Orphans of a Dark Wind
The day is clear with light, cool winds blowing from the west. I launch my kayak from a sandy beach on the edge of Crane Prairie Reservoir. It is a large lake, blue and diamond-studded when the wind blows, a glass mirror when it doesn’t. Its shore is twenty-two miles in length, most of which is fringed with long reeds and grasses that are full of small fish and bugs, muck and mud with its gooey nutrients, singing amphibians and birds, birds, birds. This place is my heaven. When I reach its outer edges, I rest my paddle across the cockpit of the boat, lean back and sob. I have come here for reclamation, redemption. My sister is dead, my brother is alive, and the story surrounding us so confounds me that all I experience is the murky, wet loss of who I used to be. Today, I enter a luminal, in-between space. I am not grounded by the land of my experience. My memories are jumbled and I am disoriented. I am not yet enlightened by the clear water of insight. I am, in fact, holding my breath in what feels like deep water, aware that something inside me must die, but not sure what.
I watch two eagles peruse the marsh. One of them descends sharply and plucks a gosling from an unprotected nest. Its fierce parents lift in pursuit, but, compared to the eagles, their wings are clumsy. Their desperate honks fade as the raptor climbs higher, flies further, then disappears altogether. Even in my grief, I watch the hunt thrilled with both the beauty and the tragedy of it. Two white pelicans drift across the sky, their bright orange horns igniting pelican-passion as they search the water for fish. Blue herons stand in wait for their prey. Industrious kingfishers hunt with arrow-like focus. I have been both hunter and hunted. Which will I be now?
My brother, Paul, after many years of estrangement, has reached out. Our last conversation had been three years prior when my sister died. I hadn’t known her well. I was a young child when she left us. I didn’t know her terrors, I only knew that my own terrors started when she left. She lived in my child-mind as an apparition of my own childish creation. She was the sister who escaped, the sister who would come home and save me. Forty-four years after she’d disappeared, Paul found her and their relationship was renewed, but when I visited her, the story I’d invented was shattered. She was not the strong, loving sister who would save me. She was a broken, hurt and haunted sister. We were strangers, utterly alike and completely different.
I had not stayed in contact with my sister after that visit. I lost track of her and had no idea that Paul remained closely attached and involved. When he called and told me of her death, it was in a text from an unfamiliar number. “I’m sorry for letting you know by text, but Patty died last night at 10pm. She loved you very much. Sad times.”
“Paul… is this you?” I’d texted back.
“Yes, sweetie.”
I dialed the number. When I heard his voice, I cried, then raged. Why hadn’t he told me she was sick? How did he even know where she was? I could have been there. I could have said goodbye.
His voice lowered, “She didn’t want you there.” I could hear his pain. Did he hear mine? Or did my rage just hurt him more? I know now what I didn’t know then. He was trying to be my brother, but I had given up on having one. My sister, the unreachable stranger, was gone, gone, gone, but he was still there, trying to share his grief. Before I could apologize to him for shouting, the line went dead. My number was blocked. Until last week, he was gone.
About a mile from the marsh a forest is submerged. Snags that breach the surface are the only remnants of what once thrived there before a dam was built across the Deschutes River and the prairie filled with water. As I coast, I wonder about that lost forest and the land it grew on. I wonder about the vanished life of the prairie, the nests and burrows, caves, bears, deer, elk, cougar and bobcat. I wonder about the nurse logs that once lay across game trails with their bellies open to a mottled sky, decomposing and nourishing the next generation of trees. I think of delicate pine drops, lupine, phlox, prairie smoke and the violet crown of a ragged robin. What happened to them as their habitat disappeared? One year, two years, three. It takes time to fill a reservoir. Does the land grieve like we do? Or does it just change, day by day, year by year?
After my sister died, the ecosystem of my inner landscape burned to stubble. I was an adult-child, alone and hurting without siblings. Our parents were dead. Our family was a submerged, drowned entity with only snags of incomplete memories left breaching the surface. I came to accept it, not in a joyful way, but in the way that survivors fiddle with memory, box it up, set it aside. I wasn’t unhappy or empty. I was loved and loving. But I was tormented, too. The past and the present battled inside me.
Then Paul appeared again. Another text arrived. It came quietly, like the one before it. The day was hot. I was drinking water that tasted like raspberries. I was trying to write, but thinking about my green boat, the glassy Columbia River and its cool water. My toenails were painted sky blue. I was just about to call it quits when my brother’s text dropped from the air onto my screen like a gosling’s feather. Utterly silent. Utterly grave and sincere. He said, “I hate the way things are between us…”
Loss and beauty and loss. Transgressions are forgotten one moment, remembered the next. The memories of my childhood were at bay in one breath, snapping at my heels in the next. Long buried questions were suddenly exhumed. How did we three children survive? What monsters did we have to become in the name of survival, we, the orphans of a dark wind? That’s how our mother described our father. A dark wind.
My brother remembers my father being handcuffed and put into the back seat of a police cruiser. He remembers watching our older sister being led to an unmarked car and driven away, disappearing from our lives for over forty-five years.
I remembered her closet being haunted by empty hangers, a single, fringed leather jacket and a pair of cowboy boots.
My sister remembered every second of every abuse. She remembered terror and helplessness and having to choose between her siblings and escape. My brave fourteen-year-old sister was blamed for exposing my father as a rapist. I was too young to know that my beautiful brother dreamt of killing him with a rifle kept in the hall closet, that he yearned to strip the evil from our lives at any cost and, when he didn’t, a whirlpool of shame began its slow spin. I was too young to know that the sight of yellow light pouring through an opening door would terrify me for a lifetime. Too young to know that children are experts at leaving their bodies and truths behind.
Long after my father’s death, I asked my mother, “Did you know?”
She didn’t look at me. Maybe she couldn’t look at me. “No,” she said. “Of course not. I would have done something.” She sighed. “Your father was a dark wind.”
In nature, hunters hunt to feed themselves and their young. Young pups become beautiful wolves at the expense of another creature’s life. Prairies teeming with life become lakes teeming with another kind of life. But what happens when the hunter preys on his own babies and threatens the mother who bore them? What happens when the hunter learns to love the quiet nature of a child’s fear, the scent of a mother’s acquiescence. What happens to the daughter who points a righteous finger, the son who swallows his rage, the baby girl who learns to hate dawn? Who do they become as they relinquish all loyalties and ingest their memories? Who can they be to one another but paralyzed, angry, shame-ridden strangers?
My brother is asking for love. We come to it scarred, raw, older. In my boat, on a buried prairie I wonder how did the murdered, drowned prairie come into its beauty? How do Paul and I remember and forget at the same time.
I asked him, “Why now?”
He says, “We’re all that’s left…we need each other.”
I turn my boat away from the marsh and look out at the lake. The surface is dotted with bobbing, camouflaged boats that hold fishermen in groups of two or three. The sounds of their chat and laughter bounce off the water. Though I’m not fond of sharing open spaces, today their presence is soothing, and their mindless, soft chatter feels calming. It’s the distance of their proximity that comforts me. They are there, but far away. I think of my brother, of the islands we have become. Memories, or are they inventions, mix and blend like silt. They are full of nutrients, but I don’t see it yet. I see only the muck, and I wonder how the water of our lives will ever clear. I am so lost in my thoughts that I don’t register the wind, or that the lake has become choppy. White-capped waves rock me back and forth, spray me with hisses of lake water. The weather had changed and I had not changed with it.
I turn my boat away from the marsh. I should be afraid, but all I feel is the rage of a sixty-six-year-old woman caught in a storm of the heart, a woman who lost her sister and brother to the appetites of a beast. I am fury, I am wrath. The fishing boats have left and I am abandoned, deserted, stubborn. I am a survivor.
I head for a cove across the lake. Increasingly taller waves bat the side of my boat and slap my face, but I lean into the paddle, belly engaged, and thighs burning. I am a hero. We, my brother, sister and I, are heroes. I feel it in the sureness of my strokes, in the bottoms of my feet as they push into the pedals. I see it in the faint, feathered wake of my boat. When the wind blows my hat off, I don’t watch it skim across the water; I just paddle, shout obscenities of loss into the wind and breathe its wild strength into my lungs.
“They are all gone.” My brother had said. “… all dead.”
My father, the killer of spirits, no longer haunts my rearview mirror, no longer chases me in my dreams or worries my waking days. My mother’s ambiguous attention has become a phantom hand that occasionally sweeps across my back in a gentle, familiar way. My sister stares at me in a dream from her heaven and mouths “I love you” into the silence between us.
And my brother, at seventy-years-old, tells me he has found peace with the past. He makes promises that I’m not sure he can keep, but he is the only other survivor. His hand is out, shaky, but resolute.
As I nose my boat across the churning lake, I know I will reach back.
Julianna Waters lives in Hood River, Oregon with her husband, his banjo, and two yappy dogs. She’s been published in CRAFT Literary, Falling Star Magazine, The Portlander, Four x Four, and has two stories forthcoming in the anthology Dark and Stormy. Julianna holds an MFA from Rainier Writing Workshop, was a Writer in Residence at The Anderson Center located in Redwing, Minnesota, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods located in Shelton, Washington. She’s an award-winning singer-songwriter, has recorded two albums, and was showcased in both the Oregon Literary Review and Songwriter Magazine. Julianna identifies as a water worshipping paddle addict, weaver of mediocre towels, hat knitter, writer of a thousand unknown songs, and garden loving dog mom. She frequently worships at the temple of mystery and steals pens.
