The Lighthouse Road (22 page)

A
s he motored out of the cove, as his boat rode the gentle swells, he knew he was crossing seiches, knew because there'd been no wind for two full days, knew because the pressure was falling, had been falling all day, the pulsing behind his glass eye his barometer. He was glad of the seiches, they allowed him to feel the water under his boat, feel it come up through his feet and into his legs.

   She moved nicely, his boat. Heavy in the bottom, firm up front. The wheel quick to the rudder. And even as slowly as he went, the boat came out of turns smoothly, found her level quickly. He was dancing with her, learning her manners and mien.

   He straightened, headed due east, pushed the throttle to three-quarters. The lake was barely rippling and the boat planed out as quickly as she accelerated. He turned her full left, north, came back across his wake and then full right. The water churned up around him as he throttled down, let her bob there in the mess of the wake. He was a quarter mile offshore, facing town. By God, he was about to be gone.

   In the Gunflint harbor he went first to the fuel dock and filled his tank. He put payment and a note in an envelope and dropped it into the harbormaster's mailbox and climbed back aboard the boat, untied her from the dock, and crossed the harbor to the Lighthouse Road, where he tied up again and waited for Rebekah. The moon was over the hills above town, nearly full and heavy with light. He remembered what Hosea had told him once about how the moon tugged the waters of the oceans of the world. Tides, he called them. Like seiches but without need of wind or pressure. Odd wondered was the moon really capable of that. All he wanted now was the light of the moon to show him Rebekah walking up the Lighthouse Road.

   And it wasn't long before he saw just that. Saw her silhouette backlit by the moon, as if she were the tide itself, the moon pulling her toward him. Saw Danny laden like a pack mule next to her. Saw her coat flaring out not from a wind but from how fast she was walking. Then saw her face as she stood on the Lighthouse Road above his boat. Saw a look something like pity cast his way, a look cast by the moonlight.

   Odd reached his hand up and helped her into the boat. He escorted her to the bench in the cockpit, told her to sit down, offered a woolen blanket for her lap, knelt before her and tucked the blanket around her legs. He whispered that he loved her. In return she gave him a smile, a faint smile, to be sure, but a smile all the same.

   Then Odd took her belongings from Danny. Two bags stuffed to bursting. A chest that must have weighed eighty pounds, a hatbox, a pillowcase full of foodstuffs. He stowed the bags in the lockers on either side of the cockpit, stashed the chest behind the motor box and lashed it and covered it with a canvas tarp. He asked Rebekah to hold on for a minute and then climbed from the boat onto the Lighthouse Road.

   He looked steadily at Danny. "I set it up with Mayfair that you're in charge of my property. If anything happens to me, it goes to Rebekah. I'll be in touch once we're settled in Duluth, if Duluth is where we end up staying. I'll send news through Mayfair."

"I'll be careful not to burn the place down."

"Hosea's first stop is going to be my front door."

"I'll have him in for tea," Danny said, and smiled.

"He's a wily old prick."

"And I ain't no northwoods rube. Don't worry."

   Odd looked up the Lighthouse Road, over Danny's shoulder, at the moon now resting on the hilltop. He looked behind him, out over the lake and onto the eastern horizon. The first inkling of light showed clouds. He looked back at Danny.

   Danny said, "There's safe water in Otter Bay. That's halfway up the shore. Safe water again in Two Harbors."

   "You reckon the weather will hold? I got that feeling in my eye."

   "Get on the water. You'll find out."

   "Danny, thanks, brother."

   Danny clapped him on the shoulder. "The world's waiting."

   Odd climbed back aboard his boat. He untied the sternline while Danny untied the bowline and held them to the quay. Odd punched the ignition and the Buda rumbled to life. He was already growing attuned to the sound of it, was already learning the way the vibrations felt in his feet. He was ready to go.

   Odd throttled the boat forward and turned her left and headed along the Lighthouse Road out past the breakwater. He turned south and west and got her up to speed and they were on their way.

S
ee the sun coming up?" Odd said. They'd been a half hour in the boat and off the portside bow the sun shone dull, half above the horizon, above the water.

"Hmm," Rebekah said.

   "We're on our way, Rebekah. The rest of our lives—" he gestured to the wide-open waters before them "—it's right out there."

   She looked up through the cockpit window but didn't say anything.

   "Are you happy?" he asked.

   "I'm here," she said.

I
n two hours they motored past the settlement at Misquah, past the mouth of the Birch River and the looming hills through which it ran. There were half-a-dozen fish houses dotting the craggy shoreline, half-a-dozen skiffs upturned for the season. This was as far south as Odd had ever been, and then only once, the summer before, when he had delivered a barrel of whiskey to the Lutheran pastor whose church stood stark white on the hillside.

   They were a mile offshore, nosing into a quartering wind, the lake not much agitated by the southwesterly breeze. The boat ran like she was on a rail, and Odd felt capable of anything.

   He'd piled some of their bags in the cockpit and Rebekah lay on them, her legs under her like a cat, a blanket tucked around her, sleeping. How could anyone sleep on a day like this, Odd wondered. He looked down at her. So lovely, wisps of hair streaming from under her hat, her eyes impervious to the wind and the dull, throbbing sky. He reached down and pulled the blanket over her shoulder. He tucked her hair behind her ear.

   The world through the cockpit window was all lake. Like it was carved from an infinite slab of granite. The feel of his boat beneath him would have been enough at any moment of his life before now, but here she was, sleeping at his leg, with a child in her belly. His child. He could see their life shining back at him, reflected off the water, could see the child coming toward him every bit as real as the next swell. Again he reached down and adjusted the blanket. Until five days ago he'd never once thought of having a child, now the lake wasn't even big enough to contain the promise of it, the promise of the life he saw taking shape.

   At noontime, six hours up the shore, the sky finally broke above them. They were passing the town of Otter Bay when Rebekah woke without a word. She went to the transom and hiked her skirt up and peed over the back of the boat. She came back to the cockpit and still without a word fetched the bag of foodstuffs. She took a sandwich wrapped in wax paper and passed it to Odd, who smiled and took it. She poured two mugs of milk and brought two apples from the bag and arranged it all on the cockpit dash before sitting back down on the pile of bags.

   Finally she said, " Where are we?"

   "We just passed Otter Bay. We're halfway gone."

   She took a bite of her own sandwich and settled back against the cockpit wall. She trained her eyes on Odd's face for a moment and then shifted them to their wake. She ate her sandwich and Odd ate his and when they were both finished he took the apples from the dash and handed one to her.

   "Another six hours," he said. "We'll be getting there in the dark."

   "That sounds about right."

   Odd looked down at her. He shook his head.

   "Six hours up the shore and it looks exactly like Gunflint. It's all the same place."

   "It ain't the same place," Odd said. "I can tell from way out here there's less bullshit in those woods." He nodded up at the shore.

   She smiled, so he did too.

   "And Duluth is a real city, Rebekah. They've got more than trees

and fish down there. We can buy a brick house and a Model-T. We'd even have proper roads to drive on."

   She looked at him for a long time, could see in his face all the faces of his childhood. She could see all his goodness, his glass eye, the weather from all his seasons on the water like a mask. She reached up and touched his coat sleeve. "Are you going to marry me?"

   "I'll steer this boat into Two Harbors and marry you this day, if it would please you."

   She smiled again, though the truth was she didn't want to marry Odd. She didn't want to have a baby or live in a brick house. She didn't want anything, nothing she'd left behind, nothing out in front. "Don't stop in Two Harbors," she said.

T
he threat of weather that had hung over the first half of their voyage gave over to an afternoon more akin to an autumn day than a late-November evening. The temperature was near fifty degrees, the clouds had broken, and now a dusk as pale as snow settled in the east. The sky above them trickled into darkness. They sailed on in silence. Odd never more at ease in his life, his girl and his boat and a pocketful of cash money all right there.

   They passed Two Harbors and Odd lit the lantern and hung it from the cockpit in lieu of running lights. In the moving shadows of the kerosene light they watched Duluth come closer. Still neither of them spoke. The glow from fifteen miles away became clearer with each passing swell. The light spread for miles to the east, to what he knew to be Wisconsin. He'd never seen so much unnatural light. All it held was promise.

   Before long they were passing the east-end mansions, everything coming clear in the night. It was enough even to lift Rebekah from her spot in the cockpit. She stood beside Odd, her hand looped in his arm. The evening hadn't cooled much. It was still almost muggy. It took a half hour to get from the first houses to the harbor entrance. Danny had told him to go until the lake ended. And that was what it did. Marked by the aerial bridge and the breakwater lights, the city to his right unlike anything Odd could have imagined. He throttled down and passed through the canal at a crawl, the swells rising and falling gently, the boat riding them easily.

   He followed the harbor east, hugging the shoreline, staying clear of the shipping lane. It was a thin spit of land between the harbor and the lake, lined with houses, a well-lit road running its length. After a half mile they came to the Duluth Boat Club, a Victorian-style building not unlike Grimm's apothecary, with several empty slips and a long dock on the harbor.

   He turned the boat wide and sidled into one of the slips, resting against the fenders that hung from the pilings, then killed the engine and rounded the cockpit to tie the boat to the dock. He came back and tied a sternline as well.

   " Where are we?" Rebekah said.

   "The Duluth Boat Club, near as I can tell."

   "What's a boat club?"