The Indian girl with the papoose was a gift from Delilah, their best cook in the boom days, before the mines shut down. Those years were nearly fatal for the towns on the Iron Range. Superior got plenty bruised as well, with its railroad and shipping industry. But she’s not complaining, she’s been luckier than most. The last things to belly up in any town are its bars; well, its churches, too. She dumps the old water into the sink.
A waltz. The piano music feels just right as Nora pushes a chair around the floor, climbing up and down to get the ornaments from the nets. She unhooks the log cabin that Ralph, her late husband, made entirely of whittled sticks. Together for seven years, married for three. The cabin twirls in a circle from an old piece of leather. That’s twenty-four years she’s run the bar on her own.
She climbs down and sets the ornaments on a table. The silver angels holding hands like paper dolls. The elf on the pinecone from her sister Joannie in California, reminding her that she needs to mail a birthday gift. The old rusty red caboose. She’ll wrap them each in tissue paper and tuck them snugly in a box, like little children off to sleep.
Nora slides the chair up against the jukebox to get at the ornaments hung from the old bowsprit. The glass bird looks like it swallowed the pink jukebox light. It came in on a salty all the way from Greece. She smoothes the bird’s feathered tail between her fingers, then unhooks her daughter’s plaster handprint, painted green and red but only on one side. She’d thought about having her granddaughter make one so Janelle could hang them side by side on their tree. She’d even thought of making one herself, a trio going three generations. It was a good idea, but she never made it happen. They were barely in town long enough to open gifts as it was.
The music stops abruptly. The bench scrapes out.
Nora climbs down from the chair, holding the Santa straddling an ore boat that John Mack gave her. It’s been two years now, and the bar is still absorbing his death. When in port, he was a fixture—last stool on the left—always trying to start up his debate: Lake Superior, is it a sea or a lake? Telling his sailing stories to anyone who’d listen: sudden storms coupled with poorly loaded freight, nasty tricks played on green deckhands. She wraps the freighter in a piece of crumpled tissue paper, seeing his speckled blue eyes, how they’d draw people in as he spun his tales. Landforms changing shape. Strange sounds from the horizon. It’s still unbelievable that after years on those freighters, he fell out of his fishing boat and died of hypothermia. They found his body the morning of her fifty-fifth birthday.
The sky through the window is tinted orange from the glow of the neon Leinenkugel’s sign. Nora opens the door to the empty street and the steely smell of winter coming in from the ore docks. Lake Superior may bring in her business, but it’s heartless; you wouldn’t catch her on it for anything.
It’s snowing again, tiny flakes like salt, dropping through the streetlight halos. There’s not even a car to be seen, not a single black track on the street’s white surface. The tiny flakes drop down from the blankness, landing on her sweater and the toes of her shoes. The chimney on the VFW is a silhouette against the sky. There was something in her dream. She’s carried it all day.
Nora feels the cold air reach her lungs, feels the particular time of night where it seems like she’s the only one awake, the only witness to the snowy street, to the air blowing in from the frozen harbor, and the small falling flakes that are touching everything.
1902
Snow sweeps past the window on a northwest wind coming down from the hills toward the lake. Berit feels like her cabin is a rock in a river, the way the wind rushes past on either side, full of snow and icy crystals. She turns from the back window by the bed to the front one that looks over the water. The snow is flying nearly horizontal, blowing out over their frozen cove, reaching the open water in dark strips of agitation that chase, one after another, toward a vague grey horizon.
Down at the fish house the window is blank. Gunnar hasn’t lit his lamp. He is bent, she is sure, over his task, straining his eyes and leaning in some posture that she will have to rub out of him later. Sometimes she wishes he’d slow down. Everything in sight, he built single handedly. The fish house is a beauty—two stories, and now the new net reel standing beside it to replace the one that the gale took last year. Extra things, too, that he makes just to please her, like the bench out at the end of the point, where she can lean back against the old pine. “You can sit there and watch your lake,” he teases. But it’s true in a sense, the lake is hers. First, she lived on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, then Duluth, now Minnesota’s North Shore.
A gust of wind hits the cabin so hard that Berit feels like she’s been shoved. The hill is in full whip and bend, the pine boughs winding back and forth as if hurling invisible stones, and the birch she’d admired just that morning, sweeping down the slope like a wedding veil, have completely turned in temperament. They lurch, bend, and jostle together, knock and stir like an army of skeletons. She holds her hand to the chinking between the logs to feel for any biting lines of cold. Wedding veils to skeletons. Her thoughts do grow strange.
The smell of bread is a comfort with the storm coming down, and she’s glad it’s baking day as she wipes the spilled flour from the tabletop, strip by strip bringing back the wood planks, the wet wood making her think of spring, as most anything does these days. It will be a relief when the steamship starts running again. Steady mail and fresh supplies. She swishes her rag in the tepid wash water. Four years they’ve been up the shore. She thought the isolation would get easier. She pauses, frowns. She thought there would be children.
Again, she finds herself stationed at the window, her damp fingers touching the cold glass. Soon the steamship will dare venture out. Just knowing she’ll pass by regularly makes everything easier, marks those days apart from the others, even if it’s just Gunnar rowing his fish out, to be transported back to Duluth. She closes her eyes—the boat’s heavy bow plying the icy water of the lake. She can almost hear the low drub of her engine, the way it bounces off the rocks.
Her fingers leave small marks on the windowpane and she touches their cold tips against her cheek. She must stop indulging this way. It only makes it worse and the boat slower in coming, but her mind is as reinable as the wind on the water, and her thoughts rush out one after the next. News from her family on the Keweenaw. Fresh coffee beans. A sweet squirting orange.
A stream of snow is blowing off the roof of the fish house, where finally, the lamp is lit. She’ll bring down a piece of fresh bread on her way to fetch water. Berit surveys her cooling loaves, smelling the deep rye and yeast. She’d love to plunge her hands right in, wear a loaf around like a fancy muff. She’ll cut a thick piece from the best-shaped one and bring it to Gunnar still warm.
Gunnar glances up from his net seam to see Berit in her dark coat, making her way down the snowy path, buckets in one hand, a dark bundle in the other, walking with her crooked limp that he loves. His Mrs. with something good for him, braving the wind to make a delivery. Already his mouth is watering, thinking of all the baking she’d done. The door opens with a wave of cold air, and there she is stamping her feet, a long strand of hair flung across her red cheeks, her grey eyes blinking away the snow.
“It’s blowing,” she says, nudging the cat from her leg.
“Yah, it sure came down quick.” He flexes his fingers and then cracks them loudly, which doesn’t get the usual rise out of her. “Something smells good in here.”
Berit hands him the warm bundle, which he makes a ceremony out of opening. “Now, this is surely a piece of heaven.” He holds the bread under his nose, then smiles as if she’d given him spring’s first strawberries. He takes a bite and sets the bread on his workbench. “Heaven. But I smell earthly paradise nearby.” He grabs hold of her coat and still chewing, slowly draws her near.
Berit jerks her coat away. “I’m sure you’ll make do with your bit of heaven.”
She scoffs as she opens the door, but Gunnar can see that her eyes are shining. The warm rye nearly dissolves in his mouth. What a figure she cuts as she heads down the path, dangling buckets in the fading light. He raps on the windowpane with a lead, just to get her to turn around.
Berit’s cheeks are flushed, but not from the wind. She hears the tap tapping beneath the blowing, but she’s not going to look back. Thoughts of their morning give her stabs of pleasure. The things between them these days, she just doesn’t know. She’d never imagined this new hunger that has taken hold, that rises like heat and falls like good rain. To experience this now after all they’d been through, all the sorrow, disappointment, and anger, just all of it. Betrayed by her body, that’s how the loss felt. And then that sad year of distance.
Now those times seem long ago, though it was only last autumn when everything changed. She still puzzles about the suddenness, and how it seems to point to the day when Gunnar was so late from picking his nets. She recalls the strange pauses in his work rhythm, and the way he kept glancing back out to the water. She can still see clearly the look in his eyes as he took the fish shovel from her hands, so full, and brimming with such a grave gentleness. “It’s time,” he’d said. “We have each other. That’s blessing in plenty.” Those were his words, and then he’d kissed her.
Since then he’d been a man determined, wooing her back slowly and sweetly. Now there are whole other worlds they share, places they go that are almost like dreaming. She just isn’t certain what’s proper sometimes. Good Lord, when she thinks of Nellie and Hans down the shore, or in the other direction the Torgeson brood. Well, she just can’t picture it.
The little light that’s left is fading fast, but the wind has yet to die down, making the snowfall nearly invisible, though she feels it like tiny needles against her skin. Berit steps onto the ice. Covered with wavering lines of old snow, it looks like a floor of grey marble. She’s smiling at how Gunnar had tugged on her coat when a gust of wind catches her buckets and she slips, banging her knee on the ice.
With a foot in one bucket to keep it from rolling, she lowers the other into the water hole, paying attention to her task now. In the dim light, the water hole is black and foreboding. It sets her insides against themselves, causing her to feel strangely cautious, as if she might pull the bucket from the lake and find it filled not with water, but with some horror instead. She hauls the rope up, and there it is, a pail of water with a small piece of ice, but its harmlessness doesn’t ease her feeling, so she works with haste and turns back toward land and the light from Gunnar’s window, lying yellow across the snow.
From below, the surf churns grey and white. It billows like the bottoms of clouds, creates a sound like rolling barrels, or the distant muffled stampede of hooves.
What prickling sensation at the precipitous drops—one hundred feet, two hundred feet, and more—where the slow-growing fish feed. The herring and the whitefish I once sought. The rising siscowet and the trout. Suspended overhead like long dark shoes. Like deeds left undone. The shape of regret.
On the lake bed the sediment rests in layers. Grey matter from the north. Red from the south. One era’s story deposited over the next.
And my own story, to which I cling.
Yet all this, too, is somehow mine.
I see the relic surfaces bearing the scour marks of ice. The fine, flowing patterns etched in the rock are as my own fingerprints.
Dimpled silt. The solitary burbot swims.
Ringed vibrations surge and rebound.
And rivers of mud waves lie in long troughs. Each red clay canyon has its own dark sounding. Each cave, a pulsating entrance.
The roaming currents carry the whisper of words. Bimitigweyaa. Bon voyage. I try to understand.
2000
The long blue door of Nora’s Buick creaks. Creaks when she opens it and creaks when she shuts it. She tightens the scarf around her neck. Even though she’d started the car earlier, the darned heater is still blowing cold air. The streets are icy and driving is slow with the grey sky pressing down on the buildings, making everything look so squat and dingy that in comparison, the traffic light is dazzling. Bright red, it hangs over the intersection, shining like a perfect maraschino cherry.
The Schooner’s pretty quiet, just a few second-shifters, though it won’t be long until business picks up. The locks are open again, and the ice cutters are out. Once the ships can pass, the railroad, everything, will start swinging into gear. Still, winter is hardly over.
Nora shoves the door to the bar open, causing the green shamrocks she’d hung from the netting to twirl and glint in the low light. Willard waves from the kitchen at the end of the bar, where he’s dropping a basket into the fryer.
“It’s freezing.” Nora hangs her coat.
“No lie. Listen, do you mind if I split? Cheryl is sick, so with the kids getting home. . . . I haven’t restocked the longboy yet.”
Nora lights her first cigarette of the shift. “How was the day?”