by Peter Geye
That night he counted the rings on the birch log he stoked his fire with before adjourning to his dreams, which came to him lit by more northern lights. When he woke in the morning he made his coffee and thought of home. He was pleased by his efforts to chart a course to get back, but knew full well that, given the vast number of steps required to get there, it would no longer be the same place he’d left, that the home he’d known was gone forever, and that his next home would be one he’d make himself. Whether that was in this life or the next seemed not so consequential. This thought carried him back toward the shack.
Before he reached their lake he took a detour, changing his skis for his snowshoes and taking an unexplored course along the western shore. For four hours he pushed through the drifted snow, passing islands and rocky shoreline and the headwaters of three streams. At the last of these he took the field glasses from his neck and scanned the wide, frozen world. He spotted the entrance to their bay and the smoke from their chimney rising weakly through the trees, one last mile between him and the shack. Looking north, he could see clear to the end of the lake, some three miles away. He took a last look back at the tracks coming up the shore and meeting him where he stood. With the field glasses back around his neck, he scouted where steps in the same direction would take him, past a gentle shore clear of trees thirty yards up off the water.
And right there he saw the moose antlers, their tips sticking out of the snow only thirty paces from where he’d just surveyed the world. He dug them free of the snow and ice and discovered there were two sets, their skulls locked together eye to eye. On his knees, he peered into the hollow sockets and studied the long teeth and the patterns on the antlers themselves and worried very much about the last breaths of these beasts. He looked around the ground on which he stood—all covered in snow, any trace of the carnage that must have accompanied their death lost to time and water and wind. Still, he could hear the snarling wolves and feel the final desperate kicks of these two bulls writhing on the ground.
And no sooner did he imagine the screaming of the ravens than he heard exactly this—eight or ten or twenty, a whole unkindness, coming over the trees. He watched those living things sharp against the sky, riding gyres up and tucking their wings to veer back down. He might have thought them a warning if he’d had sense to think anything. Instead, he took rope from his pack, laced the heavy antlers to his back, then crossed the lake to the shack.
I’D THOUGHT we had finished clearing out the upper floors of the apothecary. We’d stored the last boxes in the cellar, almost finished replacing windows and repairing warped floorboards, and we were to tear out a wall upstairs to make room for a larger office. The plan to open the historical society by April seemed feasible. Put fresh paint on the walls and a coat of lacquer on the floor, then hang a sign out front, and that’s all that was left to do on the ground floor. It was a winter’s worth of work that I regarded with equal parts satisfaction and doubt and foolishness. Who, after all, would ever visit this old place? No doubt the townsfolk knew enough of their history to want to avoid it. Visitors? They wanted donuts and T-shirts and chance encounters with moose on the trail, not black-and-white photographs and antique housewares and hundred-year-old dresses once worn by the town’s mad hatter.
In any case, I hadn’t been there in a week when I got a call at home. Thursday last, Bonnie on the other end. “There’s something you should see,” she said. So I finished my breakfast and drove in.
Up on the second floor, in Hosea Grimm’s old office, the contractors found a safe behind that wall they were removing. There had been a heavy shelf on casters in front of it before they’d set to work. Bonnie and I stood where splintered two-by-fours framed a black steel door with the words DIEBOLD SAFE & LOCK CO. arced around the tumbler. “Oh my,” I said, my mind wheeling at the possibilities. “What do we do? How can we open it?”
“We’ve sent for a locksmith from Duluth,” Bonnie told me. “I called Buck at the hardware store, but he didn’t think he could do it. Someone should be here before lunchtime.”
And they were. Two brothers spent the better part of an hour cracking the safe while I wondered if there was anything in the world that might surprise me should it fall out. In all the time they worked I couldn’t come up with a single thing. But I was surprised when the safecrackers pulled the handle down and swung the door open: a cigar box full of hundred-dollar banknotes from the First National Bank of Butte, the deed to that old cathouse up in the timber, a Norwegian Bible, a fine hairbrush. But what surprised me was a stack of letters bound with a thin leather cord, which I untied. There were twenty-six in all, fourteen addressed to Thea Inger Eide, c/o Rune Evensen, Gunflint, Minnesota. The others were addressed to Odd and Inger Eide, in Hammerfest, Norway.
“I’ll get you a chair,” Bonnie said, then scurried down the hall. She returned a moment later and set the chair behind me. The brothers from Duluth were packing their bag, and when they finished Bonnie walked them downstairs.
I watched them disappear around the banister and then flipped through the letters one by one, pausing to read the names on each envelope again. Thea Eide. Odd and Inger Eide. Their names were like some sort of strange proof of their existence, as if Harry and later Gus weren’t themselves sufficient. Good Lord, how much had that family endured? Thea came to Gunflint in the autumn of 1895. A sixteen-year-old girl expecting to find her aunt and uncle, she stepped off that boat onto a harsh and bitter shore. Her aunt had hanged herself only weeks before she arrived. Her uncle, Rune Evensen, was crazy before his wife strung a rope from the barn rafters. Perhaps it was a blessing that, instead of meeting him on the Lighthouse Road, she found Hosea Grimm instead. He brought Thea home to Rebekah as though she were a lost kitten.
For a long time Rebekah kept a photograph of Thea on her bureau. Taken by the double-dealing lens of Hosea’s Kodak, the same camera that he used to photograph Rebekah. She spoke of Thea as though she was the only permanent thing she ever knew in life. A quiet and pretty and nervous girl, she had an angelic air, and her kindness was the most obvious thing about her. Rebekah once said that the truest testament to her perfection—the word she used—was that Hosea never once tried to take advantage of it.
Two days after she arrived, Thea went to work cooking at a lumbering camp up on the Burnt Wood River. She did not speak English. She was made to live in an earthen grave, serving a hundred rough men three meals a day. Among all those souls she could not count a single friend. She toiled like a slave’s dog for a hellish winter, and came back to Gunflint in springtime expecting a child. As Rebekah told it, lots of folks thought, with some conviction, that she was the new Mary, mother of Jesus—so inexplicable was it, her emergence from those woods with a bellyful of child. Later that summer, when the Canadian Mounties brought through an itinerant watch salesman on charges of rape and horse thievery, Thea’s virginity was questioned, but never her immaculacy. She went to witness his arraignment with her Norwegian Bible in lieu of a phrasebook, still unable to speak an English sentence.
I used to listen to Rebekah’s stories about Thea and wonder that a woman so strange and beautiful herself could hold another in such exalted esteem. Especially one whose whole life in Gunflint seemed built of suffering. But when I later heard the stories as they’d been given to Harry, I began to believe them. He had a triptych of photographs of Thea Eide on his mantel, much like Rebekah had hers on the bureau. In one of them she’s holding her infant child, Odd Eide, Harry’s father, with a beatific expression on her face that not even the aging, faded paper could diminish. She was dead only a few weeks after the photograph was taken. Died under the care of Hosea Grimm, who had, as Rebekah told me, tried to slice a sadness out of her. A sadness, she was quick to add, that didn’t exist. Thea was the most blissful mother the world had ever known. Rebekah was sure of that. Harry spoke of her as divine, as though she had never really existed any more than the heavens must. How he came by this opinion was not hard to imagine, even if his father knew
her only for the first three weeks of his life. Maybe Thea Eide did have some communion with the Savior.
And here were these letters. I don’t know why, but I wondered most not about lost words between Thea and her parents back in Norway, not about the sadness these letters must have delivered, but, rather, about who had stolen them. Hosea was the likeliest culprit, of course. One thing I’d learned for certain in my months of work on the historical society was that his conniving knew almost no limits.
Good Lord, those letters nearly exhaled their sadness. I thought of the countless ones I’d sorted downstairs, when my job was mostly to slot the daily mail. How many words and wishes had passed through my unsuspecting hands? The I-love-yous and we-regret-to-inform-yous and have-you-heards? All of that life. And here were the lives of Thea Eide and her parents. Stolen. Kept. It brought tears to my eyes.
—
My own life in Gunflint began with a letter as well, sent by my father to Rebekah Grimm, one that commended me as a chaste, hardworking girl of sixteen from a God-fearing family of storeowners in Duluth, who was interested in the clerk’s position advertised in the Duluth Tribune and able to leave her studies at Denfeld High School to fill said position at a moment’s notice. He included a picture of me as well as a few words about his store, a grocery on the Traphagen Block that his father had founded. What he didn’t write about was the larger truth that, like many businesses in Duluth in 1936, ours was failing. The shelves were near empty and we had no credit, despite years of keeping our word and our end of the bargain. Our customers suffered the same hard times as we did. Of course, many suffered worse. But our troubles were plenty and true.
My mother was sickly, my father despairing. We’d already lost our modest home and moved into my spinster aunt’s even more modest home. It was a story playing out all over the country, my father assured anyone who would listen. I suppose it was his attempt to console himself for the most difficult decision he had to make, which was to send me off so I might earn a few dollars and ease his burden. I doubt he thought I’d be gone forever.
I did not want to leave my parents, but, even so young and naïve, I understood our situation. It wasn’t hard to see how the Depression afflicted nearly everyone. And perhaps because of my youth I saw an opportunity here, and was frankly excited when Rebekah Grimm replied with a letter of her own, addressed not to my father, as might have been expected, but to me.
Miss Berit Lovig:
Find enclosed passage for one aboard the Northland bus service from Duluth to Gunflint for January 13. When you disembark in Gunflint, come without delay to 1 Lighthouse Road. Dress appropriately. No pants. Only dresses, unruffled or otherwise unfancified. If you do not own such dresses, they will be provided for you, and the cost will be deducted from your wages. You will be paid $.35 per hour in accordance with the standard of this town for unskilled lady laborers. Of that wage, you will have $6 deducted for room and board at the end of each week. I expect you to work daily except Sundays, when you are free to attend church should you go in for that sort of foolishness. I await your arrival.
—Miss Rebekah Grimm.
When I found that old letter in a desk drawer, it took me back to my girlish days with force. There it was after almost sixty years: my passport to the place I’ve called home for my whole adult life. What if my father hadn’t seen that ad? What if he’d felt too weak or too proud to reply? What if I’d seemed unsatisfactory to Rebekah Grimm? These questions troubled me, but I will admit to something: the first thought I had on reading that letter again (for the first time in 708 months, in 21,568 days, I’ve counted it both ways) was not of my own life, not exactly, but, rather, of what my life would have looked like had Harry been absent from it. It would have been different in a hundred different ways.
Of my bus ride to Gunflint in January of 1937 I remember only the miserable faces, fewer and fewer of them as we passed through each small town, until, finally, only a little old lady and I myself remained. She stepped off the bus before me in Gunflint and I never saw her again. I asked someone for directions to the given address and they directed me the few blocks there. I remember walking up the wide wooden staircase, the cold winter breeze and weak sun on my back. Rebekah stood at the window. She must have been watching me. I carried only one suitcase and a hand-me-down purse my mother suggested would make me seem more ladylike. I set them both down as I entered the store. Rebekah came and stood before me.
“Miss Grimm?” I asked.
She lowered her eyeglasses and looked down her fine nose. She was as beautiful as she was strange, two facts obvious at first glance, and already she scared me.
“You’re rather less pretty than I expected,” she said. “Less pretty than that picture you sent, certainly.” She closed her eyes as though exhausted and said, “Take off your coat and stand up straight. There will be no slouching here.”
When I took off my coat and stood up straight, she walked around me as if inspecting a museum piece.
“Another photograph telling lies,” she said, somewhat under her breath. “But that’s just fine. That’s good. Plainness will keep the likes of Charlie Aas from loitering.”
She crossed the room to the counter and I followed. When we got there she stopped and looked down her nose yet again. “This is your finest dress?”
“It is my only dress,” I admitted.
In my memory, she stared for an hour, but likely it was only a second or two. “We’ll have to order you another dress, then. We might fix your hair as well.” Seeming satisfied with this assessment, she then began showing me around.
I knew from that first day that in her company I would be lonely. But I knew also that my loneliness—no matter how it came to bloom—would always pale beside hers. In the vacancy of her eyes and the timbre of her voice I could gauge how the years had done their work on her. And in that selfsame moment I vowed I would never become a woman like her.
—
Gus stood at the glass countertop, where the letters were laid out like a game of cards. I’d called him at the school to ask him to stop by after class, and he came without asking why. After a few minutes he set his satchel down and took off his coat and rubbed his hands through his hair. He picked a letter and looked at it front and back, then rubbed the Norwegian stamp and laid the envelope in its place on the counter. “You found them in a safe?”
I nodded.
“What else was in there?”
“Money. Lots of it. A property deed. A hairbrush with a mother-of-pearl handle. Those letters. And a Norwegian Bible.”
“Son of a gun.” He picked up another letter, one of Thea Eide’s, and inspected it as he had the other. “How much money?”
“I don’t honestly know. Scads of it.”
“Dirty money?”
“I doubt much clean money passed through his hands.”
He set the second letter down. “What actually happened to all his wealth?”
“It went to Rebekah. A kind of justice, really, seeing how much he made off her likeness.”
“What did she do with it?”
“Well, she lived to be ninety-four. That alone was expensive. There were those ten years at the rest home to pay for. She took care of me. My pension, she called it. It’s how I built my home. How I buy my groceries. She left a huge sum to the Gunflint Historical Society. It’s how we’re paying for all these renovations.” I couldn’t tell if he was even listening. “I think she knew that if she tried to give it to your father, or to you, she’d have been rebuffed. She wouldn’t have been able to bear any more rejection.”
He hefted the Bible.
“That was Thea Eide’s, no doubt.”
“And the hairbrush?” he said.
I pulled it from my pocket and laid it beside the letters. “I presume this was Rebekah’s. Thea’s belongings were quite meager.”
Gus picked up a third letter, from Norway, and walked over to the front window, held it up to the late afternoon light, and looked back at me.
“Can I open it?”
“I figure they belong to you and your sister.”
He returned to the counter, took a letter opener from a leather cup filled with pens and scissors and bric-a-brac, and slit the envelope open. He blew gently into it and removed the single sheet of paper and smoothed it carefully on the glass counter. The letter was covered in faint black ink, and Gus looked down on it for as long as it might have taken him to read it.
“Does anyone in town still speak Norwegian?” he asked.
“Signe does.”
“And she’s in Minneapolis.”
I thought about Ingrid Gunnarson, sitting in her shared room up at the rest home, her mind gone much as Harry’s had. Her daughter was living somewhere out on the East Coast. It seemed unfathomable that there were no longer any Norwegian speakers here. “I can’t think of a single one,” I admitted.
“So that’s that,” he said, motioning at the letters. “They were locked in a safe for a hundred goddamn years and now they’re still mute. Jesus.”
He cut open another letter, written by his great-grandmother, and stared at it for a long time, shaking his head and gritting his teeth.
