by Peter Geye
But for others, perhaps most, the moment is blindsiding. Not only do they fail to see it coming but also might never even catch its trail or notice at all that it has passed. I cannot say if one way of recognizing that moment is preferable to another, or if there are cases when the profit is in never knowing. But I count Gus among those whose moment was missed. A pity, too, considering how fateful it was.
That morning when Harry went after Charlie, Gus stepped into the sleeping sack and arranged the Duluth pack under him and sat back against the tree again. To wait for something he couldn’t truly imagine. He hated his father. He’d established that much. But as soon as Harry was gone he wanted him back. Gus was exhausted after no sleep. He was cold. The snow still fell.
And Charlie was near to hand.
Something like half an hour went by. During his months on the borderlands, Gus had become an expert keeper of time. He knew the hour by the sun and by feel and even in his distress of that morning he marked the minutes as they marched by. He was an Eide, after all. In fact, he was more intent on the movement of time than he was on movements in the woods, and at first he mistook the shifting trees for the snow playing devil with him. Three times the forest blurred and then refocused, and the fourth blurring was accompanied by Charlie’s voice. This wasn’t Charlie shouting from thirty yards away on the bay, but behind one of those tripping trees not thirty feet from where Gus sat in the sleeping bag.
“What kind of a father would leave his son out here?”
Gus could see Charlie’s long gray fur coat, half of it anyway, the hem of which met his leather galligaskins. Gus could see one of his eyes and the brim of his black hat. He could see one hand and the fingerless gloves and the blueing of the .38 Special held in it. He saw all of that and also the cigar hanging half chewed from Charlie’s red face.
“Don’t shoot your dick off with that little popgun sitting on your lap. You move one muscle and I’ll put a bullet right between your eyes.”
“I could have shot you last night,” Gus said, his voice cracking.
“You should’ve. You missed your chance. Seems to be a common refrain among you Eide assholes. Always missing the fucking chance.”
Gus looked down for only a second, and when he looked up again Charlie had moved to another, closer tree. Now he had his .38 Special raised in his right hand and with his left he lit his cigar.
“Smells good, don’t it?” He blew a long stream of smoke toward him. “I’d offer you one, but you won’t live long enough to enjoy it.”
For the second time in five hours there was a gun between the two of them, a thought that was, to Gus, as incredible now as it was then. And no less horrifying in either decade. He was sure of that.
“I was thinking,” Charlie said, “sitting here listening to you and your old man jabbering, that I actually admire your moxie, Gus. Getting your hate out like that? I approve. I get a brotherly feeling with you. Yes, I do.”
“You’re nobody’s brother.”
“Sadly.” He took a puff on his cigar. “I suppose your old man’s been filling your head on that subject. Don’t believe everything you hear, son.”
“Don’t call me son.”
“I’ll call you whatever I goddamn please.” He had a couple more puffs. “You don’t even know where you are, do you? That fucking bungler took you all this way and you don’t have a goddamn clue.”
“I know right where I am.”
“You don’t know your ass from a tea kettle. Shut your goddamn mouth.”
Charlie walked a few steps closer, and now Gus could see the gray in his whiskers. The shine in his eyes and the rifle barrel poking over his shoulder.
“I’m gonna tell you what your problem is. What your old man’s problem is, anyway, and since it’s his I presume it’s yours. It ain’t that you’re up here playing voyageur. Hell, we’ve all got our heroes. The problem is, you’ve picked the wrong goddamn heroes. Who wants to be the asshole trapping the beaver? The right man wants to be the guy wearing the beaver-skin hat. That would be me, wearing that fucking hat. Do you understand?”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m the sanest man you ever laid eyes on. Know why? I got everything I ever wanted. You should judge a man by what he wants—and what I want, I got. Including you in my crosshairs.” He puffed the cigar. “It’s a sad sack of shit I see over there, too.” Charlie cocked his head and stared at him for a long time. “How does it feel, all of this nonsense coming to an end like this? Think of the effort it took you to get here. All those portages lugging your gear through the woods. All those times you wanted to spit in your daddy’s face. All the fear you felt. All the times you just wanted to curl up on your mama’s lap.” He smiled ghoulishly. “And who was there with her? Not you. Not your daddy. Me, in this beaver-skin hat. I was in her lap and up her ass and everything else.”
He pointed his cigar at Gus. “Now you got that want-my-mama look. All you Eide boys, loving your mommies. But where is she? Where’s your daddy’s mama?” Charlie cleared his nose and throat and spit yellow sputum onto the snow. “You could go back to the first Eide mama that ever lived and she still wouldn’t be there. Probably because she was out in the barn with the guy in the fucking beaver-skin hat.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I know everything, boy. I know what’s mine and what will be. I already told you, I’m the czar of this world and what I say goes. I could tell this snow to stop and it would obey before the next goddamn flake.” He stepped out from behind the tree and started walking sideways toward Gus. “I know Daddy-Boy left you sitting here because he was scared shitless of the czar. I know you’ve got a sleeping bag full of piss over there.” He stopped twenty paces in front of Gus, nothing between them but a bare stretch of frozen, snow-covered ground. “And I know you’re dead. It doesn’t even give me a minute’s pause to say it. You’re as dead as goddamn Kennedy. And your head’s about to look the same as his, too.”
“Gus was right. You don’t know anything.”
Then they both looked toward the oaks, where Harry was no more than ten yards away, crouched on one knee, with the Remington rock-solid in his hands.
Charlie took a last puff from his cigar and dropped it into the snow, eyes jumping between the Eides—quickly, but not in a panic—before he settled them on Harry. He kept the .38 Special aimed at Gus.
“Gus, listen to me,” Harry said. “I want you to close your eyes. Close your eyes and don’t open them until I tell you to.”
“You say one more word and I’ll shoot your worthless fucking son.”
“You be quiet,” Harry said. Then, to Gus, “Close your eyes. None of this is happening, bud. None of it ever happened.”
“Lying right up to the end, huh?”
Gus closed his eyes.
“You’ve upset your boy, Harry.”
“Don’t mention him again.”
“This is a hell of a knot here,” Charlie said. “I can’t say I saw this coming.”
“I did,” Harry said. “Now put the gun down, Charlie.”
“I don’t think so. I was just telling Gus what I was about to do with this here gun. How his head’s about to look like our former president’s. And you, asshole, are next in line.”
“Why the hell do you keep talking about the president?” Harry said.
“See?” Charlie said. “You come up here and live like hermits while the world passes you by. President Kennedy was assassinated, you dipshits. The world ain’t what it was before. It never was. And you just never saw it, did you, Harry?”
“I saw plenty, Charlie. What I didn’t see, I know that, too. I know you killed your brother. I know there’s only one way of stopping you, sad as I am to say it.”
Charlie laughed uproariously. “You think you’re up for this? With your little boy crouched in the snow over there? My money’s on no. I don’t think you got the sand to see this through.” He held the Colt on Gus and swept his gaze to Harry.
G
us closed his eyes so tight it hurt.
“I won’t ask you to put that gun down again,” Harry said.
“Tell me one thing,” Charlie said. “How do you think your wife’ll feel about all this? You think you’ve got troubles now? Just wait on that.”
“Gus, are your eyes closed? We’re not here, buddy. We never were.”
“You can keep your fucking eyes closed, boy, but that don’t mean you ain’t here. You sure as shit are.”
“Do not open your eyes, Gus. Sing to yourself.”
“There’s only one song for this rat fuck,” Charlie said. “And it can’t be sung without a church choir and an organ playing alongside.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth, Charlie Aas. Shut your mouth and put that gun on the ground. This is the last time—” But there were no more words, just two shots, fired practically the same moment, two claps of thunder in the woods—Boom! Boom!—and then a silence as profound as a corpse.
—
“One of the last things my father ever said to me, or one of the last things before he started to lose it, was about those gunshots. Christ, Berit, I can hear them still, honest to God. And not just figuratively. That sound’s in me yet, like a scar from some childhood pox.”
Gus’s voice was barely louder than the snowfall coming down outside the apothecary.
“He said he was an ugly man, and that ugliness first found him when he shot Charlie Aas. He said it wasn’t the only ugly thing he’d ever done, that there was plenty of ugly to go around. But he also said that all of his ugliness and failures, all of the things he’d done wrong and regretted, they were all worth it because of how beautiful Signe and I were. He said that the beauty of our lives made the ugliness of his worth it. Even our time up on the borderlands, horrible and wrong as it was, turned out to have its own benefit—in his life and mine, he thought—because it proved to him how deep his love truly was. Despite those gunshots.
“You knew him, Berit. Probably you knew him better than I did myself in his later years. So you know I never could’ve doubted his love. It was as unequivocal as Lake Superior, and I took it just as much for granted. But to have heard him say that? About our time up there, after all these years? I don’t really know, Berit.”
He looked out at the snow and studied it.
“There’ve been many days in my life when I might’ve sworn it never happened. The whole adventure, but especially that morning. I actually swore once—with my hand on a Bible in the Arrowhead County Courthouse—that it never did happen. And that’s how it often felt. Except for those two gunshots and their echoes through me all these years.”
I watched him there at the window and thought maybe I’d been wrong about him. Maybe that was his moment of reckoning, not that morning against the tree on the bay of that remote lake. Maybe it had taken him that long for the four directions of his compass to come together. Maybe he might now have some peace.
“Those echoes, they’re like part of my own heartbeat, Berit.”
He turned to look at me, but then closed his eyes and lowered his head.
“I kept my eyes closed, just like he told me to. Ever the obedient son.” He closed his eyes tighter still. “And then those gunshots were alive. So loud and close I felt them not only in my body but through the tree I was leaning against. They’d become part of me the second I heard them. Two shots, and for the third time on the borderlands I was dead. The third, but not the last time.”
THE FIRST LETTER was about trees. “I had begun to think that trees were not real,” she wrote her parents. “When the boat to Tromsø came through the fog and the shore was there, I saw them. I was very happy.” The rest of that first letter, dated 11 October 1895, and the next several were like a strange trip through time. They recounted in childlike detail Thea Eide’s passage to America (pregnant cabinmate, stillborn child), her landing in Gunflint (no one to meet her, wild fear), meeting Rebekah (“The saddest person you ever saw”), and her opinion of Hosea Grimm (“A nice man, even if he’s strange sometimes”). She told her mother that her sister—Thea’s aunt—had passed away tragically, and that this had rendered her uncle unfit to help upon her arrival or since. She wrote in detail about the conditions of the logging camp where she found work as a cook and spoke highly of the kind, rough men who felled the trees. On the subject of the dogs guarding the camp, she wrote a whole letter. “One I have named Freya. The top of her head comes up to my belly. Each morning and each night I bring them scraps. They are beautiful, like bears. We all feel more safe for having them.”
But the most revealing letters were the last two she wrote. The first was dated 23 April 1896.
Kjære mutter og pappa,
I am happy to tell you that I have married a man named Joshua Smith and we will be having a child. We were wed in Immanuel Lutheran Church here in Gunflint, Amerika, by Pastor Erolson. Mr. Smith is a watch seller and is eight years my senior. He is a kind man and God fearing and I am happy and lucky to have found him. We will live in town. I will send a photograph of the child and his father when he is born. I am not afraid of bearing the child. Mr. Hosea has always been kind and he will see that all is fine with me. My love to you both.
Kyss og klem—
Dine Thea Inger
I looked up. “My goodness.”
“You can say that again,” Gus said.
“What about the last letter?”
He handed it to me, translated in his sister’s elegant scrawl, and the photograph that had waited in the envelope for a century. I looked at a black-and-white snapshot worn almost to the point of invisibility, though the outline of a cherubic babe was plain to see. I stared at it long enough that there passed from one minute to the next a likeness to each of the Eide men: first Odd, then Harry, then Gus. Even Tom, Gus’s grown son. I felt a chill go up my back.
“Read the letter,” Gus said softly. “It’s the last one she sent. The last she meant to send.”
There was no date on that letter, though on the back of the photograph Odd’s birthday was written: 26 November 1896. The letter began as they all did.
Kjære mutter og pappa,
This is my son. My dear sweet son. Odd Einar, I call him. He is all mine. Pappa, I have named him for you. Maybe he will grow to be as good. He will. I am certain he will. He is so gentle. You sent me to Amerika for happiness and I have found it. He will have his own happiness someday. I only wish you could hold him, Mutter. Since you cannot, I will hold him for us both. I am well. I was brave. I remember how brave you were, Mutter. I was you. I am so happy! If I die tomorrow my only unhappiness will be that I can’t see my Odd Einar grow. I love the sound of his cry. He cries now. I must feed him. But I will write again soon. Thank you for sending me to Amerika.
Dine Thea Inger
“I didn’t think Thea Eide was ever married,” he said.
“She wasn’t.” I set the letter down among the others.
“But—” Gus picked it up and held it limply, as though offering a piece of suspect evidence in a trial whose verdict had already been decided.
“I guess she had her own stories.”
“I expect she did.” He scanned the letter again before putting it atop the others. “It was often said that my grandfather was misbegotten. Like my father after him.”
“That’s what I always heard, too.”
“From Rebekah?”
“Yes. Though she wasn’t a proper storyteller, as I’m sure you know. But she occasionally muttered something, and of course there has always been the gossip and scuttlebutt. In any case, I think what we’ve heard about your great-grandmother is true more or less.”
Gus looked at her. “But she put this differently. Why do you suppose?”
“She could hardly tell her parents the truth, could she? I imagine she needed to say something, to let them know they were grandparents, even if only from half a world away. That’s what people do when they have children, isn’t it? Spread the good news? Who else did she have to tell? Her folks we
re the only people she had in this world. Which means she had no one. Imagine that. How very sad.”
“What a shame those letters never reached them.”
I shook my head. “To say the least.”
“Tell me, what’s the story as you know it?”
“You could walk over to the courthouse to find half of it signed and sealed. As far as I know, Joshua Smith was the itinerant watch salesman he’s said to have been. A strange vocation, that, but of course the lumberjacks needed timepieces, each and every one of them. Smith came through the first winter she worked up at the Burnt Wood camp. A famous winter it was, for both the cold it wrought and everything that happened up in the woods.”
“The winter of 1896?”
“That’s right.”
“You know,” he said, “the Ax & Beacon compared this winter to the one we’re talking about. This is the second coldest on record—1896’s number one.”
“Exactly a hundred years apart. Did that occur to you?”
“Yes, it did.”
“Puts a nice shape on things, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not sure I thought of it that way.”
“So what did you think?” I asked.
“Not much, actually. Maybe that a hundred years isn’t such a long time. Not when it’s measured out against a place like this.”
“It’s practically the whole history of this town, though. That’s something. Even you can admit that.”
“Maybe I should’ve said measured out against a family like mine.” He looked at me. “I consider you part of the family, Berit. I would’ve said that for years, but I say it with even more conviction now.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“And not just because of what you meant to my father.”
I saw the blush rising in his face as I felt it in my own. “Well, now,” I said, “be careful not to sweep an old lady right off her feet.”
He tucked the letters in a neat pile. “I thought they’d say more. To be honest, I thought they’d make me cry.”
