by Peter Geye
The horse answered by pushing Odd with her long face and neighing again.
In the barn Odd found the wood bucket he used to water the horse and walked the fifty yards to the well pump in the middle of the paddock. It took fifteen minutes to get water, and Odd was as primed as the pump by the time he did, but the water was frigid and delicious and he soaked his head and slaked his thirst before filling the bucket for the horse. He set the bucket next to the fence, and the mare dropped her neck and drank and when she finished she took a long and heavy piss. He tied the horse to the fence and gave her a nosebag of oats and finally turned to survey the farm, the barn, the house now fifteen years abandoned, his at the age of eight. An awfully young age to be a private landowner.
When Rune Evensen died intestate — drowned in and washed down the Burnt Wood River — Hosea hired the best attorney in Duluth, who’d convinced Mayfair that Odd, as next of kin, deserved the property and chattel and that Hosea, as Odd’s guardian, should hold the trust. It was one of the many piebald gestures Grimm had made on Odd’s behalf after his mother died. No doubt the property established Odd. He’d mortgaged his fish house and length of shoreline against it fifteen years after Rune’s death, upon Grimm’s suggestion. But how much money had Grimm skimmed off Odd’s holdings? And had Hosea known Odd would be beholden to the odd jobs he was employed in on Grimm’s behalf? The whiskey running, the mail fraud, the chopping of half-a-dozen cords of firewood each summer, the carpentry work on the apothecary. Odd often felt he’d never be out from under Grimm. “Which is why I’m out here hunting wood now,” he said to himself.
He walked into the old farmhouse. It was hard to imagine that anyone had ever lived here. Two small rooms. Two windows. Six-foot ceilings. Odd didn’t know much of the history, only that Rune was his mother’s uncle. He knew of the misfortune that had come to pass here, knew of the ghosts said to haunt the place. He knew it was a goddamned eerie place, no doubt about it. Knew that a farm in these climes was doomed at the outset. But he loved the place, and not only because it belonged to him alone. No, his attachment to the farm stemmed from a single sudden day eight years ago.
It was late November and he and Rebekah had been hunting rabbits up at the old Burnt Wood Camp. Rebekah was as sharp a shot as he, maybe even sharper. Rabbit stew, that was the idea. His favorite dish. Rebekah was like a mother to him. She’d done more to raise him than just about anyone. She and the Riverfish family. She’d bagged three snowshoe hares, he a pair, the pelts turning from brown to white. They were easy to pick in the already dormant tall grasses around the abandoned camp. Odd had gutted them and strung them and they were halfway home when the wind came up their backs, a fierce and out-of-nowhere blow that was trailed five minutes later by the unlikeliest blizzard. In the half hour it took them to get from where the wind hit them to Evensen’s farm, there was already three inches of snow on the ground, and coming down harder. They hurried into the abandoned farmhouse, Rebekah laughing, thinking it a frolic; Odd dazed, knowing just how dire the situation could have been.
They lit a fire in the woodstove, trusting the tin chimney for no good reason. They stoked the fire and in spite of the broken windows and the wind coming up through the floor, the place warmed.
And there was Rebekah, her hyaline eyes, her beautiful hair coming free of her hat when she took it off, still girl-like in every way despite being almost twice his age. Odd had always been the whole town’s child, the gamin who could find supper at any doorstep on Wisconsin Avenue, but on that late afternoon he felt a hundred years old. Their shotguns leant one on either side of the door, the snow outside coming down heavy enough to snuff out the last twilight. Inside there was the light from the open stove door but none other. It shone dully on the puncheon floor.
He unbuttoned his coat, doing as she did. He shook the snow off it and slung it over his shoulder. The rabbits he’d laid on a bench. There wasn’t much else in the cabin: a rocking chair, a small kitchen table and one stool, a woodbox, a chest of drawers without the drawers. They’d taken their silent inventories, stood facing each other in front of the fire. She took a very deep breath. Her eyes narrowed, she looked sleepy. The floor was freckled with mouse droppings and he swept them away with the hem of his mackinaw coat. He laid his coat across the floor in front of the fire. He gestured at the floor, at his coat, a place to sit. She looked at him again with those eyes of hers, a look of uncertainty, perhaps curiosity, in any case full of questions. He started to say something, he couldn’t remember what, but she stepped to him.
And then she kissed him, a kiss as unexpected and sudden as the snow. And as full. She stopped and her breath caught when she stepped back so she stepped forward and kissed him again. In a flurry they undressed and sooner than either of them knew what they were doing they made love. It was the first time for him and the first time in many years for her.
He was staring at the place on the floor now, heard the horse’s happy neigh outside. He counted back to make sure he had the years right. Eight years ago, right, and only once. Until two months ago, when it got regular.
He counted back the time to that day in May. He’d walked into the apothecary after breakfast, expecting to find Hosea. He found Rebekah instead, standing behind the apothecary counter, her fingers deep in a rabbit pelt. There were a dozen pelts spread across the counter. She didn’t even look up as he walked toward her.
“Hey there,” he’d said three steps from the counter.
She’d looked up slowly, smiled, shook her head to clear her daze. “Odd? What are you doing here? I thought you were out for your nets.”
“I’m about to head out now. What’s with the pelts?”
“Inventory,” she said, then looked back at the fur. “Why don’t you come over for dinner tonight? Hosea’s down in Port Arthur. We can act like kids again.”
His breath caught. Since that day here at the farm years before, there’d been a constant uneasiness between them. They couldn’t look at each other when they were alone, could hardly say hello.
But that day in May, she lifted her eyes from the rabbit pelts and said, “What do you say?”
“All right. Yeah. That sounds swell.”
“Come over as soon as you’re finished out there.”
“I will,” he said.
And he had. She’d baked popovers and set them on the table with a bowl of herring roe and gherkins. Sliced cheese. It all looked delicious, but they never got to eating.
She poured them each a whiskey and water. They sat on the davenport with the windows open, the lake breeze coming across the pink sky at dusk.
After their first cocktail she mixed a second and sat back down. “Do you ever think of that day up at Rune Evensen’s farm?”
“We shouldn’t talk about that,” he said.
“Do you?”
“Of course I do, Bekah.”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
He looked out the window. “What have you been thinking?”
“That we’ve wasted enough time,” she said quickly.
“Wasted time?”
And that was when she came across the davenport and kissed him. She kissed him and unbuttoned her blouse while he unbuttoned his shirt. It was as simple as that.
If he stopped to think about it he started feeling dizzy. So he cleared his head of her and stepped back outside. He took the stone path to the barn and heaved the skidding tongs and chain and an ax back to the horse.
“Yup,” he said to the horse. “Yup, yup. Let’s find a bit o’ wood.” He shouldered the ax and untied the reins and together they made for the stand of birch under the shadow of white pine up behind the barn.
Though he spent most of his time on the water, Odd loved the woods too. He knew the wilderness — the paths and meadows, the bear dens and beaver lodges, the blueberry bushes and eagle aeries — as he knew his own fears and desires. From the time he was but seven or eight years old he’d been free to roam. So he d
id, often alone but just as often with Daniel Riverfish. They were days of freedom, hunting or simply beating the summer heat in the shade of the tall pines, but even in the freedom Odd knew something was missing. He’d always known it. It took him years to understand the void, but when he did it was as if the mysteries of the wood were amplified. He saw in the wilderness a reflection of his motherlessness. It was easiness that was missing; the orphan’s onus, never seeming whole. It was as if he ran and hiked through the woods without his feet ever hitting the duff, as though his own ankles never felt the brush of the ferns.
But now it was different. Now, with the horse trailing him up the game path and into the woods, the weight of his task as heavy on his mind as the ax over his shoulder, he felt wholly less alien, as though his purpose gave him life and his prospects with Rebekah gave him a future. The thought quickened his step.
When he reached the top of the hill and looked down over the slope of birches, onto the overgrown barnyard and up at the slice of river the vantage held, he felt a new absence. The sun was high and hot, the birds shrill and all around. The hilltop here was narrow and as he stood there, he felt the sensation of someone watching. He shrugged, hoping to shake the feeling. The horse stepped toward him and when he turned to look at her, he realized that the sensation of being watched was only the sun warming his back. A stand of white pine that had once loomed from the western slope of the hill was gone. Just gone.
He stepped to the other side of the hill and looked down at the blown-over white pines. There were a dozen of them, trees that had grown from the hilltop, subject to the prevailing winds and their own heft, and so begun a slow bowing. Together they’d formed a gentle arc fifty years in the making. And now they were all down, the air above the heap redolent of the pitch oozing from the thousand broken boughs. He stared down on the tangle of trunks and limbs for a long time, as though somewhere in that crude geometry lay proof that his errand was not a fool’s. And proof took form, there, the tree that lay atop the pile, its boughs most intact and cloaking the others. He studied the curve of trunk, cocked his head, childlike, curious, first mystified and then bothered that he hadn’t thought of this on his own.
Convinced he’d found his keel, he plotted his day’s work. In his mind he trimmed the boughs and cut it to length and set the skidding tongs and rapped the horse on the ass. He turned to look at the trail heading back down the hill, judged the bend against the length of white pine in his mind, hauled it down the ghost of the ice road and meandered through the trails to his fish house, caught only a couple of times. He wondered how long it would take to bleed the pitch.
And then he saw himself with the whipsaw and planes, the keel materializing in the molds he’d fashion, he saw a whole winter of building the boat up from the keel, saw the beautiful sheer, the transom with her name hand-carved and lacquered and riding across the lake, with only the memories of them watching from the breakwater in Gunflint, waving themselves good-bye.
“You willing to wait a few hours while I cut, old girl? Get up in the shade,” he told the horse.
Then he put the ax over his shoulder and descended the hill to the heap of blown-over trees.
It was past suppertime by the time he’d finished, the task unfolded just as he’d imagined. The white pine ran the length of the fish house now, outside against the western wall so that it might take the afternoon sun. The horse had been returned to the livery; a bowl of venison stew had for dinner at the saloon in the Traveler’s Hotel; and now Odd sat on the stoop outside the fish house with a teakettle of whiskey and lake water to rout his thirst.
He sat there all of twilight, watching the gloaming fall, realizing in the deepest part of himself — the least part of himself — that he was watching something holy, this turn of day to night. He finished his drink and packed and puffed his pipe. When he finished smoking he tapped the ash out and got to it.
He covered the barrels in the bed of the pickup with a canvas tarp and covered the tarp with stacks of empty fish boxes. The trail up from the fish house was rutted and overhung with tamaracks, but he managed to get onto the gravel road and into town.
The truck was Hosea’s, but Hosea didn’t often drive. Aside from the six or eight streets in town and the gravel trail that led three miles up the hill to the Shivering Timber, the roads in and out of Gunflint were mere sleigh roads, fit for dog teams or horse-drawn wagons but not rubber-wheeled flatbeds. Grimm’s latest initiative, brought before county commissioners and the state legislature, was to transform the North Shore Trail into a highway built from Two Harbors clear to the Canadian border, insisting that people would come in droves given the chance. He had the big lodges in Misquah and Portage to bolster his argument on the grand scale, and the myriad hunting camps scattered all over the forest on the smaller scale. The ferries that ran all summer from Duluth, the pleasure craft that docked in Gunflint harbor from June through September, the anglers who were willing to hike from Gunflint up to any of a hundred lakes in the bush, all of this had convinced Hosea that given the highway, the area would become a tourist draw.
Odd had already delivered a pair of whiskey barrels at the Traveler’s Hotel and now parked the pickup behind the apothecary. He opened the cellar doors. Walked down the stone steps and found the lantern hanging in its spot and lit it and checked there was room in the false floor for the whiskey. Then he went back to the truck and from beneath the tarp removed two more barrels and walked them one at a time down the stone steps and into their hiding spot. He extinguished the lantern and replaced it on the hook. Before he fetched Hosea, Odd packed another pipe and smoked it while he rearranged the tarp and fish boxes.
Grimm stepped out the back door. “There’s our boy!” he said.
“Hooch is in the floor.”
“Very good.”
“Already dropped it at the Traveler’s, too.”
“Then we’re up to the Timber.”
“I guess you’re all dressed up,” Odd said. Hosea wore a seersucker suit with periwinkle-blue pinstripes. He wore white patent-leather brogues and a sharp white hat. His tie was mint green and pinched under his gaunt chin in a collar the color of the pinstripes. “You think those girls’ll like you better if you dress like a clown?”
“A clown, you say?”
“Some damn thing.”
“Odd, lad, the reason you spend all your time whittling and run
ning whiskey is because you don’t take care in your appearance. You’ve been wearing the same shirt all week. And it’s been hot. Maybe if you bathed and put on a hat and a pair of proper trousers, you could get one of the little ladies in town to whittle for you.” He winked.
“The little ladies,” Odd said, his secret blowing through him like a cool breeze. “Guess I’ll worry about that, and about wearing a proper pair of trousers.”
“You’re my charge is all. I promised your mother I’d raise you right.”
Odd stepped to the truck and opened the door. “I’m a grown man. I’ll dress how I please.”
“Suit yourself,” Hosea said, joining him in the truck. He withdrew a pocket flask and unscrewed the cap and sucked a long drink. He offered it to Odd, who took a draft himself.
“Now,” Hosea said, “let’s get to the strumpets.”
The Shivering Timber was an unabashed brothel and whiskey parlor that had evaded the reach of the pious Gunflinters and constables by catering to their weird and secret proclivities. It housed a dozen or so prostitutes and was guarded by two woodsmen brothers from Wisconsin on Grimm’s payroll. They were mild-mannered behemoths who abstained from the whiskey and the whores and buried their considerable fortune in coffee cans and burlap all over their ten-acre parcel.
Odd had never visited for any purpose other than this evening’s errand, but Hosea had a forty percent stake in the place. He also kept the girls in calomel and morphine, gave them abortions, and pulled their rotten teeth. And he supplied the whiskey. So he had a king’s reign.
There were thre
e girls sitting under the gaslights on the porch as Odd and Hosea carried a barrel around back. They smoked and drank from glass lowballs and when Hosea stopped to greet them on the way back for another barrel they rose and kissed him on his freshly shaven cheek from over the railing.
By the time the last barrel was in place Hosea was in the room behind the bar, standing at the glass of the one-way mirror, looking back past the bar to the dimly lit lounge and taking inventory of the whores reclining on divans or standing at the bar with their long cigarette holders and watered-whiskey cocktails. There were only a handful of other men in the lounge, men unknown to Hosea, likely sportsmen up from the Twin Ports or even come through the Soo. A long way from home in any case, from their wives and children, and playing at being their younger, wilder selves.
“You want a plate of roast venison?” one of the brothers asked Grimm.
“Thanks, no, but I’ll have a whiskey, up.” And then to Odd, “Nothing strikes your fancy, lad?”
“I ain’t dressed for it, doubt they’d even take a gander.”
“Don’t patronize me, Odd. I’m offering is all. My treat.”
“I think not.” Rebekah on his mind, her stories, their secret stories, took on a little extra heft in the Shivering Timber.
Larue returned with a whiskey in one hand and his ledger in the other. He and Grimm stood at the glass and went over accounts.
“We’ll need extra the next couple of months. Busy summer. Six barrels next week?”
Hosea looked over his shoulder at Odd, who nodded. “Six barrels it is.”
“What do you fellas know about this census taker?”
Hosea said, “He stinks. Rotten. But he’s having a fine time up here in the wilderness. I doubt he wants his good summer to end. I’ll see that it doesn’t.”
“I knew that son of a bitch was a nark,” Larue said.
