Agnes had the face of a good-hearted woman, but she was sloppy about her appearance. A safety pin held her glasses together. Her gray hair was tied back but it was not neat even though it had been combed wet. In my memory I see, too, how on her dress, between her womanly breasts, she wore a silver brooch in the shape of a bear. It wasn't an expensive piece of jewelry. It was the Walgreen's kind, but it was pretty, with a black stone for an eye.

I wanted to talk to her but I didn't know what to say. I was full of words inside myself; there were even questions in me I hand't yet thought to form, things not yet come to words. But I remained quiet. And Agnes was quiet, too, that day I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. She cried a little, and when her eyes filled up with tears, she'd stop walking, put my bags down, and wipe her eyes with an old, wadded-up hankie while I looked away, pretending not to see.

What a picture we would have made on that warm September day, Agnes and I, if any of those men and women had peered out through the little, streaked panes of glass. They would have seen a dark old woman in her blue-gray tattered fur, wearing practical black shoes and carrying the two plastic bags of my things, and me, barely able to keep up with her, a rootless teenager in a jeans jacket and tight pants, a curtain of dark red hair falling straight down over the right side of my dark face. Like a waterfall, I imagined, and I hoped it covered the scars I believed would heal, maybe even vanish, if only I could remember where they'd come from. Scars had shaped my life. I was marked and I knew the marks had something to do with my mother, who was said to be still in the north. While I never knew how I got the scars, I knew they were the reason I'd been taken from my mother so many years before.

But that day nobody peered out the windows. No one at all turned out to look at us. My return was uneventful, dull and common. And, unknown to me, it was my first step into a silence, into what I feared. I could have turned back. I wanted to. But I felt that I was at the end of something. Not just my fear and anger, not even forgetfulness, but at the end of a way of living in the world. I was at the end of my life in one America, and a secret part of me knew this end was also a beginning, as if something had shifted right then and there, turned over in me. It was a felt thing, that I was traveling toward myself like rain falling into a lake, going home to a place I'd lived, still inside my mother, returning to people I'd never met. I didn't know their ways or what they would think of me. I didn't know what I'd think of them.

And all I carried with me into this beginning was the tough look I'd cultivated over the years, a big brown purse that contained the remaining one-dollar bills Agnes had mailed me, the makeup I used, along with my hair, to hide my face, and a picture of an unknown baby, a picture I'd found in a one-dollar photo machine at Woolworth's. I used the picture to show other people how lovely I'd been as a child, how happy. I used it to feel less lost, because there were no snapshots of me, nothing to say I'd been born, had kin, been loved. All I had was a life on paper stored in file cabinets, a series of foster homes. I'd been lost from my own people, taken from my mother. One of the houses I'd lived in sloped as if it would fall off the very face of earth. Another was upright, staunch, and puritan. There was a house with cement stairs leading to the front door, tangled brambles all around it. There was one I loved, a yellow house in the middle of a dry prairie with two slanted trees that made it seem off-center. I'd sat for hours there listening to the long dry grasses as wind brushed through them. But so far in my life, I had never lighted anywhere long enough to call it home. I was the girl who ran away, the girl who never cried, the girl who was strong enough to tattoo her own arm and hand. An ink-blue cross on one knuckle, the initials of Lonnie Faro on my upper left arm. A cross on my thigh. And no one had ever wanted me for good.

In my life this far, there had been two places, two things that shaped me and moved me, two things that were my very own, that I shaped and moved me, two things that were my very own, that I did not ever leave behind or allow to have taken from me. They were like rooms I inhabited, rooms owned, not rented. One, the darkest, was a room of fear, fear of everything--silence, closeness, motionlessness and how it made me think and feel. Fear was what made me run, from homes, from people. Moving made me feel as if I left that fear behind, shed it like a skin, but always, slowly, a piece at a time, it would find me again; and then I would remember things that had never quite shaped themselves whole. And there was the fire-red room of anger I inhabited permanently, with walls that couldn't shelter or contain my quiet rages. Now I could feel another room being built, but without knowing it, I was entering silence more deeply than I had entered anything before. I was entering my fears head-on. I was about to stare my rage and history in the face. My hardness, my anger would not hold or carry me in that northern place called Adam's Rib.

I'd told myself before arriving, before constructing and inhabiting that new room, that whatever happened, whatever truth I uncovered, I would not run this time, not from these people. I would try to salvage what I could find inside me. As young as I was, I felt I had already worn out all the possibilities in my life. Now this woman, these people, were all I had left. They were blood kin. I had searched with religious fervor to find Agnes Iron, thinking she would help me, would be my salvation, that she would know me and remember all that had fallen away from my own mind, all that had been kept secret by the county workers, that had been contained in their lost records: my story, my life.

WE CAME to a worn path. "Here we are," said Agnes. At the end of the path was another boxlike house, dark brown and square, with nothing to distinguish it from the others except for a torn screen and a large, red-covered chair that sat outside the door. Like the other squat places, it was designed and built by Christian-minded, sky-worshiping people who did not want to look out windows at the threatening miles of frozen lake on one side of them and, on the other, at the dense, dark forest with its wolves.

Old smells were in the air of Agnes' house. The odor of fire smoke had settled in every corner, and there was a kind of stuffiness that dwells inside northern houses even in summer, the smell of human living, the smell of winter containment.

"You'll sleep here," Agnes said. She put my bags down next to a small cot. It was a narrow, dark living room. She hit the cot a few times with the palm of her hand as if to soften it, a useless gesture. I could already see. I could feel every lump in the mattress with my eyes. Already, my back ached.

I stood awkwardly for a moment. I felt large and clumsy. Then I sat down on the cot, as if testing it the way I'd seen people do in furniture stores. With a bend in the middle and terrible springs, it had been shaped by other bodies. Like my life, nothing at all formed by me, not skin, not shape.

THE FIRST WOMEN at Adam's Rib had called themselves the Abandoned Ones. Born of the fur trade, they were an ill-sorted group. Some had Cree ancestors, some were Anishnabe, a few came from the Fat-Eaters farther north. Bush, the woman who floated in from the canoe near Fur Island on the day I returned, was a Chickasaw from Oklahoma. Others were from the white world; these, the white people, hadn't cared enough for their own kind to stay on with them.

The first generation of Abandoned Ones traveled down with French fur trappers who were seeking their fortunes from the land. When the land was worn out, the beaver and wolf gone, mostly dead, the men moved on to what hadn't yet been destroyed, leaving their women and children behind, as if they too were used-up animals.

The women eked out livings in whatever ways they could, fishing or sewing. They brought in their own wood, and with their homely, work-worn hands they patched their own houses to keep sleet, snow, and winds at bay. They were accustomed to hard work and they were familiar with loneliness; it lived in the set of their jaws, in the way their eyes gazed off into the distance.

When I arrived, there were but a few men, and you could count them on the fingers of two hands. There were a few fishers and boatmakers, and a man named LaRue Marks Time who lived at Old Fish Hook, a nearby settlement on another finger of land that curved like a hook into water and pointed accusingly at Adam's Rib, as if it had sinned. Rue, as we called him, was a taxidermist and a dealer in bones, pinned butterflies, hides, traps, and firearms. A man my heart would not like. He was a mixed-blood from the south, a Dakota, I think, and had only recently returned from Vietnam. He'd come in search of a refuge away from crowded towns or places that minded the business of strangers. What men were capable of, he hated, and his hatred included himself.

Three old men lived quietly along the Hundred-Year-Old Road with seven old women, all of them modest and solitary as bears. The women and the men were the oldest people, older even than Dora-Rouge. But they were rarely seen. They had been alive at the time of the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee. They remembered, and they wanted nothing to do with the new world. Some said these people were keeping the Ghost Dance alive. Most everyone doubted this, but I came to believe it in a way, because in spite of the tragedies they witnessed, they all had the peaceful look of those who still had hope, those who still believed that their people and the buffalo would return. For them, time held no sway. Except for one man, that is. Wiley was his name and he had a very young wife. He rubbed his face with ice each morning to look good for his younger woman.

With the Hundred-Year-Old Road people lived a young man named Tommy Grove. He was a graceful young man with large, beautiful hands. There was no noise about him. He hunted and fished to provide the old people with food. Tommy was a year younger than I was, but in many ways, he was more like one of the elders. He spoke three languages, and because he lived with old people in death's territory, he did not fear it, which gave him a powerful strength.

The houses along the damp Hundred-Year-Old Road were even more decrepit and shabby than the others. These houses had not been built by missionaries. The old people would live in no construction of the Christians, neither physical nor spiritual.

All the rest of the people were women, mighty women, and it was to them that I returned when summer was walking away into the arms of autumn. It was 1972 and I was traveling toward myself, coming home to a place where I'd lived as an infant, returning to people I'd never met. I didn't know mny own ways or what they'd think of me, but I was something back in place. I was one of the absences filled that autumn when the trees gave off a golden haze and smell, something back in place at Agnes' little dark, small windowed house that had been designed by a missionary who did not want to see what surrounded him.

written by Linda Hogan

Solar Storms
© 1995