Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  Val held the ruined blank contract and heard crickets rasping in the new night and stared at the closed back door where she had last seen Charles Cable as he left, disgusted, and what she found herself remembering was Peter Hathaway, making some offhand comment about Wade Decker’s wife dying “unexpectedly” a couple of years ago. Somehow Peter’s comment didn’t do justice to the woman’s violent death, and Val wondered whether there was anything her colleague, her boss, her lover, her love, couldn’t belittle if it hadn’t happened personally to him.

  Val folded the papers—tomorrow she’d call Peter’s office and get new ones faxed—and walked slowly to the garbage can, where Kay had pulled it over to the front doors, and let them flutter inside.

  The three of them sat together on stools at the gleaming metalwork station in the Camp Sajo kitchen, while Kay dished up some quick bacon, eggs, and hash browns. At nine forty-five on a summer’s night, the air was draped with the smells of a good breakfast. Val forked the food with her left hand while her right kept the ice pack pressed to her eye. Maybe it was the fact that Peter’s pantry wasn’t as well-stocked as Muffy and Lana had led him to believe, but she was ravenous.

  Caroline nibbled at some triangles of buttered brown toast in a contented way, and Decker, one bare foot propped on the stool next to him, tried to glean something from the depths of his red wine. In the hungry silence, Kay scraped forcefully at the grill. Then, wiping her hands on a dish towel, she told Caroline the double sleep cabin could take overnight guests. “Good night, my darlin’s,” she finished, and walked away from them. “Just leave the dishes next to the sink.”

  “I can get you back to Peter’s, Val, if that’s what you’d like,” Decker said, but he seemed tired.

  She looked straight ahead, out into the dark, empty dining room, and shifted the ice pack. “I don’t think I can get down to the boat.” It was a strange exhaustion, like everything about her that had any weight at all had floated away, out of sight, and all she had left were the thinnest, lightest of membranes still attached in the vague shape of Valjean Cameron. “Who else is here?”

  Caroline was looking better. “Oh, the maintenance boys, and the handyman.” She cuddled her cup of rooibos tea, blowing happily across the top of the steaming cup, sending the spicy bark smell Val’s way. It seemed to Val that naming those camp jobs was enough to send Caroline back to the glory days, when “maintenance boys” meant maybe ten, and not two. Still, it was staff. Val eyed Decker, who had a shrewd look like he didn’t know how Caroline was going to meet her next payroll or ever come to terms with her sister’s murder. Then his eyes widened at Val and he finished his wine.

  “So, the meeting,” said Val, cleaning her plate, and wanting to prolong the company. “What are they fighting about?” She felt like she was back at her desk on the twelfth floor in her happy office jumble of Matisse prints and Florentine glass and Fir Na Tine books mounting toward the ceiling, with a difficult author sitting across from her who can’t quite say what he means.

  Decker waited for Caroline to start, but when her hand stayed midair, where it had strayed, and she lifted her eyebrows, perplexed, he began. The permanent residents, lake and town, want a livelihood, which here in the Northwoods has always meant lumbering, mining, construction. The seasonal people—cottagers—pretty much don’t want so much as two more boards nailed together anywhere on the lake because they see it as the old slippery slope leading to the destruction of the environment, at which point all of them—lake, town, seasonal, permanent—all of them lose.

  The Ojibways want to make a livelihood, preserve the environment, and have their traditional tribal lands returned to them, many of which are sitting under tents, cottages, restaurants, and gas stations. And the outfitters, houseboat vacation merchants, and youth camp owners, seasonal businesses that depend on a beautiful environment for their living, push for ecotourism.

  But ecotourism lets out the guys wearing the tool belts. Returning native lands lets out the folks who want to gawk at the loons and the sunsets from their cottage docks. Incorporating the lake community pulls the tax base out from under the town, but the environmental impact of twenty new cottages or lodges a year lowers the property values on the lake. There are the occasional flashpoints—claims get staked, illegal access roads get ploughed, whole stands of trees—Decker opened his hands wide—disappear, like a sleight of hand.

  It’s all provocation, and then meetings like tonight’s ensue, although not usually with quite the same outcome. Bottom line? “For Dixon Foote, a three-generation lake man, who’s a carpenter, to feed his four kids may mean new neighbors with dock lights and generators like a carnival sideshow right in the face of Martin Kelleher, who comes up here every summer from Philadelphia to get away from it all.”

  Caroline spoke up. “Wade, you’re reducing the whole problem to—to—”

  “What?”

  “Individuals.” Caroline leaned toward him, her eyes bright. “Whatever happens here will be a matter of law, finally, and community will. It won’t come down to the actions of a couple of,” she pronounced each syllable with good-natured mockery, “individuals.”

  “Of course it will.” Decker gathered up the dishes. “It always does.” He set them in the sink and Caroline turned off the lights, and the three of them found the screen door by the pale moonlight that was just enough to light their way. Val dropped the ice pack into her briefcase and fell in behind Caroline, who looked insubstantial on the path that wound slowly uphill. Behind her, Decker was lighting a cigar, the tip glowing with each draw. Caroline stopped, flashed her mini-light toward a double sleep cabin, where two rooms shared a common wall, then handed the light to Val. “This is yours. Sleep tight,” she added, squeezing Val’s arm, “and ice that cheek.”

  Decker came slowly up the path, saluting them, then moved around them on the porch of the double sleep cabin. “I’m just next door,” he told Val. She watched him disappear into the adjoining room. “That’s not an invitation,” he added, whistling to himself, “in case you were wondering.” A small toad hopped in and out of the circle of light from her flash. When she turned to thank Caroline, she was gone.

  The aromatic smoke, the Big Dipper, the waxing moon. Val wondered whether things were less distinct, or more. Why couldn’t she tell? To see landscapes of stars bursting backwards into the wilderness of the night sky, it means you’ve lost the moon for several days. She knew you couldn’t have all of the moon and all the stars at the same time, but it felt small, and somehow human, to want to.

  He was wrong.

  Caroline leaned against the door inside her cabin, thinking about Wade. She set her Coleman lantern down on the table, and in the small circle of light, closed her muslin curtains. Somewhere outside she heard the crazy warble of a loon—the danger call. Maybe we only think it’s meant for other loons. Maybe we just need to read the signs. But nothing frightened her anymore, if anything ever really did, not violence, not failure. Not even Wade’s gloomy talk about lake and town people she had known all her life.

  Her fingers pulled together the muslin wherever it gapped, the very same curtains her parents had at the windows when they ran the camp. Not even the lack of love, the lack of real love, in her life at forty, frightened her, because there were sweet compensations. And the possibility of long-lasting love was what kept her on her feet and in her right mind, against all the sorrows about her ghost camp, her crow’s feet, and her sister’s murder.

  When Caroline and Leslie took over Camp Sajo, after Trey died and then their mother less than a year later, Leslie had made the old boathouse hers, and hired locals to make the renovations. And so on the second floor of the original boathouse built out over the water there came new flooring, bigger windows, skylights. Jobs for year-rounders, Leslie had said with pride.

  Jobs for three weeks, Caroline noticed.

  Caroline moved into their parents’ cabin, where she would
never change the dark green Jotul wood stove, the colorful braided wool rugs, the log furniture that had held lucky young staff members invited in for an evening. Shelves for books had been hammered between the exposed studs, and finally there were so many books, shoved in, double-stacked, that she just left them alone, the out-of-date atlases, the discolored paperback mysteries, the hopelessly quaint nature chronicles. The funny old mustiness that happens, finally, even without water damage. The book-lined perimeter of the Selkirk living room had become part of the Camp Sajo history, no less than the framed camper photos in the lodge.

  They won’t do a damn thing to save your camp.

  She didn’t need them to save her camp. All the questions about Leslie would become tiresome, finally. Questions do. Given enough time, the lean times would get pulled away by the ice that always takes docks along with it, that day in the spring, usually in May, when the ice breaks up and the lake turns over. The ice goes, the frigid water returns, and life abides. Leslie’s death, too, would go out with the ice, someday. It would have to. And the campers would return in numbers.

  She set the Coleman lantern down beside the steamer trunk at the foot of her double bed. Family legend had it that the trunk had come all the way across Quebec with her ancestors after they had landed in Halifax in 1804. It wobbled, but the metal hinges still kept it all together, and the padlock Caroline had installed wasn’t really necessary. No one else could possibly care about the contents.

  She looked quickly at her watch. Ten minutes, maybe less, until that sweet man arrived, now that she could hear the deep nighttime silence that sinks into the ground on Selkirk Peninsula. Soon, then. While she waited, she lifted the heavy lid. First she pushed aside the t-shirt she herself had been wearing the day she and Leslie had been playing as kids on the ore crusher at the abandoned mine, when she had fallen and a piece of rusted metal swung free, cutting her across the belly. The dried blood had mostly flecked off, but the shirt was still creased from it.

  She pushed aside the neck gaiter her father had been wearing the day of the avalanche, the neck gaiter that could keep out the cold, but not the suffocation. She pushed aside the periwinkle blue silk robe her mother, Hope, had been wearing when she got the news about Trey. She pushed aside an old glass jar with a sliver of steel in it, like a specimen, or a relic, extracted from a grandfather’s eye. A rag doll from a great aunt who died of polio. A rosewood box that held her father’s ashes in a plastic bag, like Miracle-Gro.

  Then she came to the object that stood for Leslie, wrapped in what Caroline remembered was her sister’s baby blanket that Hope Selkirk had knitted in the yellow and brown colors of Camp Sajo. Caroline was three, and had liked it very much, although Leslie, as she grew, did not. Caroline took it out and unwrapped it on her knees, coming to the eighteen-inch core sample, a gray rod of pure rock—although no copper—extracted from the earth, leftover from the brief mining explorations on Selkirk Peninsula.

  In the light from the Coleman lantern she gazed at the core sample that Leslie used, for some crazy, Leslie reason, as a paperweight. It wasn’t what had crushed Leslie’s collarbone or femur or skull in three different places—the rocks below her window had done that—but it had been in the room with Leslie when the robber broke in. She could have defended herself with it, if only she could have reached it in time. Or thought of it. Or maybe even wanted to. But the cops had found it thrown into a corner, discarded, nothing but muddled fingerprints, when the robber trashed Leslie’s place. Weapons, even Caroline knew, who had none of her own, were only as good as their nearness to hand.

  All she had in the face of the cops’ never-ending questions about whether she could determine what had been stolen, was the stark truth that her sister was broken and dead. So Caroline had been no help, no help at all, because she really didn’t give any sort of a damn about what had been stolen.

  You’re never going to let it go, are you? she had said to Wade rashly.

  And as she looked at him she felt like the old steamer trunk itself, holding the steel sliver, the stiff bloodied shirt, the useless hedges against that final airlessness, the orphaned doll, the clothing that never defends against despair, and the ashes, ashes, we all fall down. This core sample didn’t need the trunk. It didn’t deserve the trunk. This core sample was just a reminder of Wade’s intransigence. Tomorrow she would take it deep into Selkirk Peninsula and hurl it away from herself and maybe her arm would go too. She set it, wrapped in the baby blanket, on the ladder-back chair, and closed and locked the trunk.

  It was a small sound, but she had been listening for it, the sound of feet springing up her steps. Caroline Selkirk opened the door to the figure outlined in the weak moonlight. He was her finest consolation. Then she stepped back, both of them pulling her shift over her head, as she let in the very lovely Luke.

  6

  Waking up to the sound of a chainsaw, Val uncurled herself from the tight little congealed mass she had rolled herself up into in order to stay warm. Under the two thin blankets Kay had left folded on what had to be a counselor’s bunk in this eight-bunk cabin, Val made herself a hard tight invisible object against the nighttime roving depredations of bears or Decker. But even keeping her clothes on hadn’t helped against the morning cold. She liked Augusts that behaved like Augusts, the way they did back home on 51st Street—hot during the day, oppressive at night. Now that was a climate she could get behind. Not this sly Northwoods summer heat that pulls the rug, and apparently the blankets, out from under you when the sun goes down.

  In the daylight, this Camp Sajo cabin was a blank space, plain square frames of bunks and shelves, everything stained dark sometime in the past, everything immovable from weight and habit and years. But it was a camp history the same as the lodge with all its framed camper pictures, because the rafters and walls and bunks were carved with graffiti, ghost campers memorializing themselves forever with signs and names, some just carved, darkening with time, some filled in with paint or charcoal or what looked like nail polish.

  Steff, one girl had dug deep into the wood of the rafter.

  Tressa, followed by a heart and the name Keith.

  Mattie & Margo 4-Evah.

  Leslie every summer til dead—swear.

  Hagit ’92-94. Shalom.

  Brianne ’65

  Paloma ’73-78

  Wadin’ in Wade. Oh, baby!

  Foxy tripper boys.

  Carvings of canoe paddles, shooting stars, and puckered lips. Pierced hearts with initials. Winged hearts with initials. Broken hearts with initials.

  Trey is RAD.

  Jean-Pierre—Awesome Tripper God

  Moose muck!

  The petroglyphs of teenage girls.

  Val picked up the ice pack, which had flopped onto the floor during the night. Now it was just a sack of room temperature water. Which pretty much described herself. A cheap drugstore mirror was hung on a nail next to the bunk. Val unfolded her arms and legs and moved slowly into place to inspect the damage, squinting. Somehow the alternating rips and growls of the chainsaw outside fit the picture. The right side of her face had all the bloat and colors of a beached jellyfish.

  The last time she had looked quite this bad was a couple of years ago on a miserable January day when she had been coming down with the flu and gone to the office anyway. Running to catch the crosstown bus after work, waving her bus pass, Val slipped on the ice. She took down the guy in the Army surplus jacket stomping next to a rickety metal display stand on the corner, where he was selling black velvet “artworks” of the Empire State Building. ’ey, look out, whatta you, crazy? was his trenchant commentary as she plunged into him, and as they toppled toward the sidewalk, his head battered her cheek, and her boot caught the end of the display stand.

  By the time they got their footing and a couple of passersby winched the two of them upright, her hair was wet from slush, which also didn’t improve the looks of a
few of his better velvet masterpieces. She ended up standing there, shaking, her hair dripping as though it was ink running right off her head, writing him a check for a hundred bucks. They argued. She felt her forehead: fever for sure.

  She pointed out the sales he was making off four Japanese tourists in camel-hair coats who had been attracted to the spontaneous street theater Val had launched, the kind of thing you can expect in America. Finally, when she couldn’t find her bus pass, a little Japanese girl with the tourist group pulled her over to the curb, where she nodded at the storm sewer.

  Very carefully, Val kneeled down and lowered her head—her flat wet winter hair, her lips swollen from the rock-like skull of the purveyor of New York crap—to look into the storm sewer. Nothing. A yellow cab screamed by, close enough to spray her, and she could swear that it was Peter Hathaway lounging warm and dry in the backseat, and she cried for her lost bus pass in the black maw of the city storm sewer, where the only sounds that roared back at her were melted torrents of captured water.

  In the cool Lake Wendaban morning, Val wrapped a blanket over her shoulders and stepped outside. Not quite eight thirty. The sunlight shot low through the trees, scattering like doubloons on the paths. At that moment Kay and Caroline came by, carrying an old, water-stained mattress between them. Caroline was wearing light cotton cargo pants and a bright green t-shirt. Her hair was still wet from a shower. “Bagels and coffee in the kitchen.” She grinned at Val, then bit her lower lip. “Wade’s gone, but he’ll be back. Charlie’s not coming for lunch.”

  Val shrugged the blanket tighter. “So, when—?”

  “Wade said he’ll see what he can do. Listen, there are a couple of jackets hanging in the office,” she jerked her head, “so help yourself. And there’s a fax machine. Use the landline, Val. Cells don’t get a reliable signal here.”