Wintering

by Peter Geye

  I picked up the book and listened as he continued his story.

  “You’ve come a long way,” Harry said, “without asking to see the maps. Here, have a look.” He handed the book of maps to him. “Turn to chart sixteen.”

  This showed the Balsam River fanning into a glut of thirty or forty unnamed islands. They, in turn, spread to a vast lake called Kaseiganagah. He studied the map for a moment and then glanced at his father, who was staring down on him.

  “You see?” Harry said.

  Gus said nothing, just turned the page to chart seventeen, which was devoted to the western half of Kaseiganagah. Along the south shore another fifty islands were marked, each shoreline more jagged than the one before. Sketched in the corner of the chart a snarling bear reared up, its paw swatting the air. The words Îles des Chasseurs crawled along the northern edge of the lake in beautiful looping calligraphy.

  “What’s Chasseurs?” Gus asked.

  “Turn the page. Keep looking.”

  Again Gus did as he was told, pausing for a minute or two to study each of the maps. They grew increasingly more vague until he got to chart twenty-four. Holy Lake. It had almost no detail but for a house on the shore of a northern bay marked Fort le Croix. In the corner, instead of a bear, a single man in a canoe was paddling through the rain.

  Gus turned the final page. Chart twenty-five was drawn to an entirely different scale and covered what must have been fifty miles of broadening lakes and rivers, none of them named. No compass rose, no arrow pointing north. No sketches, only the words L’EXTRÉMITÉ—TROP LOIN, written not in a script like Îles des Chasseurs or Fort le Croix but in bold block letters. Ominous letters.

  “Find the fort before twenty-five, eh?” Harry said.

  “Fort le Croix?” Gus said.

  “Home sweet home,” Harry said.

  Gus flipped through the maps again. “I still don’t understand. Every place is certainly somewhere.”

  “Now you sound like a philosopher. Or Pastor Nils.”

  Harry stood and went to the coffeepot still sitting on a rock near the fire. He removed his handkerchief from his trouser pocket and dumped the grounds into it, wrapped them up, and cinched the cloth with a piece of twine. He stowed the coffee in the food pack and rinsed the pot on the shore, then filled it again and brought it over to douse the last glowing embers of the fire.

  “You’re wondering the right things, bud,” he said. “I’m wondering them myself.” He packed the coffeepot and stood at his canoe. “Fort le Croix? The miles between here and there? The season ahead? It’s all out there, there’s no doubt of that.” He looked out at the lake and then he turned his gaze on the sky in the south. He seemed ready to say more for a long time before finally adding, “And maybe there’s more than that. Likely there is. If not now, then en route.” He used a hand to block the sunlight. “En route, indeed.”

  He stepped into his canoe and backstroked twice and waited for Gus ten feet offshore. When he, too, was on the water, Harry pinched a wad of snoose into his cheek and tossed him the sack, so Gus took a dip himself. Harry spit on the water and said, “Our concern now is crossing those miles. It’s finding the fort. It’s getting settled in before winter does.” He worked the tobacco in his cheek and spit again. “All those boys before us did it. We can, too.”

  When Gus didn’t answer, Harry said, “You bet we will.”

  —

  “Even now I recall that afternoon clearly,” Gus said. “We paddled around the islands on Burnt Wood Lake and into her northeastern bays, my father singing all the while. It was warm enough that I took my shirt off for an hour after lunch.” He looked across the great room at the map above the mantel. “It was, of all our days up there, among the finest. All of which ought to have made my father’s lying less forgivable.” Now he turned to me. “But instead of looking back in anger, I’ve decided I owe my father a kind of thanks that isn’t often required nowadays.” He pointed over at the map. “On this scaled-down version of Thompson’s Northwest Territory, our time on the border traveled only inches in a world six feet wide. All those unseen lakes and rivers? A thousand miles north? A thousand west? They weren’t meant for us. But those miles we did travel, my father’s apocryphal fort? They taught me more—about myself, about him, about loyalty and love—than I’ve ever learned since. No doubt about it.

  “My father did lie to me. There’s no denying that. But there was also—in his lie—a kind of truth that honesty could never have conveyed.”

  “What does that mean?” I was now the one to ask. They were the first words I’d spoken in what seemed an hour.

  Gus sat back down across the table from me. “I told my wife the same story last night. When she asked what my father taught me, I told her I couldn’t put it into words. But then I lay awake watching the snow fall outside and came up with this: how brave a thing it was for him to try to rediscover something, even if it was only himself, not a continent.”

  That sounded just right, and I smiled, if not actually, then to myself. But when I looked up Gus’s gaze was fierce.

  “There’s this, too, though I didn’t say it to Sarah: I thought how wise he was to lure his rival out into the woods, where every fight’s fair.”

  My eyes must have widened, because Gus looked at me even more fiercely and said, “I told you you didn’t know the whole story.”

  BUT GUS DIDN’T KNOW the whole story, either. Who ever does?

  After our second morning together I could already see that the story he was telling—to explain a man we both dearly loved—was lacking a few things Gus didn’t know. Things that I did know but couldn’t speak of. I’m talking about what happened many years ago to his grandfather, Odd Einar Eide, which I saw firsthand and understood better than anyone. It still stuns me, almost sixty years later, to think of it. But even more than Odd’s story, I was thinking about Rebekah Grimm and the shadow she cast over Harry’s life. And so over Gus’s, too. Secreting my knowledge felt like a betrayal, like I was sending Gus out into the woods to hunt bear with a slingshot when behind my back I held his father’s trusty Remington, oiled and loaded and sighted true. But about Rebekah I simply didn’t know where to begin. I knew that anything I said, any expression of sympathy or fondness, would be met with doubt. In fact, it would be met with a religious certainty to the contrary. This sort of thinking was as ingrained in Gus as it had been in his father, and nothing I might say would discourage it. Just as nothing I ever told Harry changed his thinking. Not about Rebekah. Not one inch.

  Harry came by his grievances against Rebekah honestly, I’ll give him that. He rarely spoke of his father, whom he adored and admired and knew as well as a person can know someone else. Harry would never share that man with anyone. But of his mother—whom he scorned and knew not at all—he spoke often.

  I heard, as everyone had, that Rebekah abandoned Odd in Duluth when Harry was little more than a newborn. Just up and left one summer morning. She ferried herself back to Gunflint and took her place next to Hosea Grimm like he was a prophet and she a hapless disciple of his foolishness. Meanwhile, Odd settled his own affairs in Duluth, packed a box of baby formula, swaddled his boy, and carried him aboard a boat named after his mother. Once the two of them motored home, he set up shop in the fish house, and carved out a living tossing nets and building boats.

  This was the popular version of their story, the one whispered over drinks at the Traveler’s Hotel saloon, coffee in the church basement, and fishing bobbers up on Long Finger Lake. The one I overheard in pieces over the apothecary’s counter. But you never would have heard it from Rebekah or Odd or Harry. For them, the story of their blood was sacrosanct. People avoided the subject with them as though it were poisonous. Children were born into old families up here knowing to give it a wide berth.

  So it came as a surprise to me when, some months after Harry and I took up, he mentioned his mother.

  “It’s a pity and a sad thing to see that woman—Miss Grimm—tucked away up t
here in that rest home. No one to bring her flowers.”

  “I bring her flowers,” I told him. “I did just yesterday.”

  He seemed insulted. “You don’t work for her anymore.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “So you don’t have to go see her anymore,” he said.

  “Are you saying you don’t want me to?”

  “I’m saying you’ve done your service. Her friends can keep her company now.”

  I remember wondering if we were arguing. What I said was “I’m her friend. Her only friend.”

  “You’re not her friend.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Well, far be it from me to say who your friends are,” he said. “Just know she won’t be a regular topic of conversation, eh?”

  But as I said, he brought her up often. Never “How’s my mother?” or “Will you say hello for me?” or “Do you think I ought to pay her a visit?” What he did say was cutting or worse. “I suppose Miss Grimm’s ranting hardly registers with the rest of the seniles up there at the home,” or “I bet there’s no one left to empty Miss Grimm’s bedpan up there, eh?” or “I bet they’ve replaced the goose down in her pillow with porcupine quills by now.”

  His barbs were so entirely out of character that at moments I felt that I was talking with another man altogether. That the kind and gentle and lonely man I already loved was someone I’d invented to salve my own loneliness, which in fact had been increased by his mother’s absence from my everyday life.

  At night, in the new house Harry had built for me, pacing around, trying to get used to the quiet thrill of it all, I began thinking of how I might tell him about her. Things I’d come to know during the many years I lived with her. My first nights in the apothecary were terrifying. I was only seventeen years old and living with a phantom. I knew that about Rebekah before I knew anything else. Each night at seven-thirty she closed the door to her room. She expected complete silence until five-thirty the next morning, when she wanted her breakfast to be served. Tea, oatmeal with butter and brown sugar, a piece of dry white toast, a glass of orange juice. At seven the store was to be opened, such store as it was. She sold hats, or anyway had hats for sale. Thousands of them, each one a particular clue to her eccentricity. In all those years, I wonder if we sold a dozen of them. That was half of her enterprise. The viable half was the post office. By some vagary of small-town life, she was allowed to operate it. Rather, I operated it.

  My job was to service the counter and sort the mail and receive packages and letters. Every morning I shook the rugs and swept the floor. At noon, I locked the door and ascended the two flights of stairs to our apartment, where I prepared her lunch. Crackers and cheese and peeled carrots (every day, year after year after year, I ate the same thing myself). Then back to the counter until three-thirty, when I locked the door again. It was in the two hours before dinner that I had my only freedom. Most often I’d walk to the end of the Lighthouse Road and stroll the shoreline. How clearly I remember that view of the apothecary. I swear, every time I looked I could see Rebekah looming in the big window on the third floor. How much time did I spend watching the town’s figurehead beating against the waves of her own grief?

  At night, because I couldn’t fall asleep and had been banished to silence, I’d go and stand at the window myself, trying to see what she saw. Or didn’t see. I now realize it was a practice inspired more by curiosity than by empathy. Though the one led eventually to the other.

  In springtime, I watched the evenings growing longer as the ice came apart and ashore. I watched the townsfolk coming out after the long winter, children running in the streets, lovers sitting on benches along the Lighthouse Road. In summer, I watched high-schoolers diving from the breakwater into the harbor, their lives so very different than mine. I watched kids throwing sandwich crusts to gulls hovering above their picnics. I watched the scant harbor traffic. More than a few times I saw Harry sidle his beautiful boat up to the harbormaster’s dock to refuel. In the cool months of autumn, I watched the smoke from Harry’s fish-house chimney filter up across the isthmus. Seeing these things didn’t help me understand Rebekah any better. I think the opposite might have been true.

  During the winter nights that followed, when darkness fell before suppertime, the window only reflected the view inside. The lamp that lent light to the likenesses in the glass. The rocking chair and davenport and braided rug. My own face. It came as a surprise every time to see myself there. It was as though I’d forgotten I was actually part of the odd domesticity that Rebekah and I were playing out against all our silence and stiltedness. In fact, it was easy to forget myself up there, plain as I was. Or what was then thought of as handsome, a word no woman ever aspired to. I had always known this about myself and accepted it as I would have a limp. But Rebekah, she was a graceful woman, as strikingly tragic as an aged movie star, with the sort of beauty that made it easy for me to forget my own plainness. So I took pleasure in her loveliness and wondered what it would be like to see such elegance in one’s own reflection. Or did she see this at all? Maybe she saw only loneliness. Certainly that’s what I saw when I looked past her prettiness, whether across the kitchen table or down on the Lighthouse Road.

  I wondered other things, too. In fact, I spent much of my early life here obsessing about her. But she was then, as she remained always, as mysterious and furtive and unpredictable as the northern lights. And as distant. No amount of curiosity could bring her any closer. Asking around didn’t help, either. Once I became friendly with the townswomen, I’d sneak questions about Rebekah into our conversations at the mail counter: Was she ever married? What about her father, Hosea? Did she ever smile? Was my work at the apothecary satisfactory?

  It took a long time to work up the courage to ask about Harry. One day Claire Veilleux came in to send her daughter a care package. About Rebekah’s age, Claire had lived here from the day of her birth and was considered by most to be a kind and generous woman. We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes. I took her package and weighed it and was getting ready to take her payment when Freddy Riverfish walked in. He doffed his cap and I turned for his mail and handed it to him.

  “Harry Eide’s today, too,” he said.

  He often fetched Harry’s mail as well. So I handed it to him without question. He doffed his cap again and left.

  I remember looking at Claire Veilleux and saying, “Why does Harry Eide never come for his own mail?”

  Bless her, she blushed deeply and stammered, then managed, “Miss Lovig, the answer to that question is buried out there.” She pointed out the window toward the lake. “You could ask Rebekah or Harry, but neither would have an answer. That’s the sad truth.” She put her mail in her purse and looked back at me. “But let me tell you something. There are truths that run deep and truths that run shallow. And there are truths that do neither. Do you understand?”

  I must have looked doubtful.

  “When you’re older, perhaps after you’ve had to lie to people you care about, or let go of that which you didn’t think you could, well, maybe then you’ll understand.”

  Claire Veilleux left that day with a sympathetic smile. For some twenty-five years I lived with Rebekah and wondered often what Claire meant about all these different truths. When I cared for her in times of sickness, which were frequent, I wondered. As I did when I helped her bathe and dress as she grew feebler. In her last years in the apothecary, I wondered as I helped her to the toilet. When, eventually, her eyes were so bad that I read to her for an hour, sometimes longer, I wondered. And I wondered then, as I read to her and as she fell asleep in her rocking chair, harboring all the feelings she must’ve had, how she could ever sleep. But despite everything we shared, she never once betrayed herself or the past I was so eager to know. To this day—now more than twenty-two years after her death—I do not know what it is to lie to someone I love. And until Harry himself vanished up the river last month, I never knew what it was to let go of some
thing I didn’t think I ever could. And because I’m an honest woman, I can say his disappearance hasn’t brought me one iota closer to understanding Rebekah Grimm. If anything, his vanishing and the stories it has provoked in his son have made her even more of an enigma.

  —

  I can’t say standing up in that same window these days has lent any clarity, either. And there have been a few such days lately, now that we’re set to begin work on the historical society, a project made possible because Gus’s sister donated the apothecary to the municipality of Gunflint, population 1,201.

  It’s been a strange string of ownership for this place. Strange and tangled, as so many things are. The apothecary was sold to Lisbet when Rebekah moved to the Lutheran Home back in the spring of 1963. By any definition it was a slap in Harry’s face that a place he so deplored was suddenly his property. Even if it was only his property until he and Lisbet divorced less than two years later.

  Not long after the divorce, Lisbet moved back to Chicago. By then I had moved into a rented house up on Eighth Avenue and on my walks through town I would often pause and stare up at the old apothecary. For years afterward it loomed over the town like some stately and remnant white pine. Paint peeled from the siding. Weeds overtook the lawn. The porch swing fell from its chains. Every five years the plywood over the windows was replaced by Harry or Gus. They must have felt they owed it to the townsfolk to keep what was in there hidden away. And then Signe, putting her estate in order, wiped her hands free of the place, with not a single condition to her donation. She only wanted out from under it. So now it has another chance to become a part of the fabric of life in Gunflint.

  Bonnie Hanrahan and Lenora Lemay talked me into helping to curate the historical society, and certainly we’ll do our best. Though to be honest I took their coaxing as a compliment and agreed without needing to think it over for even a second. Perhaps I should have. I’ve been back a few times by now and always feel a kind of presence in here. Please don’t think me a quack. I’m no Gnostic and don’t believe in sixth senses. Still and all, my memories have been especially piqued when I’ve stood up there in the apartment looking out that old pane of glass.