Northern Lights (22 page)

He fell asleep and woke up again. His muscles were stiff. His back hurt and it was still snowing. Inside the bag, the smells were bad. His tooth hurt, the pain stretching across his jaw to his right ear. Slowly, he moved a finger to the ear and pressed against
it, creating a quick vacuum to relieve the pressure. The bag stunk. He put his head outside. Still snowing and dark, and Harvey’s bag was a gently rolling lump under the snow.

He scratched his head. His hair was straggled and tied in fine knots. He touched his jaw. The beard was raw, and the skin was tight and drawn. His elbows, the cartilage and tendons and bone sockets, everything was rusted shut and creaking like frozen weaponry.

“Harvey? You awake over there?”

“Affirmative. Now I’m awake.”

“It’s cold out there.”

“It’s a bitch. Go to sleep.”

All night, Perry had been cold. Now, unzipping his bag and stepping out, he was seized by great warmth.

He helped Harvey rekindle the fire.

They moved slowly, each motion separate and distinct and labored over, and it took a long time. They ate the last two cans of chili.

Whining, the snowfall was nearly over. But the clouds remained full and gusted in desultory snaps. They did not talk while packing up the tarp and sleeping bags. Perry felt lazy. He did not want to move. Sitting still, he was amazed at Harvey’s calm way of waxing his skis, deliberately spreading the paste on and rubbing it into each blade, taking care and time. He sat still while Harvey studied the map and the sky and the compass. He was warm and lazy. The forest was all the same. Without thinking, he got up and slipped into his skis and followed Harvey’s tracks into the woods.

It was a sense of interlude, a secret waiting. He was not much afraid. Lazily, he gazed into Harvey’s orange rucksack and
followed. He considered it a kind of riding, a train trip through the forest, warmth within the coach. The trees and snow passed by through a secret window. It was simple movement, and he skated and pushed only when necessary. He felt strong, gaining confidence by not thinking. He kept his head slightly forward, and when his glasses fogged he did not bother to wipe them. No exercise of will and no deliberations.

The morning was monotonous and flat, flat through the planed country, and gradually he fell into a rhythm that synchronized motion and thought in an even, unruffled pattern of crystal images. He might have been dreaming: the bomb shelter, the sound of the old man’s spoon clanging in the spit bucket, the television telling of A-bombs in the Caribbean. It was a memory he could trace over and over, wondering what he might have done differently, what he might have said to ease the old man’s death or what he might have done to help with the digging, the pouring of cement. Then the image would slide away, join another image as the snow country went on in its monotonous eliding flow.

Once he saw a deer. He did not exactly see it. He saw through it and beyond it, the form registered, and he passed by. Then he saw it. He stopped and turned, and it was a white-tailed doe. The forelegs were splayed, delicate as though of brittle bamboo. It stood deep in snow, twenty yards away, its nose pressed against a birch trunk. He was startled to see it. He stood very still. The doe was brown and speckled white and the nose was black and the ears perked and large, as big as the snout, and the eyes were watchful, and the belly and tail and legs were cream white. It was unexpected. Without thinking, he called to it as if calling a dog for petting. The doe looked at him oddly. Then she arched her back, raising her head to reach higher bark, all the while watching him. She was frail and hungry-looking. In
greeting, Perry called again and raised one of his poles. He was struck by the desire to hail the beast, and he called once again and the doe continued to watch. Her eyes were cautious but not unfriendly. Then the wind changed. The doe’s head jerked and held for a moment in a sharp, electric pose of perfect alertness, and then it bolted, and Perry realized they’d never met, and the doe was gone. He reminded himself to tell Grace of the fine doe.

When half the dull day ended, they stopped and made a small fire and had coffee. He told Harvey about the deer.

Harvey nodded. “That’s how it can be.”

“Then the wind changed.”

“That’s how it goes,” Harvey said. “You know that deer are close to being blind?”

“Is that right?”

“It’s in the nose and ears. Those big ears and that long nose.”

“I swear it was watching me.”

Harvey shook his head.

“I swear it.”

Harvey kicked out the fire. Perry drained his coffee cup and stashed it in his rucksack and got ready. “How are we doing?”

“Fine. Made seven miles maybe. Maybe more. At least we’re moving and that’s the big thing. With luck we can maybe make it to the shore highway before dark. I’m pretty sure. Are you worried?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I guess I am. Yes.”

Harvey laughed. “Smart man, then. But really I think we’re all right. I was awake before dawn and watched where the first light came from, so I know we’re headed southeast. Mostly east. For all I know we’re headed right back into Grand Marais. Don’t worry.”

“I guess it won’t help to worry.”

“That’s the ticket,” Harvey said. “In the war … some very sensitive guys. They were good guys but they worried and they were bad soldiers. They were smart to worry. Had the good sense to worry. But they were awful bad soldiers.”

“Did you worry, Harv?”

“About what?”

“That answers it.”

“No, about what?”

“Did you worry about … having your eye ruined. I don’t know. About getting shot in the nose or something. Whatever. Ghastly things.”

“Did I worry? Yes, I worried.” Harvey buckled on his skis. “Sure. Like when you cut open a fish and you’re kind of scared about seeing the insides. It’s because the fish never thought about them but they were there all along. It was the same. Hard to say. It wasn’t the pain I was scared of. I think it was that I wanted to … react right when my legs got blown off or my chest got shot open or something, you understand, seeing the stuff inside and not going crazy bananas. I used to worry some about that, but not a lot. I didn’t want to bawl like a baby.”

“What about your eye?”

“My eye, yes. Yes, I don’t remember that much.”

“It must have hurt.”

“I suppose. That’s what I don’t remember. If I don’t remember, I guess that means it didn’t hurt much. You care about this, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah, I see that.” His palm passed to his nose in a precise gesture of dismissal. “You’re a good brother anyway. I’m not much of a fine brother, am I? I do certain things and you do certain things and here we are together at last. Not much. It’s actually too bad we weren’t better brothers before.”

“Well, we were different ages.”

“Yeah.”

“Different friends and everything.”

“Right.”

“I guess we know each other better now.”

“I guess. It’s still a crime,” said Harvey. “Talking about it and so on.”

“It should have been more like me and the deer.”

Harvey smiled as if into a flash camera. “Yes,” he smiled. He clapped Perry on the back. “That’s it,” he said smiling, “right on the button.” He clapped Perry’s shoulder. “Let’s get going before we have a fight and ruin it. Someday we’ll get on a train for Africa. Would you like to go to Africa?”

“Not much, Harv.”

“Where then? Name it.”

“Paris maybe.”

“What the devil is in Paris?”

“Nothing, I guess. Some cafés and people and Notre Dame and things.”

“Okay,” Harvey nodded, reserving the black judgment in his eyes. “I’ll buy that. Paris. After that, then we’ll go to Africa.” Again he smiled with sympathy. Perry wondered where he’d gone wrong.

It was an afternoon of communication by hand signals. Harvey stopping him with a fist raised.

Starting him with a sweeping overhand motion, a wagon master seeing the way and leading.

Rest, a certain delicate signal.

Traverse, carry through the flat pine country, skirting danger, flanking the tangles that went nowhere. “Up to you, buddy,” said his father way back, not even looking at him, as if knowing beforehand
he would not go. “You can sit home here, or you can come with us and we’ll have a fine time, but it’s up to you, buddy.” A communication of spirits. Language an artifact. Language a way to ask for the garbage to be taken out. A communication of tacit compatibility of spirit. “That’s all right, buddy,” no explanations, no sharing of insight, abandoning him as his son the none-elect. And Harvey guided with the same ease. If you saw into the forest, then you saw. If you did not, then you did not. “There’s vision on the one hand and there’s blindness on the other,” was the Kalevalian paraphrase used by his father to organize the Pentateuch sermons of 1962.

Not so perfectly crazy, after all. Effortlessly, Harvey took him deep in. They crossed a lake and it was snowing again. It was snowing in earnest. The lake wind was up, and dunes of snow tumbled along. That tension. It was that long far-back tension, a kind of tugging, a feeling of vast bewilderment and eventual melancholy at not seeing so clearly. The wind of his father, the southern calm of Grace, and all it stood for, not a matter of choice and less a matter of pure inclination, entirely a matter of circumstance, genetic fix, history, events, a long-standing ambivalence or uncertainty, pure open-mindedness. The magnet was in the North Pole, the magnetic pole. Revelation. Some sort of great and magnificent epiphany was what was needed. Some luck. The magnet was in the North Pole and there was shelter in the south. There was a warm deep soft algaed spot somewhere, a stewing brewing simmering place of contentment. Revelation was what was needed. Some rotten luck. He had a hard time moving. The lake wind was dead against him. Harvey’s orange rucksack sometimes disappeared in the eliding, slipping, skip-beat dunes of snow. Perry’s skis no longer slid along so easily. He pushed hard with his poles, kept his face down and out of the direct force of the blowing falling snow, the drifting dunes.

Harvey guided him on. They got off the lake and into some trees, where Perry stopped.

He leaned against his poles, watching Harvey continue into the forest. Perry searched, squinted and peered in another effort to find something warm in the woods, such as a sight or bundle of colors or sounds that would spark dazzling streamers of color and light in the sky, light the forest, an electric dazzling array of lights. He rubbed his mittens over the frozen lenses of his glasses, cleared the steam and looked about.

He looked back at the tumbling duned lake. It was behind him now. He could not see to the far shore. He turned and followed after Harvey.

After a time the trees thinned dramatically and the land was ripped into rugged slopes and bluffs.

The snowfall was a snowstorm. The closed, nearsighted feeling of tall timber relaxed, and the snowstorm came in. Harvey stopped and pointed at shriveled old fungus growing on the bole of a birch, nodded meaningfully, and Perry nodded back wondering, and they continued skiing. The clouds were like ordinary viscous glue. Perry ignored them. He followed the patch of orange like religion.

Beyond the slopes and bluffs was more forest.

Perry thought of a cheerful song to sing.

It eluded him.

The forest was older. The trees were giants with mangled thick trunks, clawing boughs and roots that erupted from out of
the ground and twisted like serpents under the snow, making the skiing treacherous.

Another cheerful song.

Harvey climbed a lonely bluff. He reported lakes ahead, hollering like a crow’s nest sailor. They came to the first of the lakes and crossed through the storm, followed a channel to the second lake, crossed the second unnamed lake, portaged through thick forest, eye-deep in the falling snow, and the earth inclined steadily upwards, peaked and descended towards still a third lake, which they crossed without comment, drifting with the drifts.

There on the far edge of the lake they found a broken dock, six posts frozen solid in the ice, a few broken slats.

“Well!” shouted Harvey against the storm. “Well, now we’ve arrived somewhere.”

Perry looked for smoke.

“We’ve come to someplace,” shouted Harvey again. “Where there’s a dock, there’s a cabin or a house.”

A trail led from the dock into the woods. The trail widened and climbed with the upwardgoing land. The road opened into a clearing in the forest. Perry, for the first time, pushed hard and passed Harvey and led the way into the open space.

He saw the broken stone chimney. He knew as he saw it that he’d seen it before, in one of the night dreams, in preparation, in a light-headed push-up. It was a broken old chimney fallen from some invisible earlier height. A broken stone chimney that jutted from the snow as the mast of a sunken fish-eaten schooner, a
broken stone monument. A tombstone, reverend and presiding. Blinded and fooled. A broken stone chimney. Snow stuffed and snow surrounded. A clearing in the woods occupied by the broken stump of a chimney that had once, maybe never, but perhaps once had released hot black smoke and covered a burning fire and grown hot, the stones growing hot and glowing: just a spindly sawed-off pocked old chimney. Blinded and fooled.

“I think we’ve found our place,” shouted Harvey. The wind was hard.

“What place?”

“Some homesteader’s cabin. Dumb bastard, coming way in here.”

“Yeah.”

“A dumb Finn, I guess,” Harvey shouted against the wind.

“Didn’t last long.”

“Bloody dumb Finn.”

“Let’s stop here. I want to rest here.”

“There’s still some light.”

“I just want to stop and rest here.”

Harvey nodded sympathetically. “All right, buddy.”

“I’m not tired. I just want to stop here. Awhile.”