Wintering (3 page)

“Stalwart. Indeed, sonny boy.”

He hadn't seen his father so at peace for some time and hadn't expected to now, given how many years it had been since he'd last been in a camp anywhere. Gus knew something was off, because that kind of easiness had so rarely been part of Harry's constitution. It made Gus nervous. “We'd better tend to our camp,” he said.

“Righto.”

As would become their custom, Gus got a line in the water while Harry gathered firewood and started a pot of rice. Two pike fillets were boiled and salted before the rice was done, and they ate off tin plates, the sun setting over the trees behind them. They were silent, as they'd been most of the day, and when they finished eating, Gus scrubbed the pots and plates and stoked the fire before he took his mandolin from its case.

While he fingered a few chords into that beautiful gloaming, his father pulled a length of birchwood from the pile beside the fire and cut it to a length of a foot and a half. The hatchet—like the canoes and sleeping sacks and paddles and damn near half their outfit—was something Harry had made. In a furnace he'd built, he melted the old Buda motor from his own father's retired fishing boat. He cast the hatchets and knives in clay molds, hammered the edges on an anvil, honed them with files, then his belt sander, and finally with emery paper and the sharpening stone. He'd stacked leather for the grips and cut moose hide for the sheaths, and now here he was, on the shore of Borealis Lake, trimming a birch stick by the fire.

He worked, as he always did, as though he were completely free of thought, his hands obeying instinct rather than the instructions of his own mind. Before Gus finished the first song, he'd already cut all the bark from the birch.

Gus stopped playing. “What are you making there?”

Harry sighted the birch up and down, looked across the fire, and said, “Play me another ditty, would you?”

Gus strummed the mandolin only once before repeating the question.

“I guess,” Harry said, “it's going to be a calendar. We can notch all our days on it.” He nodded, satisfied, and said, “Now play me that song again, eh?”

So Gus did. He played until the stars jumped out.

For two days they paddled against the Burnt Wood's weakening current, portaging the saults, making lunches over fires on the river's edge, pitching their canvas each night in clearings. Already each was growing used to the silence of the other's company. And to the strange beckonings from the wilderness.

Here the river was narrowing even as the trees on shore grew more distant. On either side they could touch the tall and browning cattails with the blades of their paddles, the boggy water beyond seeping toward the jack pines ashore. Every thirty strokes or so they came upon matted shoreline where moose had come to forage.

As they paddled Harry sang full-voiced:
“Le fils du roi s'en va chassant, / En roulant ma boule. / Avec son grand fusil d'argent, rouli,-roulant, ma boule roulant…”

“What's with the love songs?” Gus said.

“They're chansons. Voyageur songs.”

“Why holler about it?”

“You want to surprise some bull along this tight stretch of river? With nowhere to turn? They're hornier than you are right now. We come on one unannounced and you'll have an antler up your ass faster than you could squeal about it.” Harry smiled and started singing again. They paddled on.

An hour later, the river and muskeg funneled into a narrow watercourse no more than two feet deep and six feet wide. Their paddles struck the rocky riverbed, sending sharp reverberations into their hands. After a few minutes, Harry stepped from his canoe and unpacked a length of rope. Gus did as Harry did. They knotted their lines to the bows, shouldered and tied off the line, and started dragging their boats single-file up what was left of the river. When the trees closed above them, they had to bend and then crawl through the canopy of boughs and branches.

“I hope this means we're near Burnt Wood Lake,” Harry said. “We ought to be.”

The river was frigid and already Gus's hands were numb. “Were you expecting this?”

“I wasn't expecting anything. I will not.” Harry looked over his shoulder, down the starboard side of his canoe, and fixed Gus with his stare. He remembered that stare, Gus did. All these years later, he recognized it as a warning. For Harry knew, sure as Gus did himself, that asking if he'd been anticipating a tangle of trees and shallow water was his son's first complaint. And them only three days into a trip that would last months.

Gus had not questioned their planning much, but he had wondered—on the night before they departed—why they didn't just drive up to the public access on Burnt Wood Lake and put in there. It would have taken less than an hour from their front door, saved them a lot of unnecessary effort, and spared them this cloying mess of trees.

The reason, Harry had told him, was that since the “voyageurs of yore” didn't have the benefit of being towed up to the public access, neither should he and Gus. This notion sounded noble to Gus, and of course it was in the spirit of their adventure. But clambering on hands and knees to tow his canoe like some blind and stubborn horse, he was unable to check himself. Gus said, “This water is freezing.”

“I suppose we'll run into our share of cold water between now and then,” Harry said, still staring down the length of his canoe.

“I thought this was a river,” Gus said, rolling now.

Harry got up on one knee, cupped his hand into the water, and brought it up to his mouth. “Gus, bud, there's gonna be stretches that're tougher than others. We're gonna get wet and we're gonna get cold. I'll save you the trouble of discovery on those accounts. Let's not piss in our soup, eh?”

Gus didn't say anything, only pulled his canoe past his father and tunneled farther up the river.

“You have to wonder why we were there,” Gus said that November morning he got to talking. “Not just on that stretch of river, but heading into the wilderness beyond. It was so incredibly reckless. To leave at that time of year, for starters. With our provisions? With his miscarriage of a plan? My God.” He paused. “And of course I should've been in college. Should have been running to college. But I didn't even think of it. Can you imagine that? What mess of bent and secret lives was leading us into this? How much anger and grief?”

“Folks always chase their sadness around. Into the woods. Up to the attic. Out onto the ice.”

Gus closed his eyes. “I guess they do.”

“You're chasing yours.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it's chasing me.”

“Could be.”

“But why was I being petulant three days in? Had he overestimated me? Was I still just a kid? A little boy?” He moved his head like he was nodding yes and shaking no at the same time. “Or were we just in over our heads? Who can say? I only know that when the trees above me lifted and I got off my knees and shook like a wet dog, Burnt Wood Lake opened up right before me. I looked back at my father, still a hundred yards behind, and do you know what I felt?”

I looked at him, waiting.

“Ready to keep going. If I'd felt otherwise, we might've stopped then and there. We might have avoided everything. But I didn't want to. I took a couple steps forward into the river's earliest, feeble currents and mistook their weakness for my strength. When my father hauled up next to me he said nothing, only pointed up the lakeshore. There, standing among the duckweeds and watermeal, in water up to its belly, its dewlap dripping, its huge antlers lit up, was a moose. He was beautiful. And furious, I could tell.

“I said, ‘Why isn't he running away? He ought to fear us. I could shoot him right now. He should know that.'

“My father, he only said, ‘Yes, I suppose he should.' ” He mimicked Harry's voice—a perfect imitation—and then fell silent for a moment. “Good Christ, Berit. The things I didn't know.”

I
KNOW WHAT
some of the folks around here used to think, that for years the worst of them labeled me a boondagger because I could lift a fifty-pound sack of U.S. mail and had no husband. The fact is, there's only been one man in all my years and I simply chose to wait for him. Through the end of my first winter here, then through what seemed an eternity.

Harry was the first person in Gunflint to show me a special gentleness. This was one warm summer morning after I'd strolled the shoreline, plucking flowers from the cracks in the bedrock. He'd been out at his nets, just a sixteen-year-old boy already making a living for himself. He was tying his boat to a cleat on the Lighthouse Road. “You got a fistful of carnivorous flowers there, Miss Lovig,” he said.

“Beg your pardon?” I said, surprised to hear his voice at all. More surprised to hear him saying my name.

He finished his knot and stood and offered his hand. “I'm Harry Eide,” he said. We shook hands and he continued, “Butterworts.” He nodded at the flowers in my hand. “That's what you've got there. You'd have to walk a long way to find them anywhere else.”

I looked down at the purple flowers, then up at his fresh and boyish face. He ought to have been smiling. Later he would tell me he hadn't spoken in months. Since February. Which seemed hard to believe then and still does, though I never—not once—had reason to doubt anything he ever said.

“What do you mean by carnivorous?” I asked him.

“They eat bugs. Honest to God.”

“How do you know that?”

“My old man taught me.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I guess everyone knows that by now.”

“My given name's Berit,” I said.

He smiled, or, rather, half-smiled, the right side of his mouth curling up, his right eye squinting. “Berit Lovig. Right. It's nice to meet you. Get those flowers in a vase.” He took a step to leave, then paused and said, “Butterworts. They only grow here. This kind of butterwort, leastways. Here along the water.” He paused a second more, looked as though he was about to say something, but then went up the Lighthouse Road toward the Traveler's Hotel, where he took his lunch each day. Years later he would tell me how hard it had been to leave without saying more. Without saying thanks. Without asking me to join him for lunch. But he didn't do any of those things, and those few minutes on the Lighthouse Road would be our only proper conversation for more than twenty years. I knew from that moment, though, that he was my man. I knew I'd wait for him however long I had to. And I did.

Which is not to say that others didn't come calling. Some did. Charlie Aas, for example. But he was rotten from the word go, and rottener still with each day of his life.

By the time he was elected mayor in 1960 he presided over this town like a drunken lord. Through his strong-arming and sleight of hand he'd hidden his past, one that included charges of poaching and animal cruelty, both beaten, and a short stint in the juvenile correction facility in Duluth for terrorizing that autistic Bargaard child. No doubt there were other transgressions, large and small. I can say that because I experienced Charlie's thuggery myself, and no one but Rebekah Grimm and I ever knew about it.

By 1960 he was known for his mink coat and penny loafers in a town where every other man—even Mr. Nelson, the music teacher at Arrowhead High—wore work boots. Charlie was educated, his degree from the University of Minnesota one of only three or four in Gunflint back then. He was council president at Immanuel Lutheran. A real-estate baron. A bush pilot. A father of four, a daughter and three sons. He was respected because he was feared. Corrupter. Corrupted. Embezzler. Womanizer. Most folks knew all this. Or at least some of it.

But more than anything—and this is why he got away with so much—Charlie was third-generation. His grandfather put a fish house on the harbor shore in 1891. His father, Marcus, used to tussle with Harry's own father for whiskey dollars during Prohibition. All of which is to say that he had pedigree in these parts, crazy as that sounds, and despite his failings. Nothing has ever meant more to people up here than bloodlines.

Charlie parlayed his into public office. Being mayor around here never meant much before Charlie, but he was determined to change that. Partnering with the mining and lumber companies, he made a fortune just for saying we ought to open the borderlands, not protect them. As Harry put it, Charlie's goal was to pillage the wilderness and get rich from the wreckage. Harry's hundred acres along the Burnt Wood River were in the wrong spot. That was part of their problem. But the larger impediment was Harry's integrity and his own clout with the townsfolk.

For a year after he was elected, Charlie fought fair. Or at least out in the open. He and Harry shouted at each other across the church basement, where the town meetings were held in those days, and I was there for many of them. Charlie and his accomplices wore hundred-dollar suits and silk ties, while Harry and a few others sat there in flannel shirts with contrary views. Charlie loved trotting out phrases like “eminent domain” and “the good of the people” and was always talking about jobs. But Harry—whose name had always meant more than Charlie's, despite his office and money—wouldn't budge. And he found allies.

So Charlie reared back. For years he tried to gain the upper hand, buying friends as fast as he made enemies. He was as deft at one as he was at the other, and at times it looked like he and his Republican cronies would have their way with the wilderness. But they never did. Not then. Not ever.

The summer of '63, when Gus and his father weren't out hoisting mostly empty gill nets, they were in the fish house, building their canoes. Harry told Gus he wanted to teach him one true thing before he got out of this place, and the canoes were it. Most nights, after fishing all day and dinner at the Traveler's Hotel, the two of them would put a Bill Monroe record on the turntable and settle into their gentle and quiet labor. It was during those hours that Gus learned about Harry's own father's genius with boats, for every lesson—every word—had its root in something Odd had once said. Odd being Harry's father.

Gus recalled those hours as some of the best of his life. But he also recalled being anxious for their nights in the fish house to end, so he could steal away to meet Cindy Aas at Eddie Riverfish's house.

She was Charlie's only daughter, Gus's age and in the same high school class, and her shine for him was as unexpected and unlikely as snow in August. He'd known her his whole life, of course, and all that time they'd been strict opposites if not outright enemies. A cheerleader and homecoming queen and mediocre student, she liked to drink and smoke. The sort of girl mothers warned their sons about. Gus was quiet, a straight-A student, a letterman on the cross-country ski team, a member of the Chess Club. Those differences would have been enough to lock them in opposite circles, even without the rift between their fathers, and their grandfathers, too.

What they had in common was music. Cindy played the piano at church when her mother wasn't able to, and in the high school band she was first flute. Gus played the guitar in band and could strum any instrument with strings. Those old crones in the church basement used to whisper about the sounds the two of them could make together, but in all their lives Cindy and Gus had hardly spoken to each other.

After graduation that summer, Gus found himself sitting next to her on the deck out back of Eddie's house. It was late enough that the party, stoked all night by beer and marijuana, was finally petering out. Cindy didn't say much. Maybe she didn't say anything, but he remembered her looking up at him and kissing him, as though they'd been going steady for years. And he remembered the great whorling in his gut. And not being able to push her away even though he knew he should.

There in my kitchen, he wasn't comfortable talking about this, even so many years after the offense.

They spent the whole summer sneaking around. Swimming in the cove on the hottest nights, fooling with each other in her friend's basement, driving up to Long Finger Lake with a fifth of vodka and a pack of Pall Malls. She was showing Gus things he'd never seen before, and he loved it. He could still hear the songs on the radio, still remember how her hair gleamed with the moonlight behind it.

It would be months before Gus learned she was ordered into his life. He admitted that that fact complicated the story. But he still felt with absolute certainty that, on those nights up at Long Finger Lake, she was there because she wanted to be, never mind that unexpected wrinkle.

It was on such a night at Long Finger Lake that she told Gus about his mother and her father. They passed a bottle back and forth, toyed with the radio dial between long kisses, talked about friends and music. After a lull in the conversation, Cindy said, “My dad's screwing your mom.” Then she laughed, her eyes wide and wild. “Isn't it
scandalous
?”

Before he could answer she reached across the car seat and unzipped his jeans.

He wasn't sure he believed her. Not at first. For all the fun they were having, she was moody and prone to lying. But because of their intimacy—and because intimacy can make the blind see, if not the reverse—he did choose to believe, for the rest of the evening, that what was happening between them was at least as important as whatever his mother and Charlie Aas might be up to. Which is not to say that he wasn't curious. So he started investigating.

He had no idea, though, what he was looking for. His parents had never seemed happy, much less in love. He couldn't recall a single kiss, or a tender word, ever passing between them. As for his own experiences in affairs of the heart, that summer with Cindy was his initiation.

Still, he saw changes at home. Lisbet became glib with Harry, almost mocking. She bought new dresses. Started smoking again. Listened to loud music and spent countless hours on the telephone in hushed conversations with a friend in Chicago. And she started painting again. Feverishly, and sometimes all night long.

And his father? He became more obsessed than ever with his maps. He'd hunker down at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee and his books and pore over them as if the world itself could not impart the truths hidden within those pages. For him this was, Gus thought, a strange posture, to sit anywhere with such focus for so long, especially at their kitchen table, and Harry now reminded him of a wounded animal. Which it turns out he was.

They didn't talk much that season, father and son, but when they did—out tending the nets, or bent over their canoes in the fish house—Harry started telling Gus his war stories. The Hürtgen Forest. The Ardennes. Surprisingly, they had little to do with the men he fought beside or against, or the carnage he saw, though he told of these things, too. What he remembered most was how cold those nights were. Even worse, he said, than he'd grown up with in Gunflint. Gus was of course entranced. He listened with unwavering attention, though he was convinced even then that he didn't truly understand what he was being told, much less why. Any hours he spent alone were given over to questions of what it meant to be a man, and if he was one. Wondering if he had to go to war himself in order to cross that threshold. No doubt he'd have the chance if he wanted it. Maybe even if he didn't, given what JFK was calling the communist threat in Vietnam. He'd heard it was hotter than Hades in the jungles over there.

Things with Cindy came to a head near the end of summer, after Gus overheard his mother on the phone one night. He'd been out with Cindy, half drunk and full of lust. Lisbet was sitting by the fire, drinking a glass of wine, unaware that he'd just come in.

“I guess all the Aases are slumming it this summer,” she said, then listened for a moment to what her friend was saying. She took another pull of wine, nodded emphatically, and said, “Yes, of course. But that little trollop will flat wreck Gus. He's no match for her.” It was only then she noticed Gus, staring at her from across the room. She only smiled and turned back to her conversation.

Cindy didn't wreck him, even if she was supposed to.

They spent their last night together waiting out a thunderstorm in the fish house. It would be the first and only time they made love, a detail that sent Gus to blushing as he told me. When they finished she lay beneath him, her mouth on his shoulder. He remembered her hand in his hair, the sweat pooled in her belly, how she'd bitten him after he said he loved her, hard, right on the shoulder blade, enough to draw blood.

Then she laughed. “My dad told me I'm done seeing you, but I still wanted to do that with you.”

Gus didn't say anything.

“Did I hurt you?” She pushed herself up and looked into his eyes. “Your shoulder, did I hurt it?”

He glanced at the small arc of blood. “No,” he said. “Well, maybe a little.”

“Good. Whenever it stings, think of me.” She got up and dressed while the rain lightened outside. “I was your first time.”

Again he said nothing.

“I knew it.” She pulled her shirt on. “I hope you liked it. I sure did.” Then she knelt down and ran her hand through his hair. “I bet I even love you, too, Gus. I never thought I would.” She stood and looked away. “My father told me not to.”

She left without saying anything more, and he was still in the fish house later that night, when Harry arrived. If Harry was surprised to see him there, at that hour, he didn't let on. Gus
was
surprised, of course, and stood up guiltily and pretended to be putting some tools away.

“You don't need to do that,” Harry said.

“Do what?”

Harry came over and stood beside his canoe on the strongback. “I saw the Aas girl leaving. I was right outside.”

Gus turned away, though there was no place to hide.