Wintering

by Peter Geye

  “You know as well as I do that he never says anything he doesn’t mean sincerely, I’ll give him that. It’s one of his great faults.”

  She took a long look around my house, then shook her head.

  “He asked me to marry him even with you sitting down there at the apothecary, taking care of that meshuga in the attic. He ought to have built you a castle for all you did for him.” She opened her hands as though everything were plain to see.

  “The grand gesture, Berit. Marrying the first girl who’d have him. Forsaking a mother he had no right to. Endangering his son that season up in the woods. Now your quaint little house right up the road. How convenient for you both.”

  “You’re a cruel and selfish woman,” I told her.

  “You’re not?”

  “Harry’s my friend, and if he’s divorcing you, it’s because you’ve failed him and made him miserable.”

  Her eyes widened—so wide the lines around them smoothed—and her lips pursed. “I’m not blind, Berit. I’m not a fool. Do you think I didn’t know he was in love with you before I ever met him? Do you think I came here because he was some great catch? I married him because I wanted to be the girl on the floor of his fish house, not a girl like you.”

  “And you were that girl. You should’ve been happy. Anyone else on earth would’ve been.”

  She lit a cigarette. “You’re simpler than I thought.”

  “What about your children? Signe’s still so young.”

  “That takes some nerve, mentioning my children.” An ugly, awful snarl crossed her face. “But I suppose you wouldn’t understand about that—barren as your life truly is.” She stepped closer to me. “But that brings us to why I’m here in the first place. You can have Harry. For God’s sake, please, take him. But leave my children out of your pathetic tryst.” She walked to the door. “They’re mine,” she turned to say before leaving, “not yours.”

  —

  I’ve thought of that day often, of the hatred in her voice, and the hurt. I’ve thought of it every time Gus and I have sat down to talk about what happened up on the borderlands. And each time it comes to mind, whenever I look at his sad eyes and listen to his sad voice, I’m sure that I never could’ve been a mother, much as I’ve begun to feel like I am to him.

  And maybe I should have been. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to go. Maybe everyone involved would have been happier for it. The last time Gus and I talked, he spoke of her and said a few things that buoy this very notion. He’d just finished telling me about Harry throwing the book of maps into the lake. He paused then and stared into his hands for a moment before saying, as if we were having a different conversation altogether, “I never knew my mother very well. I was only seven or eight years old when she told me she’d never wanted to have children. She told me she wasn’t suited for it.” He looked up at me and smiled. “She wasn’t. But she tried. I’ll give her credit for that. She took us to the park and for walks up the river. She made us eat our vegetables and drink our milk and do our homework. She taught us to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ She read to us at bedtime when we were tykes. But, my God, her unhappiness was overwhelming. Even before I knew what unhappiness was. Signe always chalked our mother’s moods up to the fact that she was not from here. That she felt imprisoned. Impoverished. She wasn’t from here, true. But she did come here of her own volition. Came running, in fact, to be with my dad. No one’s ever disputed that part of the story.”

  I thought he might cry—his eyes were glossing up. “But I loved her. Very much. I loved her the way only a scorned child could. I still do.”

  —

  What’s uncanny is that Rebekah foretold all of this. It wasn’t her first act of clairvoyance, but it was her most chilling.

  On the day Harry and Lisbet sneaked off to the fish house, I watched them go from the porch. Under the pretense of needing to shake out the rug, I stood in a haze of dust and counted their steps. When the air finally cleared, I turned to go back inside. There Rebekah stood, sharp and straight as a kitchen knife. As though she were privy to the thoughts in my head, she said, “You might take comfort in knowing that the Eide men have never chosen their women well.” She kept her eyes on the alleyway. “He’s a fool for falling for that one.” Now she edged her chin up and pointed it in their direction. “She’s a vixen and a vamp. I saw it the minute she stepped off that boat. She’ll never make a mother. You can see it in how she always expects to be looked at, how she carries that sketchbook around like she knows us better than we know ourselves.” She lowered her sharp chin. “All that girl really wants is a life she doesn’t have.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “How could I not? I’ve spent most of my life being just like her.”

  She went back into the apothecary and I followed with the rug. Inside, I laid it in front of the counter and went to my stool. Rebekah rearranged a couple of the hats on the display table in the middle of the floor, then stepped back, satisfied, and said, “It’s no coincidence she’s from Chicago. I was, too.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Not born there, but I spent time in Chicago as a girl. I grew up in an orphanage in Wisconsin.”

  “Oh?”

  “I never knew my mother or father. For all I know they never were.”

  “Never were what?”

  She looked at me with her breathtaking condescension. “Never were anything. When I was twelve I stole some money and left the orphanage and went to Chicago. I worked in a brothel.”

  “Dear Lord.”

  “I wasn’t one of the girls. I took the coats. Lit cigarettes for the johns. I was all promise. All fantasy.”

  “I thought Hosea was your father.”

  “He took me in.” She looked hard across the room. “But he wasn’t my father. Any more than that girl will one day be a mother to Harry’s children.”

  She started to go upstairs but stopped and stared at me again from across the room. “He might have come for you. I know that. And I’m sorry he hasn’t. It’s my fault he never did. He thinks you’re forbidden. Because of me. Because you work here. He can’t abide me.”

  I said nothing. I couldn’t. It was the only time she ever brought him up in conversation, and I was frankly struck mute.

  She took the first step and then turned with her final thought on the matter. “But someday he’ll realize that you have nothing to do with me. Someday he’ll realize that he’s made a terrible mistake, taking the walk he did just now. Someday, his children will need the likes of you. No one should go through life without a mother.” She took another step. “Or, anyway, without someone to mother them.”

  “LIKELY we’ll freeze to death before we starve.” This was Harry speaking, later that first morning at what by now they were calling “the trapper’s shack.” “We ought to start with four cords of firewood. Four cords and a good idea where to find more.”

  Four cords without a chain saw? Gus could hardly imagine the labor.

  “You start with the gathering, eh?” Harry said. “I’ll get to work around here.”

  “Sure,” Gus said.

  “Start with that birch.” Harry pointed across the bay. “Pull out as much deadfall as you can. Paddle it back. Birch’ll burn cleaner than these others.” He waved his hands to suggest the cedar and pine and maple.

  So Gus grabbed a saw and hatchet and paddled across the bay. The sun rose behind the trees, and the whiteness of their bark and the frost still heavy on the ground magnified the glare tenfold. He put ashore and started into the woods. For every tree that stood another had fallen, and he pulled a few logs from the ferns. They were pulpy and moss-covered, and where there was no moss their bark had been weathered black. He walked farther into the trees, and the ground began to rise as if with the sun.

  At the top was a knoll of smooth granite, the downside of which opened into a stand of bur oaks. Two dozen of them, the ground beneath covered with fallen leaves and acorns. Beyond the oaks
, the forest deepened again. Gus wandered around under the shelter of those alien oaks. Woolgathering, his father would have called it, though he himself considered it simply taking stock of their situation, which was more confounding now than it had ever been.

  He walked to the far side of the oaks, acorns cracking beneath the vulcanized rubber of his boot soles. Stubborn leaves still hung in clumps in the branches above. The oaks were always the last to give up. But bur oaks this far north? He thought about that.

  And he wondered, Why had his father thrown the maps in the water? Why had he made them in the first place? Most pressingly, why had he relied on them while knowing full well their fallibility? Gus looked up again at the bur oaks. There would be days ahead when the sun would barely stretch above their stately limbs, days when the temperature at noon would be forty degrees below zero. Who in their right mind would venture toward days like that? With only those maps now on the bottom of the lake? In answer to his questions, he sat down against one of the oaks and fought some strange and sad happiness running roughshod through his thoughts.

  He sat there for a long time. When he looked up again he noticed that several of the younger oaks were dead. No leaves clung to their branches. The bark on their trunks was duller than the living trees’. He crawled over to one and began swinging the hatchet. Slowly and empty-minded at first but then faster, madly. The sun rose above the tree he was chopping, shining down through the skeletal limbs without warming the morning at all. He chopped through a quarter of the tree with the hatchet, then took up the saw and started on the opposite side.

  With only the hatchet and saw it took an hour to fell that tree. Why he did it Gus never could fathom, not then, not years later. Not ever. But it was down, and he stood over it, his hands blistered, his sweater soaked through with sweat. It would take another two hours to shear the branches from it and a full day to get the trunk back to the lake without a horse and sled. Splitting the hardwood would be brutish work, much harder than splitting birch. But he resolved that somehow he’d get that wood back to the shack, that they would live off the warmth it provided.

  He walked up one side of the fallen tree, started back down the other, and noticed there on the ground a pile of bear scat bigger than his boot.

  —

  He canoed only one load of birchwood back to the shack that day, six trunks as fat as his leg. He unloaded them and checked inside for his father. Harry was gone, but there was a pot of warm coffee on the stove. He’d repaired the door and built a table barely large enough for two plates and two cups. He’d unpacked their foodstuffs and the kitchen implements. For all their enormous weight over the portages and through the scrub, the supplies looked pathetic on the shelves. Gus poured himself a cup of coffee and stepped outside. He stacked the logs against the shack’s lee wall.

  It had been his intention to fetch more birch, but when he gave his canoe a pull across the shallows he saw, fluttering underwater not far from shore, the book of maps. He fished it out with the tip of his fishing rod, brought it back to the shack, and laid the maps page by page across the boards overhead on the joists, where his father wouldn’t see them.

  —

  They ate hunks of jerky and after dinner sat on either side of the little table, their legs crossed, sipping coffee. The cribbage board sat between them but they didn’t play.

  “Have we got enough gun for a bear?” Gus asked.

  “What do you want with a bear?”

  “I saw a pile of scat big as your head in a stand of trees over there.”

  Harry smiled. “How you gonna bait a bear?”

  He couldn’t say why, but he didn’t tell his father about the bur oaks and acorns. He didn’t tell him about chopping down one of the dead oaks. Didn’t tell him about finding the maps, either. He wanted secrets of his own, Gus did. He wanted his own discoveries. He wanted there to be things his father simply didn’t know.

  “Have we got enough gun?”

  “Sure we do. But the bears’ll be going to bed soon, and we’ve got a few things to do before we start hunting. That pile of wood you brought home today might not get us through the night.”

  “We’ll have wood.” Gus went for more coffee and poured them each a cup. “The bears won’t go into hibernation for a few weeks yet. It’s been warm. Almost no snow.”

  Harry nodded. “I admit, a few pounds of bear fat might be good for the larder. I found a bushel of mushrooms today. Fry those things up in bear fat and we’d be the happiest shitheads this country ever saw.” He nodded again. “Get some wood, then get yourself a bear if you can. Even a small boar’s, what, seventy-five pounds of meat? We could use that.”

  “We’ll have the neighbors over for a barbecue,” Gus said, leaning back on his stool and putting his hands behind his head. “But I guess we’re not expecting company.”

  The dopey smile Harry had been wearing since they’d found the shack vanished all at once. “Well,” he said, picking a piece of jerky from his teeth, “that’s the thing.”

  Gus sat up. Put his hands flat on the table. Even all these years later, he could still feel his pulse quicken to think of it. “What’s the thing?”

  Harry took a long sip of coffee and looked over Gus’s head, his eyes lighting on the windows on either side of the door. “We might have company yet,” he said. He reached over his shoulder for the coffeepot and filled his cup with the dregs. “I should’ve saved a bit of the hooch for this.” He set the coffeepot on the floor and feigned a smile. “This all happened years ago. Before you and your sister were born. Before your mother even came to town. Before I knew a damn thing.” He got up with his cup and took a step in each direction but then stood by the stove. “Me and Charlie and Charlie’s big brother, George, and Freddy Riverfish, all night we’re at a card game in the fish house. Finished a jar apiece of old man Hakonsson’s home-burnt. We’re all potted and quarrelsome and I’d lost my ass in the stud game, so I offer the boys a wager: ten bucks a man I’ll go down into the Devil’s Maw.”

  “The Devil’s Maw?”

  “Why, hell yes, they’ll take that wager.” Harry sat back down and wedged his boots off. He set them under the stove and pulled his socks off, too. “We come falling out of the fish house at sunup. Stumble down to the boat slide. Freddy’s looking up at the sky. It’s already eighty degrees and promising nothing if not more heat. He says he’ll buy me breakfast if I’ll quit this nonsense. But I’m primed. Ready to go. And so’s Charlie. He tells Freddy to pull his skirt up.

  “So here we go. Out the cove and around the point and up the Burnt Wood. But before we even make it to the highway bridge, the water craps out and we have to beach the boat. The hoppers go scattering like buckshot, and by now Freddy and George have pooled six bucks and the promise of steaks at the Traveler’s if we quit.

  “But Charlie, he’s not ready to call it a day. He’s got to get his brother up to the falls. He says, ‘You goddamn welshes. Get your pants wet.’ So we start walking. Ropes and a lantern and a fresh jar of home-burnt for the morning’s task. The four of us marching up the shallow river.

  “Christ almighty, were we a haggard bunch. George Aas was almost a friend. Hell, he was one. Very different than his old man and brother. George’s the one who brought his brother along to that card game. George, just back from Iwo Jima minus an arm and jumpy as a June bug, but a good man.” He rubbed the knuckles of each of his forefingers into his eyes. “George had joined the marines the minute he could. Went off to Fort Pendleton despite his old man’s being against it. He trained as a flamethrower, George did, and he was in the first wave of soldiers to hit the beach on that goddamn island.” Again he rubbed his eyes. “Georgie said he thought it was abandoned, just a ghost island. They marched across that beach without so much as a whisper from the Japs. Not until they reached the first line of defense did the bullets start flying. And did they ever. He said it was like waking from a dream. Turns out the Japs were all dug in, had miles and miles of tunnels and bunkers, goddam
n gophers. And there’s Georgie, blasting his flamethrower into one of the holes in the ground. He turns around and, rat-a-tat-tat, some Jap in another hole blows his arm right off. He lays there for half of a day, bleeding out, before he got found and tended to by the medics. A real hero, which is not something to be said lightly. Not ever. Anyway, it wouldn’t have taken that. Georgie could always see the forest for the trees, which his brother just couldn’t stand.

  “Then there’s Freddy Riverfish. He’s mean as a badger and always was. I’d been on a ship on the Atlantic a month earlier, the sound of Sturmgewehrs still came to me every time I shut my eyes. Of course, Charlie’s the exception in our crew. Pretty as a French maid, Charlie was. Wearing a goddamn golf shirt. His hair done up in pomade.” Harry looked like he’d just swallowed a glassful of sour milk. “Or maybe with the devil’s own spit, for Chrissakes. Anyway, there’s your crew, and we’re dragging ass up the Burnt Wood. Water’s cold and we’re passing the jar back and forth and before I pour the last drops down my gullet we’re standing under the Devil’s Maw. Even as light as the water’s running, it’s still too much. So Charlie says, ‘We’ll have to dam it.’

  “ ‘Dam it?’ George says. ‘Hell, no.’ He wades ashore and Freddy goes with him, and before I get one foot up the falls the two of them are passed out on the beach. But Charlie, he’s right behind me. Step for step. Why he’s so hot to get into the Devil’s Maw I couldn’t imagine, but he was. And it was making me nervous. He had that look in his eye I came to know well over the years. That look like he was about to put some wild idea to the test. I’ve never seen much craziness, but I saw it in him. And not for the first time on that day. Not the first by a long shot.”