The Water Dancers Read online

  The Water Dancers

  A Novel

  Terry Gamble

  TO PATSY

  Jesus answered,

  “I tell you, if my disciples keep silence,

  the stones will shout aloud.”

  LUKE 19:40

  Ah, could we but once more return to our forest glade and tread as formerly upon the soil with proud and happy heart! On the hills with bended bow, while nature’s flowers bloomed all around the habitation of nature’s child, our brothers once abounded, free as the mountain air, and their glad shouts resounded from vale to vale, as they chased o’er the hills, the mountains, rowed and followed in the otter’s track. Oh, return, return! Ah, never again shall this time return. It is gone, and gone forever like a spirit passed.

  MAC-KE-TE-BE-NESSY

  (Andrew J. Blackbird from History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan, the Ypsilanti Job Printing House, 1887)

  ge-oph-a-gy, n. Pathol. The practice of eating earthy matter, esp. clay or chalk. Often assoc. with malnutrition or religious ceremonies.

  lith-oph-a-gy, n. The eating of stones.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue · 1942

  Part One · 1945

  Part Two · 1956

  Part Three · 1970

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, my deepest gratitude to my agent, Carole Bidnick, for her tenacious, undaunted belief in me. You said I could, you said I could…

  Second, to my writers’ church, sisters bound by more than words, without whom I would not have kept going: Elissa Alford, Sheri Cooper Bounds, Phyllis Florin, Suzanne Lewis, Mary Beth McLure-Marra, Alison Walsh Sackett.

  Third, to my fine and clearheaded editor at William Morrow, Jennifer Brehl, who wanted this book, and to her assistant, Kelly O’Connor, for seeing the possibilities.

  Fourth, to my generous teachers: Donna Levin and Adair Lara for their faith; Lynn Freed for her wisdom.

  Fifth, to my early-on editor, Alan Rinzler, and my later-on editor, Linda Schlossberg, for their tough love and kindness.

  Sixth, to my father, James Gamble, who shared with me his love for Michigan.

  And to all of the angels who helped me along: Peggy Knickerbocker, Mark Coggins, Monica Mapa, Susan Pinkwater, Mike Padilla, George DeWitt, Liz Willner, Mary Jean Dominguez, Sheryl Cotleur, Marty Krasney, Winnay Wemig-wase, and especially, Patsy Ketterer.

  And lastly, to Peter, who has done everything possible to support me, and to Chapin and Anna, who know their mother is a writer. All my love.

  PROLOGUE

  1942

  Rachel Winnapee’s grandmother was dying. Her chest rattled like stones. The girl had found stones in stranger places—a pocket, a cup, even her mouth. Perhaps her grandmother had swallowed stones.

  Dusk came late in the Michigan summers, the sun not setting till nearly ten. Down by Horseshoe Lake, fires crackled, cooking something hunted or stolen—like the shingles Aunt Minnie had hidden beneath her porch—found or stolen, she wouldn’t say. Not that it mattered. The Horseshoe Band of the Odawa were squatters to begin with, and even the lake, the beach, the woods belonged to someone else.

  By nightfall, her grandmother’s breath had become like the wind that shuddered through the pipe in winter. A high, thin note—in and out. The girl counted the breaths, listened as they slowed, watched as her grandmother’s feet and hands became rocks, faintly blue.

  A pale band of moonlight drew shadows along the walls as Rachel moved about the shack, opening boxes, looking for stones she would need to anchor her grandmother when her spirit rose to the Gitchi-manitou, became sky. When she had collected three of them, she laid them on her grandmother’s chest.

  “Grandmother,” Rachel said, shaking her on the bed they shared. “Grandmother.”

  But her grandmother’s skin was drawn back, her teeth grown big in her head. The girl waited, watching her throat, but there were no more breaths. Setting one last stone on her grandmother’s chest, the girl crawled in next to her, wore her like skin.

  The next morning, when her Uncle Jedda came, Rachel screamed at him to leave. My home, she said. My body. Two days later, Rachel hurled one of the stones from her grandmother’s chest at the door where her Aunt Minnie stood.

  “There’s no corn in that husk, Rachel. Let her be.”

  “Get out!”

  “Taw,” said Minnie, backing away on the porch. “The stink!”

  Outside, the sizzling cadence of heat bugs, the sullen slop of waves. The chanting had started. In the shack down the beach, Uncle Jedda was drinking. To keep herself from wailing, Rachel held her ears.

  By the time the nun came from the convent, all the Indians had complained, saying that the old woman stank too bad to bury her right, with paint, song, and drums. Mother gone, uncle drunk, and her Aunt Minnie was no better. Best that the child be taken to town to live in the convent with the other girls who had been abandoned like junked cars in a yard.

  “Burn the shack,” someone said.

  Before the nun could stop them, they pried Rachel from her grandmother, dragged her out. Soon, the cabin became a pyre. The wood kindled, snapped, combusted, but as it burned, the smoky outline of a woman rose from the flames like a manitou and sped into the sky.

  “Look!” Rachel screamed.

  “Sweet Jesus,” said the nun, grabbing the child, holding fast.

  Later, they would say it was only a trick of light, a singed flickering of sweet grass, but Rachel knew it was her grandmother’s spirit that went up in fire, the ashes falling about her like rain.

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  1945

  For or six weeks, Rachel had been working at the Marches’ house—six weeks of lining drawers, airing closets, carrying laundry, and she still couldn’t keep the back stairs straight. One flight led from the kitchen to the dining room, the other up two floors to the bedrooms. Even the hallways confused her, twisting or stopping altogether. Wings and porches splayed out. Doors banged into each other. Twelve bedrooms and no one to use them but an old woman, the hope of one son, the ghost of another, and a girl who had died in infancy.

  Even Mr. March would only come toward the end of August, if he came at all. It was a house of women. Since the beginning of the war, women had prepared the food, cleaned the floors, kept the books, given the orders, folded the sheets, scraped the dough off butcher’s block. Then there was the ironing. Rachel had scorched three damask napkins before she got it right. The Kelvinator in the pantry made her crazy with its humming. The oven smelled of gas. Something was always boiling, fueling the humidity. When she had left the convent that morning to come to work, the air was so close, the dormitory where the girls slept had grown ripe with sweat.

  “Sister told us you could iron,” said the cook, Ella Mae.

  Her old, black eyes rested on Rachel’s braids as though there might be bugs in there or worse.

  “Remember,” Ella Mae went on, shaking a finger, their dark eyes meeting, “the Marches have took you in for charity.”

  Charity. Even Sister Marie had made that clear from the start. Our campanile, our statue of Mary—all gifts from Lydia March. You may think she has everything, but fortune is a two-edged sword. The Marches have given God a son and a baby girl. They will pay you four dollars a week.

  The Marches’ house smelled of must, camphor, lilacs, and decayed fish that wafted up from the beach at night. Located on the very tip of a crooked finger of land, it had the best view of all the houses on Beck’s Point. Who Beck had been, no one seemed to remember, but one of the girls at the c
onvent told Rachel it used to be a holy place where spirits dwelled and no one dared to live. Now it was chock full of summer houses, all white and lined up like pearls on a necklace.

  Across the harbor, the town of Moss Village sat at the base of limestone bluffs, residue from an ancient, salty sea. Then came the glacier, molding and carving Lake Michigan like a totem of land, the Indians at the bottom, then the French, a smattering of Polish farmers, the priests, fur traders, fishermen, lumberjacks, and, later, the summer people.

  And always the church. Even after the first one burned, the Jesuits built a second, then a third, its steeple rising above everything else. Next to it—a large lump of a brick building full of girls, some small, some older, all dark. All sent or left or brought by the nuns to learn American ways and to forget all things Indian. No more dancing to spirits with suspicious, tongue-twisting names. No more clothes of deerskin. Put the girls to work, and when they were big enough, some summer family—preferably Catholic—would take them.

  Beyond the tip of the point, the water widened into a bay, the trees and hills beyond the town of Chibawassee faint upon the opposite shore. From the southern edge, the bay extended west toward the horizon. To the north of Beck’s Point was the harbor—docks and trimmed lawns, raked beaches, moored boats—the best port between Grand Traverse and Mackinaw. From every window, Rachel could see water, hear water, smell it, taste it. Not like Horseshoe Lake, which was small, tranquil, almost a pond.

  “So much water,” Rachel said to Ella Mae’s daughter, who was helping her with the fruit.

  “Like the flood itself,” said Mandy, who could not swim. “Gives me the heebie-jeebies.” A girl had drowned once, she told Rachel. Years before. A girl from the convent.

  “I know how to swim,” said Rachel.

  Today, they were helping Ella Mae make cherry pie. Ella Mae worked the flour into butter until her thick, brown arms were gloved with white. Rachel pitted the fruit. It was July, and the cherries brought up from Traverse City were at their best. The juice ran down her arms. Whenever Ella Mae looked away, the girl hungrily licked them. She was always hungry, even when her stomach was full. As a child, she had sucked stones and dirt, ravenous for their minerals, as if she could consume the earth itself.

  Mandy was watching her. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” Rachel said, running her tongue around her lips. She was never quite sure.

  “Sixteen? I thought you and me’s the same age.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” said Mandy.

  The air filled with sugar, butter, cherry. Because of the war, it had been hard to get butter these last few years. That and gasoline. Stockings. Things Rachel hadn’t even known to miss.

  “Chocolate,” said Ella Mae, listing the rationed items. “Try to find that.”

  Ella Mae had taught Rachel to roll the chilled dough out thin and cut it so as to waste little. Rachel wadded up doughy crumbs and put them in her pocket to eat later. She wondered if Ella Mae would taste like chocolate if Rachel licked her. Same with Mandy and Jonah, Ella Mae’s husband. Their skin was darker than hers, which was the color of milky cocoa.

  Outside, Mrs. March, her gray hair coiled on top of her head, pointed to the empty fishpond. Victor, the gardener followed her finger, shrugged. After the war, he seemed to be saying. After the war we will fill the pond with fish, the lake with boats, the house with laughter.

  A guest was arriving that afternoon. “Before the war, we filled all five guest rooms,” Ella Mae said. “The senator from Ohio stayed a week.”

  Mandy dipped into the bowl and swiped a cherry. Rachel almost reached out and touched Mandy’s lips, they were so big and wide and black. Where’d you get those lips? she was about to ask, but Mandy spoke first, fingering Rachel’s thick, black braids. “Where’d you get that hair?” she said. “I could make it better.”

  Rachel touched her hair. Unbraided, it curled down her spine and spoke of something not Indian. French, perhaps. The fur trader who had taken her grandmother as his common-law wife.

  “You’re plain,” Mandy said. “That nose of yours. Where’d you get that nose?”

  Even Rachel had to admit her nose was different, not flat and squished like most Odawa’s, but longer and beaked like a bird of prey.

  “And your cheeks!” said Mandy. She blew out her own until they were rounder than the girl’s.

  Rachel looked at Mandy’s head—twenty tiny braids to her own thick two. It had been so long since someone had touched her, combed her hair. In the churchyard there was a statue of Mary holding the baby Jesus. Sometimes, the girl wanted to crawl right into Mary’s arms, her face so sad like she knew she’d have to give her baby up.

  Jesus died for your sins, the nuns told Rachel.

  The Marches’ daughter had died in the great influenza. There was an empty crib in one of the bedrooms, the curtains perpetually drawn. Had the Virgin Mary known her own sweet-faced son would die? Perhaps her own grief deafened her to Rachel’s pleas to send her home to Horseshoe Lake.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Rachel said, letting Mandy touch her hair. Rachel’s hands had grown sticky with cherries. Jesus bleeds for me, she thought as she picked up a towel, reddened it with her palms.

  The Buick idled in the driveway as Jonah and Victor hauled up the fiancée’s luggage. One trunk, two suitcases, three other handled boxes for hats and bottles and shoes. The boats on the harbor clanged in the breeze as Rachel and Mandy unpacked clothes, sorting piles for putting away or pressing.

  “Girl,” said Mandy, “you’re going to be ironing till next Tuesday.”

  “Truly,” Rachel replied. From the window, she could look across the harbor to Moss Village with its piers and brick buildings, the spire of the Catholic church. She wanted to ask Mandy how the one son had been killed and when the other would be home. Two flags hung in the parlor window, each with a star—blue for the son still fighting in the Pacific, gold for the one lost in Belgium. She held a cashmere sweater up to her chest and stroked it.

  “You’ll catch hell if she sees you,” said Mandy.

  Church bells rang across the water where the Odawa had once lived, their villages spreading for miles up the shore. Before the fur traders came, before the priests.

  Mandy started to say something else, but the door flew open and the fiancée walked in. She was older than they were, closer to twenty and yellow-haired. Her name was Miss Elizabeth.

  “Has either of you seen my bathing suit?”

  Hair like butter. Rachel wanted to run her fingers through it, sniff it to see if it was real. She pointed to the bureau. “In there.”

  “Thank you.” Miss Elizabeth’s nails were shiny and red. She opened the drawer, plucked out the suit, started from the room. Over her shoulder, she called back to Rachel, “That sweater you’re holding? It snags if you so much as look at it.”

  “Hmph,” said Mandy after Miss Elizabeth had gone. “Like she knows. That girl’s got more clothes than Bathsheba.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Who?”

  “The one she’s marrying.”

  Mandy started to hum. “A fool since he met her. She come up one summer with Miss Serena Boyd and beelined straight for Mr. Woody. Not that the Marches objected. She’s one of the St. Louis Parkers. My mama said she’s determined as a mule in heat.”

  “A mule?” Rachel laughed and shook her head. “She’s too pretty to be a mule.”

  Mandy, laughing, too, reached out and tugged one of her braids. “And what do you know about pretty?”

  The kitchen had new linoleum, blue as the lake, but the floor sagged and one of the windows was cracked. They sat on the kitchen floor, Rachel leaning against Mandy’s legs. The comb running across her scalp felt like the cool hands of Jesus himself. Ella Mae was baking something with layers of chocolate shallow as puddles. At midmorning, the house filled with the smell of chocolate, loam-rich and bittersweet.

  Mandy raked up a tuft of
hair. “I’ve never seen such nappy hair in my life ’cept on a colored girl. You colored?”

  “Indian. Part.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  Her grandmother’s Frenchman. The German lumberjack her mother had met in a bar. “Mixed,” she said.

  Mandy divided Rachel’s scalp into eighths, braided and looped it with pieces of yarn and rubber bands, weaving hair the way her grandmother had woven sweet grass into baskets.

  Over the sink, the buzzer sounded. All eyes turned to see what number had popped up. “Miss Elizabeth’s awake,” said Mandy. “You’re done.”

  Miss Elizabeth had been there for almost two weeks. Every morning, Rachel brought her tea and a muffin while she stayed curled under her covers, a few strands of yellow hair escaping the sheets. Some days, Rachel would hear her laughing with Mrs. March. Their laughter warmed the house as they discussed linen and china and waited for the son to come home. Miss Elizabeth’s golden hair was pulled back from her face like wings. She must be an angel, the girl thought—a beautiful, messy angel who scattered her jewelry everywhere, left cigarettes burning in ashtrays, dropped her clothes on the floor. Rachel would pick them up and fold them, trying not to covet. Even so, she had tried on a ring with a green stone surrounded by tiny pearls.

  All across the bureau, Miss Elizabeth had set out photographs. In one, her head turned at an angle, her eyes gazing upward. Her lashes and brows were dark, her eyes gray, her hair a white cloud against a smudged sky. Mandy told her it was Miss Elizabeth’s engagement picture. Rachel thought it was beautiful.

  As she set the tray down on the bureau, a snapshot stuck in the mirror frame caught the girl’s attention. In it, a young man sat on the dock, happily kicking the water. Spray rose in the air. Beyond him, boats were moored, just as now. The man’s eyes were pale, possibly blue or green. Rachel thought, It is his harbor. It belongs to him. He was smiling into the camera, but Rachel was almost certain he was smiling into her. She felt the spray as he kicked it.