Northernmost

by Peter Geye

  “A fine, fine place.”

  “What will we do now? When we get home?” The resignation in her voice was plain to hear. Like she knew our lark had ended, and now the business of becoming ourselves again commenced.

  My every third thought had returned lately to this same question, and though I knew it also weighed on Inger we had so far neglected to discuss it. Simply put, I didn’t know what we’d do. Altogether we had probably seventy kroner to our name. We still owned my boat and Inger’s spinning wheel and a few remnants of furniture and household goods. Not much to rebuild a life on, to be sure, but I had the serene feeling that the boat bringing us home was bringing us also to happiness. I would ready my faering, Inger would find other work. We would be frugal. And as long as we had each other, we would make ends meet. I doubted she shared my sanguinity, but something had changed in her during our time in Tromsø. A softening. A warming. And I knew, or at least believed, that even if she still saw rough seas ahead of us, she was also on board the boat with me.

  “I guess we step ashore,” I said. “We walk up the Grønnevoldsgaden and see about someplace to live. We gather our things. We start over again.” I wanted to say, We find Thea. We bring her home. But the pull of Inger beside me was too strong, so I only thought it for fear she might have a change of heart.

  “Okay,” she said, and then a second later pointed off the starboard side of the boat. “What’s that?”

  I might’ve thought I was dreaming or hallucinating had Inger not pointed it out: a great blazing fire onshore. It must have been a farmer’s slash pile, or some unlucky fisherman’s boat house, for the fire reached halfway to the moon.

  “Odd Einar?”

  “I reckon someone’s had a bit of bad luck.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said, and I knew she was asking not about the fire, but the wistfulness in my voice.

  I turned to her. “I never told you about the fire I was lucky enough to find on Spitzbergen. A venerable old boat hull upturned on the shore of the spot I spent my last five nights. I burned almost all of it to keep myself from freezing. The flames from my fire brought the Russian to me. It saved my life.”

  “A fire so great as that?” Again she pointed out across the water.

  “Not nearly, no. The timbers of the hull of that boat were so large I could hardly lift them, let alone take them apart. But I kept a bed of hot coals and fed timbers into the flames a foot at a time. When awake, I would chip the embers off with the hakapik to stoke the bed of cinders. I’d built a pit of stones around it, so I could shift the vents according to the wind. I tell you, Inger, I tended that fire with the care I gave our newborn daughter. I swear I did.”

  “You were such a good father, Odd Einar. Your daughter adored you.”

  “I’m still a good father, Inger.”

  I expected her to recoil, but she simply squeezed my arm again.

  We both watched the fire grow fainter over our shoulders.

  “Without that hull on the beach I would’ve died, Inger. I wouldn’t be here now. That fire, it saved me. And I can’t help wondering if I deserve it. That skeletal hull meant that others had perished before me. I was the heir of their misfortune. Is this how things forever must go?”

  “Every night I pray for God to enlighten me.”

  Now I held her more closely, and we stood there without speaking until the fire disappeared altogether.

  “Shall we go to our quarters?” she asked. “I’m ready to lie down with you.”

  Without waiting for my response, she ushered me down the gangway to our berth on the second deck.

  “If I’m honest with you, my faith has wavered too, Odd Einar. So many of my prayers have gone unanswered. I’ve been tested and tried.” She stopped at the bottom of the gangway, moved her hands to my chest, and looked up at my eyes. “But I was wrong to doubt. I was wrong to fear. For here you are. Don’t you see?”

  I held her in my arms and closed my eyes. “I do,” I said. “I do.”

  [2018]

  On weekends when Frans had the kids, Greta went up to Gunflint to work on her projects. The first order of business had been to replace the stovepipe and flue on the old potbelly. She knew the stove would eventually head to the dump, but didn’t want to spend all winter shivering. So she brought one of her father’s old splitting mauls and his chain saw down from his place, and cut and split herself a cord of wood from the overgrowth around the fish house.

  During the last three months, she’d gutted the place from floor to ceiling, culling both the detritus of her family’s life there and materials she didn’t expect to use in the renovation. Gone was the counter that had once been used to clean and salt the herring, and where she’d last fucked her husband. Gone the old fish boxes, all but three, which she kept for posterity and to use as she moved things around. Gone the half wall near the entry door, the old whiskey barrels, the floorboards that had rotted, the net rollers and buoys and scrap wood, some of which she added to her woodpile. Gone the strongback on which her father had built his canoe so many years before. But the canoe itself she kept, along with the tools in the wooden toolbox, the old Coleman lantern, two pairs of sawhorses, and a picture she’d never seen before, painted by Grandma Lisbet. It was a large canvas of a frozen Eide Cove at sunrise, though the light was blotted by the grayness of fog or snow or clouds, it was hard to tell which. The trees out on the point were mere shadows, bent southerly as though the morning brought with it a north wind. It was a striking and somber painting, but also beautiful. Greta hung it on the barn door, which would eventually become a large window overlooking the lake. She thought she might find a few additional treasures, too, but other than an old Skippy peanut butter jar full of antique coins and the sketches and blueprints for her great-grandfather’s boat, which she planned to frame, the place offered nothing of value.

  In toto, she’d scrapped two dumpsters’ worth of junk. And now, in March, except for a folding card table and pair of chairs, the stove, a tiny refrigerator like the one she’d had in her dorm room at the University of Minnesota, and the old bunk, atop which she’d put a new mattress, the place was a blank canvas. And though she’d had plans drawn for the loft addition, fireplace, kitchen, and new lake-facing south wall, she felt the freedom to change anything at any time, and so kept a notebook of her own drawings, designs she might incorporate or not. A landing on the staircase, dormers on the loft windows, a deck or patio, anything was possible. This weekend she intended to start framing the kitchen island and counter.

  All winter she’d worked for ten or twelve hours a day, and at the end of them, after she called the kids to say good night and say she loved them, and after she talked to Stig, something she did almost every day now, she’d sit down to a dinner of summer sausage and cheese and her dad’s homemade bread. Those fifteen minutes were often the only rest she gave herself all day, and even then she’d look around the fish house—her house—and raise the stories it held invisibly. This in itself was another kind of work.

  After supper, she would open her notebooks and spread them about the card table and continue imaginary conversations she’d been carrying on all day. It started with the book that Stig had sent, Nordligste, as she now thought of it. She must’ve read it ten times by then, so often that parts were fully memorized. Sometimes she read it out loud, and when doing so, she’d attribute to her three-times-great-grandfather a voice plaintive and sweet. She tried to capture that quality when she wrote.

  But what began with Odd Einar Eide and his ordeal at Spitzbergen soon became more labyrinthine. Mere weeks into writing about him, she had created a hand-drawn family tree in one of her notebooks, and jottings for everything she knew about any of them. Thea and the other Odd Einar, Rebekah, Harry, her grandpa and grandma, Gus and Liv and Lasse and Frans and Stig.

  When her father saw the notebook left open on the card table one day in February—he d
ropped by often, whether to help or just to pass some time with her—he picked it up and studied her drawing and said, “What’ve you got here?”

  The simple answer was that she didn’t know. “Am I right remembering that when you taught high school, you told everybody that history did not abide acts of the imagination?”

  A doubtful look spread up to his eyes. “I’m afraid I used to say plenty of things that I’d be wary of standing behind now.”

  “That memory and imagination are two different things? Didn’t you used to say that?”

  “I think I used to talk about that one in English class. When we’d talk about Emily Dickinson.”

  “I recall you used to say it pretty often. Especially after Grandpa Harry died.”

  “You were in grad school when Grandpa Harry died.”

  “And you’d call me to talk about him. His death seemed to be the only thing on your mind for about two years.”

  He appeared humbled, as if those years in the nineties had been some mark against him. As though grieving your father was somehow a sign of weakness.

  “It’s okay, Dad.”

  “I know it is. I was just thinking about the years after Grandpa Harry died. A lot of what I once held to be true was proven wrong by his disappearance. Well, that and the fact I spent the next couple years reviewing my life with him over and over again in my head. I about drove your mother batty.”

  “Well, the story of our family isn’t exactly paved with straight roads, that’s for sure.”

  “And that’s what this is? You’re straightening out the roads?”

  “I’m getting to know them a little, maybe that’s how I should put it. I’m trying to learn how I got here.” She closed her eyes and saw the parade of Eides passing through the darkness. When she opened her eyes, and noticed the searching look on her father’s sweet face, she knew that his grief was her own, and that the notebooks spread out before her, and the hundreds of sleepless hours spent dreaming about her entire genealogy, and her devotion to a past that depended equally on her memory and her imagination, all of it was a gift. To her father and to her son and daughter and to the man she was planning a new life with.

  “I’ve not been very good at letting the people closest to me know how much I love them. You included. Maybe what I’m doing is trying to tell you all.”

  “I’ve always known how much you love me, Greta.”

  “Well, maybe that’s because you knew me back when I was pretty good at loving people.” And here she picked up one of the notebooks on the table and thumbed through the scribbled pages. “And maybe now I’m trying to get better at it.”

  “At love?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked so lonesome, then, this beautiful old man with the white hair and beard. He was still trim and fit, still dressed each day like he was going to teach his classes, still went down to the Blue Sky Café to play cribbage with some of the Gunflint folks on Tuesday afternoons. But aside from those games and an occasional fishing date with Eddie Riverfish on the Burnt Wood, and chance encounters he had with old colleagues at the co-op or donut shop, he spent his days alone. And all of that time seemed to have gathered in his gaze, which he kept on her now.

  “I could use your help tomorrow,” Greta said. “The windows and doors I ordered from Buck’s came in. I have to pick them up.”

  “You got it,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, he arrived at seven-thirty and came in without knocking, as was his habit. But because she hadn’t heard his car rolling up the drive, she jumped when he shouted hello.

  “You scared me,” she said. She’d been standing in front of the painting of Eide Cove, drinking her coffee, and some of it splashed onto her hand, which she wiped on her jeans.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “I’ve got some things for you.” He raised both hands, holding four of the canvas bags he often carried around. They were stuffed to bursting, and when he set them down next to the card table, they thumped. He hurried back out to his car and came in next with an old number-four Duluth Pack and put it beside the other bags.

  “Cleaning out your closets?” she asked.

  “I’m sure you don’t want to keep all this here while you’re building the place out, but you’ll definitely want to see what I’ve got.” He took his coat and hat and gloves off and laid them across the back of a chair, then removed from one of the canvas bags a paper sack from the donut shop. He spread two napkins on the table and put a chocolate knot on each, then went to the stove, got himself a cup of coffee, and came back to sit at the table. He wore an expression she remembered from when he was her teacher, too, the one that said: All right, today we’re going to talk about “The Buck in the Snow” or some other such lesson, hundreds of which she’d heard in Arrowhead High classrooms and at their own kitchen table alike.

  The first bag he lifted from the floor was capped with Grandpa Harry’s red wool hat. The only trace they ever found of him after he wandered off into the woods and never came out, drowned in the Devil’s Maw, if what everyone believed was true. Greta had seen it, naturally, sitting on her father’s dresser in his bedroom as though it were a souvenir from a trip to Canada. And she knew what it was. But in all her life she couldn’t remember ever holding it. When Gus handed it to her, it was as if she’d been visited by Grandpa Harry’s kind and distant eyes, and she felt tears welling in her own.

  “You know about that, eh?”

  “Grandpa’s hat.”

  “He wore it every day that winter we went up onto the borderlands.”

  Here, too, was a shock. Because after the summer of 1997, Greta never once heard her father mention that misadventure, and if someone else dared to, he was quick to say he was done talking about it. As though it were a terrible secret that he alone must bear, instead of the only thing the people of Gunflint talked about for ten years after. Greta knew the story better as hearsay—or myth—than as the most trying experience of Gustav Eide’s life.

  “There’s more about that,” he said, and reached down to unbuckle two straps on the Duluth Pack, then pulled out a black bear pelt and laid it across the floor like a rug.

  “I’ve never seen that,” Greta said. “That’s the bear you killed?”

  “It’s like Odd Einar put our destinies in motion up there on Spitzbergen, isn’t it? And my grandpa after him. This bear was my birthright.”

  “I’m happy these bear confrontations seem to skip a generation.”

  “I don’t really think anything skips a generation, do you?”

  “Maybe not. I’ll let you know when I’m finished with this,” she said, and gestured at her notebooks.

  For an hour Gus regaled her. Photographs and newspaper articles, a couple of her grandma Lisbet’s sketchbooks, the stack of letters that had never been sent or delivered between Thea and her parents back in Norway, the ones Berit Lovig found in an old safe during renovations on the apothecary. The ones Gus believed had been stolen by Rebekah Grimm. There was Thea’s Bible. And Berit Lovig’s diary, which had been willed to Gus, along with dozens of love letters that she and Harry had sent to each other. And the book of maps Harry had drawn and that for years had stood on the mantel at Gus’s house, untouched, as though they were the Dead Sea Scrolls or something equally valuable. He also had the maps Gus drew in a composition book while they were up there; the ones that got them out of that wilderness.

  And there were other things too: invitations to weddings and high school and college graduations, the bulletin from Sarah’s funeral, as well as the obituary that Greta herself had written. There were several leather-bound ledgers that had once belonged to Hosea Grimm, the town apothecary and would-be doctor who more or less raised Odd after Thea died. These accounted for everything from the births and deaths in Gunflint—excepting Thea’s own—to the levels of the Burnt
Wood River for over twenty years.

  He had given her a trove of information and artifacts, and just when Greta thought he’d finished he gave her two more things. The first was the handwritten account of what happened to Odd and Harry on the day the father drowned while ice fishing with his son. Written by Berit Lovig, Harry’s great love, this had been stored all these years in a wooden box with nothing else in it. Greta sat there and read it, and when she was done she folded the stationery it had been written on and put it back in the box. “It’s like a little coffin,” she said, holding it up.

  “I thought it was a beautiful letter. It meant more to me than any story or poem I ever read. And it inspired me to forgive my father. How about that?”

  “Your father needed forgiveness?”

  “Sweetheart, we all do.”

  The last thing he pulled from the bag was the most magnificent, though—a three-ring binder that must’ve dated from his earliest teaching days, three inches thick and as overflowing as the canvas bag he’d pulled it from had been. “No making fun of me,” he said, sliding it across the card table. She opened it and first saw a typewritten poem called “Née Bergan,” whose dedication read, For my bride on her wedding day. There were hundreds and hundreds of poems.

  “You come by it honestly,” he said, as Greta quietly wept. “I thought to bring my mandolin too, but I still play it all the time. You can have it when I’m done. But all this”—and now he gestured at the things scattered across the table—“I thought it might be of some use.”

  And so it was.

  * * *

  —

  Now, toward the end of April, three weeks after her father had given her that bounty, she was back up for another weekend in Gunflint, Lasse and Liv with Frans at his new condo in the Minneapolis warehouse district. Her project was to install the kitchen sink. The house had already been plumbed for it, and a bathroom as well. It would be a relief to have running water, and she had everything she needed to get the sink in. The tools and parts and faucet and the sink itself, all of it was sitting right there. But as often happened, she instead found herself hunched over the card table for most of Saturday morning. Despite everything her father had given her, and all the stories the artifacts told, she’d lately found herself frustrated by the lack of completeness in them. She might read a page from Berit Lovig’s diaries, about the first time she saw Lisbet Johansson sail into Gunflint harbor, for example. She could see the boat arrive, and was privy to Berit’s thoughts, and how her grandpa acted when he saw her. She could see all of that, and begin from it, but the stories usually wandered into unknown territory, and it was there that she found the deepest pleasure in her writing.