Wintering (9 page)

G
US RECALLED
how the nights so often ended, pacing around the kitchen cradling his babies, finally drowsing after their fitful, colicky sleep. Sometimes he would nearly nod off with them while standing there looking out the window, watching the first reach into the darkness, twice seeing a fox cross the deck, stop to lift his nose toward the bird feeders, then jumping down onto the snow-covered yard. Usually it was his daughter, Greta, in his arms, Tom being quick to sleep. Gus could still see her eyes fluttering shut, and feel the heaviness of his eyelids and the lightness of her against his chest.

But above all, he could remember the quiet of those nights and mornings. So quiet he could hear Greta breathing. So quiet he could hear the flakes falling when it snowed, the drips of icicles in springtime, or Sarah rolling over in bed on the other side of the house.

When he woke that first morning at the shack it was to a similar silence. After a month of sleeping under a canvas tent, the quiet indoors was unsettling. It took him a long minute to realize where he was. He listened for any sound at all, but then gave up. Not even the wind moving the pine trees outside. He peeled himself from the sleeping sack on the floor and walked to the window. The world was white with frost again.

Harry was in a canoe fifty feet offshore, hunched over the gunwale and holding the end of a length of rope that disappeared into the steaming water. Gus watched as he marked the rope, then pulled it hand over hand. He wrote something in the book of maps, made five paddle strokes up the shore, and dropped the rope back in again. For ten minutes Gus stood at the window before he finally went outside and hailed his father.

As Harry paddled back toward shore, Gus said, “What are you doing out there?”

“Getting the lay of the lake bottom,” Harry said as he stepped out of the canoe. “So we know where to fish when the ice comes.”

“It's cold enough I'm surprised the water isn't frozen already.”

“That'll happen soon enough,” Harry said. “Water's not more than knee-deep for thirty feet off the point here, then it drops off. Twenty, twenty-five feet sheer. A good place to jig once the ice sets. We won't have to travel far.” He nodded, satisfied with his soundings. “How'd you sleep last night?”

“It felt good to wake up warm and dry, that's for sure.”

“You won't get any argument from me on that account.”

“Whose place do you suppose it is?”

“I was wondering the same thing. I reckon it's a trapper's shack. Some fella who got tired of trudging all these miles through cold and snow for a hundred dollars' worth of beaver pelts.”

“But there's no trapping gear.”

“True. So maybe it's a hunting camp.” He looked up at the shack for a moment. “It's a lonely son of a gun who comes out here to hunt by himself, though, ain't it? Hardly fit for a big party, is it?”

“No,” Gus said. “It hasn't been used in a while.”

“Likely we don't have to worry about the proud owner jumping us for trespassing.”

“Or anyone else, either,” Gus said.

Harry forced a smile then. “There are some things I need to tell you, bud.”

“All right.”

“You'll want to punch me in the gut when you hear them.”

“I doubt that, but go ahead.”

Harry looked at the lake, then at the book of maps in his hand. “Fort le Croix—”

“What about it?”

“There never was such a place.”

“What does that mean?”

“What I just said. There never was a Fort le Croix up here. Or any other fort.”

“I don't get it. Where were we going, then?”

“Here, I reckon.”

“What if we didn't find here?”

“Hell, here or someplace like it. I told you before, we were going to be fine regardless. Set up a wigwam. I used to spend a week at a time with Freddy Riverfish up on his traplines. In the deepest part of winter. We were fine then, so we'd have been all right, you and me, without any shack.”

“What about the maps?”

Harry looked at the book in his hand again. “Yeah, the maps.”

“We followed them. They got us to Kaseiganagah, didn't they?”

“They sure did.”

Gus was out of questions. He sat there, waiting for the truth.

On those mornings with his own children, once Gus had finally soothed them to sleep, sometimes while it was still dark outside but just as often after sunrise, when the house was warming with the morning, he would sit back in the big chair beside his fireplace and put his feet on the ottoman and pull the afghan from behind his shoulder. Greta or Tom would nestle into him, their fine and unruly hair tickling his chin. He would spread the afghan over them and close his eyes and fall asleep while their little hands lay between them.

Gus told me that, of all the things he'd done in his life, none ever seemed as wonderful as getting his children to sleep. Keeping them warm. Giving his exhausted wife a few hours' rest herself before it was time to nurse the baby again.

Sitting with his father at the shack after he'd admitted that Fort le Croix was a hoax? That morning, and being with his father, was just as important as those mornings with his own children so many years later. He knew that now.

And he did not—as his father had said—want to hit him. He wanted to hug him.

That morning at the shack, the soundings recorded, Harry explained how the maps came to be. They began as true facsimiles, Harry said. He told Gus how he'd always wanted to follow the old voyageur maps into the wilderness, so he started copying them on long winter nights. But as Signe and Gus got older and as his marriage and livelihood took their dives—fewer fish biting, fewer folks buying his handsome canoes, Lisbet becoming as anxious and aloof and distant as the city she came from—these maps became a means of seeing the world differently. Especially his own place in it. Harry began to imagine everything north of the divide. He so desperately needed to find that world, and to find himself in the bargain.

“I remember watching you at the kitchen table,” Gus said. “Drawing those things. I thought they were so cool. I wanted to be like you.”

“You don't want to be like me, that's a fact. Surely you know that now.” Harry looked at him. “And I don't want you to be, either. That's why I brought you up here. One of the reasons, leastways.”

“I still don't understand,” Gus said, meaning that he didn't understand
anything.
About the maps, about why they were there, about what was to come, about what his family was anymore.

“Maybe you never will understand. Could be you'll understand only if you get married and have kids yourself someday.”

Gus gave him a blank look. “You can't honestly have thought we could survive the winter in a wigwam.”

“Wasn't long ago that every living soul in this part of the world did exactly that. Winter and summer both. Ten generations of Freddy's people made out just fine in wigwams before our people showed up.”

Gus walked to the water's edge, his head hung down.

“Get married and have kids, bud, you'll think surviving the winter in a wigwam's not only possible but a dream come true.”

Gus didn't turn around.

“Anything that came before your wife and kids? That doesn't mean a damn thing.”

He turned around then and stared at his father.

“I know you've been watching your mother and me. You're old enough to see what's going on. It must all seem damn crazy. Parts of it are. But just wait a little, and know while you're waiting that I'd never let anything happen to you. Not ever.” Now Harry walked over and wrapped his arms around him. “I should've brought proper maps, I can see that now. I overestimated myself. I've got a long history of doing that. But we're here now. We're safe. We've got a whole new season to figure the rest of it out.”

Gus shook himself free. “We're up here so you can decide what to do about Mom?”

“Christ almighty, bud, I don't know. I can tell you that all the horseshit that's going on between us is as much my fault as hers. That's usually the case when things get this far gone.” He nodded his head yes, then shook it no. “We'll have plenty of nights to chew the fat off that bone, I'd guess. What we don't have is much time to get ready for winter.”

He opened the book of maps and tore a sheet from it. “I made a list of things to do this morning,” he said, handing it to Gus.

Who read:
WOOD. CACHE. MEAT. LOOKOUT
?

Then Harry ripped out the sheet he'd written his soundings on, folded it up, and slipped it in the pocket of his flannel shirt. “Ready to get to work?”

Too baffled to say anything, Gus just stood there looking at his father.

“One more thing,” Harry said. He smiled, kissed the moose-hide binding of the book, then winked at Gus and threw the maps into the lake.

I
REMEMBER ONCE,
many years ago, when Claire Veilleux came into the apothecary with her granddaughter. They collected their letters and were ready to leave but met Eleanor Rusk and her newborn daughter at the doorway. Eleanor was then only twenty or twenty-one and this was her first baby. I wasn't part of their conversation, simply overhead it from my perch behind the counter.

After pleasantries and a word or two about the baby, Claire said, “Yes, well, they do teach us to love in ways we never knew we could, don't they?” She ought to have known something about loving children, having five sons and five daughters herself.

That comment has stayed with me ever since, and I've often wondered what I've missed out on by not having any children of my own. I used to watch Gus and Signe gallivant through town and wish they were mine. But that wish, too, was decades ago.

They might have been mine were it not for Lisbet, whose grand entrance into the life of this town quashed my prospects with Harry. Like so many before her, she arrived by water, though not on some ferry or fishing boat. Her father—a law professor at the University of Chicago, president of the Chicago Yacht Club, political confidant of Adlai Stevenson—steered his thirty-six-foot sloop into Gunflint's harbor like an Annapolis bluejacket. Lisbet and her mother stood topside, looking like breezy models on the cover of
McCall's.
Stylish and scrubbed, with a highborn air of invincibility. It wouldn't be too much to say that at first glance they seemed regal.

That air was shortly dispatched. Once her father docked the sloop in one of the slips along the Lighthouse Road, he went straight to the Traveler's Hotel and took two rooms. Though the tavern wasn't open, he offered the hotel manager fifteen dollars to stand behind the bar and pour apple wine. After the first glass, he offered him another ten bucks to leave the bottle on the bar and retrieve his wife and daughter from the harbor. After six hours on that barstool, he hadn't yet figured out why the string of bartenders weren't converting the change from American currency into Canadian. He thought he'd docked in Port Arthur.

Lisbet's mother was perhaps even more striking than her daughter. She left her hotel room only for meals in the Traveler's Hotel dining room, wore ridiculous gowns, and seemed always on the verge of fainting. Whereas Lisbet—given her parents' aloofness and her own fierce independence—spent the week freely roaming Gunflint.

I'd noticed her several times. She was uninhibited and loose-lipped and seemed proud that her family's adventure was dreamed up as a solution to her spell at Passavant Hospital in Chicago, where the plants were plastic and the windows covered with bars. She'd landed there after an episode in which she drank a bottle of her mother's champagne and stole her father's Cadillac. She admitted these things to me, standing before the counter while I was sorting the mail.

On the third or fourth day, I saw her sitting on the breakwater with her ubiquitous sketchbook open in her lap. That's the spot where she first saw Harry Eide, and I watched her watching him. For a long time. Later, standing in front of the counter at the post office again, she told me, “It was the most perfect moment of my entire
life,
seeing that man. He's like something out of Homer.”

He'd cruised past her, tipping his cap as he went. He wore oilskin pants and red galluses. He motored around Fisherman's Point and into Eide Cove, and suddenly it was her solemn vow to have him.

“I doubt he owns a suit jacket,” she said, and then looked out the window, though his boat was gone. “Does he have a girl?”

Well, I might have stepped in. Steered her away. Run to Harry's fish house to tell him how he made me feel, how I saw us together, how I wanted him and nothing else. I could have. But I didn't think I needed to, because I had no idea she'd be so true to her word. If I'd come to know anything of Lisbet during our short conversations, it was that she liked to talk—and talk big—and that had never counted for much in my life before then.

That evening, she saw Harry sitting in the Traveler's Hotel dining room, and he looked even more exceptional than he had on his boat. That was the word she used the next morning. He ordered a pork chop and a baked potato and a crock of creamed corn. She was surprised to see a glass of milk before him, but even that glitch in the picture she was building in her mind didn't deter her. She found it charming. The whiskey he ordered with his coffee and pie made him irresistible. Her father, she added, ate like a woman, only steamed green vegetables, white fish, salad, and sweet German wine.

By now, Harry had traded his oilskin pants for a pair of worn-hard dungarees but still wore his canvas work shirt, one side of his collar turned in, the other turned up. His face had a week-old beard scratched across it, and his hair probably hadn't seen a comb in his whole adult life. She described all this as if I hadn't registered every last detail every time I'd closed my eyes and begged for my real life to begin.

Lisbet saw him again the next night, and the night after. Each time, she allowed herself more generous fantasies. The firmness of his body. A sagacious streak borne by hours of contemplation out on his fishing boat each day. Finally, how he would be in bed. She was graphic about this last supposition. He would be silent, unlike her father, whom she'd heard bleating like a sheep on those rare occasions he'd made love with her mother. She imagined that when they finished he'd say something to make her see the heavenly night in a new light. That she spoke so uninhibitedly about such things proved at once that I could never be a friend to this strange city girl, even as she was trying to make one of me.

She came the next morning, too. She lingered by the window, looking out at the harbor and telling me how she'd brazenly flirted with Harry from across the dining room the night before. When they passed each other in the lobby after dinner, she told him to meet her at the harbor for a walk in the morning. She was waiting for him now, both uncertain he'd come and positive he wouldn't miss it. She had her sketchbook along and she kept flipping it open and closed.

How could he have stayed away? And why would he? As sure as the clock struck nine, he was standing there by the water, in his dungarees again, but with his shirt tucked in, his collar right. She passed me a devilish smile—as though I were a part of her ploy—and went out to meet him.

She accepted his offered cigarette. He asked her about the sketchbook, which she had shown me more than once, standing at the counter. There were several pictures of him in his boat. Of the lake and the sky and woods. Even I, never having seen a true work of art, could tell she was gifted. Perhaps even more. She wanted to show him her work, but couldn't bear it—turning to one drawing, then another, always closing the book before he could see them. I thought she was faking that coyness. I watched them smile and laugh and smoke before they walked away. I saw her father's sloop sail out of the harbor three days later, but I didn't see Lisbet again until she came back, a month later.

For years I was haunted by what came to pass between them on that day they turned up the alley by the Traveler's Hotel, no doubt heading to Harry's fish house. I was aware even then that something decisive was happening, and as much to me as to either of them.

It would be nearly half my life before I finally found out. Being proper, I never asked Harry. And Harry, being a gentleman, wouldn't have answered if I had. But Lisbet, well, in the late winter of 1965 she gave evidence that she'd been waiting all that time to bring the story to me. It was my first season living in the house that Harry built for me on the Burnt Wood River. He and Signe and Gus had been my only guests until that morning she came to my door.

Our lives were by then so bound together that only deaths could untangle some of the knots, but at that moment she and Harry were in the middle of their messy divorce. I'd made friends with Gus and Signe not because I had any ulterior motives, simply because it was only natural, given the amount of time Harry and I were now spending together. Standing at my door, Lisbet looked very much as she had as a young woman in the apothecary all those years before. She was still nearly as beautiful, even if she wore her lifetime of disappointment in the lines around her eyes. She held me in those eyes, standing there in my kitchen. I offered her coffee, which she rejected with a wave of her hand.

“Harry has built you a lovely home, eh, Miss Lovig? He once did the same for me.”

“I paid Harry as I would any other carpenter, Lisbet.”

“I suppose you have paid him, if that's what you'd prefer to call it.”

I bristled, of course, but didn't know what to say. If I'd been in her shoes, I might have confronted me, too.

“Harry and I are divorcing. I'm sure he's told you. I'm sure you know why. I'm sure you see the reason why every time you catch your reflection.”

“Oh, Lisbet, let's be honest about all of this.”

“You want honesty? Certainly, let's be honest. Harry has a habit of the grand gesture. Standing here under this vaulted ceiling, no doubt you're daily reminded of that. But he was the same with me.”

She walked across the kitchen and stood close to me. “We made love the first day we met. Right on the floor of the fish house. It was the first real thing I'd ever done.” Her eyes narrowed and wandered to the carpet. “On a blanket on the floor. Wood shavings in my hair. It felt terrible and wonderful. And I had been exactly right about him.” Now she looked back up at me and her eyes widened again. “I actually thought of you while I lay there, watching my life come to me. I thought of you because I didn't want to become you. A spinster before you had a single gray hair.” She looked up and down her nose at me. “I wanted to be the woman I was in just that moment. When we finished he got up and walked across the room and brought me a glass of water. He lit a cigarette and handed it to me. Then he said, ‘You'll stay here. You'll be my gal. We'll get married.'

“You know as well as I do that he never says anything he doesn't mean sincerely, I'll give him that. It's one of his great faults.”

She took a long look around my house, then shook her head.

“He asked me to marry him even with you sitting down there at the apothecary, taking care of that meshuga in the attic. He ought to have built you a castle for all you did for him.” She opened her hands as though everything were plain to see.

“The grand gesture, Berit. Marrying the first girl who'd have him. Forsaking a mother he had no right to. Endangering his son that season up in the woods. Now your quaint little house right up the road. How convenient for you both.”

“You're a cruel and selfish woman,” I told her.

“You're not?”

“Harry's my friend, and if he's divorcing you, it's because you've failed him and made him miserable.”

Her eyes widened—so wide the lines around them smoothed—and her lips pursed. “I'm not blind, Berit. I'm not a fool. Do you think I didn't know he was in love with you before I ever met him? Do you think I came here because he was some great catch? I married him because I wanted to be the girl on the floor of his fish house, not a girl like you.”

“And you were that girl. You should've been happy. Anyone else on earth would've been.”

She lit a cigarette. “You're simpler than I thought.”

“What about your children? Signe's still so young.”

“That takes some nerve, mentioning my children.” An ugly, awful snarl crossed her face. “But I suppose you wouldn't understand about that—barren as your life truly is.” She stepped closer to me. “But that brings us to why I'm here in the first place. You can have Harry. For God's sake, please, take him. But leave my children out of your pathetic tryst.” She walked to the door. “They're mine,” she turned to say before leaving, “not yours.”

I've thought of that day often, of the hatred in her voice, and the hurt. I've thought of it every time Gus and I have sat down to talk about what happened up on the borderlands. And each time it comes to mind, whenever I look at his sad eyes and listen to his sad voice, I'm sure that I never could've been a mother, much as I've begun to feel like I am to him.

And maybe I should have been. Maybe that's how it was supposed to go. Maybe everyone involved would have been happier for it. The last time Gus and I talked, he spoke of her and said a few things that buoy this very notion. He'd just finished telling me about Harry throwing the book of maps into the lake. He paused then and stared into his hands for a moment before saying, as if we were having a different conversation altogether, “I never knew my mother very well. I was only seven or eight years old when she told me she'd never wanted to have children. She told me she wasn't suited for it.” He looked up at me and smiled. “She wasn't. But she tried. I'll give her credit for that. She took us to the park and for walks up the river. She made us eat our vegetables and drink our milk and do our homework. She taught us to say ‘please' and ‘thank you.' She read to us at bedtime when we were tykes. But, my God, her unhappiness was overwhelming. Even before I knew what unhappiness was. Signe always chalked our mother's moods up to the fact that she was not from here. That she felt imprisoned. Impoverished. She wasn't from here, true. But she did come here of her own volition. Came running, in fact, to be with my dad. No one's ever disputed that part of the story.”

I thought he might cry—his eyes were glossing up. “But I loved her. Very much. I loved her the way only a scorned child could. I still do.”

What's uncanny is that Rebekah foretold all of this. It wasn't her first act of clairvoyance, but it was her most chilling.

On the day Harry and Lisbet sneaked off to the fish house, I watched them go from the porch. Under the pretense of needing to shake out the rug, I stood in a haze of dust and counted their steps. When the air finally cleared, I turned to go back inside. There Rebekah stood, sharp and straight as a kitchen knife. As though she were privy to the thoughts in my head, she said, “You might take comfort in knowing that the Eide men have never chosen their women well.” She kept her eyes on the alleyway. “He's a fool for falling for that one.” Now she edged her chin up and pointed it in their direction. “She's a vixen and a vamp. I saw it the minute she stepped off that boat. She'll never make a mother. You can see it in how she always expects to be looked at, how she carries that sketchbook around like she knows us better than we know ourselves.” She lowered her sharp chin. “All that girl really wants is a life she doesn't have.”