by Peter Geye
Still Gus did not get up.
“Come on, bud. Eat a little supper. It’s a hell of a sight better than that lutefisk your mother cooks up each Christmas Eve.”
Gus started playing then, a sort of medley of Christmas songs. He’d figure out the chords and muddle through the first few bars and then give up and go on to the next. “Silent Night.” “What Child Is This?” “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Thinking of the words to the songs was a help, but he didn’t sing them. Only played round and round. Harry finished eating and sat back in his chair, listening.
After a while Gus started playing something else, a farrago of deep and troubled notes. He played without looking up or stopping. After an hour he got up and ate the plate of hare and wiped his hands on his pants, then played for another hour. The wind now so fierce he could only hear that and his song.
“Snuff out the lantern when you’re done,” his father said later.
Gus stopped playing. “Go ahead and turn it off now,” he said, then kept playing in the dark. By the time he set the mandolin on the floor under his bunk, Harry was snoring soundly. The wind was still rocking the shack, whistling through it, making its own song. Gus couldn’t hear the fire ticking in the stove, or his own breathing. So he listened for the words to the song he’d been playing that night. They came to him in those last moments before sleep and were slowly lost in his dreams.
—
Gus woke up when a candle his father was holding lit the cabin from where he stood at the window. The glass was glowing inside and out, flickering like a strobe light. The wind had quieted but still had some legs. Walking to the window himself, Gus saw his father had the pistol in his free hand.
He looked out the window, pressing his hands around his eyes and against the glass to see better. Out on the bay, a great blazing fire lighted up the thirty yards between it and the shack as well as its own smoke rising into the sky above the flames, now twisting wildly in the wind.
“What is it?” Gus said.
“I’d call it the tip of the iceberg.”
—
They did not light the lantern. In the husky dark of the shack they dressed and drank coffee and Harry reloaded the pistol. The sound of bullets snapping into the clip was paralyzing.
Before the sun rose through the trees they stood out at the remains of the fire, still smoldering and smoking: the scorched skeleton of one of the canoes loaded with all their meat, a can of kerosene smudged black, a dozen unburnt ends of split oak, all of it charred and stinking and ringed and soaking in a slurry of soot and ash and melted snow. Harry knelt and prodded the ashes with a gunwale from the canoe that had broken off outside the fire. Cigarette butts littered the ground around it.
“Add arson to the list of his crimes,” he said, slowly circling the ashes, stopping to inspect the boot prints in the snow. Then he walked the trail leading away from the fire for perhaps ten yards and stopped to scan the length of the bay and the woods on either side.
He looked back at Gus standing there. “Well, bud, we’d better find our dancing shoes.”
Harry walked back to the ashes and knelt and poked them once more. “Looks like he cooked up all our meat.” He pulled a charred-black strip from the steaming heap. “I bet the cache’ll be empty.” He nodded. “But we should check.”
Gus bent at the waist and vomited in the snow, stood upright, then bent and vomited again. He wanted to think it was the dreadful stink coming off the ashes—burnt meat, lacquer from the canoe, the kerosene used to light the fire—but it wasn’t this that made him sick. It most certainly was not.
Harry patted his shoulder and led him silently back to shore. He climbed the ladder and peered into the cache for only a second and climbed back down. “Sure enough,” he said. “Son of a bitch.” He gazed out at the ruins of the canoe. “We should see if we can find the plane. See if they’re still around.” He looked at Gus.
“One of us should stay here to watch the shack,” Gus said.
“I want to stick together. I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“We’re going to starve now,” Gus said. “If he doesn’t just shoot us first.”
“He’s not going to shoot us. And we’ve still got food to eat. He’s only testing us. That’s good. It’s his first mistake.”
Gus didn’t answer, simply went into the shack to gear up. When he came out he had his pack on, the rifle slung over his shoulder, his snowshoes under his arm. “I’d rather walk than ski.”
“Okay,” Harry said. He brought his own snowshoes out and they both put theirs on as the sun topped the trees. Side by side they followed the tracks up the bay.
Three men had left them. At the mouth of the bay Harry pointed at an empty fifth of whiskey. The tracks continued north of the bay, though wind had obscured them. Harry stared out across the ice, and Gus did, too.
“That’s where I found the antlers,” he said, as though they’d just been talking about this.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Harry held out his index finger. “I’m thinking we should cross the lake and go north up that shoreline.”
Gus had no intuition of his own. “Okay.”
“It’ll leave us wide open for the time it takes to get across.”
Now Gus looked all around. There were hiding places galore in those woods. He felt a moment’s panic but subdued it. “I guess we’re pretty much out in the open anywhere.” He checked around again. “Do you think they’re close by?”
“No, I don’t. I think they’ve probably left.”
“For now,” Gus said, and felt childish about thinking out loud.
“Right. For now.”
They began crossing the lake in the tracks of Charlie’s gang. Midway, they veered north, and father and son paused. The snow was deep and tough going even in snowshoes and Harry said, “Maybe just keep following the tracks, eh?”
Gus answered by turning into the already trodden snow.
After half an hour they found the grooves of the plane’s floats, which spun for the flight out with two parallel sets. There the men’s tracks stepped into packed snow, and Gus noticed how their strides lengthened. He and Harry stepped into the tracks, too, and before long they came to the last of them. More cigarette butts were scattered over the ground here, and Harry muttered that Charlie was a complete pig and then turned and looked back from where they’d come. “I reckon that’s a three-mile walk, eh?”
Again Gus didn’t answer. He felt somewhat better since they were gone for now and because his father had been correct in predicting they would be; then he tamped the feeling out and told himself to remember exactly what had happened last night. That thought was bad enough, but then he imagined all that was still to come.
THOSE LETTERS had put a stutter in Gus, and a week passed without my hearing from him. Then it was his wife who called. “Come over for dinner tomorrow,” Sarah said. “Gus has been wandering around here like Harry did in the end. I can’t stand it. Could you maybe help him get his bearings back? And, Lord knows, I could use the sound of another woman’s voice around here. What do you say?”
I should’ve guessed how much those letters would shake him up. Though I could plainly see Gus’s reckoning would require visiting more than his and his father’s past, I don’t think he did yet. And so those letters pushed him right off course. Got him thinking about older blood. People he’d not thought were involved with the story he was telling.
My initial notion was to decline Sarah’s invitation. It was one thing to sip a morning’s cup of coffee with Gus at the kitchen table, another altogether to dredge up so many feelings in the evening. But after all the time I’d spent in the shadow of Sarah and Gus’s domesticity, sitting vigil by Harry and his sorry thoughts, it would’ve been rude to say no. So I walked over the next evening.
I should add that Sarah’s one of the best ladies this town has. Not only does she keep their woodpile stacked and their ho
me impeccable, not only has she raised two valedictorians of Arrowhead High and kept her husband in starched shirts for twenty-odd years, managed to finish law school at the age of twenty-three, and gotten elected a sixth-district judge right here before her kids were done with grade school, but she did all this without ever crossing another living soul. More than that, she treated folks with a kindness that few of us can even aspire to, let alone reach. She’d certainly been kind to me. More than once she brought me a dinner plate while I sat at Harry’s bedside. On the hardest nights—when he was aggrieved and howling like a loon, when his anguish truly found its pitch—she would insist I share a cup of tea with her before I left. She never asked me one question I didn’t want her to, either, which might say more about her goodness than anything else.
We were always friendly, but until Harry took to bed we’d never wined and dined each other. Nor even after he did. Sarah and I, we’d say our hellos at the market or the odd social gathering down in town, and wave when our cars passed up and down the Burnt Wood Trail, and we exchanged Christmas cards. But we were not bosom friends. Perhaps this was due to our difference in age or the strangeness attending the fact that I was her father-in-law’s ladylove. Certainly it wasn’t because I didn’t find her charming in every respect. Even so, I admit I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to her home for dinner that night.
Gus was shoveling off their deck when I arrived, their house smelling equally of the fire in the hearth and the soup on the stove. Mushroom, turned out. How she could have known it’s my favorite I don’t know. But that’s another of her gifts.
“It’s so nice to have you in our home again,” she said. “It’s criminal, I know. All winter you’ve been keeping Gus company and I haven’t mustered the courtesy to thank you for it until now.”
“Gus and I are just keeping each other company. The pleasure’s been as much mine as his.”
The table was set as though she were expecting the governor: linens and fine stemware and cloth napkins folded into the shapes of swans, three of each. She knew to mix me a toddy, which she was doing at the counter. She knew to play the music quietly, my hearing not being what it once was.
“Well, there’s no excuse in any case.” She offered me the toddy. “But you’re here now.”
I took the glass from her hand.
“Gus told me how much you enjoyed them. I mulled lemon zest rather than simply squeezing a wedge in there.” She smiled. “I hope it suits you.” She picked up her glass of red wine and raised it. “To righting a wrong. I’m looking forward to this evening.”
“Me, too,” I said, then took a sip. “Mmmm,” I hummed.
She ushered me into the great room and gestured to the chair beside the hearth.
“If I sit there you’ll need a crane to get me out,” I said, and this was true of the bonded-leather chair as brown as a beaver’s pelt and deeper than Lake Superior, sitting under the floor lamp next to the fireplace.
Sarah smiled. “That’s Gus’s reading chair. He wouldn’t admit it, but he very nearly needs his own crane to get out of it these days.” She walked to the sofa instead.
I sat down, but before Sarah did, she pulled the screen aside and added two birch logs. The fire flared as she plopped down on the ottoman and took a sip of her wine. She was tapping her toe to the sounds coming from somewhere behind us.
“The music,” I said, “it sounds nice.”
“That’s Gus and Davey Blum. They recorded a CD in Davey’s basement some time ago. I guess boys will always be boys, right?” She smiled and had another sip of wine. When I followed suit, she looked straight at me. “I remember what it was like the first few weeks after Greta left for college. Tom, of course, was already gone. I remember how quiet the house was. How strange it was to be here without either of them. Like there was something missing.” She smiled again. “Well, something was missing. But we got used to it. Gus started talking more, though it took him a long time to find his voice. The one meant only for me. I think he’d admit that. He started playing more music. That’s how he found his bearings. By playing his guitar.” She took another deep breath and cocked her head. “I love the sound of a guitar, don’t you? And when it’s played by a handsome man?” She fanned herself with her open hand.
It did sound nice, his guitar and Davey Blum’s banjo turning melodies together. But it got me to thinking about how Gus would often bring out his guitar while Harry was still here. Usually late at night, while Sarah and I sat on the deck with a cup of tea. Sometimes the guitar was the only thing that could quiet him down enough that he could finally fall asleep. I looked at Sarah, at her beautiful, smiling face, and understood she’d meant the music as a special kindness. “Yes,” I said, “I love the sound of a guitar. Thank you for putting it on.”
Gus came in through the sliding door. “Hello, hello,” he said, stomping his boots on the rug. He unzipped his coat and after he’d hung it on the coatrack he, too, cocked his ear. “Good grief, Sarah, are you playing that CD?”
She looked at me and winked.
Gus walked over to the stereo and hit a button, and the music stopped.
“Party pooper,” Sarah said.
“Miss Lovig has heard more than enough of me lately.” He stopped at the counter and picked up his toddy before he went over and kissed Sarah on the top of her head. “Berit,” he said, and smiled. He admired the fire, which was burning beautifully, then looked again at me. He sat down beside Sarah and put his hand on her knee.
“I’m happy to see you, Gus,” I said. “I’ve missed you this week.”
“Thank you for coming. Sarah has cooked us up a right feast, you can be sure of that.”
“It smells scrumptious.”
She gave his hand a squeeze. “I’d hate to ruin it,” she said as she stood up. “Excuse me while I tend to the food. Gus, keep the fire burning.”
He stood and watched her straighten her skirt and walk across the great room to the kitchen before he sat back in the brown chair. He put his feet up on the ottoman and raised his mug. “To you, Berit.”
I raised my own mug. “And you.”
“The new snow’ll melt before this time tomorrow,” he said. “Why I went out there to shovel I do not know.”
“Your father was the same. As soon as it started to fall he started shoveling.” I felt the blush rise in my cheeks. “Of course, you know how your father was.”
“I never saw him shovel once. At least not that I remember.” He smiled. “That was my job.” He took another long sip of his drink. “Do I owe you an explanation, Berit?”
“Whatever for?”
“For not being in touch.”
“Heavens, no,” I said. And I meant it. I admit it had been strange to see him once or twice a week for so many weeks running, then not at all. But certainly he owed me neither explanation nor apology.
He nodded and tried to smile and then glanced at Sarah in the kitchen. “It was those damn letters,” he said, speaking into the mug more than to me. He pointed at the counter, where the letters were sitting.
“Should I have kept them from you?”
“No. Of course not. I’m grateful you gave them to me.”
“Have you figured out who can make sense of them?”
“Signe will be home next month. For the opening of the historical society. She’s offered to have a look at them. I guess there’s no hurry.” He looked at me. “Right?”
“They’ve sat there these hundred years.”
He smiled.
“For what it’s worth, they haunt me, too. I’ve thought an awful lot about them since they turned up. But I imagine it’s a bit harder for you.”
He studied them one more time, stood to put a log on the fire, but then saw it didn’t need one. “I wish I could say why they’re so distracting. I just can’t put my finger on it.” He sat now on the raised hearth and leaned back against the fieldstones. His eyes caught the fire’s flare and shined, and in that instant I saw Harry’s eyes a
nd my breath caught. I had to put my fingers to my lips. “Is it strange being here again?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He nodded at the far side of the house, into the dark hallway that led to the room where Harry’s last days were spent. “I believe it,” he said. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to come. But Sarah—” His voice trailed off and he merely raised his mug in her direction.
“She knows best,” I said.
He smiled again.
“I wonder if those letters are bothering you because they make the story even longer, and you might’ve thought you were nearing the end.”
Now his smile faded, even as his face kept a kind aspect. “I guess I figured out some time this winter that the story was never going to end. I didn’t want to tell you for fear you’d quit listening.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d known this truth from the first word he uttered. I just hoped he didn’t notice I was looking down the dark hallway again.
—
Sarah called us to the table and ladled three bowls of soup. She offered wine and water and bread, and butter she’d salted herself. Two candles were guttering above the table. She raised her glass and toasted family and friends and the end of winter, and we ate.
The soup tasted even better than it smelled, and the freshly baked bread was still warm. There wasn’t a hair on her head out of place, and if she’d been anyone else I might have resented how effortlessly she managed everything. Instead, I listened to her stories and questions and marveled at how truly good she was.
When we finished the soup she cleared our bowls and plated the main course, baked steelhead trout she’d caught herself. Parsnips mashed with chives. Brussels sprouts sautéed with bacon and garlic. A ramekin of drawn butter on the edge of each plate. More bread. More wine.
The conversation turned to Greta and Tom and the accomplishments of their young lives. I knew them to be outstanding kids. Kind and smart and clever about all the right things. It was no surprise to hear they were doing well, Tom in graduate school in New Hampshire and Greta working as a cub reporter for a weekly newspaper in Minneapolis. It was odd to watch Gus talk about his kids, the expression playing across his face so different from the one I’d grown accustomed to. He was happy, I could see that.
