The Lighthouse Road (13 page)

   Over the course of that summer Arne taught Odd everything: how the fish ran, what the wind meant, how to judge a lowering sky, how to mend a net. He taught him how to barter with the fishmonger and keep a ledger, how to sew oilskin and make gunnysack anchors. At the end of summer, after a long day on the water and in the fish house, as Arne cooked sausages and onions on the stove, he told Odd to sit down.

   "We'll start building you a skiff this winter. There's plenty of work to do in winter without building a boat, too, but together we can manage. Next spring you'll get your first grounds. You'll use my fish house."

   Odd nodded.

   Arne stirred the sausages, forked an onion into his mouth.

   "The grounds won't yield much. They'll be near the shoreline. And you'll still be apprenticing, but you'll be doing it in your own boat. The season after next you'll be on your own. Do you understand?"

   "Yes, sir."

   "Good. Now have some grub."

"You look just like your mother, Odd," Hosea said.

   Odd glanced up in the mirror. Hosea was standing behind him, his arms crossed.

   "She'd be proud of the young man sitting here today. Even if he was fool enough to raid a bear den."

   Odd smiled.

   "Are you ready for this?"

   "Where's Rebekah?"

   "She's tending the store. You can show her when we're finished."

   "All right."

   "Okay?"

   Odd nodded.

   It took a few minutes for Odd to look into the mirror. When he did, all he saw was the sunken lids of his wounded eye. It dawned on him at once that the space where his eyeball once had been looked an awful lot like a miniature version of the cave entrance in which he had lost it. The eyebrow above the wound had grown back darker than the eyebrow above his good eye, and the effect was shadowy. It seemed to set the hole where his eye should have been deeper in his face.

   He reached his hand up to the wound. The tips of his fingers dipped into the folds of his eyelids and he pulled them quickly back out.

   "Let's see how it fits," Hosea said. "Tilt your head back."

   Odd stared at himself for another moment before doing as Hosea said.

   The sensation of having the glass eye inserted was a dull one, just the tugging and pinching of skin. It took only a minute.

   "How does it feel?" Hosea asked.

   Odd didn't say anything. In the years to come Odd had two eyes custom made, but that first was culled from Hosea's ready supply. And though it wasn't a perfect fit it wasn't bad either. Except for some taut ness in the skin there was no sensation at all to having the glass eye in place.

   "I believe this will suffice," Hosea said as he pressed the skin around the glass eye with his thumbs. "Are you ready to see it?"

   "I am."

   Odd sat up and looked at himself. He looked for a long time and didn't say anything. It was himself he saw, but it wasn't. He blinked and despite all his conviction he felt tears welling in his right eye — his good eye. He saw his right eye gloss over. The glass eye stared back brown and too large and dry as chalk.

   "The skin around the glass eye will stretch a little. It's like breaking in a new pair of boots."

   Odd's right eye was the color of wet blueberries, but the glass eye was brown. "I look like one of Danny's sled dogs," Odd said.

   "You'll probably need to have new eyes fit as your skull grows. When you do, we'll have them made so they match your real eye."

   Odd said nothing. He put his left hand in front of the glass eye and held it there. The tears welled again.

   "It's temporary, lad."

   "I heard you," Odd snapped. He used all his will to quell the tears. Blinked hard. And brought his face closer to the mirror.

   "Listen to me, Odd: What the eye can't see, your heart will find."

   Odd looked up quickly, met Hosea's eyes. "I don't understand," he said.

   "Someday you will, son. Someday you will."

T
hea was nearly seventeen years old when she saw a tree for the first time, and then only from the rail of the topsail schooner
Nord
sjøen.
The boat was bound for Tromsø, a day and a night out of Hammerfest, and those few on board were cold and tired. The captain and his three-man crew were busy at the rigging, dodging the skerries and shoals, slogging through frazil ice and fog. When the sun began its burn the high fjords and their plunging ridges on either side of the boat came into view.

   At first she mistook the tree line for a lowering storm, some sharp front from the east. As the good boat slipped forward, though, she saw it was no storm at all. For all her short life she'd lived in Hammerfest, had never, before yesterday, been out of view of it. The hills in Hammerfest were gradual and bare — arctic desert— and what green there was came by way of the cloudberry boscage and lichen for a few summer months. Now a forest of spruce cascaded down the mountainsides, each minute the lifting of the fog revealed more forest. She'd been told of trees, but not these. No, the trees she'd heard of were still more than a month before her, in Amerika, on the shores of a lake said to equal any ocean.

   Strictly speaking, the voyage between Hammerfest and Tromsø was the second leg of her journey. Early the morning before, she'd stood on the rocks while her papa had loaded her belongings into his fishing boat. They had an hour before the ferry would leave Hammerfest quay, and her mama was busy finding anything else she could send. They lived in a sod house on Muolkot, an island in plain sight of Hammerfest. Her papa had a few sheep and a potato garden. He had a skiff that was safe along the shore and in the harbor but not equipped for open water. He was a decent and pious man, a mostly quiet man. He played his
hardingfele
on Saturday nights and was capable of good humor, though not much recently. He knew he could not offer his daughter much. So he sold a sheep and half of his parcel of land and spent the rest of his life savings on passage to Amerika.

   The voyage had been more than a year in the planning. A year of strict saving and hoarding, of frugal and meager living. Thea's belongings were paltry. In her carpetbag she carried only an extra dress, two scarves, her summer bonnet, a pair of stockings, and her mittens. It was cold enough passing through the fjord that she already wore her winter cloak and hat. She also had a basket of food, one meant to last her entire voyage. It contained three jars of soused herring, lefse, pickles, a pound of gjetost cheese, two jars of sheep's milk, two jars of cloudberry jam, and a small burlap sack of pears already bruised and mealy. Who could say where the pears had come from? Sewn into the skirt of her dress was a secret pocket, and in this she kept her purse. It held fifty American dollars and ten Norwegian kroner. When she got to Kristiania, she was going to put her papers in this same secret place. Last was her handbag, woven in the last days by her mother. It was filled with essentials: her Bible, diary, English phrasebook, and a hairbrush.

   Slight as she was, Thea had no problem carrying her belongings. When the N
ordsjøen
reached the dock in Tromsø she had already re trieved her baggage from her bunk. She stood at the rail waiting for the gangplank to be dropped from the dock, first in a queue of ten weary travelers.

   By the time she debarked and stopped in a harborside café for bread and cheese and coffee, it was already time to find her next boat, which would bring her to Kristiania. She boarded the P
ort av Kristiania
at noon, two days of starts and stops along the western shore under steam ahead of her.

   The P
ort av Kristiania
arrived at her final destination in the middle of the night. Thea was sleeping in her bunk when she felt the ship's definitive stop. She found her bags and joined the crowd and by the time she reached the main deck she was wide awake and consumed by a new awe: Kristiania— even at night, perhaps especially at night— sprawled all around her. The gas streetlamps flickered near and far, those on the yonder hillside a kind of greasy mirage that might not have been light at all, might have been only an impossible reflection. There were warehouses on the waterfront three times larger than the ship she was now stepping off. Everywhere the sounds of harbor life thrummed: the grinding and shrieking of train and trolley tracks, the clatter of horses' hooves on the dock's planks, the moaning of loading cranes, and above and below all of it the sound of human voices.

   Before then, Thea had never seen more than one hundred people gathered together. But even in the middle of the night there were thousands of people here. In the next slip two steamships, each twice as long as the P
ort av Kristiania,
were loading, crowds of people tunneled into the shadowy quay. As Thea reached the gangplank, she noticed the taut ship lines crisscrossing the docks, the enormous nets hauling cargo onboard the steamships before her, and casks by the thousands ready to be loaded into ships' holds.

   As soon as she was on the dock she was swept into a cordoned area where several nurses stood ready to examine and interrogate the passengers. One at a time they were led to tables. When it was Thea's turn, a grim-faced woman signaled her to come forward. Thea was asked to provide her ticket for passage. The nurse confirmed the ticket against a list in her passenger log and proceeded to ask a series of twenty-nine questions.

   Aside from the routine questions regarding her final destination and place of birth and the promise of labor in America, she was also asked whether or not she was an anarchist or polygamist, if she was in any way crippled or had deformities, if she had ever been imprisoned. She spent fifteen minutes answering these and other questions, and when the interview was complete, the nurse took Thea into a curtained area and asked her to remove her cloak and hat.

   The medical examination that followed was cursory. After the nurse listened to Thea's lungs with her stethoscope and checked her for a hunchback and diseases of the skin, she filled out a landing card and told Thea she could go aboard
Thingvalla.
As she ascended the steep gangplank, she could already feel the melancholy sea in the soles of her feet.

   
Thingvalla
was a three-masted, single-stacked steamship already some twenty-five years old when Thea sailed across the North Atlantic. She had a third-class ticket and found her berth on the aft end of the tween deck. There were four canvas bunks in a six-by-eight-foot cabin, but it was late in the year and a ship made to carry nine hundred steerage passengers had only three hundred aboard. So she bunked with only one other passenger, a rawboned pregnant woman with a ghost's pallor and darting eyes. The woman's belongings were even more pathetic than Thea's: a filthy gunnysack not much filled and tied closed with a piece of balling twine. She had no foodstuffs and no purse and Thea, for all she'd seen, had never seen anything as sad as this.

   Aside from the people aboard her,
Thingvalla
also held a cargo of barreled fish: brisling, anchovies, herring, cod. The casks must have leaked because the smell seeped through the interstices of the floor and on warmer days put a stink in the air impossible to ignore. The stench especially disagreed with Thea's bunkmate, who had trouble enough with the heavy seas and yawing vessel. Whole hours passed with a constant moan coming from the woman.

   On their third day at sea Thea had had enough, and she ventured to the main deck for fresh air. The deck was slick and crowded and Thea could hardly bring herself to move. She stood on the threshold of the gangway, making a slow inspection of the panorama. Though
Thingvalla
was only forty nautical miles north of Scotland, there was nothing but the brumous sea and its slowly rising swells to see. Thea was used to long views, but this was otherworldly. In Hammerfest, the tundra was locked and still. Here the sea roiled and splashed and went on forever. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.