The Lighthouse Road (8 page)

   The first days in camp the quarters actually appealed to Thea, contrary as they were to the ship's berths where she'd spent so much of her recent time. At least here the squalor did not pitch and roll, was not rank with the smell of vomit, had not, in those first few days anyway, been infested with rodents and lice. Though it was true she could not stretch her arms fully above her head, though her bunk was barely wider than her thin hips, though it was true that when the autumn winds came howling through at night they sawed through her eiderdown as if it were no more than mosquito netting, she still possessed a sense of relief for having found a place to rest.

   It was a mere ten sleepy steps from her bunk to the stove in the kitchen. She could retrace half of those steps to fetch stores from the cellar. And unless she was setting tables or making a trip to the privy she did not much move beyond that scant domain. By the time of the first snowfalls, she had begun to feel caged.

   Each day after Thanksgiving the hours of daylight shriveled until it seemed there was hardly any purpose to the sun rising at all. And with each short day a definite restlessness settled into her. The jacks returned for lunch and for dinner with frosted coats, their faces hoary as ash, wraithlike. As their coats melted in the mess hall's heat, they appeared to be vaporizing. Where once she had needed all her powers of concentration to perform her tasks, she now found herself with time to daydream. While plating their slices of pie she would puzzle over their evanescence as though it were a religious rite. Day after day they entered and took their seats and began their disappearance. It saddened her and scared her some, but mostly it simply mystified her.

   She spent all her spare thoughts on the men, and what she discovered— for the first time in her life — was simple desire, as if their warming, their steaming, their appetite, the way they smelled, all of it fed this new thing in her. Each night, after the camp had settled, after she had finished her own duties and lay in bed exhausted, she would recall the subtlest moments: the way a man would rub the cold out of his hands, for example, or the way he would blow on his stew, any of a hundred such mundane habits. In her revisiting them, the moments became profound, delicious, and she would often find herself caressing the bottom of her belly or tracing her fingers up and down her neck, feeling for her quickening pulse.

   The second week of January was colder still. Twice the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero overnight, and on those mornings following, the murmurs in the mess hall began. Any speech at all was rebellion, but even the hardened bull cook seemed reluctant to enforce the rule of silence. From his stool at the head of the table, he looked thoughtful, judicial, even, as he contemplated the new boundaries of his order. The taciturn resignation in the men had given way to anger. They griped about the cold, about frostbite, about the snapped saw blades and shattering ax handles. The teamsters lamented the horses' agony and their own. In all of this the bull cook and foreman indulged the men.

   Thea was not so alarmed by the cold, partly because most of her day was spent near the comfort of the ovens and stoves and scullery fires but also because of her arctic childhood. So despite the turn to peevishness in the jacks, and despite the fact that she understood almost none of what they said, she actually welcomed the sound of their voices.

   It was during the third week of January that something completely unexpected happened to Thea. After supper on Sunday, after most of the men had filed out of the mess and trudged back to their bunkhouse, one of the jacks stopped by the kitchen to address Thea. He was an old man, his lips cracked to the point of bleeding. He said his name was Rolf and that he had been asked by the bull cook to speak with her. He spoke in Norwegian, and the sound of her mother tongue after months of its absence almost made her cry. The old man must have sensed as much because he paused and smiled and patted the back of her hand. He then told her what he had to say was important. He reiterated that he was speaking on behalf of the bull cook, who was speaking on behalf of the foreman. Thea composed herself and sat down.

   Rolf said that there had been reports from the jacks and teamsters of wolf sign. He said there were many wolves in the woods, and that in all his years of working in the forests, he'd never seen one himself. Given the horrendous cold, the wolves were perhaps getting desperate, and that was why they were encroaching on the camp. Were, in any case, coming nearer and nearer. He told her about the tracks on the river, about the scant moose and caribou, and that she was not to use the latrine without being accompanied by the old lady. The bull cook thought it best for the women to move as a pair until further notice. And then the old man nodded and left.

I
n mid-March, along the river's frozen waters, two thirteen-year-old boys shattered the glaze on a knee-deep and moon-shaped snow. They wore snowshoes they'd made of bent ash and moose gut. Their hats were beaver fur, trapped and skinned and finally sewn while they sat around the fire in the wigwam.

   Odd and Danny Riverfish. They wore bowie knives on their belts and carried shotguns over their shoulders and they dragged a toboggan behind them. They were on their way to Danny's traplines on Thistle Creek and in the beaver ponds above. Their play at being men was grave and full of purpose and hardly premature anymore.

" Maybe there'll be some otter or marten, too," Danny said.

   "Otter's good to eat. Pelts will fetch a fair price at the trading post. Maybe at Hosea's," Odd said, trying the woodsman's banter he was just learning that winter.

   " Loony Hosea."

   Odd smiled. "Yeah."

   Danny smiled back.

   "How's marten roasted up?" Odd said.

   "We don't eat marten."

Odd nodded, committing to memory this new knowledge.

   They went into the woods east of the lower falls. The water had cut through the snowpack and fell thunderously, icy mist rising into the clear, hard morning.

   "You think Miss Huff will miss us today?" Odd asked.

   "Miss Huff could make a forest fire boring. Besides, I don't plan on ever going to that schoolhouse again. I've had enough of her goddamn Bible. Goddamn arithmetic. Arithmetic never got a beaver tail to fry up, did it?"

   "Or a pelt to sell," Odd said, then fell silent for a moment before he added, "She tells Hosea I'm truant and I'll get the belt."

   "Someday you'll be doing the belting."

   "I'll never be able to whomp Hosea."

   "Sure, you will. Someday we'll whomp him up together, steal his money."

   The mere thought of this made Odd despair. His feelings about Hosea were as complicated as his own true history. The only thing in his life that held any semblance of order was his friendship with Danny. They'd been fast friends since they could crawl. Miss Huff had been their teacher since kindergarten.

   "I don't mind her lessons," Odd said. " Those Old Testament stories are about as scary as hell."

   "None of it makes the least damn sense. Fire and brimstone and a bunch of things to be scared of. Bunch of impossible rules. And she's ugly as a pile of bear shit."

   "That's plain meanness. She can't help how she looks. And her Bible stories ain't that different than those stories your grandpap tells around the fire."

   Daniel looked over his shoulder and smiled at his friend. It was his best feature, that smile. It conveyed a minute's speech in a second's time. "Grandpappy never whipped you if you doubted him, though, now, did he?"

   Odd tried his turn at a smile.

   "Did he?" Daniel persisted.

   "No, he did not."

   "And besides, you think Miss Huff could tell you a damn thing about these woods? You think there's secret directions in that black book of hers on where to set your traps? Where to tap the maple trees come spring? Where to go ricing?"

   "The woods ain't everything, Danny."

   Daniel stopped, held his hands palms up. "What else do you see?"

   It was true: The wilderness was ubiquitous, in all its guises. From where they stood he could see the cedar swamp east of the lower falls, knew it went from bog to basalt in a few mere steps, the rock rising sharply into bald outcroppings too steep to climb. This late in winter the lichen would have been eaten away by the surefooted caribou, their tracks were all over the place.

   The outcropping went on for a mile, and they walked its base in silence until they heard the river falling at the Devil's Maw.

   "We'll take a break at the river, eat those biscuits and bacon," Danny said. They each had a pair of sandwiches in the pockets of their wool coats.

   "I'm about hungry enough. That gruel Bekah cooks up in the morning is the worst."

   "You know, you can come live with us anytime you want."

   "I don't think Hosea would like that very much."

   "Hosea. Pap says he's two men at once."

   "I believe he might be."

   They walked through the edge of the woods to the river's shore. Odd said, "It ain't that I wouldn't want to."

"Want to what?"

"Live in the wigwam village."

"It's better than town," Danny said.

"Sure is."

   They stood on the shore and unwrapped their sandwiches and drank cold coffee Odd had carried in the deer-hide wineskin.

   "You got the land and farm now," Danny said.

   "It ain't so bad at Hosea's. Except he makes me go to school."

   "Plus you got Bekah."

   "Yep."

   "Well."

   They finished the coffee.

   Odd said, "I'm going to apprentice with Arne Johnson in springtime."

   "A herring choker? That Hosea's idea, too?"

   "Hell, no, it ain't. It's what I want to do."

   Daniel Riverfish wore his rascally grin.

   "The hell's so funny?" Odd demanded.

   "It's just that you're a bit of a chickenshit, is all. I don't see you out on the lake by yourself. Least not when the wind comes on down."

   "A chickenshit?"

   Still that grin.

   "I'm no chickenshit, Danny."

   "You mess your britches and run for Bekah when an owl hoots. What's it gonna be like out on Gitche Gumee?"

   Odd turned inward, began to think about this, was readying some sharp response. But Daniel spoke again first. "We got a ways to go, let's walk."

   So Odd stowed the wineskin in his coat and put his mittens back on and adjusted his hat.

   "You make the trail now," Odd said crossly. "I'll drag the sled."