by Peter Geye
On the last occasion I got thinking that perhaps Rebekah was long past waiting. Maybe she’d spent her time in that high window wanting to jump through it. This thought put a chill right down my spine and left me feeling heartbroken for days. Because, for all of her coldness and eccentricity, I was actually very fond of her. I might even say I loved her.
There were moments when her guard went down, when she entered a room or a conversation as if she’d been delivered into another life that wasn’t smothered by personal history. It’s true those moments were infrequent, but suddenly she could be witty or blithe, even warm. Sometimes they’d come at the breakfast table. She’d recall a scene from the story I read her the night before and she’d laugh. Or maybe it was a story she heard on WTIP that led her to questions. Does this new desegregation law mean the Norwegians and Swedes up here will be forced to walk the same road to school? Eight cents to send a letter? I’d better capture a hawk when they fly through this fall. On the rare instance when she sold a hat, she was moved to something like giddiness. The tone of her voice would change. The tension around her eyes and lips would release and she could smile like a woman thirty years younger. Those moods might last a minute or an hour, but she was lovely then.
I’ve not thought often enough about those happy times, though I found myself reminiscing when last I was up on the third floor. It felt good—quite good—to recall the sound of her laughter. It lingered in my mind and got me thinking about how that window was something like a crystal ball for me. How it looked onto a future that might have been very grim if not for those glimpses of Harry and his fishing boat.
But as soon as the thought of him crossed my mind, I was struck by the notion that Rebekah and I might have been waiting and wishing for the same man.
THE FIRST DAY beyond Burnt Wood Lake was the last of their easy days. The weather was fair, their lungs and legs were fresh, their outfit was complete. The fish were biting, and that night they ate walleye breaded in crackers and fried in oleo, so their guts were well pleased. They were equal on the water, which surprised Gus as much as it did Harry, but he was commended for it. He saw, with every paddle stroke, a stoutheartedness he’d always known in his father but was thrilled to discover in himself. The looming voyage made sense for the entire day. They found the first portage and crossed two more lakes before making camp and finding a long night’s sleep.
Already the next morning the maps proved unfaithful to the country, accounting for fewer and fewer of the lakes and portages, and by the third afternoon on this stretch they were relying more on compass and feel than on charts. The fact that they were lost—paddling shorelines for hours, looking for access into the woods, cutting trail through cedar swamps or pine stands when they couldn’t find any—didn’t seem to alarm Harry. And because he was nonchalant, even confident, Gus put his own worries aside. Until the night the wind came.
They were four or five days beyond Burnt Wood Lake when a squalling, screaming rain ambushed them on what they guessed was Malcolm Lake. They took shelter in the lee of its craggy shore, which didn’t provide much. Whitecaps swamped their canoes. Lightning split thunderheads. Late in the afternoon they found a place to camp along a narrow arm of the lake and pitched their canvas between two trees on the granite shore. With everything too wet for them to start a fire, they ate jerky and crackers for dinner and then hoisted the food packs into a swaying pine before settling in.
All night the wind hollered. The flapping canvas and dropping temperatures made sleep fitful. Twice Gus was shaken wide awake by the sound of a snapping tree. At one point Harry crept from the tent to check on the canoes. When he came back in and burrowed into his sleeping sack he said, “It’s unnatural, that wind.”
The rain relented before dawn and Gus had an hour of peaceable sleep. When he woke, he crawled from the tent and saw his father staring across the lake. Atop the ridge that they’d canoed under the evening before, all the pines had been blown over. Hundreds of trees. Thousands. A mile of trees, felled in a single night. They could have built a lodge from them.
Harry turned and smiled. He held his compass in his hands, the wind blowing the pompom on his red hat like a rooster’s tail on a weathervane. “A perfect day for scouting, eh?” He had to shout to make his voice heard above the relentless gale.
He pointed up the narrows. “North!” he said. “Look at that rise.” He moved next to Gus and leaned into his shoulder. “A hill like that could damn well be the divide.” He turned and looked again up the lake. “What do you think?”
Gus scanned the ridge once more. “I think we’re lucky we didn’t get crushed by timber last night.”
“I guess any night you don’t die under a falling tree is a lucky one,” Harry said. He had a dopey look on his face.
Gus looked up the narrows. “You really think that could be the divide?”
“I’ll make coffee, then we’ll go have a look.”
—
They launched only one canoe, Harry taking the helm. Even though it was no great distance up the narrows, they were paddling into the northerly wind funneling down the gorge, and it took them nearly half an hour. Near the end of the lake Gus saw a sort of line, a change in the light. The wind was visible above it, and below it the air was clear and hard. As they passed under it, the atmosphere suddenly felt almost weightless. The wind—noisy as a passing train when upon them—now quieted, nothing more than a faint whistling.
Harry turned to look back at Gus in the stern. “Creepy, eh?”
It was ominous, all that shifting light and sound. When Gus turned back himself to study the lake behind them, he thought, We’re gone. There’s no turning back. Not now.
They gently beached the canoe on talus black with rainwater. They heard the unmistakable hammering of a waterfall and followed the sound west by climbing a steep escarpment. The roar was soon imminent and everywhere and Gus expected to see falls at any minute, but they ventured as far north as they did west before they found it twenty minutes later. A pool of water the size of a baseball infield, rimmed with fallen trees and knifelike rocks, caught the water falling from thirty feet above. It was beautiful. The mist rising. The cedar trees lining the falls and drooping under all that wetness. The wind forgotten in this seam of the earth.
Harry sat down on a rotted-out cedar half submerged in the pool. “Goddamnit,” he said, his voice hoarse. He coughed and spit and said “Goddamnit” again, as if maybe Gus hadn’t heard him the first time.
“What’s wrong?”
“This water’s flowing the wrong way.” He snapped a branch off the fallen tree and threw it into the shallow creek running from the pool, as though he expected it to flow up the falls instead of down. He watched it bounce between rocks for a moment and said, “Obviously.” He shook his head and added, “What kind of a fool would think a rise like this would go farther down the other side?”
“What’s the big deal?”
He shook his head. “I’m not thinking straight. We can’t have that.” He turned and looked up at the falls.
“We should still go look,” Gus said. He was rightly confused by his father’s mood swing.
Harry said nothing, just started wading around the edge of the water. It was hazardous alongside those falls, the rocks slick and sharp and given to shifting underfoot. The temperature must have fallen thirty degrees overnight, which made the water feel warmer but the air biting and cruel. When they reached the top, the ground flattened and spread out in a tangle of warped cedars. They stumbled through the grove in water up to their thighs, the wind back in their faces. When they came through the trees a lake opened wide and white with churning water. All along the southern shore the cliffs dwarfed the ones in the gorge below.
A look like panic came over Harry’s face—almost as if he’d been slapped—and he surveyed their surroundings like a simpleton for a few long minutes. But then his face lit up. He took the book of maps from his daypack and flipped between two pages, then studied these cliffs aga
in. “This could damn well be Rouge Lake. That means we’re on track after all.” Now he looked behind them, from where they’d just come, and conjured with the maps and his memory for a long time. He nodded emphatically. “Yes, sir, I think this might very well be Rouge.”
Gus pulled himself up into the crotch of a cedar and sat with his back to the open water. The wind blew through his wet pants and burned cold. “It won’t be easy through here,” he said. “It’s like a ball of yarn, all these trees. Won’t be easy up those falls with the boats, either.” He pointed behind him. “It’ll take us all day.”
Harry squinted up at Gus. “We’ve been at this long enough for a day off, eh? What say we tackle this portage tomorrow? Maybe give this wind a chance to blow itself out?”
“I’m for that,” Gus said.
They started back down; in spots it was so steep that it seemed impossible they’d climbed it without aid of a ladder or ropes. Before returning to the canoe, they foraged in the undergrowth of the cedar swamp for deadfall. They found four good logs and loaded them into the canoe and paddled back to their campsite, the gunwales not more than six inches above the waterline.
After all those days of going strong it was strange to idle around the campsite, but that’s just what they did. Harry roused a huge fire and Gus went to work on the deadfall, quartering all the logs before splitting them with the hatchet. They hung a rope between two trees and washed their clothes and hung them near the heat of the fire to dry. Gus made a pot of coffee, and by noon they’d done all the chores.
Harry sat with his feet toward the fire and took the Remington apart, carefully wiping out the barrel after all the rain the day before. Gus watched him, feeling drowsy and hungry and in some back room of himself, like he wished he’d never joined this expedition. His father must have read his mood, because he said, “You look like you came out on the wrong end of a bad night’s sleep.”
“I’ve had better. That’s for sure.”
Harry was oiling the pins, squinting down his nose at his work.
“I was going to fish,” Gus said, “but I think I’ll take a nap.”
Harry kept working on the gun. “A nap would do you well. I’ll wake you for dinner.”
So Gus climbed under their canvas and wrapped himself in the sleeping sack. He slept hard that afternoon. When he woke it was to a sound like a baaing sheep somewhere near. His right arm and shoulder tingled from sleeping on them wrong. He lay there listening to the strange sound while the wind ruffled the canvas. After a while his blood washed the prickling out of his arm and he sat up. Through the tent flap he could see Harry up the shore, standing in plain sight beside a boulder the size of a bear and aiming the Remington across the lake.
Gus had seen that look on his face before—a great many times—and he knew there was game in his sights. He crawled up to the flap and peered out. On the opposite shore, a fawn stood with its hind end to them, its bleats carrying across the water on the strong wind coming down the cliff. He could still see vestiges of the fawn’s spots.
Gus swept his glance between the deer and Harry for what seemed ten minutes. Twice his father lowered the gun and closed his eyes with the countenance of a man at prayer. When he opened his eyes again he retrained his sights on the fawn. Then he noticed Gus crouching in the tent, aimed a third time, and fired.
Gus was surprised to see the fawn merely flinch and buck. It seemed impossible that Harry would have missed so easy a shot, but Gus felt relieved when the fawn only bawled louder.
Harry slung the Remington over his shoulder and walked briskly toward him. Once within earshot, he shouted, “Grab the hunting knife and come on.”
Gus rummaged through the pack and found the knife, put on his sweater and boots, and stepped out of the tent. The fawn still hadn’t moved.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
They jumped into a canoe and crossed the narrows. Harry splashed into the knee-deep water and took a few cautious steps forward. The fawn looked at him and baaed frantically before burying its nose in the rocks. Or what Gus thought were rocks. In fact it was the fawn’s mother. The doe was headshot, her legs splayed like a marionette cut from its strings.
Gus was having trouble sorting it all out. Between the fawn and the doe and his having just woken up, he thought that perhaps he was only dreaming. He tried to wake himself again, better this time, but found himself still standing at the canoe, watching his father step cautiously toward the fawn, his hand outstretched as though the little deer were a dog.
When he was within twenty feet he turned and glanced at Gus, looking confused himself. He shrugged and widened his eyes as though to ask, What should I do?
Gus shrugged back.
Ten feet from the fawn Harry stopped, stood tall, and put his hands at his sides. The fawn sniffed its mother, licked her ear, then turned and ran up the craggy shoreline. Gus and Harry watched it go.
He might still have thought he was dreaming if, a minute later, he hadn’t crossed the beach, looked down, and seen the dead doe. He stood beside his father, who had his hat in his hand as if he were paying respects.
“What the hell?” Gus said.
Harry still had the Remington slung over his shoulder. He removed it and checked the safety and laid it on a rock. “I’m sitting there drinking a cup of coffee while you were napping. The wind was back up. Fierce again.” He whirled his hands above his head as though this needed to be acted out. “I’d already put the gun away. So I get up to take a piss and have a look around. I’m walking up the shore”—he pointed across the lake at the huge boulder—“and looking up at the ridge, where the trees are down, and, no kidding, I see this doe and her fawn coming along the edge. I mean the very edge. A gust comes down and, I shit you not, the doe’s blown right off the cliff. Or she slips. Anyway, she lands here.” He gestured at her.
“Bullshit,” Gus said.
“I’m not making this up. Look at her legs. Look at her goddamned neck.”
“Then why’d you shoot her?”
“Because she wasn’t dead!”
Gus stared up at the cliff. “She fell from there and didn’t die?”
Harry scratched his head and put his hat back on. “That’s thirty or forty feet if it’s ten, eh? Just fell off. Two minutes later, that fawn comes walking up the rocks, bawling its fool head off. You heard it.”
“I think it woke me.”
Harry waved a hand above his head. “She just fell off. She landed here. She was still alive.”
“How?”
“I have no idea. None in the world. When I saw her twitching I went for the gun. Got it out of the case and walked over to that rock. That’s when I saw the fawn.” He reached under his hat and scratched again. “How in the hell?”
They both stood over the deer for a spell until Harry said, “I had to shoot her.” He knelt and grabbed one of its hind legs. “It must be broken in a hundred spots.” He took the other hind leg in his hand. “They’re all broken in a hundred spots.” He stood back up and looked at Gus. “I guess we gut her.”
“I can do it,” Gus said.
“No. It was my shot.”
Gus took the knife from his belt and handed it to his father, who unsheathed it and knelt and rolled the doe onto her back. Before he cut into her he glanced up. “I guess the snow’s gonna beat us now, eh, bud?”
THEY SPENT two or three days at their camp on the narrows, waiting for the wind to blow through and jerking the venison. By the time they portaged up those falls, their larder was heavier than when they’d left home.
Gus had suggested when they broke camp earlier that morning that they wait for the fog to lift, but Harry insisted the sun would burn it off. It hadn’t. Half a day later they were paddling slowly, still staring into the whiteness. Every twenty strokes the trees hanging over the water came into view through the fog and Gus felt relieved. It was short in lasting, though, for the fog would swallow them back
up almost immediately.
Harry sang the whole time. One of those chansons that had become anthem. “Petit rocher de la haute montagne, / Je viens ici finir cette champagne. / Ah! doux échos, entendez mes soupirs, / En languissant je vais bientôt mourir….” Gus hummed along even as he wondered what the hell the words meant.
They paddled for another hour before Harry stopped singing, rested his paddle, and stretched his back. “Half a goddamn day,” he said. “We’ve been four hours on this lake and it just won’t quit.”
“Could be Biwanago,” Gus said, though he had no hope that it was.
Harry studied the fog in each direction. “And this weather. Christ almighty.”
Gus took his compass from the hip pocket of his pants. Before he even took a reading, his father said, “Dead west.”
Gus held the compass up anyway.
“Dead fucking west,” Harry told him.
“Biwanago goes east and west,” Gus said.
“It’s not Biwanago, Gus.” Then Harry gripped his paddle and dug in for a hard pull.
—
But it was Biwanago. Most likely, anyway. They cut through that misty morning for another half hour before the fog was gone all at once. Not like smoke rising, which was what Gus was used to, but as if it had been shattered and shot across the water like blowing snow. Green pines suddenly came into view against a soft blue sky, the trees here dense and unbroken.
They paddled until they came to a point of gnarly granite. Gus moved ahead of his father without a word and passed into a long, narrow bay. Before he was halfway across he heard rushing water. He turned to look at his father, who had his ear canted toward the sound as though God himself were whispering across the water.
