by Peter Geye
“And though I had misgivings—obvious ones, too—one overwhelming thing drove me on: on the borderlands, my father would need me as much as I’d need him. That’s what made me so blindly ready to go off with him. What boy doesn’t wait his whole childhood to walk alongside his father on equal terms?”
Gus sat there in my house, staring into the fireplace, the expression on his face—well, he wore it like an old coat he’d inherited from Harry. I could see his memories traveling back as he called them up one by one, willing to speak of them only after he was sure that no errors would accompany them in the retelling. It was all I could do not to fall in love with Harry all over again, sitting there looking at his son in my home.
“What if I’d seen right then the folly of it? I’d already been accepted by four colleges, which was the best built-in excuse I’ve ever had for not doing something else. What if I’d said no, that I didn’t want to go?” Again he looked up from the fire. “You can’t imagine how many times I’ve asked myself that question.”
We sat silently for a minute or two before I offered him another cup of coffee.
“No, thank you. I’d best get moving.” He got up and walked to the door and put on his coat.
“It’s no secret Charlie’s been a lout his whole life,” I said. “No secret about him and your mother. So why mention him at all?”
“To understand why we went in the first place, you need to start with Charlie. In order to understand any of this, you need to know everything about that crooked bastard.”
“He’s the reason you and Harry went north that winter?”
“One of them, yes. Maybe the main reason.”
“What about your mother?”
Gus nodded his head slowly. Was he agreeing with me? He kept nodding and then closed his eyes, as he would do so often in these sessions. Once he opened them, he said, “Why didn’t he just go to you then, Berit? It would’ve been so easy. None of this would ever have happened. Not to him. Not to me.” He nodded yet again, as if the idea was just now taking shape in his mind. “My father and his friends, by then they’d done enough to stop the developers, timber and mining both. I don’t believe that was a danger anymore. My father would’ve known that better than anybody.” He looked at me. “So was Charlie the reason my father took me north? The answer is yes. Absolutely.”
BEFORE CHARLIE was elected mayor, before he went after Harry’s wife, before he sent his daughter to cow Gus, he was just a young bully. I should know, and I can offer an example from the spring of 1942.
For six months, every young man from Duluth to the Canadian border had been ready to fight. Harry had been at basic training in Fort Dix for three weeks. Charlie’s brother, George, was anxious to enlist himself. But Charlie? He came home from the University of Minnesota with his diploma and a medical exemption his father had paid for, already grooming Charlie to run the family’s business.
Not that they had a legitimate enterprise. The Aas clan—even back then—was focused on back-door deals. I already mentioned that Charlie’s grandfather had his hand in whiskey smuggling during Prohibition. Marcus was a rival to Odd Eide, who was Hosea Grimm’s right hand. But as Hosea’s empire went the way of his sanity, fueled by Odd’s striking out on his own, and as Charlie’s father, Marcus, Jr., came of age, the Aas family became the kingpins of Arrowhead County. By the time Hosea passed away, they controlled the real-estate market and ran a couple saloons and, for a few years, even a family restaurant and the confectionery on the Lighthouse Road. What these businesses had in common was that they were all duplicitous, each fronting some other endeavor or working in concert with something crooked. Politics. Tourism. The church. They had a hand in it all, like minor and pathetic gangsters. And Charlie was the natural heir to every bit of it. Home from college, he was anxious to prove his grit, and any target would do.
During those years I was running the post office myself, Rebekah having gone properly and finally as mad as a March hare. Though, in fairness, there was no shortage of craziness back then, what with all the mothers and wives stopping by daily in hopes of letters from their sons and husbands. Failing that, they’d settle for news of any sort. So it was a busy time to be sorting mail. And to be offering kind and hopeful words.
I was sorting a bag of those letters when Charlie came in. I was alone in the apothecary except for Rebekah’s dog, a yappy little schnauzer that patrolled the sales floor like a sentinel. She growled as Charlie leaned against the counter smoking a cigarette, her black lips quivering. I could smell the whiskey on Charlie’s breath even from behind the counter. He was paunchy and red-faced but it wasn’t hard to see the handsome in him. I’ll admit that, much as it pains me to say it. Everyone thought so.
“Now, Miss Lovig, I know you’ve been patient. Biding your time. And I appreciate it,” Charlie said. “But your lucky day is upon us.” He made a show of crushing out his cigarette, then set his hat on the counter. “What say you and I take a stroll up the Lighthouse Road? We’ll wait for the moon to rise and then, well, I’ll give you a chance to see what all the fuss is about.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Aas?”
That leer, it was as ugly a thing as I’ve ever seen. “Come on, now, Berit. This is your chance. Get out from under this roof and that hobgoblin upstairs. I’ll show you a time!”
“Please leave,” I said. It took some courage to say it, and I could feel the weight of his black eyes on me. It wouldn’t have been unheard of for him to smack me right across the counter. Or worse. When he said nothing, I turned away from his stare and whispered, “There’s no mail for you today.”
“You goddamn cooze.” He stepped back slowly and spread his arms wide, stabbing at me with his hateful eyes. “You ain’t seen the last of Charlie Aas. I’ll be back for you.”
The next day he was there before lunch. This time he walked in the front door with a gargantuan dog he kept on a shot-peened length of chain. This beast was rumored to have descended from the legendary Ovcharkas that had guarded the logging camp up on the Burnt Wood River, back in the days of Gus’s great-grandmother.
Of course, excepting Rebekah’s little yapper, dogs weren’t allowed in the apothecary, and straightaway I told Charlie to take his mongrel outside. In answer, he jerked the chain sharply. The dog looked up at him, then sat back on its haunches. Charlie squatted and rubbed its belly for a long minute. The schnauzer was growling all the while, quickstepping in circles, its little ears pinned back, its teeth clenched and bared.
“You’d better rein that little bitch in,” Charlie said as he stood up. “Czar here’s got a pecker like a stick of dynamite and he ain’t afraid to use it.” He kicked his brute’s hind leg out to show what he said was true. “You see what I’m saying, Berit Lovig?” He nodded down at the dog’s genitals. “All I have to do is cluck my tongue and Czar here will rip that little shit in half. I couldn’t stop him if I wanted to. That’s just how it is.”
“Take that hellhound out of here, Mr. Aas. Right this minute.”
“You call old Czar here a hellhound?” Charlie said, feigning indignation. “You might stop to consider what that makes me.” He made another great show of taking a cigarette from his shirt pocket. He struck a wooden match and lit the tip of the cigarette. Rather than blowing out the match, he let it burn down to his fingers and didn’t flinch when the flame touched his skin. Nor did he drop the match. He merely smiled and exhaled smoke from his cigarette. “You’ve been warned. Consider that little rat warned, too.” He stomped his foot at the schnauzer and howled like a dog himself.
—
His message was sent. Of course it was. And I was properly terrified. It’s easy to look a fiend in the eye and know that much. But it wasn’t enough for him to leave me scared. For that man, nothing was ever enough.
Two days later I went onto the porch to shake out the rugs. It was early morning and no one was about. I opened the door, hung the rugs over the railing, and then noticed the schnauzer in the empty flower box. Or
, rather, I noticed half of her, the hind legs and tail and rump all torn or eaten away. I screamed. I screamed and ran inside, wanting to tell Rebekah. It was her dog, after all. I thought, too, of calling the sheriff. But, like everyone else in town, the sheriff was just another lackey on the Aas payroll. So I fetched a paper sack and my gardening gloves and carried the remains to the rubbish bin out back, dumped them in, and spent the rest of that week and most of the next frightened of what he might do.
It was six weeks later when his final revenge came. In any case, that’s what I always considered it. I read that warm morning that a new post office would be built, near the library on the highway running through town, the apothecary, according to the Ax & Beacon, having become unsuitable as a federal building. The article cited fire hazards and vermin infestation, neither of which was factual. There had never been an inspection. Never a letter. Never a word of any sort that might have questioned the building’s integrity. Charlie was finally learning how to wield his influence.
NOWADAYS the book of maps sits on the mantel, between deer-antler bookends, in Gus’s great room. Above the mantel, a scaled-down replica of David Thompson’s epic map of the Northwest Territory hangs where the painting of Harry in his fishing boat once did. It is, Gus admits, a peculiar choice. It could even be mistaken as an affront to his father and his own maps, given their history, to say nothing of their proximity to Thompson’s replica. But he likes to think it’s to the contrary, that the juxtaposition is in fact a fitting homage.
The only sound beyond the chafing fire was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner. It was the first morning he’d invited me in, and I cannot say how strange it felt to be there without Harry down the hall. Even the coffee steaming from mugs on the table sent me back to those nights I spent watching Harry’s mind begin fading away. And Gus sitting at the head of the table in much the same posture that Harry always assumed—chin both jutting and hanging, eyes watery, hands folded before him. All of it so eerie and wonderful that it would have been easy to get swamped by sad memories.
But Gus was quick to speak. “This is chart eight,” he said, pointing at the volume open in his lap. “The map of Burnt Wood Lake.”
I leaned in for a look.
The map was puckered by water from dozens of lakes and rivers and streams, from snow and rain and rising mist. The pencil lines, too, are fading, but they, at least, are not gone yet. “Someday,” Gus said, “maybe when my grandsons are old men themselves, no lines at all will be left. These beautiful wind roses. The sketches. They’ll fade right into oblivion, the paper thinning and thinning and turning to dust in somebody’s hands. Why I can take any comfort in such thoughts, I couldn’t say.”
Chart 8, excerpted from one of Thompson’s maps, shows the source of the river as a small bay on the southeastern shore of the lake. In truth, the bay was rounder and much larger than this chart suggests. “My father knew it was off-scale. One glance at a Fisher Map proved that. But he also knew that to reach our first portage we only needed to paddle to the northernmost point of the lake. From there we would continue to bear north and cross the Laurentian Divide between Lake Tramontane and Ostro Lake.” He took a sip of his coffee and peered at it closely. “That’s what he told me. As though it were simple as walking up the Lighthouse Road.”
All morning, he held that book of maps while he talked.
—
They bobbed in their canoes where the bay met the broader waters of Burnt Wood Lake, which opened up in all directions. On Thompson’s map there are only three islands, but Gus could see no fewer than a dozen as Harry pointed to one and said, “Let’s have lunch over there. We’ll plan the rest of our day after some vittles.”
So they paddled the half mile of open water to that island, trolling rubber leaches behind them. They each reeled in a few small pikes before landing on the southern shore, skirted by bedrock that rose into a tuft of scrub spruce and dormant blueberry bushes. They went ashore, and Gus gathered wood and built the cook fire while Harry readied a pot of coffee and got some rice on. They boiled the fish and when the rice was done settled into their lunch, forking bites straight from the pots.
“I suppose we’ll tire of this fish,” Harry said, “but, sweet Christ, it tastes good now.”
Gus was already sick of boiled fish and rice, but didn’t have the heart to say so.
“This time the day after tomorrow we’ll cross the divide, then on to Lake Biwanago and the old voyageurs’ highway. It’s all downhill from there.” He spoke with his mouth full of food, chewing around his words.
“How far from Biwanago?”
Harry sat on his bootheels and sipped his coffee. “No more than sixty miles as the crow flies, most of that on water. But things get a little dicey past Biwanago. The maps are truer up there, sure. But that country’ll all be strange. Country we’ve never seen, leastways. And getting colder and darker, eh? There’s that.”
He stood slowly, cracked his back, walked over to his canoe, and pulled out the birchwood calendar. He checked the notches in it—only four, though to Gus it felt like two weeks—and put it back in the pack, then turned to the maps. “Even if we get turned around up here, we’ll beat the snow.”
This had been his aim: to reach the fort before the first snow. Gus could tell it pleased him to be on schedule, even though that proved to be fallacious and meaningless. Harry was punctual to a fault. As exact as the sun- or moonrise, both of which he daily knew by heart.
I remember him winding his old Schaffhausen wristwatch at our lunch table, sandwich crumbs still on his plate. Almost nothing pleased me as much as his easy pleasure after a meal. He wound the watch then, on that island, before stepping to shore and washing their lunch dishes while Gus lay back against a rock and let the sun warm his face. In that moment he was utterly content, all misgivings arrested by both time and place.
Harry came back to their dwindling fire, poured himself the last of the coffee, and said, “How are you holding up, bud?”
Gus held his hand up to block the sun. “I’m good.”
Harry sat down and slapped him on the knee. “I should say you are. If the measure of a man’s his ability to carry a load, you’re as fine as they come.”
“Is that the measure?”
“It’s one of them.”
“But there are others?”
Harry smiled. “I sure as hell hope so.” He took a sip of coffee and lay back himself.
“So, we’ll get to Biwanago in a day or two,” Gus said. He was thinking of their route, but also found himself curious about their destination. They hadn’t talked about it since that night in the fish house. Gus had trusted that what his father’d said was true, that the plan was reasonable and sound. Why wouldn’t he? Harry had never done anything unreasonable in his life. Though it was now dawning on Gus, having reached what could have been called their first milestone, that he had no idea where in fact they were headed.
“Then up the Balsam River, along the border. A day’s paddle. Maybe less. Lots of portages and white water, but then the water gets smooth and big.” He sat up on his elbow and took another sip. “That river’s the last place we’ll know for certain where we are.”
“What does that mean?”
Harry lay back down. “Like I said, that’s new country up there. Big country. I’ve never been north of the divide. Can you believe that?”
The truth was, Gus didn’t know what the divide was, or where it was, or even what it was supposed to look like. Still, it was hard to believe that his father had never crossed it—a man who’d been to war in Europe, who could walk through any forest with the same sovereignty he had going down his hallway to the bathroom, who knew practically everything. Nothing seemed beyond him. Yet that’s exactly what he was describing: a world beyond him. Now that seemed hard to believe.
“Does it matter you’ve never crossed the divide?”
“La Vérendrye, Thompson, a hundred others like them, a thousand others, all of them pass
ed through this neck of the woods. They all went across Biwanago. Hell, before La Vérendrye or Thompson made it, somebody else did. Some Frenchman or Scotsman three hundred years ago. When that man came through he didn’t have any map or the slightest damn notion of where he was. That’s a historical fact. That man—whoever he was—thought he was headed to the Orient, with China just up the river.” He waved at the water. “At least I know we ain’t on our way to China, eh?” He slapped Gus’s knee again and wrestled himself up off the ground. “Not only that, but he had to worry about the natives in the woods. He didn’t know what fine folks they were. And he was paddling along in a birchbark canoe. They sewed those goddamn things together with the split roots of black spruce. Roots. He didn’t have one of these stalwart vessels.” He winked and took a step toward his boat and nudged it with his toe. “And he didn’t know when winter was coming. Hadn’t a clue what winter means around here. So does it matter that I haven’t crossed the divide? I reckon it does not. Not in comparison, leastways.”
This answer did nothing to allay Gus’s rising doubt. More to hasten it. Because Harry was dodging the question, Gus could see that even then. Perhaps he was right to.
Now he refilled our coffee mugs and stood at the kitchen counter. “To tell you the truth, I’d be hard-pressed to articulate what it was I wanted to know. Maybe just: ‘You know where we’re going, right?’ Or: ‘I’m safe with you, right?’ In any case, all I could muster was a boyish and anxious reiteration of the question that came up only moments before: ‘What do you mean, the river’s the last place we’ll know for certain where we are?’ ”
He gestured at the book of maps sitting on the table between our coffee cups. “Where my father was going—where we were going—”
