Wintering

by Peter Geye

  Each night they ate bear. One night it was a slumgullion of boiled paws and snout with their last potato and onion. Another featured sweetbreads, which Gus could hardly choke down. Twice it was merely strips of meat fried in the bear’s own fat, a meal as rich as chocolate fudge.

  After supper Harry labored at tanning the bearskin. With the bear’s thighbone he rubbed the skin soft, a practice that Freddy Riverfish had taught him and that had been passed down for a thousand years among his kin. Gus marveled at his father’s fluency in skinning and butchering and fleshing and tanning and cooking. It was as if he’d done nothing in his entire life but put a bear carcass to good use. And the work obviously pleased him.

  Gus reckoned that the debacle involving the bear had helped his father to regain himself and took comfort in seeing him look and act like the man he had always known. But that same experience cast Gus even deeper into a wilderness of confusion. He responded by abandoning himself to cutting and splitting and stacking the oak. Eight or ten hours a day, for days on end. His hands cramped and callused and grew viselike in their strength. His shoulders and back, which had always been lithe and lean, turned unequivocally muscular after the countless hours spent sawing and swinging a maul.

  They were fateful days. The sky was heavy and hard as an anvil at times, then light enough to whisper the whitest snow down on them. It snowed every day, though only twice with purpose. One day it started at dawn and didn’t relent until suppertime. When Gus went outside for a night’s worth of wood, snow came up over his boot tops. A couple nights later it snowed while they slept, and by morning the lake was solid white. Just like that the bay had frozen and the landscape doubled in whiteness.

  When it wasn’t snowing, the north wind blew the fallen flakes up in waves, and before long the bay was clear, the ice mirroring the dull sky, and it seemed impossible the world could be so colorless. It took night and the coming of stars to shed any brightness on their lives, and the few nights the clouds parted they stood together on the shore as though it were a Mexican beach and they were tanning their cold faces, staring silently up into the sky, waiting, each of them, for something they could not know.

  —

  When he laid the last split log on the woodpile, it seemed nearly as large as the shack. Gus stood back and studied their camp. The shack and the cache and the woodpile. The privy a ten-step walk toward the woods. Their canoes leaning keels-up against a tree on the edge of the clearing. The smoke rising from the chimney and the icicles hanging from the eaves trough. It was the most inexplicable fort in the long and cold history of world. But one he was so glad and grateful of he could not, even now, all these years later, find words to express his relief at its being there.

  That night—after the last of the wood was split—they stood together again on the shoreline. The wind still blew from the north. And the ice beneath their feet sent a sudden shiver into the soles of their boots. Then a proper moan issued from the frozen lake. Gus thought it sounded animal and he turned quickly to the woods behind them.

  “That’s the ice,” Harry said. “Must be a spring feeding this bay.” He stepped back, and Gus swore he felt the air pulse as his father shook with cold.

  The ice moaned again. Now it was musical, like a low note from a clarinet.

  “Beautiful, eh?” Harry said. “You’ve not heard that before?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just our bay settling in.”

  It was such a strange and lovely sound, Gus remembered. After days of hearing nothing but the thwack of splitting wood and the clunk of piling it up, to hear something like music again came as both a relief and a great sadness. Especially because it was native and wild but also because it seemed, inexplicably, destined for just the two of them. As though they deserved that euphonious moment. To prove that life was not just gathering wood and butchering bear. Gus closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them the clouds in the night sky whistled away and in their wake the stars snapped like embers in a fire. The ice sang on. They listened until it quieted and then turned back for their shack.

  —

  Harry seldom spoke of his own father, Odd Eide. Neither to me nor to Gus. Or he seldom spoke of him when he wasn’t extolling his command of one of the family trades. Almost everything Gus knew about his grandfather he’d learned from hearsay. From gossip and legend.

  So he was surprised when Harry brought him up that night. He’d draped the bearskin over his shoulders and took a cup of coffee to his bunk. “My old man, he never hunted bear. Everything else, but not bear.”

  Every time Gus looked at the bearskin he bristled and glanced away. “Is it true about him?” Gus said.

  “What?”

  “That a bear took his eye?”

  “Yup.”

  “That he crawled into a bear den?”

  Harry smiled. “It’s true. Right on the Burnt Wood. We passed the place coming out here.” He took a sip of coffee and smiled. “I guess you and him got something else in common.” This was meant to be playful, even sympathetic, but it stung and Gus felt foolish again. “Of course, you got out of your spat with both eyes.”

  “Some consolation.”

  “Well, it’s better than the alternative.”

  Harry set the cup on the floor and shifted the bearskin on his shoulders. “I always admired him for doing it. Pretty goddamn tough, if you ask me. He was only about twelve years old.”

  Over the course of their time on the borderlands Gus would come to learn the whole story. Not only of his grandfather and the bear but of his grandmother and great-grandmother, of the watch salesman and Hosea Grimm. But as of that night of the ice song, he knew only rumors. “It’s weird,” he said, “how you never talk about your dad. About our family history.”

  “History,” Harry said, as though it were a profanity. “History for us doesn’t exist. History requires proof, of which we have almost none.” He looked at his son and then quickly added, “You have plenty of proof. Nothing’s ever happened to you that might compromise your history.”

  “Like getting lost up here?” Gus said. “Or killing the bear? Nothing like that counts?”

  “Those are stories, bud, not history. Not yet, leastways. Besides, I talk about my old man all the time.”

  “Sure, whenever we’re cooped up in the fish house working on a boat, you remind me how skilled he was. At fishing, too. But you never talk about anything else. You never told me about when he went into the bear den.”

  “I’ve been saving that one,” Harry said, a wry smile on his face. “Anyway, I thought you were done listening to my stories.”

  Gus felt himself blush.

  “All right. You want to hear about him?”

  “It’s just that I’ve never even seen a picture of him. I wouldn’t know him if he walked through the door.”

  “Well, that ain’t happening. But I could tell you about him some.” Again he shifted the bearskin, then sat up straight and wiped the hair back from his eyes. “My old man never knew who his father was. Never met him. He also never knew his mother. She died soon after he was born. The story goes, she came from Norway expecting to find the promised land. I guess that didn’t work out. But the land on which our house is built? It came down to my father when his mother’s people died. You ever hear of Rune Evensen? Our house is on his land. Or what used to be.”

  “Why didn’t Rune Evensen take care of Thea Eide?”

  “His own wife strung herself up from the barn roof just to get away from him. He was unglued real good, that one.”

  “So your dad raised himself?”

  “More or less. Learned everything he knew—which was plenty—by trying until he didn’t fail. He didn’t fail much.”

  “I guess he passed that along to you.”

  “Naw, all I got were his good looks.”

  “Not much of an inheritance,” Gus said, and they both smiled. After a moment, he said, “Who would do that? Climb into a bear den?”

  “The way
he told it, there was no choice in the matter. The hand of God reached down and gave him a shove. He didn’t regret it.” Harry finally took the bearskin from his shoulders and spread it across the foot of his bunk. “Christ if I know why he did it. Why do we do any of the things we do? Why’d you shoot that bear? Probably you did it for the same reason.”

  “I shot the bear because we’re going to need food. A lot of it.”

  “You shot the bear because I told you not to. You shot the bear because you wanted to see what it was like.”

  He picked up his coffee cup and got out of his bunk and went to the pot on the stove. He shook the coffeepot, discovered it was empty, and put it down hard. “Which isn’t to say I don’t understand. I do. We’re men. We need to see ourselves against the world. Against our fathers. I did. No doubt you do, too.”

  “I bet you never defied your father. I bet you were a perfect son.”

  “Far from it.”

  “But a better son than me.”

  “No chance of that.”

  “So did you ever defy him?”

  “Nope.”

  “See, you were better.”

  “I had a better father, that’s all.”

  Gus was old enough to carry his share of the load into that wilderness, old enough to kill the bear and harvest the wood, but he felt like a child when it came to understanding the nature of men. He felt, too, that he would never be old enough to manage to.

  “The difference between my father and me,” Harry said, “or one of the differences, is that he never would’ve gotten us in this tangle. He would have squared it all up over a beer at the Traveler’s. He had more trouble with those Aas boys than I ever did. That’s a certifiable fact.”

  More confused than ever, Gus wondered how a livelihood mattered more than a marriage. And what the difference was.

  “My old man had a saying,” Harry told him. “Well, not a saying, exactly, but a question. He asked it of himself and he asked it of me and he asked it of anyone who came to him with trouble: ‘Can you get ahead of it?’ The answer, for him, was always, always yes.” Harry stood in the middle of their small shack, holding his hair back off his forehead. “I should’ve thought about that before I sicced the goddamn dogs on Charlie.”

  “Charlie’s a killer. He killed his brother.”

  “And a crook and a thug and a cheat. I know.” Harry walked slowly back to his bunk and sat down on the edge. “But the reason I went after him has nothing to do with him killing his brother. It has nothing to do with him stealing from the church coffers. Hell, it doesn’t even have to do with his big plans to plunder these wilds.” He ran his hands through his hair once more.

  “If old Marcus Aas had come after my father’s gal, you know what would’ve happened? He’d have walked right up to Marcus’s door and asked him to step outside. He would have told him the jig was up, that if he saw her again there’d be hell to pay. And if Marcus had kept at it, my father would’ve rolled up his shirtsleeves and gone three rounds with him. If things weren’t square after that, he’d have set the bastard’s house on fire.”

  “You said your only chance against Charlie was to get him out here, though. You said that this was a fair place to fight.”

  Harry looked at him as though at a simpleton. “The reason my father went into the bear den was because Danny Riverfish called him a chickenshit. My father knew, even then, as a boy, that being a chickenshit was about the worst thing you could be in this world.” He stared at Gus then for a long time. “I say again, he was twelve. I’ve got gray hair.”

  Gus remembered sitting in the shack waiting for his father to say more. Of course, there was nothing more to be said.

  EARLY MORNINGS I went to the apothecary and sorted through the miscellany that Bonnie and Lenora found stashed in every box and drawer and hidden cranny in that old building. There were coded ledgers, correspondence from as far away as France and New Zealand, a passel of letters to and from Chicago and San Francisco, several dozen from Montana. Piled waist-high on the floor, a stack of folios that could best be described as books of spells. Some of the recipes in them called for the blood of wolves in heat or ground stag antlers or the dried wombs of rabbits. There were hundreds of photographs, maybe a thousand, in dozens of warped and yellowed albums. One morning Bonnie brought me eight red-rope legal files, full of documents even young Curtis Mayfair III, Esquire, couldn’t decipher. There were boxes and boxes of medical records, including the notes for perhaps two hundred births, among them Odd Eide, Gus’s grandfather. All of these the records of Hosea Grimm, who built the apothecary and whose influence lived on long after his death, which came before I arrived here in Gunflint.

  Mostly I filed things in bankers’ boxes and set them aside, and at the end of a morning Bonnie or Lenora would cart them down to the cellar, where wire shelves had been built and arranged like those in a library. But occasionally something stood out and was set aside as an artifact that might warrant inclusion on the walls or in the glass cases we had ordered to furnish the old sales floor of the apothecary.

  One such item was a poster-sized graph of the water level of the Burnt Wood River at the Main Street Bridge for the year 1899, as recorded every day. It charted not only the water level but the phases of the moon, the sunrise and sunset, the direction of the wind at each mealtime, the day’s precipitation, and, in winter, the particular quality of the snow, whether heavy or light, dry or wet. As with all of Hosea Grimm’s notes and documentation and correspondence, the information was recorded in elaborate and very beautiful calligraphy. The graph itself was hand-drawn and perfect, an accomplishment unto itself. What’s most intriguing about it, though, is the note at the bottom of the page, with an asterisk before it: “Aristotle said that venerable and most ancient sage—old Thales of Miletus—decreed all matter and all form were first and last WATER. A fool’s metaphysic, as our measure of April One, Eighteen and Ninety-nine, brought with it him who was most decidedly NOT water, but went by the given name of Rune Evensen. Drowned and dead and fished FROM the water.”

  Everything about the graph speaks to this place. To our need to order that which is chaos and could never be ordered. To our thoroughness in most—if not all—matters. And of course to our feebleness beside this wilderness. When I showed the chart to Gus, he put on his reading glasses and studied it carefully, as though the minute changes in water level nigh a hundred years ago were of great interest and importance.

  He took his glasses off. “I’ve always heard it said Marcus Aas pulled Rune Evensen from the river. That Marcus believed the Evensen property was his by dint of that universal law we now know as finders keepers.” He looked up and smirked and sat on the stool opposite the counter. “It’s hard to imagine that kind of meticulousness, though, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s foolishness. To measure a river that way. A sounding a day.”

  “It’s not so strange,” I said. “He was a scientist, after all.”

  “If Hosea Grimm was a scientist, I’m the king of Norway.”

  “Well, he certainly was meticulous, whatever else he was. A couple days ago we came across the notes he made after your grandfather was born. There were notes for every child he delivered here. Most every letter he ever wrote had a duplicate copy. His record of boats coming and leaving the harbor is more thorough than the lighthouse keeper’s.”

  “Any first-grader can count boats.”

  “But most don’t. I understand you’d deny him any admiration, but he was a man with interesting qualities.”

  Gus waved this thought away with the back of his hand. He tapped the postscript on the graph and said, “Besides, Thales was right, not Grimm. The human body is mostly water, after all.” He glanced at it once more. “Anyway, this”—he ran his fingertip down the column of soundings—“is the simplest sort of inquiry. It rains, the water rises. The snow in the hills melts, the water rises. The last days of a drought summer, the water’s lower. You don’t need to be a philosopher or a scientist to understand that
. People have always mistaken Grimm’s fussiness for learning or wisdom. Fact is, he drew pretty pictures with one hand while he strangled people with the other. He was a crook and a bully. Just like Charlie Aas.”

  Though I mostly shared his view, I said, “That sounds like an opinion your father might have helped you form.”

  He smiled and put his big, warm hand over the back of mine. “There’s more intelligence—more truth—in my father’s book of maps than there is in the mighty Hosea Grimm’s archives.” He removed his hand and walked to the end of the counter and removed the lid from one of the three boxes stacked on the floor. “And certainly there’s more elegance. Mountains are only mountains if they’re mountains.”

  “About any of that, you’d get no argument from me.”

  “And still you’re busy cataloging his life.”

  “Gus, honestly. He wasn’t the only person who lived here. His story isn’t the only one these walls hold. Furthermore, this place”—now it was me spreading my arms to encompass the apothecary altogether—“was, whether you want to see it or not, the centerpiece of this town for most of a century. Some might even say this building made a town out of Gunflint. This place and the Traveler’s Hotel. Otherwise, it was a fishing village. A place to load lumber or trade furs, nothing more.”

  “Of course you’re right,” he said, but then paused and walked back to me. I was rolling up the graph, tying it with string. “But maybe,” Gus said, “if Hosea Grimm had spent a little more time measuring his own conscience instead of the river, my great-grandmother would have lived. Maybe Rebekah Grimm wouldn’t have gone daffy. That’s all I mean to say. Maybe things in Gunflint would have been different for a lot of people.”

  “Should I be offended, Gus?”

  “Offended?”

  “If all of that had happened, you likely wouldn’t be standing here with me now, would you?” I smiled, and he did, too.