Nannuck - Grief Giver

~*~ My mother was a brilliant artist. In my earliest memories, I see her paint-splattered and smiling. From the mural on my bedroom wall to the still life in our dining room, the house bore her essence in every brush stroke. But no painting captured and retained more of her than Nannuck. Nannuck was her oil masterpiece, the product of nearly two years’ labor. The canvas drank her up like the cactus hoards water in the desert. What she created was incomparable. The painting was dark, with the illusion of light hidden just behind it. Lake Nannuck stretched nearly the length of the five foot canvas with only hints of the shores and wooded banks around the edges. The real substance was in the center of the lake. Her subtle impasto technique added a depth that was disconcerting to behold. So many shades of gray and charcoal intertwined to create a living entity, that lake. There, beyond the fog that appeared to be rolling gently over the water - there were the shadows.~*~

I snap the last tent pole into position and begin attaching the rain flap. Angie kneels beside me humming quietly as she digs through the bag for the tent stakes. I take her in with a single glance, soaking her up like a ray of sunshine. She’s gentle, passionate, stubborn, and generous. An artist, like Mom. Tuned a little differently, just like Mom.

I grab my fishing tackle, Angie grabs her notebook and pen, and we haul our camp chairs to the water’s edge. Angie sits cross-legged in her chair, bent over writing, while I cast and wait.

* * * * *

I was ten years old the last time I saw Lake Nannuck in the flesh. I didn’t understand much of what happened on that trip, but I knew that the woman who came back home with us from Nannuck was not the same joyful, wide-eyed person who had packed my suitcase and rushed me out the door. Mom would spend every daylight hour painting that cobalt lake. Then, she spent weeks and months wasting away before it, and so she was consumed one thought at a time.

Mom passed away when I was 15, four years before I met Angie, yet Angie is intrigued by Mom’s story in the way that sensitive people always are when they sense an ache that they want to ease. She finally saw Nannuck when we visited Dad a few months back. When I close my eyes, I can still see her standing there, pressed against it, staring into it, like a suicidal person teetering at the cliff’s edge.

Angie swears she felt my mom calling to her from the painting, summoning her to Nannuck. She’s been fixated on this place since that day in my dad’s library, and nothing I do can shake her from it. So, now we are here at this spooky-ass, deserted lake, trying to connect with my dead mother. Dear God.

* * * * *

Angie’s voice cuts my reverie like a sharp razor blade. She’s solemn, thoughtful. “Every place has a story, John. What do you think Nannuck’s story is?”

I ponder as I reel my line in, less one worm. “It’s probably a story of disappointed fishermen,” I joke.

Angie smirks at me. “Perhaps..” she says, and her pen dances again.

I feel her tugging at me and I say, “Dad used to tell me that the lake has a tragic past, dating back almost a century.”

Angie looks at me expectantly, thirstily. “I was ten, Angie. He didn’t give me details.”

Angie opens a photo on her phone and hands it to me. “I found this at your dad's, John.” The photo is of a faded newspaper scrap preserved in plastic with the headline in bold.

TRAGEDY BEFALLS LOCAL FARMING FAMILY

Below it, I see a grainy picture of a family of four with the date, August 1929, and the subheading:

Local farmer, Roy Palmer, mourns the tragic loss of his wife and two daughters.

I enlarge the photo, trying to read the words there. I gather that the girls were very young, that the family was considered generally happy, and that no one was certain what happened that day. I gather that whatever occurred happened right here, at Nannuck, mere miles from the family’s homestead.

A quick intake of air and I glance up “Why do you…” Angie’s gone, but her notebook lies open in her chair beside me. I cast my gaze down guiltily upon Angie’s delicate writing:

Elizabeth Palmer was a golden girl of eight years old with quick, dark eyes and wit to match. Little Francie was a rosy, plump four-year old child with wild, brown curls, clear, blue eyes, and laughter that floated on the wind like flower petals. Above all else, Francie adored her elder sister, Liza. She skipped eagerly toward the woods when Elizabeth called “Come along, Francie! Let’s hop along the creek a ways!”

The girls walked for more than an hour along the winding creek before the forest spilled them out onto a grassy bank. They stood, muddied to the knees, looking out over a vast body of water. Lake Nannuck, Father had called it.

A chill passes over me and I close the notebook quickly and bolt to my feet to search for Angie. I find her crouched outside our tent examining a pile of rocks. She holds one in her hand, rubbing it with her thumb and staring at it with a dark, pensive gaze.

* * * * *

At night, we crowd into our tent and fall asleep beneath a light blanket. I feel myself slip into a dream and hear a child’s voice humming a broken melody “Hmm. . . Hmm. . . Hm, hm, hm. Hmm.. hm, hm. . Hmhmhm, hm, hm….”

I open my eyes to the deep black of our tent and reach over to find Angie sitting criss-cross beside me, her bare leg covered in goosebumps and her breath coming quickly. Then I hear it: Tap. . Tap. . Tap, tap, tap.

“What’s that?” Angie asks, and I can hear her effort to keep calm.

“I think it’s just a branch tapping against a tree,” I say, with my most reassuring voice. Tap. Tap. Tap. T-t-tap, tap, tap.

“It sounds like rocks,”Angie says quickly and decisively. “Don’t you recognize that rhythm?”

I hear a disquieting desperation in her voice, and I try to reassure her “No, it’s just the woods at night.” For 30 minutes, I lie awake as the tapping gradually fades and Angie’s tense body relaxes.

When I open my eyes again, it’s day, and the tent flap is open. I step out to see Angie sitting at the edge of the lake, her notebook beside her, and her arms wrapped around her knees. The day is overcast, and the water looks smokey gray.

“You okay?” I ask.

She nods slightly. “Yeah” she says, slowly and deliberately. “She’s here, you know? Your mom. I feel her.”

We pass the day pleasantly enough, but when night falls, the temperature drops, and we zip up in our double sleeping bag for warmth.

I wake up with the moon high in the sky to find the sleeping bag has been thrown open and the tent flap is half unzipped. I grab my flannel shirt from the tent floor and pull it around me before reaching for the flashlight. “Angie?” I call. “Angie??”

I hear a distant voice “Right here.”

“Where are you?” I glance around me and call again “Angie!”

“Mmmmhmmm” I hear a voice reply.

In the moonlight, I see a thin layer of mist gliding along the lake’s surface as the lake extends and curves around to my right. A thicket on my left impedes my view of the far end of the lake. In the silence, I hear a “plop” like the sound of something dropping into the water.

I walk through the mud between the thicket and water’s edge, and as I round the trees, I nearly trip right over her! “Ah!” I gasp and shine my light down. Her moon-shaped face turns up to me and I watch her pupils shrink from dime-sized to nearly invisible as an unworldly crystal blue eclipses the blackness and bounces the light back at me. “What are you doing?!” I ask her.

She stares, unblinking, unsmiling at my face for several moments, then she whips her head back toward the lake and grabs a rock from a pile at her side. She reaches up and places the rock on top of a tower of rocks next to her. The stack of rocks reaches 12 or 13 high. She bobs her head side to side and from her profile, I see her grin. “Building..” she says in a sing-song voice.

As she reaches for another rock, I pan my flashlight around to see no less than ten rock towers up and down the bank. I hear the clack of rocks as Angie tries to place her next rock at the top of her tower. She sings “One, two, three, four, five. Once I caught a fish ali--” the rock plops into the shallow water near her feet - “oops” she giggles. She reaches forward and grabs it again and continues “Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Then I let it go again.”

Now, I see the mud, ALL OVER HER. It streaks her cheeks and cakes her brown hair, and her light blue tank and underwear are a murky shit color. “Angie!” I say in a half yell. She bobs her head side to side and I can feel I’m really starting to lose my grip. “Angie, what in the actual FUCK are you doing?!!” I yell and reach for her arm. She jerks away before I even make contact and careens her head towards me. Her eyes are black again. She springs up like lightning and screams right into my face. Not a scream of fear or terror, but a scream of bitter rage. She lunges sideways and slaps over the rock tower. Then she runs down the bank kicking over one after the other.

Angie runs into the woods, still screaming like a banshee. I feel myself shaking all over because I’m pissed off and my nerves are shot. Twenty yards into the woods, I find her sitting at the base of a tree, whimpering. I notice her bloody fingertips and nail beds as I haul her up from the ground. I rinse and towel dry her hair as she sits silent and shivering.

Back in the tent, I hold Angie close inside the sleeping bag until she stops trembling. Sometime after daybreak, I drift off with the sunbeams filtering through the tent.

I wake up at 10 with Angie asleep beside me. I feel a sickly, plunging sensation in my chest and stomach, the residue from what I know better than to hope was a nightmare. I grab Angie’s notebook quickly from the tent floor and slip out of the tent. I find her latest entry and begin to read.

Elizabeth dances towards the water, but little Francie hangs back, afraid of those dark depths. “Liza, I don’t want to go there. Momma will be angry.”

Elizabeth laughs a short little laugh and answers “Okay then. Go on home!”

Francie glances back to the impenetrable darkness of the woods behind her, fights the tears swelling behind her eyes, and tiptoes towards the water.

Elizabeth twirls in the water, calling “Come on silly! It’s fun.”

Francie removes her small, muddy shoes and steps into the cool, clean water. A sharp pain in the back of her head causes her to cry out and wheel around. Elizabeth is dancing and laughing, her eyes growing wider and darker all the time. She tosses a stone and catches it in her hand. “You have to catch it, silly!”

Then, she throws the second rock.

I close the notebook quickly and set it somewhere on the ground as I stumble toward the woods to upchuck the remains of my dinner. Wiping my mouth on my sleeve, I glimpse the site of last night’s horror show through the boundary of trees. I step out to the mess of rocks and mud and find myself facing eleven perfect pillars of rock. Crouching in the mud by the nearest pillar, I see a very small footprint amidst the muddy mess. It’s too large for a raccoon, and it looks so… human.

“John?” I hear Angie call, and I double back through the woods to come out beside the tent.

“Sorry, had to piss” I say, reluctant to remind her of the night before. Her eyes look tired and dull, and she stares down at her scraped hands in wonder. I throw my arm around her in forced gaiety. “Hey! Let’s build a fire and cook some breakfast. Then I say we pack up and get out of here a day early? We can do some hiking or catch a ride to the nearest town and find a B&B.”

Angie’s shoulders slump. “I’m tired, John,” she says, staring out toward the lake. “Let me rest today, and we’ll leave in the morning.”

I feel nauseous again and the air seems dense and heavy around us. “Lie down for a bit, Angie. I’ll make breakfast and coffee.”

Angie sleeps most of the day, occasionally wandering out of the tent to walk along the edge of the lake. She picks up her notebook and puts it back down again. She nods delicately when I ask her if she is okay and shakes her head adamantly when I insist we still have enough daylight to pack up.

I dread the night, and I lie awake for hours, just watching Angie sleep. In the darkness, I hear my mother’s voice, singing to me:

“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Momma’s gonna buy you a -.” The singing is cut short by an anguished cry, and then all I can hear is wailing. Wailing.

Wailing. The tent flap is open and I tear out into the cold in just my boxers. I can hear her wailing a mournful, agonizing tone. I run towards the sound and push through the fog to the edge of the lake where I see her small, dark shape, ill-defined in the gloom. She is standing 10 or 15 feet out into the water. “Angie?” I whisper cautiously. Her wailing continues. I wade into the cold water until I am a few feet from her. The water laps around her just below her waist. Her hands are held at her sides, facing palm up. She is dripping. I take two more steps, with quicksand in my gut. My heart is racing and I’m torn between the urge to vomit or turn and run.

“Angie…” I croak, as I reach out and touch her shoulder. Electricity shoots from her through my fingertips up to my ocular nerves and it’s daylight and a child is singing.

Mother bursts from the woods, calling frantically “Liza! Francie!” She shields her eyes from the initial onslaught of the blinding light and gradually takes in her surroundings. She sees her daughter, Liza, stacking rocks and singing Francie’s favorite song “One, two, three, four, five..”

“Liza, thank goodness!” Mother darts forward. She stops abruptly, frozen where she stands. Pillars of rocks confront her: seven, eight... eleven tall pillars of rocks. Beyond them, lying face down in shallow, pink stained water, is her little Francie. Mother rushes, screaming to the water and pulls Francie’s body away. Her bright blue eyes are still open in a look of horror, and her face bears many gashes. Mother knows that it is too late to save Francie, and she holds her baby and wails.

“Six, seven, eight, nine, ten..” Elizabeth chants as she continues stacking stones. Mother looks up at Elizabeth through her tears and thinks “Too late for any of us.” She calls Elizabeth to her and kisses her on the forehead. Then, she reaches toward the nearest stone pillar and begins removing rocks, dropping them alternately into her daughter’s pinafore and her own apron pockets. Liza’s wild black eyes stare up as Mother disassembles three of her rock towers, tucking the rocks into every loose bit of clothing.

Mother stoops down and picks up Francie’s limp body, hoisting it over her right shoulder. Her left hand reaches to Elizabeth, who obediently clasps it. Then, she trudges steadily forward, deeper and deeper into the water, humming “Hush, Little Baby, don’t say a word.”

The lights go out. Angie’s wail crumbles to a wracking sob and she trembles “God, help me. Help me. Please, God. Help me.”

As I nudge Angie around to face me, I feel the vomit surfacing. Her once beautiful green eyes are dark, bloody pits and clumps of tissue and blood run from the sockets down her face into her mouth and all over her body. Angie opens her mouth and screams, spewing spit, mud, and blood into my face.

I hunch forward and vomit violently. Angie holds a partly crushed crystal blue eyeball in her right palm and a whole, bloody black eyeball in her left. The heaving of my body buckles me towards the water as my vomit mixes with Angie’s blood and soft tissue. Then, she screams “I CAN’T SEE!!!” and I feel myself submerged in the lake by an unnatural force that my senses can’t rally against.

My oxygen is used up and my thoughts are coming in fuzzy patches now, my head throbbing and ready to explode. My last perception in the complete dark of underwater night is a child’s voice, singing:

“One, two, three, four, five. Once I caught a fish alive. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I never let him go again.”