There are wolf tracks around the woodpile, though Berit hasn’t seen one for a few weeks. She knocks the logs against each other to scare off any spiders. There’s no sense bringing more into the house. To make double use of the wood, she’s going to cook a pot of beans while she heats the laundry water. With the bacon they now have down in the cool-shed, the beans will be especially good.
Berit stokes the stove to its limit. She has her large pots and kettles arranged, the big tub in the middle of the floor, and the soiled clothes in piles on the chairs. She has a fresh bar of soap that came in on the new steamer. The packet freighter
America,
she’s called, and what a vessel.
Stately
is the word they’d decided best described her after listing other possibilities one night after supper. Gunnar had of course been focused on her seaworthiness. “Sixteen to twenty miles per hour,” he’d said. What she can’t get over is the news about the inside. If they take a trip to Duluth one day, she’ll see it for herself. A social salon that has a piano. A grand staircase. She can’t wait to stroll down that.
Berit decides on the rest of dinner while she works, the beans, fried trout, and rye rolls to go along. Her cheeks are damp from standing over the steaming tub. A shirt on the surface has an air bubble in the sleeve, and she pushes the shirt to the bottom with her wash-pole. She ought to use the last of the stewed lentils as well. She could add moose and potatoes, that would make a good supper.
Out the front window the sky is blue, and the lake is cobalt and rolling like raw satin. She pauses to listen to it sweep against the shore. She loves the lake in the early spring, when it has tossed off its ice sheets and is free again. Out the back, the birch trees have tiny green leaves, which brings her jars of seed to mind, though it’s still much too early to plant. She lifts the water-drenched shirt with the pole. Maybe she’ll give the soil in the garden a turn if there’s time left in the afternoon.
Berit rifles though dirty clothes, checking the pockets of Gunnar’s trousers, where she’s bound to discover a lead or a nest of twine. She lifts a sweater from the pile to find its front speckled with dried fish scales. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times she tells him, she still winds up picking fish scales out of newly cleaned clothes. She carries the sweater to the door for a good shake. Was she asking for the world? Good Lord. Is he incapable of brushing them off himself?
Berit replaces the lid of the butter tub, and pushes aside the wedge of wood that she uses to prop open the cool-shed door. She walks down onto their thin strip of rock beach, a dish of butter in her hand. The cold lake air wafts around her skirt hem as she casts her gaze over the water. Gunnar should be rowing in, but she doesn’t see his skiff anywhere. She hopes he had an especially good catch, which would certainly put him in a light humor. Better that than he’s had some trouble with a net.
Walking up the path, she notes the transition that happens in the short distance from the shore to the house. It grows quieter and warmer, but that’s only part of it. It’s the feeling of moving across distinct realms. They each have their own, she and the lake. A blue jay is nearby, voicing its call, and the fresh smell of balsam pitch is in the air. She’ll hang the clean clothes and hold his dinner. There. She spots it on a high pine bough, a blue dab of color on a field of green.
Berit folds the shoulder of a wet shirt over the line and clamps a wooden pin down over it. There’s virtually no wind, so the clothes just hang. The lake undulates and shines; there’s nothing daunting about the weather. She pins a dish cloth to the line, her eye moving from the sunlit white to the dark blue water beyond.
The blue water touches the blue sky. Blue over blue where the two seem to meet.
From below, the expanse of water spreads. From above, the clear blue sky curves down.
The thin line is merely sight’s limitation.
So much light and air. So much open space. Mesmerizing in its constant stirring.
In the blue, I once found reason to clutch or to let go.
To justify equally action or inaction.
I flung my deepest feelings out into it. The spit and drain of fear. Of desire. Trickled harmlessly. Joined unnoticed. Its muteness a comfort. Its muteness defeat.
I am beginning to know its tendency to absorb everything.
My poor. My Mrs.
At the blue line of the long horizon.
Birds and boats disappear.
1622
Large logs of green wood bracket the fire and the moose-hide vat is swollen with sap, turning the air thick inside the lodge. Three Winds bends to feed the fire and keep it at the right height, while Bullhead stands over her taming the froth. The sisters have been together constantly, though their talk, once as persistent as buzzing flies, has calmed to a satisfied silence.
Grey Rabbit sits along the wall, examining a straining mat. They’ll need it in the morning, when the boil is done. She runs her fingers over the narrow strips of basswood, testing the weave for weak spots.
“You should rest now,” Bullhead says to her. “You’ve been tree to tree like a woodpecker all day. I’ll wake you when it’s your turn to work.”
Grey Rabbit feels tired, though she’d rather not give herself over to dreaming. “I’ll go see that Standing Bird and Little Cedar are settled.”
“You rest,” Bullhead more than suggests.
Three Winds backs up her sister. “With hot coals and sap that scalds to the touch, you’ll be in no shape to help if you don’t sleep now.”
To say anything more would be disrespectful, so Grey Rabbit sets the mat aside and spreads her sleeping roll against the wall. She lies with her head resting on her arm as a slow trail of people carry in wood and the last of the day’s sap. Her eyes half open, she watches the sisters work, one broad, one thin, but both similar in gesture and in the rising and falling patterns of their speech. It’s lulling, the soft sound of their voices, punctuated by the snapping fire, and her arms are sore from the day’s work cutting, and her stomach is full of squirrel, and the weight and warmth of the furs press down on her, and the fire-smoke rises through the hole in the roof.
Bullhead is over her, touching her arm.
Grey Rabbit groggily steps outside to find clouds covering the stars, cocooning their camp in darkness and night woods. Below her the black water pounds against the shore. She bends and scoops up a handful of snow, touching it to her cheeks and neck, holding it for a moment over each eye, her skin waking with the cold. Her nose waking. Her hair smells of sweet sap. The water pounds a rhythm against the rocks, and though she can’t see it, she feels each wave sending vibrations up her legs. The giver. The taker. Gichigami.
When Grey Rabbit returns to the lodge, she sees a flash of disapproval in Three Wind’s eyes. She’d looked in on her sons, but she’d hurried back. It’s warm inside and bright from the fire, the air hanging smoky sweet.
Bullhead is already asleep near the wall, so Grey Rabbit takes her place at the vat. Three Winds hands her the long stick with a spruce branch lashed to it, which she is to dip across the froth whenever the sap starts to bubble too much. The two work together without speaking; there’s only the fire and the sleeping sounds from along the wall.
“Long ago, when Bullhead and I were girls learning to do quillwork, an awful thing happened.”
Grey Rabbit keeps her head down and her eyes on the spruce bough. Already her legs are hot and itching from the fire’s heat.
Three Winds describes how she was jealous of Bullhead’s superior skill, and the clean pattern she accomplished. And then, when everyone was asleep, how she laid it in the fire and watched it burn. She told of Bullhead’s misery over its disappearance, and of her own, which she concluded was much worse because she never told anyone.
Grey Rabbit turns the story over in her mind, wondering at its telling and what in it was meant for her. She wonders what Three Winds has heard. She must speak with Bullhead soon. The longer she keeps silent, the harder speaking becomes. In the morning, then. After the pour. She balances the dripping spruce bough on the edge of the vat, bends down and squints as she rolls a smoky log.
1902
Berit stands on the point and scans the horizon. “Enough,” she tries to hush a red squirrel that natters from a thin spruce. The sun has passed its high point by a hand, and she hasn’t seen any sign of Gunnar. Arms crossed, she sits on the bench, but she can’t keep her leg from jiggling. Maybe he rowed up to see Hans, or all the way down to Torgeson’s to borrow something, though she can’t think of what he’d need. She’d heard tell that Torgeson keeps a regular bottle. If Gunnar rowed down and didn’t inform her he was going, he’ll hear about it for some time.
Berit forces the tip of the shovel with her foot, lifts and turns the winter-packed soil. Lift and turn. Lift and turn. The sun angles back toward the ridge, where a hawk glides silently above the green spires. When she gets to the end of the row, she’ll allow herself to look out to the lake. She forces the shovel in, lifts and turns, scrapes caked dirt from the sole of her boot. Four more shovels-full and she’ll turn to see him. Three. Two. One.
The water and the sky form an unbroken line.
The sun has slid behind the ridge, leaving the cove in shadow but the lake still in sunlight. Berit paces in her long coat, back and forth along the length of the point. There’s a gnawing sensation in her stomach. “Oh,” she scoffs. “Oh, if ever . . .” Her face clamps tight, and she blinks back hot tears.
The light is draining from the birch-covered slope and the lake has turned soft pastel blue. It’s hardly rolling at all anymore, just rising and falling peacefully. Berit sits on the bench and listens as the lake rises over the stone beach, then slides back to itself with a long hush. She tries to match her breathing with the sound, and to keep the worst thoughts from getting in. Something happened, he’s hurt and unable to row. The waves, though not strong, would push him in, deposit him somewhere along the shore. He could be walking home through the woods at this very moment. If he’d been down to Torgeson’s all this time, he’d be headed back now while there’s enough light to navigate. The lake glubs in a hollow beneath her.
Berit pulls the blanket tight around her shoulders and legs, her feet drawn up on the wooden bench. The brightest stars are already out, and she feels as if she is in a horrible dream. She rocks herself, a short pulsing back and forth, going over the day in her mind. Just this morning they’d lain in bed, the familiar weight of his arm across her waist. Just this morning the cabin was full of pink light. How did she get to this awful place, and what can she do to turn things back.
“Good God.” She launches herself off the bench. He’ll get his comeuppance when he gets home.
It’s dark. There’s no denying it anymore. It’s dark enough that she should have brought a lantern. A lantern. Lord, how could she be so daft? She rushes up the path toward the cabin. She’ll light every lantern she can find. If he’s out there the light will help guide him in.
It’s black on black, the sky dizzy with stars that twirl and reflect on the lake. Berit sits bundled on the bench, listening harder than she knew she could. The lake fans against the shore. There are indiscernible rustles and scratchings, and somewhere in the woods, an owl. There are other sounds as well, faint and unnamable, that could as easily be coming from the lantern at her feet as from the million stars. She peers back at the windows all ablaze. They look warm and homey, as if there were nothing at all wrong, as if she could go up and find him sitting at the table. It seems likely even that both of them are there, comfortable behind the warm yellow panes, talking, their feet on a chair near the stove.
Berit has snuffed her lantern wick, finding she can see further into the night without it. A distant wolf howls a long drawn out call, and her heart rises like dough in her chest. She listens for the dip of oars. She waits for the skiff to take shape among the stars lying on the black surface of the lake. Again, the wolf howls and she feels the ache of it in her chest, stretching the thin skin of her heart.
2000
“Hi Mom.” Nikki kicks off her boots.
“There you are.” Janelle turns from the stove, where she’s frying ham.
“Look what we got. It’s all horses.” Nikki holds up the plastic bag from the drugstore, with the coloring book inside. “And a whole box of new markers, too.”
“That was nice of your Nanny. Come give me a hug. I was starting to worry about you guys.”
Nora turns from the coat rack to see Janelle sniffing the top of Nikki’s head. “You smell like smoke.”
“I had cherry jubilee.”
“Where?”
“At the Windigo.”
Janelle glares at Nora across the room, and turns Nikki around by the shoulders.