by Peter Geye
I cannot say, exactly, what had led me to the map. Some need of proof? Did I expect the Fisher Map would be marked with a skull and crossbones? Or a note in the key reading: Here rests Charles Aas? Or did I just want to put my unpainted nail down on a map and announce: Presto! Even if Gus didn’t know or want to, would my own knowledge make the endgame permanent and put it finally and fully to rest? If I was expecting any of that I had clearly been mistaken, but there was a sense of calm that came upon me. So I rolled up the map and brought it to the girl at the cash register. Maybe I’d make it a gift for Gus. More likely I would put it on the desk in my den, along with every other memento and bit of evidence I’d compiled in the months since Gus came knocking on my door.
—
The next morning Gus and Sarah picked me up at ten o’clock. Signe was with them, sitting in the backseat of his Subaru, and he opened the other rear door for me.
“Hello, Berit,” Signe said.
“It’s so wonderful to see you.” I squeezed her arm.
“And you,” she said back.
“Today’s the big day,” Sarah said from the front seat.
Gus climbed back behind the wheel. “Ladies, shall we?” There was a lightness to his voice I’d not heard in a great many years.
“I’m so excited for you,” Signe told me.
“Oh, it has nothing to do with the old postwoman.”
“Nonsense,” Gus protested, peering into the rearview mirror. “It has everything to do you. Well, with the two of you back there.” I could see his eyes turn up in a smile.
We drove down the Burnt Wood Trail, the winding road crossing over the river in three spots before dropping us in town. I could still see ice drifting along the Lake Superior shore, and there were piles of snow in the ditches along the road, though a restless energy was everywhere in the woods, and the first songbirds of spring could now be heard in the mornings.
“It surprises me every year,” Sarah said.
“What’s that?” Gus asked.
“That winter does actually end. That the snow melts away and the trees’ leaves grow back.” She smiled at him and then turned around to us. “But it happens, every April, almost like clockwork.”
“Last year it snowed on Tom’s birthday in May,” Gus said.
“I watched it snow in June one year. The lilacs took a real dusting.”
“Well, there’ll be no snow today,” he said.
“Certainly not,” said his wife.
We veered right at the stoplight and drove toward the Lighthouse Road. When the apothecary came into view three blocks away, Gus craned his neck and said, “What’s that?”
Sarah was looking at Gus. So was Signe. But I was watching the expression on Sarah’s face as Gus drove. Something about her eyes reminded me of the fresh green of the grass on the roadside. We parked in back and Gus jumped out of his Subaru and started around to the front. By the time we caught up with him he was standing by the boat, one hand under his arm, the other on his chin. Sarah stepped beside him and put her arm around his waist. Signe moved to one side of them, as I did to the other. He glanced quickly in both directions, pausing once on each of us.
“Well?” Sarah said.
The boat had been my idea. For some thirty years it sat in the carriage house behind the apothecary, forgotten for so long. A more dilapidated thing you’ve never seen, but there was plenty still true about it. The keel, for instance. And the lapstrake planking. When Signe donated the apothecary and we took our first inventory—Bonnie and Lenora and I—we were surprised to discover it in the carriage house, covered with canvas on a trailer with four flat tires, a home for mice and chipmunks. But it also had an air of latent perfection, of incorruptibility, and we all agreed it would make a perfect showpiece. I asked Chuck Veilleux if he would restore it. He couldn’t, but knew who could. So, one day last November, he pulled it out of the carriage house and hauled it down to a place in Duluth. Sargent’s Boatwright and Chandlery, it was called. They spent the winter rehabbing the boat, not to make it seaworthy again but so it could sit out front of the Gunflint Historical Society with dignity.
Gus stepped over the hawser that had been strung around it and walked up its starboard side, his hand on the newly lacquered hull, the three of us behind him like schoolchildren trailing their pied piper. But at the stern he stopped and covered his eyes. The boat had once been named Rebekah, but I’d asked the men in Duluth to give her a new name, specifically the name of the man who’d built it: Odd Einar was now painted on the escutcheon.
“I thought it was gone,” Gus said. In the sunlight we could see his eyes get glassy.
“Nope,” Sarah said. “Berit kept it safe all these years.”
“No, Rebekah did,” I said.
Signe stepped over the rope and stood beside her brother. “Rebekah bought the boat the year you and Dad went wintering. He thought it was sold to some fisherman in Sault Ste. Marie. It’s been stored here in the carriage house all these years. It seems everyone forgot about it.”
“I never did,” Gus said. “I dreamed about it a million times.”
“Well, now you have it again,” Sarah said. “We all do.”
—
Four sets of bleachers had been erected on the Lighthouse Road in the shape of a horseshoe surrounding the Odd Einar. A podium and microphone had been set up in the bow. Bunting was hanging from the apothecary’s windows. The high school marching band stood off to the side, ready to play. At one o’clock folks started turning out, pretty much the whole town. The bleachers started filling up, and so did the lawn all around.
At one-thirty Mayor Bear Anderson stepped aboard the Odd Einar, welcomed the townsfolk, thanked the members of the historical society—singling out Lenora and Bonnie and me—and then reminded everyone that after the ribbon cutting there would be a pemmican feast sponsored by Sons of Norway and Immanuel Lutheran. It didn’t take him more than thirty seconds to get to introducing Gus. “We’re lucky up here, having such outstanding citizens. I bet if I asked any one of you about this next gentleman, the first thing you’d say is ‘I know Gus. He’s a friend of mine.’ That’s what I think of him, that’s for sure. This boat I’m standing on now was his granddad’s. And his great-grandma came walking down the Lighthouse Road about a hundred years ago. That’s how long the Eides have been here. I can’t think of anybody better to say a few words about this here historical society, the renewed heart of our beautiful town. So, without further ado, here’s Gus Eide.” He laid out a welcoming hand. “Gus, come on up here.”
He climbed the makeshift steps and shook Bear’s hand and pulled his speech from his coat pocket, laid it on the podium, then buttoned his coat and pushed his windblown hair out of his eyes. Smiling weakly, he looked at Sarah and Signe and then at me. When he put his mouth up to the microphone, it screeched, and he stepped back and smiled and then adjusted it and began.
“Thanks, Bear.” He nodded at the mayor, still right behind him. “You’ve done a lot for this town, a lot for all of us, and I think I speak for everyone when I say we appreciate it.” Everyone clapped. “See?” he said, and turned again to look at Bear, who waved like a grand marshal.
“And you’re right about us being friends. Friends and family. We’re lucky indeed.” He took his reading glasses from his chest pocket and squinted down his nose at his sheet of paper. He took one deep breath and then another and then took off his glasses and slipped them back in his pocket.
“Maybe I’d do better to wing this.” He swept his hair back again and began in earnest. “Without these three women down here, none of us would be standing here to celebrate the opening of a society dedicated to who we are. Bonnie Hanrahan, Lenora Lemay, and Berit Lovig, you’ve accomplished something really wonderful.” He gestured back at the apothecary. “Almost from the time folks started settling here, this building has been the center of Gunflint’s life. Your hard work ensures that it will continue to be. Every one of us thanks you deeply.”
He
paused to collect his thoughts. “Miss Lovig tells me the walls of this place went up in the summer of 1893. Ever since then we’ve all called it the apothecary, even though not a single aspirin’s been sold here in about seventy-five years. I suggest that from this day forward we say it’s what that shingle up there says it is: the Gunflint Historical Society. Can we agree on that?” Again the crowd clapped.
“I’ve seen the exhibits inside and can tell you there’s something for everyone. We’ve got a rich and colorful past. And a complicated one. But I think it’s important we hold our past near to us. That we learn from it and keep living by it. In fact, I think we’re nothing without it.” He stared up at the pinnacle. “This building will help us keep our past to heart. It will help us keep it alive.” He nodded his head, satisfied.
“So, Miss Lovig, and Bear, why don’t you join me at the front door so we can cut this damn ribbon.”
—
At four o’clock we locked the doors. Bonnie and Lenora were behind the counter counting up the donations—a fair number had been made—and Sarah stood at the window. Gus, who’d been quiet, almost taciturn, all afternoon, was beside her, staring across the room at the portrait of Rebekah Grimm.
All the townsfolk had come through the exhibit, and by any measure the grand opening had been a success. I was relieved, as Signe was. It seemed an odd time for Gus to seem so melancholy, so I walked over to him.
“You look glum, Gus.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I was just looking at my grandmother over there. She’s still keeping an eye on us, eh?”
“I suppose she is.”
“Do you remember the first morning I came to visit you? After my father disappeared?”
“Of course I do.”
“I said maybe you’d be able to help me understand why he’d set off again.”
“I remember, Gus.”
“I thought if I told the story of that winter, if I told you all those secrets, I’d feel better. I thought life would make more sense.”
“Do you feel better?”
“I believe I do.”
“And does life make any more sense?”
“Does it ever?” He nodded at Rebekah’s portrait. “You know, there’s more than a glancing resemblance between her and Signe. I’d never really noticed before.”
“I often thought the same thing. Not about the painting, but about the two of them.”
“No, life doesn’t make any more sense.” He turned to me and smiled. “Let’s go upstairs. For one more look from on high?”
Up we went, those steps I’d walked more than any others in my life.
On the third floor he said, “What a rousing success, eh, Berit?”
“It was quite a day.”
Out the window, down below, a crew was disassembling the bleachers.
“You’ve really done something amazing here. I wish I could have articulated that better in my speech.”
“It was a beautiful speech.”
“I’d written something, but, standing on that boat, with all the kids from town there with their parents, it suddenly felt entirely too academic. So I winged it.”
“Even so, it was lovely.”
“I’m not fishing for compliments.” He smiled almost to the point of blushing and then turned to gaze out the window.
After a while he said, “I was thinking about my dad an awful lot today. Especially standing on that boat.”
“I thought of him, too.”
Another moment passed.
“I was also thinking today about our walk up to the Devil’s Maw, Berit. About what you said.”
Now I turned to look at him.
“About my father keeping some secret from you. And how that made you feel.”
I kept my eyes on him until he faced me. “What about it?” I asked.
“You’re not the only one he kept secrets from. That’s all.”
“I guess we all have some.”
“You sure do,” he said, then gave me another weak smile.
“Not so many as you might think,” I said.
Now it was Gus keeping his eyes on me.
“What?” I said.
“Downstairs just now, I said life didn’t make any more sense now than it did on that day Dad disappeared. But, still, I think I understand it better. Can those things both be true at the same time?”
“I’m a small-town girl, Gus. I never went to college. Never traveled the world. I wouldn’t have an answer to that question.”
“You’ve never fooled me, though.”
I smiled.
“Tell me that story, Berit. The one that started all of this. Tell me that, and then I promise we can move back to the here and now.”
“I knew this was coming. It had to. I’m glad you see that, too.”
“So you’ll tell me?”
“No, I won’t. I can’t.” I took my purse from my shoulder, opened it, and removed the envelope I’d been carrying around in there for weeks. “Maybe I should’ve told you all this back in November, when Harry vanished.”
He took the envelope and flipped the unsealed flap open. “What’s this?”
“It’s something I wrote down for you. Things I didn’t think I could tell you. Maybe this will help you understand.”
YOUR FATHER and I didn’t speak often of what happened to his own father, though I recall those conversations very well, and one in particular. We were sitting on his deck on a late-spring afternoon. This was some ten years after the Riverfish brothers rescued the two of you. The Burnt Wood was surging with snowmelt and two days and nights of wild rain. We could feel it thundering through our bodies even a hundred feet away. Your father cradled his coffee in his hands, his eyes fixed on the river. He was quiet. As always, he was quiet.
I watched him staring at the river, then watched it myself. I remember thinking what a raucous and beautiful thing it was. And how patient it was, too. It had flowed for thousands of years to make itself as it was just then. I’d seen it freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw over and over, year after year, and this was only the merest fraction of its existence over those millennia. What a beautiful notion this was.
As he did so often, your father read my mind. “I was reading a book by Louis Agassiz last night,” he said.
“Was he a scientist?”
“That’s right. He thought there was once an enormous sea here. It was called Lake Agassiz.”
“Back in the Ice Age?”
He nodded.
“I believe I’ve read about that myself,” I said. “What of it?”
“You think it’s true?”
“That this land was once a sea?”
He nodded again.
“I do, yes.”
“Think it will be again someday?”
“Someday?” I said, and caught him with my smile. “The way that river’s running, it might be as soon as this weekend.”
Precisely then we heard a terrific boom. We flinched simultaneously and looked hard through the mist and saw a lump of ice the size of a misshapen truck that had rolled out and flattened several trees on the other shore.
“My goodness,” I said.
“Let’s have a look.”
We walked across the clearing and stood on the river’s edge, which was some thirty feet higher than it would be come August. The water was one long manic sault, churning and lapping furiously back on itself. Countless chunks of ice were coursing down the current, but this massive piece that must’ve calved from the falls upriver was now dragging the felled trees along with it, completely at odds with its essence, but in fact no different from the livid river itself. It was the same stuff, after all.
I could see from the look on your father’s face that this ice troubled him, too. As if he’d seen a ghost. He stared at it for a long time before saying, “I never thanked you.”
This perplexed me. “Thank me?”
“For those fried potatoes.”
I must have looked stunned.
“On the day we first met.”
“I know what you’re talking about,” I told him.
Now, understand, my memory is a cursed thing. It grabs hold of everything without my say. It always has. And it stays with me. I sometimes have trouble remembering where I put my teacup, but I can tell you exactly what I wore to Rebekah Grimm’s funeral. Exactly who was there and what the pastor said. I can recall whole conversations with my mother from sixty years ago. In many ways it has been unfair, going through life not being able to forget. But what is sometimes a curse also allows me to conjure up the story of what happened to your own father when he was still just a boy. It was, I am sure, the prologue to all his life after.
—
It happened on a morning in February, an easterly wind blowing cold across the lake. The sun rose over low clouds. Snow was in the offing from the east, as it had come overnight and would again that morning, blowing up off the lake and over the breakwater. But just then the sky above was blue and unbitter, and your father and his father, Odd, hauled their toboggan out from the cove. I cocked my ear to the ceiling above and listened for the sound of Rebekah’s arthritic feet crossing the floor.
I sorted the mail, keeping one eye on your father as he augured holes a quarter mile offshore. I watched them sit on the upturned buckets and drop their lines in the water as I slid letters into boxes and wondered why, after nearly a month here in Gunflint, I’d never seen that boy—your father—anywhere but out on the ice.
At nine o’clock I went upstairs and made tea for Rebekah, as I did each morning. She stood, as she nearly always did, at the window, her fingertips touching the glass, her head down, and her eyes fixed on the lake. She turned when she heard me. “Oh,” she said. It was the first thing I’d heard from her in weeks. Maybe it was meant as thanks.
At ten o’clock—I know this surely, because I can still hear the soft ten gongs of the grandfather clock—it started happening. And though I saw it with my own eyes, I’ve always remembered it through your father’s.
