by Peter Geye
She nodded, and finished her whiskey.
With his eyes back on the window, he said, “You two will take care of my grandkids. That’s the important thing now. And if you need money, let me know.”
“I have money. And I can pick up more freelance work if it comes to that.”
“Well, keep it in mind.”
Now he turned to her, put his arms around her, and hugged her close. She thought she might cry, but the feeling passed and instead she felt rejuvenated by her father’s love. “I have something I want to show you, Dad.”
He stepped back but still held her by the shoulders. “Before you do, there’s something I want to give you.”
“What?”
“We’ll have to get in the car. Can all this wait an hour?” He was talking about the turkey and stuffing and the rest of the dinner.
“I suppose,” she said. “I don’t even know where Frans went off to.”
“I think Frans has worries beyond what time we eat dinner.”
“He probably does.”
“Get dressed, then. Let’s leave in five minutes.”
* * *
—
It took twenty minutes to get from her father’s house to town, and they hadn’t seen a single other car on the road. Arrowhead County was twice the size of Rhode Island, with only five thousand people living in it. Greta figured those who hadn’t gone off to visit their families were sitting inside beside warm fires. She could’ve used a fire herself, since the heater in Gus’s antique Subaru hardly staved off the cold. Earlier that morning, while Greta stood over the kitchen sink washing the mixing bowls she’d used for the pies, the thermometer read zero.
“Maybe it’s time for a new car, Dad.”
Gus took his right hand off the wheel to check the odometer. “I told your mom when we bought this car that I’d drive it until I turned seventy-five. I need to get two more years out of it.”
“You’ve had it since I was in college.”
“Twenty-five years.” He checked the dash again. “There’s a special club when you reach half a million miles. We’ll have to see which comes first, another two years or twenty thousand more miles.”
This effort at normal conversation felt unnatural to Greta, like she was lying or something. “The next two years will be the longest of my life,” she said, intent on being honest.
“Your mom used to say time made the poor people rich, and the rich people poor.”
“Mom sure had her sayings, didn’t she?”
“Because she knew whereof she spoke.”
Greta couldn’t argue with that, so they rode on in silence and were about to crest the ridge overlooking Lake Superior. Even for all the places she’d seen, both here and abroad, that view remained her favorite sight. On this Christmas Day, the water settled beneath a suffocating sky as white as the snowbanks along the road, and its surface shimmered, the color of blueberries beneath its gray glitter. That lake, it had as many moods as Greta herself did, and in the silence of the car with her father she was experiencing a new one. Or, if not new, very old, recalling her childhood, when the lake inspired awe and anxiety in equal measure. Probably because of the toll it had taken on her family. Those stories were known well. She felt the pocket of her coat, where she’d put the book Stig had sent. She wanted to be able to tell her father everything, should the urge to come clean overwhelm her.
“I want you to know I’ve already talked to Tom about this,” Gus said.
“About what?” She hadn’t even wondered where they were headed until now, just as Gunflint and the harbor came into sight below. The streetlights were on. Two lonely cars drove east out of town, a mile between them.
“You’ll see. But just know that your brother’s fine with this. More than fine.”
Greta looked over at her father. “You’re being so coy.” Just as she said it, the calm expression on his face snapped, and he slammed on the brakes. The car fishtailed, heading briefly toward the deep roadside snow before it straightened and lurched to a stop.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Greta glanced up just in time to see the whitetail swerve around a tall pine and disappear into the woods. Then she looked at her father, who’d held his right arm out in front of her, as if to protect her. She took his hand in her own. “I’m fine, Dad. Are you?”
“Every day for over fifty years I’ve been driving this road, and that’s the closest I’ve come to hitting one of those damn things.”
“The luck of the Subaru,” Greta said.
Gus pinched the key again and restarted the car. “Only twenty-five years of luck. The rest has just been good driving.” He brought the car back up to speed.
“Where are we going, anyway?”
“You’ll see,” he said.
It was another ten minutes before they turned onto Eide Cove Road. It hadn’t been plowed since the last snowfall, but the Subaru didn’t have any trouble moving along under the weighed-down tree branches. Greta remembered the last time she’d been here, at Thanksgiving with Frans. A thought that brought with it a deeper chill.
Gus parked and turned the car off, then reached over and opened the tidy glovebox for the key. “Come with me, kid,” he said, opening his door and stepping out into the cold.
Greta followed him through the doorway, the gray light spilling in behind them. It was exactly as she’d left it. The lantern on the hook by the door, the fish boxes moved aside on the counter, even the cigarette she’d stubbed out after that shameful fuck. She watched Gus scan the room.
“What are we doing here, Dad?”
He ushered her a few more steps inside and closed the door. He lit the lantern with matches from the box beside it on the little shelf, then walked to the windows on both sides of the barn door and pulled back the curtains. He turned and took in the whole place as though seeing it for the first time.
“I’m not a rich man. Not moneywise, leastways.” He nodded at the window on the south side of the door, and then faced the window on the north.
Greta stood at the other window and peered out at the lake, which hadn’t frozen yet but lay in the cove as still as if it had. The curve of shoreline heading out to the point was blanketed by snow.
“Not rich,” he said, “but we have places important to our lives, don’t we?” he said.
“We sure do,” she said. She was lost in another favorite view, and thinking of Stig, as she so often did now. She wanted to share everything with him. This would be a good place to start.
To her father she explained, “I haven’t done as much work down here as I wanted to, but I still intend to tidy it up. I hope that’s okay.”
“Well,” he said, “I guess it’s more than okay. And none of my business. It’s all yours now.”
“What’s mine?”
“This.” He spread his arms.
“What are you talking about?”
Now he put the lantern on the counter and pulled out the old three-legged stool beneath it and sat down. “All of this. The fish house. The three hundred feet of shoreline. The acre of land back to Old Shore Road. I figured you’re going to need a place of your own. A place big enough for Lasse and Liv. A good place.”
Greta was not herself quick to cry, and she felt the tears before she realized they were falling.
Gus looked up at her, his demeanor steady as the winter is long. “I’m sure you’ve got some argument against this. I’m sure you’re going to invoke Tom. But just hear me out, okay?”
She stepped to the counter and leaned against it, rubbing her eyes again.
“Tom will get the house up on the river when the time comes. You get this. Not quite a wash, so you also get the money. There’s not much of it, and I can’t give all of it to you now, but you’ll get it eventually. It’s a hell of a piece of property, as I’m sure you
know. Larry Schmidt just sold his lot a mile west of town for two hundred grand.” He shook his head. “That sounds damn near like a boast, which isn’t what I mean.”
“I know, Dad.”
“In any case, I have but one request. It’s actually your mother’s request as much as it is mine. That you not tear the fish house down. Don’t build one of those monstrosities all around us nowadays. See through some renovations of this place, okay? It’s as much a part of our family as anything.”
“I would never—”
“I know you wouldn’t, but I had to say it, so there.” He clapped his hands on his knees. “It feels good to make it yours.”
Greta took a fresh look around and was overcome at once by the failure of her imagination before now. Where lately she’d thought this might make a nice three-season studio, she now saw it as a home to live in. She could add a loft, a full kitchen, a fireplace on the west wall. She’d replace the barn door with a huge window overlooking the shoreline. While rebuilding her life, she would rebuild the fish house. She would make each her own.
“I never thought of it as something to be passed down,” Greta said. “It was just, I don’t know, our place.”
“I might not’ve either, if not for your mother. When we used to talk about it, she’d say things like ‘Greta’s the one with the imagination, maybe she could make something of the old fish house.’ Your mother, she knew you. And she loved you.”
Greta looked around again, and saw the place with new eyes. She remembered her grandpa Harry bringing her down here when she was a kid. He’d find some little thing to give her. An old pocketknife or a fishing lure or a Coke bottle from fifty years before. And while he puttered around, looking for who knew what, he’d tell her stories about his father, the second Odd Einar, who’d drowned right off the shore, and who, as far as Grandpa Harry was concerned, was the single best man the world had ever known.
The thought of her great-grandfather reminded her of the book Stig had sent her. She touched the pocket of her coat and felt it there and wanted to tell her father about it, but in order to tell him about that—and about the first Odd Einar too—she’d also need to tell him about Stig.
“What is it, kid?” Gus asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Aren’t you always saying this place is full of them?”
He nodded.
“I was thinking about Grandpa Harry, and how he used to talk about his father whenever he took me down here.”
“Those two lived in this damn shack, if you can believe that. Pissed in a wooden box outside. Must’ve eaten beans from a can most nights, warmed up over a hot plate. But oh my, was my father a devotee. Yes sir, he was true to his old man. Who I think must have been pretty special. A single father until the day he died.”
“I guess our family’s full of special men.”
“And women,” Gus added quickly.
“Do you ever think about the misfortune? How bizarre your father’s and grandfather’s deaths were?”
“Sure,” Gus said, as though he’d been doing so just then. “But both of them lived lives that might allow for it. Neither one was a retired schoolteacher.”
“I learned something while I was in Norway. I learned lots of things, actually. But one in particular I want to tell you about.”
“Okay.” He seemed eager to listen.
“Your grandpa Odd Einar was preceded by another Odd Einar in Hammerfest.”
“No kidding?”
“And that Odd Einar, he was described to me as something like a folk hero.”
“What does that mean? And described to you by who?”
“He was a poor man, Odd Einar. His wife was Inger. A beautiful name, don’t you think? Anyway, I gather Hammerfest in the 1890s was a hard place to make a living, because Odd Einar worked on a seal-hunting boat in the Arctic Circle. Up in Spitzbergen, which they call Svalbard now. One day, he and his hunting partner were attacked by a polar bear and presumed dead. He survived on his own for two weeks.”
“Attacked by a polar bear? In Spitzbergen?”
Greta nodded.
“How do you know all this? Why was he a folk hero?”
“I read about it. In this.” She withdrew Isbjørn i Nordligste Natt and offered it to him, as though it were a codebook. A sacred text.
He took the book from her with much the same reverence that she herself had bestowed upon it.
“That’s the story of what happened to him. It’s pretty remarkable.”
“But it’s all in Norwegian,” he said. “How do you know what it says?”
“The local guy who sent it also sent a translation.”
“And where’s that?”
“Back at the house.”
Gus stared at the book in his hands. “Who translated it for you? I’m having trouble tracking all this.”
“I met someone.”
“A translator?” he said, still looking at it. When, after a moment, she didn’t answer, he looked up at her. “Oh,” he said, “I see. In Norway?”
She observed in him the perfect expression of how she’d felt on Stig’s boat, when she realized how much larger her world had just become by virtue of another’s. “Yes, in Hammerfest. This man translated it. He told me about Odd Einar being a folk hero.”
“What’s his name?”
Again she thought of Stig, who’d asked the same question, in a similar tone, about her children. “His name’s Stig Hjalmarson.”
“Okay,” he said, as though answering a question himself.
“I’ve known I was going to leave Frans since last Christmas, Dad.”
“And how did you know that?”
For as much as she’d thought about it, she couldn’t articulate an answer, at least not to her befuddled father. It would’ve been no less a lie to say she’d known their marriage was doomed from the time she’d accepted his proposal than to say she’d known it only since the night she heard Stig playing the church organ. “Isn’t it funny,” she said, thinking up the words only as they came out, “that it’s so easy to tell people about falling in love, and so hard to describe falling out?”
“You really don’t love Frans?”
“I haven’t for a long time. Maybe I never did. Not like I was supposed to, anyway. I’ve been so sad for so long. A hundred times over the last ten years, I’ve seen how we’re not right for each other. But the kids, you know? Last Christmas morning we had the most awful fight. I don’t even remember what it was about, but I was making Lasse and Liv pancakes while he was in the living room playing with them, and I cried and cried because I knew that it was going to end. It was just that plain to see. Isn’t that terrible?”
“For both of you, it really is. I’m sorry, Greta.”
“Sorry for what?”
“That I hadn’t actually noticed. That I didn’t help you.”
“You help more than anyone, Dad.”
“What a hell of a Christmas.”
Gus flipped carefully through a few pages until he came to the first engraving, the one of the schooner trapped in ice floes. Greta could well imagine the range of thoughts running through his head, and she was positive that at least one of them had to do with the boat he was studying, the cut of the sails and the rigging crisscrossing the decks. Even now, meeting this ancestral link for the first time, his mind would’ve been drawn to these practical matters. Something for which she loved him all the more.
He paged through the whole book, stopping to study each picture, lingering over the text as if he’d suddenly been gifted with the ability to read Norwegian. When, at the end, he came to the portrait of Odd Einar Eide, she studied his face for any changes. She might’ve expected surprise or dismay, but instead she saw that famous smile come to her father’s mouth.
“Well, I guess I used to be an old seal hunt
er,” he said.
Now Greta could feel, for the first time ever, how enduring familial love really could be. “I guess so, Dad.”
He glanced again at the portrait and handed the book back to her. “You say there’s a translation of all this?”
“Handwritten. A private one, I suppose.”
“What are the chances you’d let your old pops read it?”
“Pretty darn good.”
Now he stood up and brushed the butt of his pants, and appraised the fish house like it was the last time he’d ever see it. “I always thought there should be a window where the barn door is. It seems silly, to be this close to the lake and only have those little portholes to look out.”
“I already thought the same thing. And a fireplace along the west wall. A kitchen over here. Maybe even a loft with a couple bedrooms in the back.”
Gus beamed, and Greta hugged him.
“I’ll have the window put in before the steelhead run this spring,” she said.
Now even more joy sprang onto his face. “You know, those fish return to spawn in the same river they were born in.”
“You could’ve been a great poet, Dad.”
“Who’s to say I’m not?”
She slipped on her gloves and walked to the door beside her father. “How could I ever thank you enough for this?”
“Just find some happiness here. That’s all I want for you. And for this place.”
When they stepped outside, he handed her the key to lock the door behind them.
[1897]
Over the next two days I met with Granerud in the mornings, our routine now not unlike the daybreaks of my former life, when I’d wake on Muolkot with Thea and Inger and take porridge and tea with them and head out before dawn to draw in my nets. Except now I woke up later, and in the extravagant Grand Hotel, then dressed in a respectable shirt and coat, walked along the quay to his offices and, instead of stepping aboard my boat and taking my spot on the stern sheets, I sat in a captain’s chair to sail the rest of my story across the sound of my memory.
