leapt from the dock with no coat on, and skidded out onto the ice, halted in her slide only by Melissa’s outstretched arm. The wind came up as if to greet them.
She pulled Melissa’s socked hand up, placed in it one blue-tipped feather of a heron, a piece of purple yarn wrapped around a pebble, a red bead no larger than a raspberry, and a long pale strip of green milkweed with the feathered seeds intact.
“I love you, Melissa Alyssa.” They kissed, on the lips, and didn’t care what the others thought. “So, what are you waiting for?” But Melissa just stared at her. Samantha shrieked: “Go!”
“You quit looking at me,” Melissa lowered her eyes. Samantha slammed back up the hill. Marguerite and Elecmantha gazed stunned after her.
Later, Marguerite pushed the heavy door shut against the wind and, pulling off her scarf, glanced around to get a sense of the fire; did it need banking? But the large smoky room held blankets strewn with dirty boot prints; the precious fire trashed with melted snow; black ashes that streaked across the walls. Marguerite barked her yippy dog bark then set to howling. Elecmantha gusted in behind her, stamping off snow. The large woman stood stunned, then, walked briskly over to Samantha, grasped her arm, pulled her onto her lap, and rocked my mother until night came on dark, and my mother’s tears washed Elecmantha’s skin, until Elecmantha’s hard red psoriasis grew pink and soft and shimmery-clean.
* * *
In their journal, its frail leaves lying open before me now, I see the two older women penned these words cryptically into the margins of Long’s Bible, taking turns in the handwriting to get the words to curl around the corners of the page. “We saw her stare south, shading her eyes. The sunlight glinted on the ice, making it hard for us to see. Maybe she could see the twenty miles to Leelanau before she arrived. Her young sight must be better than ours.”
But I have been out on the ice on a clear day. And I have stood where my mother’s friend stood, and could not see Leelanau Peninsula, and have been told by others living on Beaver Island now, that you cannot see Leelanau from Beaver.
It’s too far.
Late February, west of Beaver Island, the wide eye of a blizzard exploded eastward across the ice, its snow squalls rupturing north to south.
O-da me-tchaw-ne’s head snapped up on his scrawny neck, a hairless white cannonball rising on a string. He scanned the breadth of the storm, estimating its speed. At his feet, two black bass slapped the ice, a rainbow trout banged its body defiantly up and down, and a small perch lay still. He tugged the dropline until the hook popped up through the ice fishing hole, then coiled the line and laid it in his creel.
Red, white and blue remnants of gill net and rusty fish hooks werre embedded so deep into his beard, he thought a woman would prick her fingers if she tried to stroke it. Clumsily, he sawed with a flint knife to cut two new hooks out, wondering why a woman had not yet wanted to touch his beard. Maybe it was the color. He could dye it with plant tinctures. This was a vain thought for a man half-Jesuit, half-Ottawa Indian.
A few feet away, a wolf lay on the ice, her head up, sniffing the air. The wind ruffled her fur. “Mabel,” he whispered. “You like it this way? Also this way?” Her ears pricked forward.
With startling quickness, the first wind squall unfurled its baggage. The onslaught of snow knocked him back and he bent his head into it.
O-da me-tchaw-ne jammed the gill rope with two salmon to his belt hastily. He shoved open the top to his creel and dropped in the trout and the perch. Banging the lid shut, he slung the creel and his burlap pack over his shoulders. Striding with ear flaps wide and tugging in the wind, he steered toward Beaver Island and his tiny cabin on the eastern shore. At a half-run, his curved back, splitting with streaks of pain, bent into the gale. His beaver-lined boots left no track as the wind swept all life signs away.
Mabel’s surly wolf’s head rose and followed, nose to heel.
He strode fast now, head down, not daring to turn around on the ice. A man could get lost in this blizzard, panic dragging him in God-knows-what-direction, until he fell foolishly into his own darn fishing hole. Didn’t he knowJoe Hollis had misstepped year before last, one blackened, frozen glove stuck fingers up to the inside edge of his ice hole? That hole Oda me-tchaw-ne had come upon in the wake of a snowstorm. The thin skim of fresh ice still on it. As if Joe Hollis had tried to climb out, changed his mind. As if God didn’t just reach up when you were not looking and yank you under.
Shrieking, the snow pounded him, whiteness blinding him. He paused, waited. Waited, feeling the wolf waiting behind him. Waited, feeling numb. Mabel nudged his knee. The curtain parted briefly. Boulders at the shore’s edge were within a quick run. He allowed himself one glance at the Mormon women’s cabin on the hill, which he used as a marker, knowing his own house squatted on the shore below. He turned, stepped sharply, stumbled and fell.
Surprised at his clumsiness, he hoisted himself onto one knee, boosted himself up with the wolf whining, nosing him, but tripped again, slipped on the ice and skidded. Mabel howled. The two errant gilled ones flopped away across the ice. The wolf charged after them, snapping at their gills, her toe nails scratching across the rough surface. His right knee felt half torn off while his face, numbed on the rough surface, smacked up against a woman’s fragile features frozen stone-cold solid to the ice’s floor.
He sang out sharp, scrambling back now, howling more like a wolf than a man, but with a richness of timbre Mabel could never achieve. The wolf crept forward, sniffed, licked the woman’s face. This, O-da me-tchaw-ne knew, was a prelude to Mabel’s determining the edibility of the woman’s flesh. He wrenched the wolf’s hind feet out from under her, and Mabel’s hard jaw banged down on the woman’s cheek.
Pale as the ice itself, the woman’s skin broke in fine lines. A first layer crumbled like opals, skittering across the ice. Her eyes blue and distant gazed at him with a look he translated first to pity, secondly to love. He knew without knowing she had been in love with someone when she died, and he felt that love now in his own marrow, in his own big heart, as if it had been he.
Yes, he said. Even I could have been loved.
Never daring to approach when she was alive, it was doubtful she had ever seen his shy presence. But he had glanced at her among the trees, across the hills, and come to know certain things about her. The two older women shouting at her. The way she danced alone amid the young maples, sashaying round a sapling, singing softly. Often, he had seen the young red-haired beauty that walked at her side among the trails, giving her a hug now and again.
Her lips had turned black, but to him they seemed still red. So had her fingernails, though to him they were soft pink. Held to her face, her hands had frozen with a gesture so delicate, he thought he would cry with the beauty of them.
No newcomer to snow squalls, he tore himself from that lovely face, scrambled up, chased after the flopping lake trout, caught and smacked them a good one with his fists. Pounding their sides until they were dead, he then kicked them solidly, thumping and thumping until their scales scattered in the wind, then retied them, knotted, on his belt with just barely enough time to retrace his steps before the storm blotted out his new lovely vision forever.
He kissed the ice next to her lips, so as not to offend her, and offered his thanks to a Lord God far mightier now than he had ever imagined.
She was the first woman he had seen close up in fifteen years.
For reasons no one in northern Michigan could figure or even the scientists who study the eccentric meteorological perversions of the great lakes, Lake Michigan, with its usual bent toward February mysteriousness, thawed. In the middleof the coldest winter on record, it thawed. During this thaw, which lasted less than twenty-four hours, and before the lake’s grey surface froze solidly again, O-da me-tchaw-ne chipped the woman out of the ice.
The ribs of fools and freighters were visible near the surface where O-da me-tchaw-ne roped his lumber boat to the only dock on Beaver Island and brought Melissa Alyssa Victoria Long home.
The United States Postal Office on the Leelanau Peninsula commissioned the Queen of the Lakes to deliver the mail to the islands when there occurred a thaw. The captain, familiar with the great lakes’ eccentricities fo de-icing and re-icing, spewed a white canvas bag, a whole side of beef, and Daniel Ben Long out onto the Beaver Island dock, and steamed away through thick ice floats that threatened to lock the boat in.
O-da me-tchaw-ne had just managed to scuffle his frozen burden out of his lumber boat and tip her up onto the dock’s planking. He paused, his acute hearing listening to the boat’s arrival. When it ground against the dock, spraying cold water over him, his back seized up. Painfully, he glanced sideways.
The tall thin severe man fit the rumors the hermit had heard about Daniel Ben Long. He knew too, with the kind of sixth sense hermits have about other folk, that if this furious fellow were Long, the chap might have a dangerously wrong idea about what O-da me-tchaw-ne might be doing with his wife. Daniel Ben Long, he had heard, was very proprietary.
To the Ottawa, O-da me-tchaw-ne meant He-Has-A-Big-Heart. But O-da me-tchaw-ne’s heart was not big toward human beings. O-da me-tchaw-ne was the kind of man who needed quiet, extended pauses, one sentence spoken with a long wait before the next. With their impatient eyes and tapping fingers, humans hurried his thoughts, confused him as to what he had been thinking, until he felt moved to do what he had not intended.
On his father’s Jesuit side, he was a decent, extremely though erratically religious man. On his mother’s Ottawa side, he had a distrust and a sixth sense for people as well as a slight common sense. This brought him enough words to get by. And so he used what sense he had now, to find words that might protect him from death. And although he chose an obvious lie, the religion he chose was not unnoticed by Long.
“I am a Mormon.” And he sunk his head to his chest.
Daniel Ben Long said nothing, but his entire posture suggested an enormous rage.
O-da me-tchaw-ne, not realizing rage was Long’s normal posture, carefully, gently, set down on the dock the end of the frozen block that was Melissa, Long’s wife. Instead of stepping backwards into his boat as he thought he should have if he were wiser, O-da me-tchaw-ne glanced down at the lovely face of his love. His heart gave a groan and he stood his ground, or, since his back wouldn’t let him straighten up, stood his ground bent over.
The snow, which had paused briefly, fell once more on the men’s shoulders, while the wind lifted their coat ends and pocket flaps, and laced and ruffled their beards as if it could act as intermediary.
Long, eyeing O-da me-tchaw-ne, slipped his hand into his coat pocket and flicked out a Bowie knife, the size of a cutter for bear skin.
O-da me-tchaw-ne moved quickly.
Scrambling down the bank to the shore, he knew death required choices one must not leave to chance. If I drown, he thought, maybe they will bury me near my love. If he knifes me, he will throw me in the lake. But then, a contrary thought came. What if the Mormons don’t bury people at all? What if they put them in trees like his mother’s ancestors? And so he hesitated before throwing himself in.
Aiming with a furious eye, the thin, severe man lifted his knife high and stabbed down hard. The blade chipped off a tiny nick of Melissa’s ice block, skidded away on the dock, slipped between the planks and splashed into the depths below. Enraged, he fell on the block of ice, scraping it with his fingernails, chomping at it with his teeth, but the serene Melissa remained oblivious to her husband’s torment. As he lay breathing hard on the block of ice, Long seemed to become aware of O-da me-tchaw-ne, standing at the end of the dock.
Leaping up, he grabbed O-da me-tchaw-ne, laced his arms around the large man’s chest, doubled him backwards, wrenched him to the right, wrenched him to the left, and with a resounding pop-pop, O-da me-tchaw-ne stood up straighter than he could ever remember.
Wheezing, Long backed up onto the rocks. But before O-da me-tchaw-ne could thank him for the adjustment that he felt deeply, the Mormon hefted one side of the block that was Melissa and, nodding to the Jesuit to lift the other, rose to one knee. O-da me-tchaw-ne, a man suddenly released from years of stultifying back problems, grinned. If he had not been weighed down by the block of ice, and the enraged man at the other end, the half-Jesuit, half-Ottawa bear of a man would have floated up the hill.
For the approximately twenty minutes it took the men to get Melissa up the snowy hill toward the cabin, a strange peace settled over Beaver Island. Even the birds began to chirp.
* * *
Hiding around the bend, the Michigan Tax Revenue boat pulled up to the dock at the exact moment that Samantha – her shawl flung from her shoulders, her lungs heaving in anger – beat the tar out of her husband. And standing with his arms tembling at his sides, Long let her. Melissa’s death was likely their only compassionate moment, if compassionate be the word where a wife hits her husband in the chest with a snowball with rocks embedded in it.
O-da me-tchaw-ne wisely removed himself to a tree.
Samantha stamped off west of the cabin. She did not detect O-da me-tchaw-ne in the tree beside her. Perhaps grief had wound itself around her too tight for her to see clearly. What she observed instead was a little man in a grey coat climbing out of a boat with “Michigan Tax Revenue” painted on its side. Hands on hips, shawl bound tightly round her head, Marguerite stood in front of this man at the dock, gesticulating, her words inaudible.
The cabin door slammed open. Frightened, O-da me-tchaw-ne flung himself from the tree down the steep hill behind the cabin. With head hanging from the beating he had just received, Long turned just in time to notice the tax boat at the shore, the little grey man climbing up the snowy hill, and his first wife gesticulating violently. He instantly launched himself at O-da me-tchaw-ne’s deer hide heels. But Long’s legs tangled on the icy slope, and he banged into O-da me-tchaw-ne’s heels. But Long’s legs tangled on the icy slope and he banged into O-da me-tchaw-ne and sat down. Thus began their strange ride together down the icy hill, for a short intense period of their lives, with O-da me-tchaw-ne’s legs splayed out in front, Long snuggled up behind. Over snow-hidden rocks, with arms flung out, they careened into a big maple and bounced off to the side to lie heaped up in the deep snow.
Recovering from the sudden flight of the two men, Samantha watched as the two spoke words, then dug furiously into the snow. Long dropped in a white cloth bag, kicked dirt and snow onto it, then thrashed through the brush to the dock just as the little grey tax man reached the cabin. O-da me-tchaw-ne oared his boat briskly out through the floes of ice with Long lumped into the bow as so small a mound, he seemed no more than a mess of flopping trout, eager to be set free. About a half mile out, the boat met the Queen of the Great Lakes, returning from delivering mail to the other islands. The smaller boat pulled alongside, hesitated, unhanded its passenger, and rowed back to shore.
A small boy, a child of Elecmantha’s scrambled down then back up the slope on hands and knees and flashed by Samantha, who turned to follow him inside.
She sniffed as she stepped around the Revenue man. She decided the Revenue man stank of rank lagoons with the bones of marsh birds sucked into the peet. Paintable. Were such odors paintable? Sidling next to Elecmantha, she stood at the table at Melissa’s head, and laced her fingers through Melissa’s frozen hands.
“You can see we have had a tragic death here,” Elecmantha spoke firmly.
Marguerite sniffed. “What is that . . . odor . . . sir? Is that you or Melissa?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is I. Out on the lake two months now following your husband. I have a complaint signed by the Michigan Tax Revenue Service that your husband – that is, Daniel Ben Long?” Marguerite did not answer; Samantha bit her lip. Elecmantha spoke firmly. Marguerite sniffed. “What is that . . . odor . . . sir? Is that you or Melissa?”
“Yes, Ma’am, it is I. Out on the lake two months now following your tax-evading husband. I have a complaint signed by the Michigan Tax Revenue Service that your husband – that is, Daniel Ben Long?”
Marguerite did not answer; Samantha bit her upper lip. Elecmantha stared at him so hard, his fingers twitched strands of wool from his coat. He addressed Marguerite again. “Ma’am, we believe he’s been burying whiskey in a dry county and avoiding the tax, then shipping it out. You don’t mind if I look ar . . . ?”
Very slowly, very carefully and extremely tall, Elecmantha twitched round the table and looked down into the Revenue man’s eyes. He winced, not to be put down by any woman, no matter she stood nearly seven feet and had to stoop six inches to keeep from getting her Samson’s hair cuaght on the overhead beams. The Revenue man was not himself particularly tall. He looked at the short black-haired one with the pinched face. Marguerite was no Delilah.
“You can see,” Elecmantha whispered, “that there has been an accident.” In height and breadth Elecmantha’s voice grew, until the little room reverberated and the stove’s smoke fled out the window. Her eyes hardened with the force of iron ore, heated to dusk amber.
“I understand, Ma’am, but I’m sent by the Michigan Tax Revenue Department to find a Mr. Daniel Ben Lo . . . “
Elecmantha’s massive finger touched the only flesh on the man that was large: his nose. It swelled out of proportion to his body. Its only job, Samantha thought, to sniff out the elusive fumes of lakebound tax evaders.
“You!” Elecmantha’s voice held the timber of God’s own range sucked up a grizzly’s nose, and blown out its throat. She gripped him by his shoulders, pressed his back to the table. He clutched at her hands large as any man’s to pull himself up. The back of his head pressed within an inche of Melissa’s face. Elecmantha grasped his flailing hands, yanked him up.
“Yes, ma’am?” His voice choked ever so slightly.
“This is NOT a bootlegger’s warehouse! This is THE house of God!”
“Er? It is?”
“Look around you. What do you see?”
The man’s eyes glanced back and forth across Samantha’s colorful paintings splashed up and down the log walls, as if in their colors, somehow, he could remember what the Revenue book had told him about hostile situations. “A . . . a . . . a . . .I don’t know.”
“A TABERNACLE! Take your tax violations to the politicians where they belong.” And in that way, Elecmantha, unknowingly, gave her politician husband away.
The stove burned low toward midnight. Samantha stroked the cold Melissa’s head with her fingers. “Wake up,” she whispered miserably. Dusk turned to dawn. Still, no one moved. Light rose in the room. Marguerite kicked the table. This jolted Melissa so that her body jumped as if alive. Samantha scowled at Marguerite; Marguerite glared.
“The truth is not even a damn duck could get in and out of here now ‘til May.” Marugerite clipped her words out. “Damn lake’s freezing again. Not that WE have even a logging boat.”
“Throw some logs across, end to end. Ice cracks, at least you’re sitting on a log when you go through.” Samantha bared her teeth. Marguerite scowled. Elecmantha raised her goddess’s head and stared at the boy in her lap. Because at the word “log” he sat up, spoke out, shrill.
“I carved my letters on a log, Mama.”
“Shh! We’re trying to think. Be quiet!”
“T.L. for Tom Long. That’s I. Mama, isn’t that me?”
“Yes, now shush so I can think!”
“I couldn’t walk, the snow was deep. Daddy lifted me up and set me over on the pile of rocks and snow he’d been shoveling.”
“Just for once! Can’t you keep that child quiet, El?”
“What’s flown into your mouth, Tom?”
“Mama, I was just trying to say, Daddy had to move the log back over the hole where the bag was.”
“What bag, Tom?”
“He said he was burying gold and that if I told anyone he’d . . .” Young Tom glanced round the faces, eyes filling, then buried his head in Elecmantha’s shoulder and sniffed his betrayal to his father’s scent, laced into one of Long’s old coats bound round his mother.
Samantha stood up and walked out into the dusk of another night.
Clouds trailed the last edges of lapsing light. Wind picked up tendrils from Samantha’s hair. She brushed the snow off a stump, and sat stiffly, sorrow in the slump of her shoulders, despair lining her young face.
O-da me-tchaw-ne appeard in her mind. Strange, she thought, he had not uttered one word before he boated Long off. Samantha ached to know how he had found Melissa, an event he had not had time to reveal. Too, she secretly wanted to touch him, and she didn’t know why.
From her pocket she drew the gifts Melissa had given her the day they had said goodbye: a four-holed button on a loop of red thread, a hankie with “Samantha” embroidered in pink script, a little doll hardened with peat and two rose petals stuck on for a dress.
Marguerite came up silently behind her. She touched Samantha’s hair. Samantha took hold of Marguerite’s elbows and jolted her until Marguerite’s thin black hair worked from its bun and flew in wild circles. She rattled Marguerite until Marguerite’s hands popped loosely round her wrists. “You let her go! You MADE her go! You didn’t like her. She didn’t even KNOW where she was GOING!”
Until Marguerite brought her arms up sharply and knocked Samantha’s hands back and said simply, “ I did what I had to do.”
A slight commotion caused them to turn simultaneously. O-da me-tchaw-ne stood at the cabin door, head down, ear flaps rising in the wind, the wolf Mabel sitting, panting behind.
Marguerite stepped forward. “Thank you for bringing our sister home. Listen, we’ll make up a bed of blankets and straw for you in the barn. You won’t even have to look at Melissa lying opposite you. We can’t bury her until the ground thaws, and only God knows when that is now.”
“May fifteenth,” O-da me-tchaw-ne sighed, who kept track of dates.
Marguerite beckoned for him to follow her into the cabin for blankets; absentmindedly, the wolf followed. Marguerite felt a nosy nudge in her rear. A shriek shot out the door, and Mabel galloped out after it, ears laid back. Eyes alternating from the door to Samantha, the wolf curled twice and lay in the snow. Samantha picked up the rose petal doll from the ground, reseated herself on the stump, and considered the wolf with tearful empathy.
For a day or two, unwilling to re-approach the cold body of his recently found love nor leave her completely, O-da me-tchaw-ne slept curled with Mabel’s nose on his back. It was cold on the doorstep of the Mormon wives. Too religious to sleep in the barn to which they had removed the dead woman, every night he dreamed his body heat thawed Melissa by tucking his arm under her head and holding her close.
Snow slid off the hermit in huge chunks when Marguerite woke him to catch fish before dawn. He happily acquiesced in the fishing, but from sleeping outside his back started to go bad again. Reluctantly, he moved into the barn. It was delightful, like being a hermit again, what with the company being so quiet as it was, undemanding, so beautiful, so close.
O-da me-tchaw-ne dared not touch Melissa lying frozen in the straw, but every part of him ached to kiss her to life.
“I remember a child who had words full of gold?” Marguerite’s little yippy face barked out the word. Elecmantha looked up from her plate where she was cracking beef bones with her buck teeth.
Marguerite stepped in close to the large woman and leaned up on her toes and hissed into her ear: “Aren’t you his mother? Doesn’t EVERY mother know how to unlatch the cage to her child’s heart? A little sweet maple sugar that sticks to the mouth’s roof? Hard taffy culled from the lake? Sweet walnut butter that coats a young mouth with promise, so the tongue leaps out and spills what it knows? Hey?”
Elecmantha eyed Marguerite. She was not a woman who moved quickly, so Marguerite waited, busying herself with stirring the stew. But, not being a woman of great patience, Marguerite soon yipped a little yip and leapt for the door with a bucket in her hand. Within an hour, the bittersweet odor of walnut butter emanated from the churn. Elecmantha raised her massive golden head and with a wink, nodded to her sister in crime and swooshed little Tom over to his Aunt Marguerite.
Ecstatic at all the attention and sweets, he was receiving, little Tom stated only AFTER all the walnut butter was gone, and only AFTER they agreed they could make more, that yes ma’am, he knew EXACTLY where that white cloth bag was buried. Yessirree. He could take them right to it.
A promise for a promise. Sweets for the gold.
Tucking the boy into a sled, Elecmantha and Marguerite and little Tom set out. It was now midmorning, the sun was high, the snow banks no lower than the day before. Samantha was too grief-stricken over Melissa to be of much use. Willingly, they left her behind.
O-da me-tchaw-ne, cleaning lake trout by the back porch, eyed the two women in the snow and the one standing at the door.
Marguerite and Elecmantha trucked out through the heavy snow drifts, lifting their legs high, pushing their toes in until they were thighs deep. Their process of walking was painful and laborious for O-da me-tchaw-ne to see. Daren’t he ask where were their snowshoes?
Not being one to speak this thought aloud, he took his rifle, tracked out, and shot a buck deer. Roasting the sinew over a hot fire, showing how he separated it into strings, shortly O-da me-tchaw-ne found himself in a group session teaching the skill of tying snowshoes to three Mormon wives, who for reasons he couldn’t figure out, listened. Painstakingly, the women laced the sinew to deer bone, yanked the strings out, furrowed the needles through and, by noon, arms out for balance as if treading a high wire, they walked gingerly over the snow, on top, without sinking.
Marguerite and Elecmantha stopped, stunned, then jumped and swung each other out across the snow with gleeful shrieks. But when they went to hug O-da me-tchaw-ne, he shied into the woods without a word, Mabel following, looking back over her shoulder, growling low in her throat.
Coming back along the hill paths, Samantha showed him how she had dyed her snowshoes purple. She was careful not to touch him though she yearned to. O-da me-tchaw-ne smiled. Living on crab apples and nuts and venison, he had the seetest breath. Samantha sniffed close as she dared.
“That one!” Tom Long shouted. “No! That one!” His mother marched the boy up to a tree and scouring the snow from the lower branches, glanced at him questioningly. “No,” Tom Long stuck his thumb in his mouth. “No, must not be that one. It must be THAT one we buried the gold under! It was in a white bag! I remember I carved my name on the tree. Daddy showed me how.”
“Isn’t he a teaser?”
“Just like his father.”
Exhausted from scraping snow off too many trees, Elecmantha and Tom fell into a bear cave hidden under a downed log. When she rose again, little Tom stayed below. Briefly he showed himself, happily trundling on all fours after the bears, eating what bears eat, set to sleep through the winter. People who visit even now say they hear his voice in the trees, calling from farther along the path, shouting, “THIS one! No, THIS is where the gold is!” Like sirens of the Great Lakes calling men down.
At the beginning of April, at the wives’ request, O-da me-tchaw-ne went home. He spent a quiet two weeks at his little cabin on the shore. It did him good. Gads, he said, yap this, yap that, everything in the Mormon house is a discussion.
He stuck peet to fill winter holes in his boat, replaced the anchor, measured by eye what weight the yarn might carry. With holes plugged up and a new top board nailed on, O-da me-tchaw-ne wove his way back through the water. The ice floes bounced more loosely on the lake than they had before. Throwing a rope around the pilings, he tied up at the women’s dock.
Marguerite and Elecmantha huddled around O-da me-tchaw-ne, pulling their shawls in close from a wind just giving over to spring.
“You log all the logs you can take and you’ll get paid with the money we collect from you carting the lumber down to Leelanau. But! If by-some-strange-chance-you-find-the-gold-our-husband-buried-in-the-woods, we’ll give you a quarter of it for your effort.” They spoke in monotones as if he were dumb.
O-da me-tchaw-ne was not known for being bright. He could work a hard day, longer than any man, cut more trees than a stouter fellow. But following directions, sounds that zigged into his wind-whipped ears with specific instruction came out cross-hatched, incapable of comprehension, blown around on the waves of his brain. Which is not to say he didn’t have one good idea, helped along by Samantha’s inventive mind.
Two days later, O-da me-tchaw-ne carted one log down to Leelanau for lumbering. On it were the initials “T.L.” In the boat with him were Samantha, Melissa Alyssa Victoria Long, the wolf, and a white cloth bag. In a particularly deep part of water, Samantha nudged the log with the initials over the side.
On the public dock at the mainland community in Leelanau, Captain Frederick Johnson and first mate, Boon, glanced up from their unloading of the Chicago-bound Queen of the Lakes. They saw a strange man, half-Jesuit with the look of a Native upon him, a wild beard with hooks and fishnet tangled in it, and two Mormon girls in what had to be a stolen lumber boat. One was alive; one was clearly dead.
With a show of the men’s guns, O-da me-tchaw-ne jumped backwards into the water. Samantha stood up and slapped the captain across the face. The wolf leapt snarling for the first mate’s throat while the captain pushed Samantha down, raised his flintlock and shot Mabel through the heart.
The men whisked the two girls away over Samantha’s loud protest, untangled O-da me-tchaw-ne from the lake reeds gasping and coughing, and tightened him in baling wire. Incarcerating him in the harbor master’s wood shed, the two men tossed the heavy cloth bag in after him without once thinking they might want to check its insides. They laid Melissa out on the straw floor of the ice house and padlocked its door twice, as if they thought she might escape.
Samantha was questioned ferociously and repeatedly by members of the Mormon church, a journalist from Traverse City looking for a good shoot-‘em-up story, and a politician banging around trying to get the voters’ attention with a knock-‘em-dead tale. The fact that she said nothing to anyone made the Leelanau community think she had been mistreated. Word went out to Beaver Island that the women had trouble brewing fifty miles south and that the Mormon wives best get down there and take care of their business, which was disturbing the local population.
By the time the two older women arrived, anger had looped round their insides, roping them in so tight, they came spitting with the howls of a single, snarling bobcat. The next day, Marguerite, grown tighter, and Elecmantha grown stronger, arrived in a flurry.
“Hey! In there!” Terrified, O-da me-tchaw-ne kept his tongue inside his mouth. The thin wooden door trembled from their pounding.
“We know you’re in there!”
Surrounding the shed, the two wives stomped down the door, and pressed him flat. In a fury they themselves could barely fathom, they cut O-da me-tchaw-ne’s tongue out for thinking he was telling locals in Leelanau about gold up on Beaver Island, a story they fabricated out of fear that he had. Not side to side, they split his tongue down the middle, front-to-back, so when he talked at all, long after, he spoke with the slur of a serpent, his split words sounding like lies, though every thought was keener to the point than most people’s adamantly stated truths.
In their fury, they missed the white cloth bag completely.
Samantha scratched and tore at the captain’s hands that tried to hold her, until he backed off. Furious, she packed comfrey into the long cut in O-da me-tchaw-ne’s tongue to stop the bleeding, then rose from her knees and banged open the shed door. She strode from house to house, knocking on doors, whispering rumors of gold on Beaver Island and how, if people knew what was good for them, they should best get up there before the gold vanished.
The reporter and politician took the nearest boat for Beaver. The captain let O-da me-tchaw-ne out of the woodshed and took off for the island, too. Marguerite and Elecmantha leapt aboard the last ship to fight for their right to the gold. The families from the community, too long in this godforsaken north country not to want something for themselves, followed in rowboats and canoes until the town held only two.
Sitting outside the shed on two overturned buoys, Samantha’s and O-da me-tchaw-ne’s faces glowed warmly in the early spring sun. While the breeze shifted from cold to cool, and snow drifts lowered and puddled around their boots, an inner warmth rose between the two, as intimacy warms and links those who have gone on to find out of sorrow their own hope.
Delicately, wistfully, feathery stitch by feathery stitch, with fingertips so gentle they stroked poor O-da me-tchaw-ne’s face nearly to orgasm, Samantha Long laced O-da me-tchaw-ne’s tongue together with the tiniest needle she could find. His eyes never left her delicately boned face the entire time, and in his attention to the details of her small nose and beautiful eyes and the wild red curl of her hair alongside her ears, he would say to her later, slowly and painfully during their lovemaking, that he never felt the needle at all.
* * *
Elecmantha seemed to want to forgive O-da me-tchaw-ne and allow him to stay on Beaver, since, as Samantha suggested, he could not have the gold because why was everyone digging holes all over the island if the gold were in Leelanau? Marguerite wasn’t sure since even now through the window, a man dug furiously in the yard after gold. Whose fault was it after all, if not O-da’s? But the look in Elecmantha’s eye suggested that they might consider their husband’s involvement.
Standing at their husband’s desk, Samantha looked over the deed Long had created that granted him all the lands of Beaver Island. Marguerite was crossing out his name and replacing it with her own.
My mother turned eighteen that spring. She did not argue her share of the island’s ownership as she could have. Nor did she argue the fact that Long was still alive and could re-take possession, though both thoughts occured to her. She stood up instead and paced the small log room, coming to an abrupt halt by a wall where she had painted her first angry pictures. I think she changed then, became a woman, where before she had only been a girl. “I remember,” she enunciated each word, turning and sweeping both women with her gaze. “You let Melissa walk out on that ice with a blizzard coming, and her not knowing where she was going. And O-da me-tchaw-ne saved your puny lives from starvation.”
Marguerite opened her mouth to retort. Elecmantha stroked her fresh pink skin washed clean by Samantha’s tears, and shot Marguerite down with a rib bone she was cleaning of its meat with her teeth. The bone lodged in the dress folds over Marguerite’s left breast, as close to the heart as a bone can go.
“All right then,” Marguerite held up the bone. “We’ll say there wasn’t any gold or bootleg whiskey either, and that the tax man was a liar. Oh yes! And that Tom Long didn’t know a white cloth bag from a she-bear. But!” And she stroked the left side of her nose with her forefinger. “Being your Native man there is a good wildlife tracker . . . and to make up for skipping out on our logging agreement, O-da me-tchaw-ne can stay on Beaver IF . . . he does one last thing for us.”
* * *
O-da me-tchaw-ne, contemplating the body of Melissa Alyssa Victoria Long in his cabin down on the shore, listened silently to Samantha’s report. And in a thrall of recent oral pain, O-da me-tchaw-ne agreed to Marguerite and Elecmantha’s request. If they wanted him to bring Long back, he would bring Long back. That’s what he did for a living: he tracked people. It was one of those things he never asked himself why; it just seemed right concerning what he’d seen happen to the women on Beaver.
A man’s wife calls him, a man goes. And he felt proud of that thought. He took it to mean he knew a thing now about married life. And he touched the red curls that lay on the shoulders of the woman he considered his wife.
* * *
The legislature’s final session closed for the summer. Long took his leave, riding back north, picking up rumors in Saginaw that a large fellow was after him. So too, the rumors went, was a gang of anti-Mormon politicians, claiming Long owed a full year of taxes for hiding whiskey in a dry county. Much note was made by the tellers of this traumatic news that, though the politicians were out for blood and money, the single fellow on his own was a bear of a man, one of the best trackers in the business. His reason couldn’t be discerned by anyone trying to get him to talk. “Off Beaver,” they said. “Ain’t that where you come from?” Worried the revenuers had hired a gun, Long surrounded himself with highly paid guards.
South of Beaver Island, O-da me-tchaw-ne hid his boat on the mainland in a stand of poplars. Yanking himself by roots up a short steep bank at Neahtawanta, he snuck onto the farm of Mormon Tucker. As Long’s two highly paid guards were seeing who could pee the furthest, O-da me-tchaw-ne spotted Long. The tall, thin, sesvere man was bent over burying crates that rattled with brown bottles, when O-da me-tchaw-ne rushed him. At the same moment, a gang of men holding short guns and a small grey man waving a paper charged out from behind Tucker’s house. In the resulting skirmishes and gunshots, Daniel Ben Long was killed and O-da me-tchaw-ne arrested.
On June 1, the prosecuting attorney for the State of Michigan filed a complaint in the Michigan criminal courts against Theordore P. Stevenson a.k.a. O-da me-tchaw-ne, a hermit of Jesuit and Ottawa blood, to be tried for the murder of Daniel Ben Long, a state legislator and Mormon minister.
On appeal to the second appellate division, many people spoke for O-da me-tchaw-ne, including but not limited to, Samantha Long, former wife of the notorious tax invader, Daniel Ben Long. She testified as to the treatment and starvation of the Beaver Island wives by Long. The Michigan Revenue Department testified also with profound praise for the hermit who singlehandedly ended Long’s long racket of tax law violations regarding the selling of whiskey in dry counties, and the problem of polygamy Long had created in violating the Presbyterian moral code up on Beaver Island.
O-da me-tchaw-ne was acquitted.
* * *
In the early autumn, they buried a young woman next to a small cabin on the western shore of Beaver Island. A simple white cross marks the young woman’s grave, cut and placed there by the rough, gentle hands and the slender fingers of the simple man and the artist who loved her.
In the grave was laid a white cloth bag holding $150,000 in bootleg gold. On it as on a pillow, rested the head of Melissa Alyssa Victoria Long.
“In this hour of rest, God look down upon you and keep you and hold you. May heaven be warm for you, and these things with which we bury you, stay with you forever, as a token of our love. Amen.”
On October 21, a Jesuit priest married Samantha Long and O-da me-tchaw-ne. They lived an unnotable quiet life on the shore of Beaver Island until the locals rousted up and chased them off in a mass exodus and persecution of the Mormon community among the northern isles.
On Melissa’s birthday in the late spring, on Ottawa allotment land owned by O-da me-tchaw-ne’s mother, lying slightly north of Reverend Peter Dougherty’s New Presbyterian Mission on the Leelanau peninsula, Samantha Long me-tchaw-ne gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl.
I was the girl.