Wintering (25 page)

Y
OU'RE NOT DEAD
until you're warm and dead. That's what they say about hypothermia. When I saw Harry the night he was brought out of the woods, he looked more than warm—he looked like a burn victim. And I couldn't believe he was not dead. Not even for all of the medical equipment and the doctor and nurses that surrounded him at the Gunflint hospital.

I had sneaked up there after dark to see for myself what was being whispered in town: that he and Gus had been delivered by the Riverfish brothers, and that Harry would not survive the night.

The tip of his nose and his cheeks above his beard were frostbitten, blistered, and red. He was covered from ankles to chin by an electric blanket. One foot was covered, the other elevated and being treated by a nurse. His faintly orange ankle deepened through peach, umber, rust, and brown until it finally turned black near where his toes used to be. When the nurse saw me—it was Ana Olsson—she smiled and covered his foot and stepped out from behind the curtain.

“What are you doing here, Berit?” She put one hand behind her back and touched my arm with the other. “I didn't know you were friendly with Harry Eide.”

How could I explain? Even to myself? I had gone up to the hospital because I could not wait a minute longer to see him. When I'd first heard about Harry and Gus paddling up the river, I thought, with some certainty, that I had seen the last of them, a feeling that filled me with regret and shame. So when word filtered through town that they were back, and in such shape as they were, I would not be stopped.

“Of course, you spent so much time with his mother,” Ana said.

I smiled weakly. “What happened to his foot?”

“Hunting accident.”

Harry? A hunting accident?
I thought.
In January?

She still had one hand behind her back. “His foot is the least of his problems. His body temperature was well below ninety degrees when we admitted him a couple hours ago. We're warming him slowly, hoping to avoid cardiac arrest. He needs to make it a couple more hours. That's what's important now.” She spoke in a whisper and nodded behind the next curtain, where Gus slept like he was on fire. His right hand was wrapped in gauze, his hair a bird's nest of matted curls, his young man's beard only an inch long where it had grown in full, and I couldn't help thinking he resembled a child because of it.

“Has his mother been here?” I asked.

“She left twenty minutes ago.”

“Will the boy be all right?”

“He's skinny as a newborn fawn. Has a little frostbite of his own, on his hand and up on his cheeks. But mostly he's just tired.”

“Is it true Freddy and Marcel Riverfish brought them in?”

“Honestly, Berit, it was the damnedest thing you ever saw. Those two and these two, right out of the woods.”

“Where did they find them?”

“I heard they were about to die up on the Burnt Wood River. Not twenty paces from the Devil's Maw. Their canoe had caught in a snowbank alongshore. A few more feet to the right and they would've been swallowed whole.” The nurse looked at Gus for a long time and then back at me. “He looks just like his pops, doesn't he?”

“Yes, he does.”

She patted my arm again and told me to have a seat. When she pulled the curtain to step back to work, she did so with the hand she'd been keeping behind her back. On it was a plastic glove covered in blood.

News of Harry and Gus coming out of the woods that January day in 1964 spread through town even faster than reports of JFK's assassination had two months earlier. Some folks were already calling it a miracle. Others said that fate had smiled kindly on them. Surely it was a bit of both. A few even said that between Thea Eide, Harry's grandmother, and Odd Eide, his father, the family had endured a generous portion of misfortune, and this was God's way of evening the score.

But I could have told you, sitting in the corner of that hospital and watching that man's suffering, that this was a godless business. The only credit I was willing to give providence was for making our winters what they were, and for making Harry the man who he was and his situation as devilish a thing as anyone could ever imagine.

It seems so recently that I sat through that night. So little time since the great happiness of my life came to bloom. It's true I hardly knew Harry then. And it's true I didn't know exactly why I'd gone to the hospital or what I expected to find once I got there. Certainly I had no idea what he'd been through in the months he'd been gone, or any sense of what it was that drove him into the wilderness in the first place, but I did know—sitting there that night—that the care he was receiving in that hospital room would have less to do with his survival than my love of him would. I knew this because of how powerfully my feelings were welling up in me. And I was right.

First I sat there and thought about all the lost time. Not his stint on the borderlands but all the time before that. The years since I'd first laid eyes on him in the winter of 1937 and the day we'd stood there with the butterworts six months later. It pained me to think of what had been squandered to those years. It pained me also to think of what Lisbet had gained instead: Gus and Signe, their beautiful home on the river, all of that time with Harry, all the dusky nights and bright mornings, all the happiness of a full life. I even wished for the spats and sadness and hard and hateful moments that I knew they had and that we, too, would inevitably have shared. All of it should have been mine.

Now, before you judge me I should say that I knew even then what an ugly thing it was to covet. But I had waited. I had been patient. I had lived my life and had done so without objection. Indeed, I had lived it as well as I could. All the friends I had. All the books I'd read. All the quiet and soulful evenings when I'd felt near to bursting because of how beautiful this place was. All the snowfalls and sunrises. All this added up to a life of plenty, that's for sure. And as I sat there, watching Harry not die, all those things, and everything else, was suddenly larger and more stunning because I saw what I'd always really known—that I would love this man.

It's an amazing thing—the most amazing, in fact—to sit through a night and know in the morning that you are in love. That it's not a dream or a fantasy or something to covet, only something to fill you up. There are those people who say it's a folly or that only fools rush in, but I have lived all three ways—without it, with wanting it, and with it in my hands—and I say the latter's by far the best.

Before it was even light outside, I opened my eyes to old Willem Lundby standing above Gus, holding his notebook mid-inquiry, his badge on his chest. Gus was picking pieces of dried fruit from a plastic bowl. Before Willem noticed I was awake, I closed my eyes again and listened.

“So you never saw Charlie Aas?”

“No, sir.”

“You never saw his plane?”

“No, sir.”

“Because no one has seen Charlie or his plane for coming up on ten days now. The last time someone did see him, he was heading over the hills above town.”

“I don't understand what you're saying. My dad and me, we were just wintering.”

“And where did you say you were wintering?”

“I don't know exactly.”

“You don't? Really?”

“No, sir. I don't know exactly. Somewhere up on the borderlands. We got lost.”

“Huh. So you got lost?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And not even Charlie in his plane could find you?”

“Not even God could have found us.”

“What about your old man's foot over there? He step in a wolf trap?”

Gus looked over at his father. “We had a hunting accident.”

“A hunting accident?”

Gus nodded.

“Your old man never poached a day in his life, so why start now?”

“We had to eat. We were trying not to starve.”

“Had to eat.” Willem shook his head. “Good God almighty,” he said, and shook his head, flipped back through his notebook, tapped his pencil on his mustache. “Most folks figure Charlie went up to find you and your dad. On account of the hot water your old man put him in.”

“How could he find us, though?”

Willem looked up from his notebook. “That's what I want to know, son. Or, rather, I'm wanting to know what happened when he did.”

“But he didn't. Nobody could find us. I told you that. We couldn't even find ourselves.”

On it went like this for some time, Willem sure there was a connection to be made, and Gus, still nibbling on his dried fruit, insisting there was not. In the end, Willem smiled and shook his head and said, “I'll be damned. You Eides can really tell a story after all.” He pocketed his notebook and pencil and took his brown felt campaign hat off the chair beside the bed and put it on his bald head. “I just hope your old man tells the same story when he wakes up.”

Maybe Harry had been awake during Willem's questioning of Gus. Maybe they'd talked it through before, on those days they spent escaping from the wilderness. Maybe he simply knew through their consanguinity what Gus would have told Willem or anyone else like him. Maybe—and least likely, I think—he actually was amnesiac and simply couldn't remember the details of their last days. Maybe their story was merely telling itself. Whatever the case, when Harry woke the next morning and Willem came back to put his campaign hat on the chair beside his bed, the story did stay the same, what parts of it he could remember, anyway.

Ana assured Willem that it was natural Harry could have lost some of his memory. Hypothermia did that, stripping things from your mind. And even if the hypothermia hadn't, the shock and trauma of their experience might well have. Indeed, that was likely, too. So Willem left again, the story still the same.

A week after Freddy and Marcel Riverfish delivered them to the emergency room, they came back to drive them home. Or to what was left of it. Lisbet had moved into the same attic apartment where I'd spent so much of my life, an irony that's still not lost on me. (It wouldn't be long before she left Gunflint altogether, a divorcee headed back to Chicago and whatever might have been there.)

The whereabouts of Charlie Aas was the only thing Gunflinters talked about the rest of that winter. Many folks were ready to believe that he'd merely skipped the country and had flown his plane into Canada to avoid his local legal troubles, which were by then considerable. The authorities would find it impossible to prove he'd killed George, but all the rooting around they'd done investigating that charge had unearthed dozens of other crimes on top of the good work the
Tribune
reporter had done. By the time Charlie left Gunflint for the last time he'd already had his real-estate license revoked, he'd been placed on unpaid leave as mayor, and his wife—long-suffering—had filed for divorce. His daughter, Cindy, hadn't spoken to him in months, not since she'd been brought down to Duluth to get better in the psych ward at St. Luke's.

There were others who believed his last flight was a suicide mission. These were predominantly the same people who blamed the Cubans for JFK's assassination. Folks like Len Dodj, who, instead of being with Charlie on the borderlands, was mopping the floors at the hospital where Harry and Gus ended up. Matti Haula was seen plenty around town, usually plunked down at the Traveler's Hotel, and he had his own theories about where his pal had disappeared to.

But no one knew, not even Lisbet. She told Willem first and then the federal authorities who came later that when Charlie left on that January morning she knew neither where he was going nor who was with him. I never doubted the veracity of this. No one else did, either.

It wasn't until early April that the speculation came to an end. A Canadian trapper on a lake called Hagne—deep in the Quetico—found Charlie's Cessna, undamaged and empty but for a pack of American cigarettes, a box of rags, and three empty Mason jars. A twenty-gallon jug of airplane fuel sat on the ice outside the plane.

The trapper reported his find to the ranger at the Cross Lake Station two days later, and in turn he dispatched a party to retrieve the plane. Because by then air-traffic restrictions were already in place for the entire borderlands wilderness, Charlie's plane being where it was at all made this a criminal investigation from the outset. But the search lasted only one day and included only the three men whom the ranger had sent out there. By the time the plane was linked to Charlie, and Willem and the federal investigators were alerted, he'd been given up for dead.

Charlie Aas, and the two men who'd been with him, left no trace.

“This is your first time back here?”

“Yep.”

“What about when you were searching for your father?”

“I stopped below the lower falls that night.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder as though to say,
Down there.

“Is it strange?”

“No. I don't think so.” He stepped up to the railing on the lookout and peered over the edge. “In a way it's like I never left. Lately, it sometimes feels like that.”

There was still snow in the woods, and ice knurling from the fissures above and below the falls, but the birch trees upriver were greening.

“Do you think it's true that people have thrown pianos and cars down there?” Gus said, pointing at the Devil's Maw.

“I've heard those stories, too.”

He looked around. “How could you even get a piano up here?”

I shrugged. “I don't know whether to hate you or thank you, Gus.”

He looked at me like I'd slapped him.

“I know you meant no harm. I'm just certain of that. But you have to understand something about all that you've told me.”

He stepped away from the railing, toward me. “What is it, Berit?”