40022.fb2
The shingle above the chandlery door read, eide’s boatbuilding & supplies. Every time Odd walked under it, he thought of Sargent and Hosea, the two men he had had to learn from. Both men had hung such shingles over their doors: Hosea at the apothecary, Harald at the boatwright.
That morning he and Harry walked in together an hour before sunrise, a strange, cold wind blowing away a fog bank outside. They went to their desks and poured coffee from matching thermoses and spent fifteen minutes cracking their knuckles and sharpening their tools before either of them spoke.
Odd said, “We’ve got a letter here. A query about building a canoe.”
“I’m not building a canoe,” Harry said.
Odd smiled. “I guess you think they wouldn’t pay for a canoe?”
Harry took his adze to the skiff he was building. He put his hands on the gunwale the way Odd always did, walked around the boat twice before he set to shaving a bit off the transom.
Odd still sat at his desk, sipping his coffee, watching Harry. He wondered how the boy would be different if he’d been given his mother.
“You’ll be done with that in a week,” Odd said.
“Less than that.”
“Then you can get to work on the canoe.”
“All right,” Harry said.
Odd watched him for another spell. Long enough that the boy had set down the adze and was stroking the transom with his sanding block. “I don’t see why we wouldn’t go out and catch some of those morning trout, do you?” Odd said.
Harry gave up that big, boyish smile. He didn’t say anything, just smacked the sawdust from his trousers and went to the door to fetch his coat and mitts. He stepped outside, crossed the yard to the fish house, and pulled the toboggan loaded with their ice-fishing supplies from the barn door.
“Let’s walk around the point today. Get some of that sunrise on our ugly mugs,” Odd said.
“Let’s go, Pops.”
How many times had Rebekah stood at the window as she did that day, her forehead and fingertips resting on the glass? She was watching them walk into the rising wind, out from the point, a sled trailing the boy. They’d been at it often enough since the ice had come to stay in January, and she always watched them go. On some days she stood at the window the whole while they were gone. Others she went to her needlepoint and tried to put them out of her mind.
That morning she would lose hours to the sadness left in their wake. Though she literally could no longer cry, she felt the phantom welling in her eyes. She wondered, Has the boy ever known? Does Odd ever think of me now?
Out on the ice Harry said, “You don’t feel it?”
“I don’t,” Odd said. “You sure it ain’t the breeze is all?”
“The breeze coming up through my feet? I don’t think so.”
“Your tongue ain’t getting any duller, is it?” Odd asked. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and smiled to himself. The smile lasted only a moment.
These mornings ice fishing? The summer mornings when they were at their nets before dawn, the only herring chokers still making a go of it out of Gunflint? Or, back across the isthmus, those mornings in their workshop, building boats side by side? Thousands of mornings if you added them up, all begun with the memory of her looming above him.
If Harry knew of the grief that attended his papa, if he saw it in Odd’s bowed head, he at least had the wisdom to witness it in silence instead of badgering his father about it. Odd took pride in his son’s stoic silence. The whole world, it seemed to Odd, was garrulous. But not Harry.
Out past the breakwater Odd said, “That is a strange wind.”
“And cold.”
“Did you ever know a February wind to be otherwise?”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know it.”
They walked another fifty rods before they stopped. Odd turned to the shore to take measure of where they were. He turned to the lake to do the same. “What do you think?” he asked Harry.
The boy answered by lifting the auger from the sled. He set the blade on the ice and started to drill. He was a long-armed, well-built kid and it wasn’t ten minutes before the auger broke through to water. It came splashing up through the hole.
Odd and Harry looked at each other. “Maybe we should go a little closer to shore,” Harry said.
Odd inspected the horizon over the lake, the sky above them. He pulled the sleeve of his coat up, took off his mitten, and knelt. He stuck his hand into the hole in the ice to measure its thickness. He stood up. “I think we’re all right.”
Harry started another hole ten paces from the first. He’d inherited his father’s habits of calm and diligence, and he went about the work of making a fishing hole with an old man’s patience. When the second hole was augered he brought his papa’s stool to it. He brought the small ice-fishing rod and the box of jigs.
“You rig it,” Odd said.
“I know.”
Odd’s hands were worthless in winter. He could hardly tie his boots anymore, let alone jigs onto fishline. So Harry baited his papa’s line and handed him the rod. He tied a jig to his own line and in no time at all they were both fishing for steelheads. They’d eaten nothing but trout dinners for two weeks, and still they had a freezer full of fish. Times were better on the ice than in the open water, something Odd brought up every day.
“You give any thought to Veilleux’s offer?” Odd asked over his shoulder.
“I give it some thought, sure.”
Already Odd had a strike and he set the hook and started reeling. He loosened his drag and then, as though nothing were happening, he said, “It’d be a good move. He’s a good man with a good business. His family has been here from day one.”
Harry was peering into his own hole on the ice, more intent on hooking a fish than on his papa’s pitch. Even still he responded, “You know how much I like fishing and boatbuilding.”
“And I can’t say I blame you, Harry. But there ain’t much of a living to be made any longer. Neither enterprise pays for itself nowadays. Not small operations like ours. You apprentice with Veilleux and you can make money all year long. You could still fish some. Obviously we’d keep filling boat orders. Canoe orders. You’d just have another wagon to hitch your load to.”
Odd pulled the fish from the hole, unhooked it, and threw it on the ice a few feet away. He took his knife from this belt and knelt before the fish, thumping it on the head with the hilt before he sliced the guts from it. He threw the offal as far as he could, with the wind. He did this in twenty seconds and in twenty seconds more had his jig back in the water. A colony of gulls descended from the clearing sky and went to work on the fish guts.
“Besides,” Odd continued, “you keep telling me how you want to build something out at Evensen’s farm.”
“I could build it without apprenticing. I ain’t talking about a castle.”
Odd looked up into the sky, took a gulp of the cold wind, noted the snow squall on the eastern horizon. “You’re sure and steady with a hammer and nails, there’s no denying that. But there’s more to building a house than a hammer and nails. And it ain’t like building a skiff. Trust me on this one, buddy.”
Harry felt a hit on his line but he failed to set the hook. “Shit,” he said.
“I don’t know how many times I got to tell you don’t horse it.”
“I know.”
“You know.”
They sat for a spell jigging in silence. Finally Odd said, “I’m telling you it’s a good move.”
“I’ll go see Veilleux this afternoon. See what he has to say.”
Odd said, “You got some saying to do yourself, don’t forget that. Sure, he knows you and he’s the one offering, but you stand to gain here. Don’t go over there acting like you deserve it.”
“I wouldn’t.”
As he spoke Harry hooked a fish. A big one. The short rod arced.
“See? You listen to your old man and good things happen.”
Harry was too pleased to say anything back.
But it was moments like this when Odd saw most clearly what his hardheartedness all those years ago had wrought, when their joviality felt most suspect. Good Christ, Odd thought. What have I taken from this boy?
Just as Odd had foreseen, Rebekah had left Duluth back in the summer of ’21. On a Sunday morning after she’d fed the four-week-old Harry, while Odd still slept on the Murphy bed, she went. Odd woke hours later to the boy’s hungry lamentation — it couldn’t have been called a cry — and knew as soon as he stepped out of bed that Harry was his alone.
When the questions started three or four years later, when Harry wondered about his mother, Odd told him what he’d told the townsfolk the autumn they’d returned, that he’d met a sweet gal up in Port Arthur, Ontario, married her, then lost her nine months later when she’d given birth to Harry. That lie and the others it spawned came easily to Odd and he realized that his deceit was different from Hosea’s only by degree. He was not proud of this, but neither did he ever tell the truth. Not to his son. And not to anyone else.
If the townsfolk had ever wondered about Harry, if they tried to make sense of the rift between Odd and the Grimms, they did so in the privacy of their own homes. Hardly a suspicious glance had ever come Odd’s way along the Lighthouse Road. He’d never heard so much as a snigger.
Maybe this was because of the visit he’d paid Rebekah and Hosea the day he’d returned to Gunflint with Harry. Odd had come down from Duluth, turned into the harbor with his boat bell tolling, tied up on the Lighthouse Road, and marched up to Grimm’s. He found them sitting at the kitchen table — the same kitchen table where he’d taken almost all his childhood meals — and held the boy before them.
“Look at you two,” Odd said, feeling as sad as he did angry. “Couple of quacks.” He shook his head fiercely. “I want you to take a gander at my boy here.” When neither of them looked up, Odd said, “All right. You mind your own business. That’s good. We’ll all mind our own business. From this day forward, don’t utter his name. Don’t even look at him. If you pass us on the Lighthouse Road, walk on by. If anyone asks about him, about me and Rebekah, you shrug your shoulders and don’t know a damn thing. Understand? You never breathe a word about this.”
He’d not waited for them to respond, those loonies sitting there holding hands above the linen tablecloth, only cradled the boy and turned and went about his life. And so Harry became, like his father a quarter century before him, Gunflint’s motherless son, the heir of their blind-eyed sympathy.
Odd looked over at him and wondered again what his hardheartedness had done to the boy.
“Hey, bud,” Odd said. “Hell of a morning for catching fish, ain’t it?”
“It’s unnatural, the way they’re biting.”
She was fifty-seven years old as she stood at the window. Except for that year in Duluth with Odd she’d spent almost forty-four of those years living here, the last ten of them alone. The apothecary had de volved first into a general mercantile, then a clothier, and finally a haberdashery before it became nothing more than a madwoman’s madhouse. That was what people thought, anyway. What the high school– aged kids said as they roamed the Lighthouse Road on Friday nights. Sometimes they threw rocks through the big front window, once they painted a large owl on the clapboard siding. She thought nothing of their mischief, was only relieved to know that Harry was not among the vandals.
She looked up and down the shore at the snow in the pines. Some of the trees had grown in the years she’d been there, others had been felled, but the shape of the wilderness had stayed the same. The shape of the lake, too. She took comfort in this, felt some affinity with the years.
But it was a comfort short in lasting. As soon as she settled her gaze back on the ice fishermen, the vagaries of time that a moment ago had provided solace were now as cruel as the wind.
Out on the lake the ice fishermen were hauling them in, one after another, even as the fissures spread like veins through the ice, even as the wind stiffened from the northeast.
Odd said, “That wind is coming around now, ain’t it?”
“Maybe we should call it a day.”
“Look at that pile of fish. We’ve never had a day like this.”
“Still. The wind.”
“We’ll be all right.”
And because Harry believed every word his papa ever said, he dropped his line into the lake again.