Wintering (26 page)

It was only as I stood there looking at the falls that the notion had come to me at all. Rather, it was only by standing there that I was able to start making sense of it myself. “We almost never talked about that year, your father and I. When we first started seeing each other I asked him what happened up there. He told me only what he'd always told the authorities. He said the story was out there for anyone who wanted to hear it. As though the whole thing had been written in some book.”

Gus now wore the expression of a scolded child.

“I believe there was only one other time,” I continued. “This was maybe five years ago. I asked him about it after Charlie's wife, Maddy, passed away. In fact, I didn't even ask him about that winter, simply what he thought had happened to Charlie.” I looked at Gus, who was standing so near I could've reached up and touched his cheek. “Your father said that Charlie probably got lost in the woods and froze to death up on the Îles des Chasseurs. He said he hoped he'd died slowly.”

He had such an expectant look on his face, Gus did. Like I held the secret answer to the whole riddle. He seemed almost to be tipping over. So much that I put my hands up as though to catch him. “I don't understand,” he finally managed to say.

I took a step back. “We were together for more than thirty years, Gus. Think of that. He knew me better than anyone. A hundred times better.”

He still looked at me like he couldn't understand.

“And all that time,” I explained to him, the falls rushing, the falling water rising again in cold mist, “I did not know him. Actually,” I said quickly when he raised his hand to object, “I meant to say I didn't know one of the most important things about him. His secret, if you will. All you've told me, it's got me wondering if it changed who he was—if it changed who we were together?”

There's a little wooden bench up there on the lookout, and I sat down on it. I felt dizzy. I put my hand to my head and tried to press the whirling sensation out of it with my fingertips.

Gus sat down beside me. “I'm sorry,” he said.

It seemed wrong for him to apologize, and I told him as much.

“I didn't give enough consideration to how this story would affect you,” he said. “I really didn't. I'm sorry.”

I looked at him and saw that boy in the hospital bed all those years ago. For a long time I kept looking. Also seeing someone else.

When he started talking, I could barely hear his voice above the river. “When we got back, after Dad got home from the hospital, I used to sit around the house with him. Just waiting and hoping he'd say something. Anything. An apology, sure. That's what I wanted most. But eventually I would've happily taken a simple glance.”

He scooted even closer to me now. “I had no idea what was happening, since my mom and Signe were staying down at the apothecary—it was only me and Dad. Not so different, really, than it had been in that shack.

“In my memory he never spoke at all, but he must have. Just not about what had happened. So it was mine to live with, that winter, as it turned into spring. Mine alone. It began to seem—and I'm sure this sounds crazy—like he wasn't even there. That I was alone again up on the borderlands.” Now he paused and took my hands, exactly like he had the morning after Harry disappeared, back in November. “I should've been more thoughtful, Berit. Should have considered how hard it would be for you to hear all this. I didn't, and I am truly sorry.”

“I was never anxious to know much about the things your father kept to himself. He never told me about the war. I know very little about his marriage to your mother. At least not as told by him. He was intent to remember the good times, the happy times, of his life.”

“My God. I'm such a fool.”

“That's not true.”

He let go of my hands and gazed down between his feet for a long time. I thought of so many things in those moments. I thought of Harry, of course. Of how much I missed him and how much I loved him and how much I would've given to have him sitting there next to us. I would've gladly traded whatever time I have left on this earth for one more hour with him. But I also thought about Gus and his adventures up there—I glanced above the falls—and how it still wasn't finished. It never would be. And anyway, weren't my memories as much a part of Harry as he was of them? Especially now? I could let it all be. Could leave it all just as it had been. That was my prerogative, right?

I turned to Gus. “Don't fret about it, please. Nothing could change how I felt about your father. Nothing in this world, much less something that happened so long ago.”

When it was time to go Gus stood and offered me his hand, helped me up, and said, “Are you ready for the long walk back?”

“I guess I'd better be.”

We took one more long look down at the Devil's Maw and turned to go.

What I didn't tell Gus as we walked through the woods back home—what I might have told him, and maybe should've—was that I'd been up here myself only a week before. The walk had been even harder than I knew it would be, especially for an old girl like me, but I'd wanted to make it alone. To be the first to visit.

I didn't bring flowers, as I perhaps should have, but only that pompom from Harry's red hat. I brought it along with the last bits of my anger and threw it all into the river above the maw. I watched them funnel into the chute that dropped into the hole and saw them disappear. And I was content that my final gifts would find the bottom and be gone forever. And that maybe Harry's spirit or his soul or some such might see the pompom and know that I'd not stopped thinking of him. And that I never would.

T
HE DAY BEFORE
the ribbon cutting, I walked down to the outfitters on the end of the Lighthouse Road. In the back of the shop, behind the Duluth packs and cook kits, they keep a supply of maps. One of the kids who work there came back to help me.

“Miss Lovig,” she said. I think she was one of the Veilleux girls. “Are you planning a canoe trip?”

“I've never set foot in a canoe,” I said, hoping I sounded playful, as I'd meant to.

“Most folks looking at the maps back here are planning a trip. That's all.”

“Once upon a time I might've tried it. But these days I prefer my feet on solid ground.” Now I smiled, trying to assure her I wasn't the old crank people so often mistake me for. “But I am looking for a map. Maybe you can help me.”

“Of course.”

“There's a lake up in the Quetico called Hagne. I'd like to see it on a map.”

If this girl knew that lake had any significance, she didn't let on. “I'm not sure where that is, but we can figure it out.” She pulled a map from one of the slots below, one of the yellow Fisher Maps.
E-
15,
it read in the upper right-hand corner. “This is the whole boundary waters–Quetico wilderness.” She smoothed it atop the rack. “Almost all of it, anyway. You said it's in the Quetico? What's its name again?”

“Lake Hagne. Or Hagne Lake. It's a big one.”

She ran her finger across the map. It was painted red, her fingernail, and it went right to a spot in the middle of the map. “Hagne Lake.” Now she reached below for another map,
F-
18.
“This is the map of that area.” She laid it beside the other. “Here's Hagne Lake.” Again with her red fingernail.

“Thank you,” I said. She didn't leave, so I said “Thank you” again.

Then she did step away, saying that if I needed anything else I should give her a shout. Before I'd even looked back down she stopped and added, “I can't wait to see the history place. Our whole family's coming.”

I looked over at her and smiled. “That makes me glad. Pray for some sunshine.”

She went off toward the front of the store.

First I studied the map of the whole wilderness and noted, in the key, that each inch equaled two miles. Therefore, the full map from west to east covered eighty miles, fifty miles from north to south. Four thousand square miles. Was that right? There must have been a thousand lakes. A hundred streams and rivers. In the middle of it all was Hagne Lake, my eyes drawn back to it from everything else like it had a magnetic pull.

I cannot say, exactly, what had led me to the map. Some need of proof? Did I expect the Fisher Map would be marked with a skull and crossbones? Or a note in the key reading:
Here rests Charles Aas
? Or did I just want to put my unpainted nail down on a map and announce:
Presto!
Even if Gus didn't know or want to, would my own knowledge make the endgame permanent and put it finally and fully to rest? If I was expecting any of that I had clearly been mistaken, but there was a sense of calm that came upon me. So I rolled up the map and brought it to the girl at the cash register. Maybe I'd make it a gift for Gus. More likely I would put it on the desk in my den, along with every other memento and bit of evidence I'd compiled in the months since Gus came knocking on my door.

The next morning Gus and Sarah picked me up at ten o'clock. Signe was with them, sitting in the backseat of his Subaru, and he opened the other rear door for me.

“Hello, Berit,” Signe said.

“It's so wonderful to see you.” I squeezed her arm.

“And you,” she said back.

“Today's the big day,” Sarah said from the front seat.

Gus climbed back behind the wheel. “Ladies, shall we?” There was a lightness to his voice I'd not heard in a great many years.

“I'm so excited for you,” Signe told me.

“Oh, it has nothing to do with the old postwoman.”

“Nonsense,” Gus protested, peering into the rearview mirror. “It has everything to do you. Well, with the two of you back there.” I could see his eyes turn up in a smile.

We drove down the Burnt Wood Trail, the winding road crossing over the river in three spots before dropping us in town. I could still see ice drifting along the Lake Superior shore, and there were piles of snow in the ditches along the road, though a restless energy was everywhere in the woods, and the first songbirds of spring could now be heard in the mornings.

“It surprises me every year,” Sarah said.

“What's that?” Gus asked.

“That winter does actually end. That the snow melts away and the trees' leaves grow back.” She smiled at him and then turned around to us. “But it happens, every April, almost like clockwork.”

“Last year it snowed on Tom's birthday in May,” Gus said.

“I watched it snow in June one year. The lilacs took a real dusting.”

“Well, there'll be no snow today,” he said.

“Certainly not,” said his wife.

We veered right at the stoplight and drove toward the Lighthouse Road. When the apothecary came into view three blocks away, Gus craned his neck and said, “What's that?”

Sarah was looking at Gus. So was Signe. But I was watching the expression on Sarah's face as Gus drove. Something about her eyes reminded me of the fresh green of the grass on the roadside. We parked in back and Gus jumped out of his Subaru and started around to the front. By the time we caught up with him he was standing by the boat, one hand under his arm, the other on his chin. Sarah stepped beside him and put her arm around his waist. Signe moved to one side of them, as I did to the other. He glanced quickly in both directions, pausing once on each of us.

“Well?” Sarah said.

The boat had been my idea. For some thirty years it sat in the carriage house behind the apothecary, forgotten for so long. A more dilapidated thing you've never seen, but there was plenty still true about it. The keel, for instance. And the lapstrake planking. When Signe donated the apothecary and we took our first inventory—Bonnie and Lenora and I—we were surprised to discover it in the carriage house, covered with canvas on a trailer with four flat tires, a home for mice and chipmunks. But it also had an air of latent perfection, of incorruptibility, and we all agreed it would make a perfect showpiece. I asked Chuck Veilleux if he would restore it. He couldn't, but knew who could. So, one day last November, he pulled it out of the carriage house and hauled it down to a place in Duluth. Sargent's Boatwright and Chandlery, it was called. They spent the winter rehabbing the boat, not to make it seaworthy again but so it could sit out front of the Gunflint Historical Society with dignity.

Gus stepped over the hawser that had been strung around it and walked up its starboard side, his hand on the newly lacquered hull, the three of us behind him like schoolchildren trailing their pied piper. But at the stern he stopped and covered his eyes. The boat had once been named
Rebekah,
but I'd asked the men in Duluth to give her a new name, specifically the name of the man who'd built it:
Odd Einar
was now painted on the escutcheon.

“I thought it was gone,” Gus said. In the sunlight we could see his eyes get glassy.

“Nope,” Sarah said. “Berit kept it safe all these years.”

“No, Rebekah did,” I said.

Signe stepped over the rope and stood beside her brother. “Rebekah bought the boat the year you and Dad went wintering. He thought it was sold to some fisherman in Sault Ste. Marie. It's been stored here in the carriage house all these years. It seems everyone forgot about it.”

“I never did,” Gus said. “I dreamed about it a million times.”

“Well, now you have it again,” Sarah said. “We all do.”

Four sets of bleachers had been erected on the Lighthouse Road in the shape of a horseshoe surrounding the
Odd Einar.
A podium and microphone had been set up in the bow. Bunting was hanging from the apothecary's windows. The high school marching band stood off to the side, ready to play. At one o'clock folks started turning out, pretty much the whole town. The bleachers started filling up, and so did the lawn all around.

At one-thirty Mayor Bear Anderson stepped aboard the
Odd Einar,
welcomed the townsfolk, thanked the members of the historical society—singling out Lenora and Bonnie and me—and then reminded everyone that after the ribbon cutting there would be a pemmican feast sponsored by Sons of Norway and Immanuel Lutheran. It didn't take him more than thirty seconds to get to introducing Gus. “We're lucky up here, having such outstanding citizens. I bet if I asked any one of you about this next gentleman, the first thing you'd say is ‘I know Gus. He's a friend of mine.' That's what I think of him, that's for sure. This boat I'm standing on now was his granddad's. And his great-grandma came walking down the Lighthouse Road about a hundred years ago. That's how long the Eides have been here. I can't think of anybody better to say a few words about this here historical society, the renewed heart of our beautiful town. So, without further ado, here's Gus Eide.” He laid out a welcoming hand. “Gus, come on up here.”

He climbed the makeshift steps and shook Bear's hand and pulled his speech from his coat pocket, laid it on the podium, then buttoned his coat and pushed his windblown hair out of his eyes. Smiling weakly, he looked at Sarah and Signe and then at me. When he put his mouth up to the microphone, it screeched, and he stepped back and smiled and then adjusted it and began.

“Thanks, Bear.” He nodded at the mayor, still right behind him. “You've done a lot for this town, a lot for all of us, and I think I speak for everyone when I say we appreciate it.” Everyone clapped. “See?” he said, and turned again to look at Bear, who waved like a grand marshal.

“And you're right about us being friends. Friends and family. We're lucky indeed.” He took his reading glasses from his chest pocket and squinted down his nose at his sheet of paper. He took one deep breath and then another and then took off his glasses and slipped them back in his pocket.

“Maybe I'd do better to wing this.” He swept his hair back again and began in earnest. “Without these three women down here, none of us would be standing here to celebrate the opening of a society dedicated to who we are. Bonnie Hanrahan, Lenora Lemay, and Berit Lovig, you've accomplished something really wonderful.” He gestured back at the apothecary. “Almost from the time folks started settling here, this building has been the center of Gunflint's life. Your hard work ensures that it will continue to be. Every one of us thanks you deeply.”

He paused to collect his thoughts. “Miss Lovig tells me the walls of this place went up in the summer of 1893. Ever since then we've all called it the apothecary, even though not a single aspirin's been sold here in about seventy-five years. I suggest that from this day forward we say it's what that shingle up there says it is: the Gunflint Historical Society. Can we agree on that?” Again the crowd clapped.

“I've seen the exhibits inside and can tell you there's something for everyone. We've got a rich and colorful past. And a complicated one. But I think it's important we hold our past near to us. That we learn from it and keep living by it. In fact, I think we're nothing without it.” He stared up at the pinnacle. “This building will help us keep our past to heart. It will help us keep it alive.” He nodded his head, satisfied.

“So, Miss Lovig, and Bear, why don't you join me at the front door so we can cut this damn ribbon.”

At four o'clock we locked the doors. Bonnie and Lenora were behind the counter counting up the donations—a fair number had been made—and Sarah stood at the window. Gus, who'd been quiet, almost taciturn, all afternoon, was beside her, staring across the room at the portrait of Rebekah Grimm.

All the townsfolk had come through the exhibit, and by any measure the grand opening had been a success. I was relieved, as Signe was. It seemed an odd time for Gus to seem so melancholy, so I walked over to him.

“You look glum, Gus.”

“I'm not,” he said. “I was just looking at my grandmother over there. She's still keeping an eye on us, eh?”

“I suppose she is.”

“Do you remember the first morning I came to visit you? After my father disappeared?”

“Of course I do.”

“I said maybe you'd be able to help me understand why he'd set off again.”

“I remember, Gus.”

“I thought if I told the story of that winter, if I told you all those secrets, I'd feel better. I thought life would make more sense.”

“Do you feel better?”

“I believe I do.”

“And does life make any more sense?”

“Does it ever?” He nodded at Rebekah's portrait. “You know, there's more than a glancing resemblance between her and Signe. I'd never really noticed before.”

“I often thought the same thing. Not about the painting, but about the two of them.”

“No, life doesn't make any more sense.” He turned to me and smiled. “Let's go upstairs. For one more look from on high?”

Up we went, those steps I'd walked more than any others in my life.

On the third floor he said, “What a rousing success, eh, Berit?”

“It was quite a day.”

Out the window, down below, a crew was disassembling the bleachers.

“You've really done something amazing here. I wish I could have articulated that better in my speech.”

“It was a beautiful speech.”

“I'd written something, but, standing on that boat, with all the kids from town there with their parents, it suddenly felt entirely too academic. So I winged it.”

“Even so, it was lovely.”