“That’s so brave.”
Nora has nothing to say to that.
“Flint here went around the lake,” offers Bob. “What was that, two, three years ago?”
“Yep. Ninety-seven.”
“Flint?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the bartender empties the ashtray. “It’s the stone . . . flint. People have to amuse themselves.”
“Flint, Michigan,” Margaret says.
“Sam Granite,” Bob cuts in.
“Looks like Rocky Shoreline to me,” adds Nora.
“Oh great, you too. You’ll fit right in.”
A steady trickle of people are coming through the door, all to big “hellos” and “how have you beens” occupying Bob and Margaret each time.
Nora slides the postcards out of her notebook. She bought the last two that morning in Munising. One is of an old wooden lighthouse on Grand Island—as big as Manhattan, the card says. The other is from the Pictured Rocks Lakeshore, the place that Frank said she really should see. But the only way to see it was from a boat. The pictures in the brochure looked impressive though, enormous striped and sand-colored bluffs. One looked like a castle, another an Indian’s head.
“Dear Bun Bun,” Nora writes on a postcard. “You wouldn’t believe this place. How do you think this Indian head got carved? Just from the wind and water, they said. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Next, I’m going to the Shipwreck Museum. Lots of love, from your Nanny.” She’s not really lying. Nikki doesn’t need to know that she didn’t actually take the boat tour. She addresses the card and presses a stamp in the corner.
“Are you always this busy in the afternoon?” she asks, ordering another beer.
“It’s the first weekend of the season. People are up to open their summer camps.”
Nora feels like she’s meeting half the town, Bob and Margaret introducing her around, her mood lifting with each new encounter. There’s Stan, who has the smallest eyes she’s ever seen. “He’s the second best fisherman in the U.P.,” Bob keeps telling her, and Stan laughs each time he does.
“I’ll have a vodka rocks when you’ve got a minute,” Nora says, catching Mike’s eye. “And a grilled cheese.” She needs to get something in her stomach.
On her way back from the bathroom she notices the lights hanging over the line of bar stools. It’s a regular string of Christmas lights, though each bulb is covered with a plastic shotgun casing—red, blue, green, yellow, pink—the shells wired over each little light.
Her grilled cheese comes in a red plastic basket, the same kind she served food in at the Schooner. It takes her aback when Mike sets it at her place.
“Isn’t that what you ordered?”
“Yeah. Perfect.” It makes her sad, but happy in a way, too. Not that the baskets are particularly rare. She just likes that they both use them. Used.
When Nora dials home again, Rose doesn’t pick up. She wanted to let her know that she’s okay, not to worry, and to tell her all about the shotgun-shell lights, and the friendly people. “Rose, listen, you’d love this bar I found,” she says to the answering machine. “And I’m fine, really. Hell, it’s Friday night in Paradise.”
1622
“How is she?” Night Cloud bends as he enters the wigwam.
Sitting on the floor near Grey Rabbit, Bullhead turns up her hands to show emptiness.
“I think she is asleep. It’s hard to tell.” She moves over and pats the mat by her side.
Night Cloud kneels next to his wife’s curled figure. “I thought she was getting better.” His voice is as thin as a wisp of smoke. “Her eyes look like a raccoon with those dark markings.”
“They don’t see when they’re open. I don’t know where she is.” Bullhead picks a pine needle from Grey Rabbit’s hair. “Have you noticed anything about the beavers?”
“Why?”
“Their behavior, have you heard or seen anything? She said that the beavers are angry.”
Night Cloud touches Grey Rabbit’s shoulder gently. “The beavers?”
Bullhead turns up her hands again. “They were her only words.”
Night Cloud looks up at a crack in the bark, where a finger of blue sky is showing through. “The beavers’ numbers are strong. You’ve tasted the meat. Their furs were as thick as the winter was cold.”
Bullhead places her hand against Night Cloud’s leg to quell the fear she hears in his voice. “When we get to Bawating she’ll need to be tended to. I don’t know what to do for her. Has the time to move on been discussed?”
“The decision was to wait. The water surface has been murmuring all morning. We’ll travel after the storm has passed.” Night Cloud grazes Grey Rabbit’s cheek with his fingers. He closes his eyes, and rises slowly.
“Ask about the beavers,” says Bullhead.
He nods and pushes aside the door flap, sunlight spreading across the mats.
2000
Nora stands beside the locks at Sault Sainte Marie, where the International Bridge spans the water, its ironwork yellow against high stretching clouds. She has traveled clear to the end of the lake. And it does feel like an end of sorts, with the mammoth locks forming a gateway, the lake on one side and the river on the other, connecting Superior to Lakes Huron and Michigan. But lakes don’t really have ends, she thinks, popping an antacid into her mouth. They just keep going around in a circle.
The ore boat’s hull is a reddish-brown wall gliding slowly in front of her. It is marked with draft lines, rivets, and scrapes—a colossal rust-colored whale. Groups of people are lined along the fence and standing on the observation platform, waving to the sailors with the open-faced cheer usually mustered for firemen. The ship is the
Oglebay Norton,
and she’s headed for the Twin Ports. Home.
The sailors lounge nonchalantly against the ship’s rails, talking to each other, waving down to the crowd, biding time while the water level rises to match the lake. “Twenty-one feet,” the brochure says. “Iron ore called the tune, and America danced.” She doesn’t feel at all like dancing, though that morning, she’d been determined to continue with her trip.
Everyone around her has someone else. Couples. Families. Tour groups. Friends. She walks along the fence in pace with the freighter, looking up at the sailors, hoping for a familiar face. She’s pretty sure Jim Haala is still the
Norton
’s cook. She doesn’t recognize anyone.
“How long till they make port?” Nora asks through the fence.
A man who’s wrangling a rope as thick as his arm looks over. “Twenty-four to thirty hours, depending,” he says.
From the window in the visitor’s center, the International Bridge looks particularly high, and as flimsy as a roller coaster. Go or turn back, Nora can’t make up her mind. She’s never been indecisive. In fact, indecisive people try her patience. So she has never left the country before; why should it be a big deal? Her reflection in the large pane is transparent, and people down on the pavement are walking through her head.
Nora drifts haphazardly through the exhibits—a model of the locks, a photo display of their construction. The information is all steel and tonnage capacity. It’s something—the engineering, and the enormous scale. But it’s like war in her mind; it belongs to men.
A small section displays artist-drawn renderings of the area hundreds of years ago. The pictures show a long rapids and an island lined with Indian huts instead of the locks. “Bawating—water beaten to spray,” she reads. The people in the drawings are dressed in skins—a group of children playing, adults at work. Large fish hang from racks like clothes left to dry. It looks serene. Idyllic. Not of this world. She skims over a plaque headed “Etienne Brule.” “At the age of sixteen, Etienne Brule, came from France to Quebec. The first to leave the European outpost. He lived among the Huron, learned their language, lived their lifestyle. Captured and tortured by the Iroquois. The first to paddle four of the five Great Lakes. The first white man to reach Lake Superior.”
Nora chews on a chalky antacid tablet as she peers down at the locks from the high yellow bridge. The locks look like long watery landing strips. A big lumber operation sits on the Canadian shore, and a plant with flaming smokestacks, like the refinery back home. Surprisingly, she doesn’t even have to get out of the car at customs. And Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario doesn’t look all that different than Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, except for the maple leaf flag and conspicuously fewer signs trying to draw in tourists. She feels foolish. What did she expect, the trees to look different, the sky a new shade? The road she’s looking for is 17—the Trans-Canada Highway according to her map—but she’s lost right away, her stomach flip-flopping.
The first surprise at the gas mart is the familiar brand names in the aisles. The second is the exorbitant cost of gas and cigarettes. On top of the price, they don’t carry her brand. She picks out two packs—one green, one blue—and the counter girl, who looks like any American teenager, puts them in with the rest of her things. Nora hands over a number of bills. The girl gives her an exasperated look, and points to a bank across the street.
Nora steps back into the lot, the clouds overhead breaking up and blowing. The antacids aren’t helping at all; her stomach feels like a big raw hole. She should have gone back. She needs to be home. Not crossing this foreign street with its empty planters, where no one even knows her name.
The outer lobby of the bank is airless. French or English, the screen asks. It seems implausible that her card will work, but colorful bills soon cascade into the tray.
When Nora pushes the heavy glass door open, the sun is out and lighting everything—the curb, the gas pumps, the hoods of parked cars. But the brightness only makes her feel worse, smaller and more alone. The blue day feels impenetrable, as if behind glass. She’s alone. She’s not attached to anything. Nora sits on the edge of a planter, her breath short, her neck sweaty.
In the car, she leans back against the headrest, eyes closed, smoking her last cigarette. She could leave her car and fly home if there’s a plane. Somehow come back and get the car later.
She picks up the flimsy map. She has two options—keep going or turn around. If she did go back, what would she say to Nikki? And what kind of example would that be? What would she tell herself, for crying out loud? She looks at the map, at the northern and then the southern route. Either direction, she’ll be on her way home, driving toward, not driving away anymore.
Nora walks back into the station.
“I need a real map,” she says to the counter girl.
The girl snaps her gum, and reaches for the bag she’s kept off to the side. “Where to?”
“Superior.”
“Where’s that?”
“Wisconsin. The other end of the lake.”
1902
Berit places a jar of wildflowers in the center of an overturned fish box. The day’s warm and calm. The lake laps. An occasional breeze stirs the long grasses. She adjusts her skirt and opens the sketchbook she’d found propped against the fish-house door the morning after John’s visit. It was weeks until she had the heart to open it. She pages through the drawings she’d done in the winter—a baby spruce lined with snow, a pair of chickadees, black bears, then the unfinished spray of pussy willows. And the new things, drawn over the last week. The first, of her boot lying on the floor. The second, of the sleeping cat. The new drawings are hardly recognizable as hers with their heavy marks instead of finely hewn lines.
Berit twists the jar of wildflowers, leaving the white daisy off center. She adjusts her posture to get a better position for her leg. It used to be that she would savor starting a new drawing. Now it takes sheer will. The day is soft and hazy, so there are no shadows within the arrangement of flowers. She looks over the relative sizes of the blooms, and the shapes of the spaces between each stalk.
The tip of her lead rests on the blank sheet while her eyes drift over the striped water—tawny, white, pale blue. He’s somewhere out there. She’ll never hold him again, smell his head, or feel his calloused palm on her cheek. She closes her eyes, opens them on the flowers. If she can concentrate long enough to enter the drawing, she will reach the place where the rest of the world dissipates. Her gaze moves from the flowers to the paper. The stones in the bottom of the jar stretch and curve against the delineated edge of the glass, and the handful of stems crisscrossing underwater are dotted with tiny air bubbles. Her pencil moves lightly, barely touching the paper, just a curve of space marked, an angle suggested. Then another. And another.
Berit doesn’t hear the
America
until she’s in view, steaming southwest toward Duluth. She keeps her eyes on the paper, listening to the boat engine, fighting the urge to run into the fish house. She can picture it out there perfectly—white top, dark bottom, the big doors in its side, and the smudge of smoke trailing from its stack. She moves her pencil in time to the drubbing, darkening and darkening the edges of stems, feeling that everyone aboard is watching her. She won’t look up until it has passed.
If she were on the boat, bags packed, she’d soon find herself on the town dock. And then what. Back on the hillside in her rented room that smelled like cut cedar and faintly of bleach. The room was a tiny rectangle, with yellow-rose wallpaper, and one dormer window that faced a wasteland of tree-stumped hills. She used to try and imagine the view before the hills were clear-cut. She was living there when she’d first met Gunnar.