Wintering (13 page)

It occurred to him more than once that he would never be rescued. That the woods and the night had swallowed him and that he was already lost forever and just didn't know it yet. He would die curled up under the tree, starved or frozen or both. Years later, it struck him how unlike the bear he was in this respect, how fragile the night made him.

He told me—slowly, very quietly—that he thought often of how many nights had passed between then and now. He allowed that if he'd ever seen any evidence of God it was in his shivering and intermittent sleep that night under the tree. All of it—the fire and snow and stars and moon and darkness all around—hinted at such. But even more than these physical things, it was the feeling that accompanied him as he prayed that tested his doubt. He prayed clumsily, ardently, all through the night. He prayed like a beggar. And he had never felt so alone or so far away or so helpless as when uttering those words. The words themselves he could no longer recall. But the vulnerability alongside them? That feeling stayed with him in the years since, whenever some danger presented itself. And thus he had his religion. And thus his God had always been an orphan to the ones found in the holy books.

Gus woke to the sight of his father walking toward him. Walking and then running and then throwing a sleeping sack over him. He kissed him on the cheeks and forehead until Gus pushed him away. Harry pulled off his coat and wedged it under his head. Then he stoked the fire with all the wood that remained, blowing into the embers until the flames grew as tall as he was. He took a chocolate bar from his hip pocket, ripped it open, and broke a piece off, then knelt and put it in Gus's mouth. His son took the rest of the candy from him and sat up. He guzzled from the canteen and stuffed the rest of the chocolate into his mouth.

“What the hell, bud?” Harry said.

One of the logs toppled from the fire and Gus kicked it back into the flames.

“We're a long way from the shack,” Harry continued. “And there's six inches of snow on the ground.”

Gus's mouth was full of candy. He couldn't have spoken even if he'd wanted to.

“Your tracks are almost gone. It's a miracle I found you.” Harry was pressing back tears as he spoke. “If not for the fire, bud, I might not have.” He gazed into the fire and followed the flames as they turned to smoke and rose into the dawn. The sky was purple and clear.

“I shot a bear,” Gus said, wiping chocolate from his chin. “I was tracking it.”

Harry was still staring at the smoke. “And you didn't notice it getting dark?”

“I—”

“You didn't notice the snow?” Again he pressed back his tears. “You should've known better than to do just about everything you did. I taught you better than that.”

Gus turned away. “Yeah, most of what you taught me isn't really holding up out here.”

Harry waited for Gus to look back at him. “You're right about that,” he said when Gus finally met his eyes. “I guess I thought we were back on track.”

“There's no track,” Gus said. “Not that I see, anyway.”

Harry nodded. He came and sat down next to him.

“I know I shouldn't have shot the bear. That was stupid.”

Harry nodded again.

“I know I shouldn't have tracked her till dark. I know all that stuff.”

“You warming any?”

Now Gus nodded. They sat there beside the fire for a long time before Harry said, “There's something you should see.”

Gus stood and wore the sleeping sack over his shoulders like a cape as he followed his father for a minute or two, until they came to the hilltop. Gus took in the steep drop to a lake that appeared black as coal against the snow-white world around it. Then he noticed tracks along the ridgeline between the bent pines.

He looked at his father, who pointed to where the tracks first appeared and gestured for Gus to move ahead. After twenty paces he was standing beside the dead bear. She was blanketed in snow, her snout resting on her forepaws. They weren't a hundred yards from where he'd slept the night before.

“There's your girl.”

Gus could see where his father had brushed the snow away to reveal the bullet wound on the sow's right flank, where blood had frozen in her matted coat. He knelt and swept the snow from her face. Her eyes were closed.

Gus stood and knocked the snow from his trousers, then looked back at the fire through the woods.

“You okay?” Harry said.

“Yeah. Or I'll be okay. Why not?”

“Listen,” Harry said. “For everything you did wrong last night—for everything that went wrong last night—there's one thing you got right. You survived. You did everything right after you got lost.”

“Maybe,” he said.

His father rested a hand on his shoulder and they stood there in silence until Harry took one of the bear's hind legs and told Gus to grab the other. Together they dragged the bear back to the fire.

Harry said, “You want to learn how to do this?”

“I don't think so. My plan is never to hunt bear again.”

“You want to keep me company anyway?”

Gus, in answer, sat down by the flames.

His father removed his coat and unbuttoned and rolled up his shirtsleeves, then pulled the knife from his belt. He knelt down and rolled the bear on its back, and sang softly while he went to work.
“Un loup hurlant vint près de ma cabane, / Voir si mon feu n'avait plus de boucane, / Je lui ai dit: Retire-toi d'ici, / Car, par ma foi, je perc'rai ton habit!”

When the bear was skinned Harry slit open its gut and yanked the offal from its belly. Soon after, he took the bear's heart from its chest and offered it to Gus. “Freddy Riverfish would say to take a bite. You want one?”

“No way,” Gus said. “That isn't happening.”

Harry's smile was mischievous. He raised the bear's heart up to the morning sun, then brought it down to his open mouth.

“I
CAN'T IMAGINE
why you'd want to spend another minute in here.” This was Gus talking. We stood again in the apothecary, on the main floor. “All this dust. Everything faded and worn.” He shook his head. “It's ghostly.”

“Ghosts are the stuff of dreams, Gus.”

“This place is a dream,” he said.

He by then had taken on the countenance of someone wearied by his own story. I thought he might say something more about his father and their winter—there was almost never a preamble, and he started each memory like a man running out of a burning house—but instead he said something that surprised me. “It's always bothered me that my father had to spend his childhood living in the fish house. Poor as a peasant. While she lived here. Feeding filet mignon to those dogs of hers. Starting fires with ten-dollar bills.”

“All that money, Gus, what did it buy her?”

“Hey, she was warm at night. She didn't have to spend her time worrying about which way the wind was blowing.”

“Fortunes turn, though, don't they? Just look at you and your sister. Consider the legacy of Rebekah and Hosea Grimm and put yours next to theirs. I don't need to point out that the same building you think your father must have pined away for is one that your sister just gave away. Not sold, given. Your family name will be right above the door.”

“We've come honestly by what's ours, Berit.”

“Oh, I know that. Of course I do. But that sign came at a price and Thea Eide—your great-grandmother—paid it. Odd Eide paid it. Your father, he paid it, too. You're paying some yourself, no doubt.”

He looked at me.

“Other people paid other prices, Gus. That's all I want to say. I don't mean to harp. But there's not a soul in this town who doesn't owe something to their neighbor.”

He took in the big open room and drew a deep breath. “That's why you're curating this place? There can't be very many other reasons to.”

I crossed the room and hung my coat on the hook by the door and turned again. “I told you before, this place isn't as fraught with meaning for me as it is for you.”

“Even before my mother made this her trysting place, my father had us understand we were not to come here. We were not to speak with Rebekah. We were not to so much as look in her direction. Like she was some sort of sorceress. A Medusa.”

“She was a great many things, but a sorceress? No. Far from it. And she was beautiful, not hideous.”

“I don't know, she turned plenty of folks to stone.”

“More like she was made of stone herself,” I said. “Of all the heartbreaking lives this town has harbored, Rebekah's was the most so. The most.”

Gus rolled his eyes.

“It's true. And you owe her much. Harry had it otherwise. I know why, and I understand, and I'm sure I could never convince you to feel differently. But you'd be a fool not to look around. There are things for you to see here.”

“Such as what?”

I said nothing, just walked to the staircase and started up, rounding the newel post on the second-floor landing and heading up to the attic, where I went to the kitchen table. A hundred years it had stood there. Now I swept a sheet off it and Gus walked over and looked at the portrait lying on the table.

“Your mother's,” I said.

He stared at it intently. “She could only see something through if she was painting it,” he said. “Or destroying it.”

“She saw you and your sister through to the end.”

“Now you're her champion?”

“Certainly not. But as it was with Rebekah, so it was with your mother. They were complicated women. Their lives weren't easy, either one. Rebekah's especially.”

“Not easy? She never knew anything except ease.”

“She didn't have to hoist gill nets, it's true. But ease? You're mistaken about that.”

“What was hard for her? Tell me.”

“Try to imagine what it would've been like for a woman to abandon her child back then. Seventy years ago, Gus. Women were treated very differently in those days. Even a woman with her means. She might as well have been a leper.”

He looked doubtful.

“She made a decision that cost her any chance for a normal life.”

“You said it—she made a decision.”

“Have you ever thought about how much easier it would've been for her to leave from behind this window? To be with your grandfather? To raise your father?”

“Then why didn't she?”

“Because she didn't know how to. She didn't know how to love herself, much less the people she cared about.”

“What does her gravestone say?”

“Gus.”

“Tell me. You know.”

“It says, ‘I have loved.' ”

“That's right.”

“She learned how to love by staring through this godforsaken window. By looking down on a life she could only regret not being a part of.”

“Nonsense.”

“How could she be a mother? She was no one's child.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“She was an orphan. She never had anyone.”

He stepped away from the painting and shook his head again.

“Think of all you and your father went through. And I don't just mean that winter. I mean all your years together. Think of all the questions you ever asked him. Think of all the questions your children have asked you. All the things you've taught one another. Think of all the love you've known. She never knew any of that.”

“She could've come down from this place anytime at all. She could've said she was sorry. Any of the million days she spent up here, she could have quit this for good. None of us were ever very far away.”

“And what if she had come down? Your father, he'd have forgiven her? No, he wouldn't have so much as looked at her. In fact, he might have struck her down. And you? You'd have forgiven her?”

He was almost shaking, he was so upset.

“She knew where she stood with those closest to her, or who should've been. She was scared and alone. All she ever knew was loneliness. Loneliness she brought on herself, true. But she had to live with it all the same.”

“My father, he had his own share of loneliness.”

“Of course he did. But he also had you and Signe. He knew your love.”

Gus walked slowly back toward the portrait.

“Signe was here to see her paint it. Part of it, anyway. So many years ago. Still, I remember it very well. Charlie Aas was here, too. And because Rebekah was here, so was I.”

The layers of light and subject in that painting are unlike anything I've ever seen. In the center of the canvas, Rebekah Grimm sits in her rocking chair, holding a hat. The background is a view of the lake from the window, and waves are coming across it from the south. The portrait streams from dark-as-night blue on the left edge of the canvas to indigo as soft as the blue of Rebekah's iris. It is as if the waves are bringing the light, or, perhaps, the dark. Maybe both. Her eyes—indeed, all of her—seem to gather the thousand shades of blue between the two edges before casting the color back onto itself. Her face is oversized. Not exactly caricature, though not far from it. But beautiful and youthful. The only thing that isn't a shade of blue is the pink hat in her hands.

“All those years ago, when your mother bought this place, Rebekah made it a condition of the sale that your mother paint her portrait. She never showed it to your father, I'm certain of that.

“I remember Signe. She didn't know enough to be leery of Charlie Aas yet. She was only twelve years old. She didn't know how to be amazed yet, either. By your mother's talent or the particulars of that gathering. All those people in the same room. What it all meant. All the endings it foreshadowed.” I got a chill just thinking of it. “Your mother, though? Well, she was right at home. She explained that they'd been working mostly at night or in the afternoon, but on that day they were into the morning light. She wasn't sure the composition would work, so she asked Signe what she thought.

“What in the world was Signe supposed to say?” I asked. “It seemed cruel, putting that question to a child. But Signe, she surprised me. She said, ‘It looks sad.' Oh, I can remember it perfectly.
Perfectly.
I was just delighted.”

Gus smiled and shook his head as though it was beside the point to explain about Signe, and it was. After a moment he said, “She was a beautiful artist. There's just no getting around that, is there?” He took a deep breath. “If only she'd been as gentle with her family as she was with her brushstrokes.”

I sat down on the chair beside the table and told Gus about the rest of that morning.

I wish I could say why it was such a memorable day. Partly, of course, it was Lisbet and Charlie being there together. So brazen they were, even if they had their excuses. Charlie was her real-estate agent, after all. Partly, though, and maybe more important, it was because I saw in that gathering three generations of Eide women in the same spot, and what Signe had said about the painting could have been said many times over about the incongruity of their being in one another's company.

Signe asked her mother, “How long have you been painting this?”

“We started the day we bought the place. Miss Grimm is a determined subject. She sits for hours on end without so much as batting an eye.”

“I've had much practice,” Rebekah said, her voice sharp. It would have been the first time Signe had ever heard her speak.

The girl looked at Rebekah sitting in the rocking chair, her eyes cast down on that hat in her lap. By 1963 I'd spent more than twenty-five years with her and I thought I'd seen every expression she was capable of, but there was a new depth to her sadness with Signe in the room. And what did Signe herself see? It was impossible to tell. She was every bit as stoic and straight-faced as her mother.

“Miss Lovig,” Lisbet said, “why don't you put water on for tea? Maybe we'll take a break and Signe can spend some time with her grandmother.”

And because it was my place, I went to the kitchen and put a pot of water on the stove. From where I stood, I could watch Signe and Rebekah. They said nothing to each other, only sat there by the window. Rebekah with her hollow gaze on the water, Signe with her eyes on the woman she'd spent her whole young life not knowing. Charlie and Lisbet, they stood on the edge of the kitchen and lit cigarettes and watched Signe as though she were a puppy. It wasn't long before they found an excuse to fetch something from Lisbet's car and went downstairs.

It was only then Rebekah said, “Your mother, she's running around with another man? With Charlie Aas, no less. Charlie's a swine.”

This was Rebekah's way. She spoke to almost no one. She hardly ever left her seat at the window, entertained almost no visitors. Still, she knew the color of everyone's underclothes.

“An oinking pig.” She almost smiled before her expression turned sour. “He's not the first hornswoggler who'd have us believe this backwater's the headwaters of the world. It is certainly not. That's one thing you should know.”

Signe looked at her for a long time before her eyes widened. “Miss Grimm, are you blind?”

“I can still see light and dark. But not much more.”

Signe didn't say anything.

“Don't pity me, child. I've seen enough in my life.”

Signe still didn't speak. She stared at Rebekah, rather too freely, as far as good manners went.

“How old are you, Signe Eide?”

“I'm almost thirteen.”

“That means your father is now forty-three. Am I right about that?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Who will tend his nets?”

“No nets this year. He might have to sell his boat. That's what Mom says.”

“Sell his boat?”

“Mom says there aren't any fish in the lake anymore.”

“Sell his boat?” she said again.

“He might. If anybody will buy it.”

Signe simply could not take her eyes off her grandmother. They sat there silently for as long as the water took to boil.

Then, while I made the tea, I heard Signe say, her voice almost a whisper, “Miss Grimm?”

Rebekah held her gaze on the window, as if she could see again and the lake was on fire.

“Miss Grimm, why aren't we allowed to know you?”

“Young lady, don't ever doubt that your father knows what's best for you. He learned how to be a father from the best man this town has ever known.” She finally turned to her. “He was right, keeping you from me.”

I set the tea on the table before the rocking chair and poured a cup for Rebekah. She took a sip and looked toward the staircase. Charlie and Lisbet appeared as if magically summoned.

“You've been telling secrets up here, haven't you?” Lisbet said, glancing at Signe even though her words were meant for Rebekah.

Rebekah leaned toward Signe and whispered, too silently for Lisbet to hear her, “Tell your father I'd like to buy his boat.”

I could tell my story didn't impress Gus much. He might even have been getting impatient.

“Let me see if I understand,” he said. “Because Rebekah was once decent to Signe, we should exalt her? Hang up her portrait as the Matriarch of Gunflint?”

“Honestly, you're even a harder case than your father.”

“I mean, the simple fact she wanted her portrait done in the first place says it all.”

“You're right. She was vain. Because she was beautiful and thought of herself and no one else. I actually think wanting to have her portrait done was an attempt to understand herself differently, though.”

“And not because it was my mother doing the painting? Not as a way of getting closer to us?”

“Maybe that was a part of it. But I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“How can I say this?” I offered, blushing. “Rebekah, she was the subject of countless photographs.”