by Peter Geye
Hosea walked to Odd’s bedside and carefully removed the bandage covering the boy’s eye. Blood pulsed slowly from the wound with each beat of Odd’s heart. Hosea put two fingers on his neck and opened his pocket watch. After a minute he wrote the boy’s heart rate on a chart on the bedside table. From his pocket he removed the ophthalmoscope and trained it on the empty eye socket. He had identified the essential components. The extraocular muscles had been severed. The ophthalmic artery was intact. The bundle of optic and sclerotic nerves was horribly frayed. Hosea could not imagine the pain. It made his skin crawl to think of it. He wet a clean cloth in the bowl of warm water and washed the wound for the tenth time. Odd stirred but did not wake, the drugs staying consciousness.
He replaced the ophthalmoscope and walked to the window. The sun was near to rising over the lake. He had to catch his breath looking on the horizon, thinking about the boy and how from now on he’d only ever see half of what he ought.
After lunch, after Hosea had been up the Lighthouse Road to the telegraph machine in the lighthouse keeper’s office, after he’d exchanged telegraphs with a physician friend in Chicago, after two more hours spent with Howe’s Manual and another hour studying Gray’s Anatomy, after he’d administered another dose of ether, after all this, Hosea performed the surgery. With a speculum holding Odd’s eyelids wide open, Hosea trimmed the frayed nerves and cut back the extraocular muscles. The bear’s claw had entered at the corner of the boy’s eye and broken the bridge of his nose in the process. Hosea removed several tiny fragments of bone that he’d not seen until then. For an hour he labored over the boy’s injury and when he was satisfied he stitched the gash extending down from the outer corner of Odd’s eye, bandaged it, and wrapped his head with gauze. Finally he gave him a last dose of morphine and left the boy to sleep.
Danny had been sitting outside the surgery since early morning, and when Hosea stepped out of the room Danny stood with a questioning look on his face.
Hosea took a deep breath, he cracked his knuckles. “Hello, Daniel.”
“How is he, Mister Grimm?”
“I think he’ll be fine. He’s lost his eye. It will take him some long time to recover. He’ll need visitors. I hope you’ll come see him.”
“I will. Every day.”
“I believe you will.”
“Can I go in and sit next to him?”
“Don’t touch or otherwise disturb him. Do you understand?”
Danny nodded.
“And if he wakes, or if anything seems strange, come up and fetch me.”
“I will.”
Hosea turned to leave as Danny stepped into the room, but Hosea paused and turned. “Daniel.”
Danny paused in turn. “Yes?”
“Where were you boys when this happened?”
“Up on the Burnt Wood. We spent the day on my trapline.”
“Why did you call Odd a chickenshit?”
Danny blushed.
“I already told you it’s not your fault, son.”
“He told me about learning to fish with Arne and I couldn’t help it. I just don’t see him out on the big water all by himself.”
Hosea considered this for a moment. “So he went bear hunting.”
“Mister Grimm, I wish I wouldn’t have said it.”
“I’m sure. Go on in there, sit next to your friend.”
Danny did.
Twice each day Hosea cleaned the wound and changed the bandages. He administered smaller and smaller doses of morphine until finally none was needed. Danny came every day and sat on the bedside chair. Rebekah brought Odd his meals and watched over him when Danny wasn’t there.
After a week Odd was well enough to convalesce up in the flat, so Hosea moved a chair to the front window and piled books around the boy and in this way Odd ushered in spring. Danny still came often and the two boys spent the first days of April playing chess or card games rather than romping through the woods.
On one such day, as the boys sat in the flat putting new backing and line on their fly reels, Hosea joined them.
“I’ve something to show you, Odd.”
Three weeks had passed since the surgery and except for the regular, dull throbbing in his eyeless socket Odd was feeling fine. The boys set their fly reels down and looked at Hosea standing above them. He held a metal box.
“What is it?” Odd asked.
Hosea set the box on the coffee table, knelt on one knee, and opened the box. He withdrew one of a dozen silken handkerchiefs. He peeled the silk back as though it were a banana skin and withdrew from its center a glass eyeball. He offered it to Odd, who took it and held it close to his good eye.
“What is it?” Odd asked again.
“It’s a glass eye, son. I have several here. Wanted to see whether any of them might fit.”
Odd was transfixed by the eyeball. He held it up to the sunlight in the window and rotated it as though he had in his hand a precious jewel. The sunlight caught the glass and flashed brilliant penumbras on the floor.
“I don’t understand,” Odd said.
“You put it in place of the eyeball you lost to the bear.”
“Will I see from it?”
“No, it’s cosmetic. It will look just like a regular eye, but it serves no purposes for sight.”
“So he won’t have to walk around with a patch over his eye for the rest of his life?” Daniel ventured.
“Precisely,” Hosea said. He removed another of the silk handkerchiefs and extracted a second glass eye. “If none of these work, we’ll have to order one.”
Odd reached into the box himself now, pulled another out, and unwrapped it. He couldn’t imagine it in his eye socket. For that matter, he couldn’t imagine that he’d lost one of his eyes. The thought quickened his heart and the pulsing behind the bandages intensified.
“We’ll have to wait another month or so, until the eye has healed some. But I wanted to show you. What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s a good thing, Odd.”
Odd said, “What if it shatters? What if someone hits me in the eye? What if I slip out on the boat, hit my eye on the deck?”
“I believe they’re quite durable, though I suppose there’s always a chance of the eye shattering. Or cracking. In which case we’ll replace it.”
Odd was now holding the second glass eye up to the light. The quizzical expression on his face suggested he’d heard none of what Hosea said.
“In any case, wearing a glass eye will be better than walking around looking as though your face were half melted away. Hell, it might even help you find a wife someday.”
“Hosea?” Odd asked a moment later, as Hosea was wrapping the eyes back in their silk handkerchiefs.
“What is it, lad?”
“Will I still be able to apprentice with Arne Johnson this spring?”
“I reckon you will, yes.”
“Because it’s time I got started earning my share.”
“There will be plenty of time for earning your share,” Hosea said. He put the eyeballs back in the box and clasped it shut. “You boys finish with your fly line. I’ll talk to Arne Johnson soon.”
Arne Johnson saw no reason Odd shouldn’t start learning the ropes, so five weeks after he’d climbed into a bear den Odd straddled the forward thwart of Arne’s skiff as they headed out to haul the first set of the season.
Arne was a widower, childless, and the least garrulous man in a town full of reticent men. That Odd was in Arne’s skiff at all was a testament to the boy’s standing among the villagers. From the first days of his life, Odd had been the whole town’s ward. All his sweaters were hand-knit by the fishermen’s wives; his haircuts given under a bowl by the innkeeper’s wife; the men took him hunting and handed down their own sons’ outgrown boots and shotguns; Christmas morning always found twenty gifts intended for Odd on the apothecary doorstep. The godly wives took him to church on Sunday mornings, and the schoolteacher stayed afte
r class to help with his lessons.
That brisk April morning in Arne’s skiff was just another version of those Christmas gifts and haircuts and Odd was as grateful for this as he’d been for all the kindnesses bestowed on him over the years. As Arne pulled for the open water beyond Gunflint harbor, he said, “You watch what I do. If your hands get cold, keep it to yourself. If you get hungry, eat the sandwich in your pocket. Watch the shore closely, that will tell you where we are. If you fall overboard, God rest your soul.”
Odd listened intently, coupling Arne’s terse lecture with what Danny’s father had told him about the big water. Arne’s thirty-second speech was the first of only a few short speeches that season, but what Odd learned that summer would last his lifetime. They rowed an hour offshore to Arne’s buoys, where Arne secured his oars and set immediately to hauling the net. Odd knew to sit still at first, to watch, as Arne had put it. Odd likewise knew that as Arne choked the herring through the net it was his job to box them. The fish were cold and slippery and the wind coming up his back might have dissuaded other boys, but Odd relished it from the first moment. The fear Danny had diagnosed that fateful day on the Burnt Wood River never entered his thoughts.
Five hours they hauled, tending fifteen thousand feet of nets at two different sets. They worked in harmony in a way Arne found unbelievable. The boy with the patched eye was as natural under the rolls of the boat as the water itself. When they got to shore that afternoon, after they’d hefted the boxes into Arne’s harborside fish house, as Arne gutted and salted the fish and Odd packed them, Arne offered the only praise he ever would. “You’ve a fisherman’s blood,” he said.
Odd would have known this without hearing it, but he blushed all the same, the color in his cheeks announcing not only his embarrassment but also his thanks for the chance.
Over the course of that summer Arne taught Odd everything: how the fish ran, what the wind meant, how to judge a lowering sky, how to mend a net. He taught him how to barter with the fishmonger and keep a ledger, how to sew oilskin and make gunnysack anchors. At the end of summer, after a long day on the water and in the fish house, as Arne cooked sausages and onions on the stove, he told Odd to sit down.
“We’ll start building you a skiff this winter. There’s plenty of work to do in winter without building a boat, too, but together we can manage. Next spring you’ll get your first grounds. You’ll use my fish house.”
Odd nodded.
Arne stirred the sausages, forked an onion into his mouth.
“The grounds won’t yield much. They’ll be near the shoreline. And you’ll still be apprenticing, but you’ll be doing it in your own boat. The season after next you’ll be on your own. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now have some grub.”
The leaves were turning by the time Hosea fit the glass eye. Odd sat before a mirror in Hosea’s examination room. Though his eye still pulsed and sometimes ached behind the patch, he could tolerate it. He hadn’t seen the wound yet, and this fact alone worried him that morning.
“You look just like your mother, Odd,” Hosea said.
Odd glanced up in the mirror. Hosea was standing behind him, his arms crossed.
“She’d be proud of the young man sitting here today. Even if he was fool enough to raid a bear den.”
Odd smiled.
“Are you ready for this?”
“Where’s Rebekah?”
“She’s tending the store. You can show her when we’re finished.”
“All right.”
“Okay?”
Odd nodded.
It took a few minutes for Odd to look into the mirror. When he did, all he saw was the sunken lids of his wounded eye. It dawned on him at once that the space where his eyeball once had been looked an awful lot like a miniature version of the cave entrance in which he had lost it. The eyebrow above the wound had grown back darker than the eyebrow above his good eye, and the effect was shadowy. It seemed to set the hole where his eye should have been deeper in his face.
He reached his hand up to the wound. The tips of his fingers dipped into the folds of his eyelids and he pulled them quickly back out.
“Let’s see how it fits,” Hosea said. “Tilt your head back.”
Odd stared at himself for another moment before doing as Hosea said.
The sensation of having the glass eye inserted was a dull one, just the tugging and pinching of skin. It took only a minute.
“How does it feel?” Hosea asked.
Odd didn’t say anything. In the years to come Odd had two eyes custom made, but that first was culled from Hosea’s ready supply. And though it wasn’t a perfect fit it wasn’t bad either. Except for some taut ness in the skin there was no sensation at all to having the glass eye in place.
“I believe this will suffice,” Hosea said as he pressed the skin around the glass eye with his thumbs. “Are you ready to see it?”
“I am.”
Odd sat up and looked at himself. He looked for a long time and didn’t say anything. It was himself he saw, but it wasn’t. He blinked and despite all his conviction he felt tears welling in his right eye — his good eye. He saw his right eye gloss over. The glass eye stared back brown and too large and dry as chalk.
“The skin around the glass eye will stretch a little. It’s like breaking in a new pair of boots.”
Odd’s right eye was the color of wet blueberries, but the glass eye was brown. “I look like one of Danny’s sled dogs,” Odd said.
“You’ll probably need to have new eyes fit as your skull grows. When you do, we’ll have them made so they match your real eye.”
Odd said nothing. He put his left hand in front of the glass eye and held it there. The tears welled again.
“It’s temporary, lad.”
“I heard you,” Odd snapped. He used all his will to quell the tears. Blinked hard. And brought his face closer to the mirror.
“Listen to me, Odd: What the eye can’t see, your heart will find.”
Odd looked up quickly, met Hosea’s eyes. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Someday you will, son. Someday you will.”
X.
(August 1895)
Thea was nearly seventeen years old when she saw a tree for the first time, and then only from the rail of the topsail schooner Nordsjøen. The boat was bound for Tromsø, a day and a night out of Hammerfest, and those few on board were cold and tired. The captain and his three-man crew were busy at the rigging, dodging the skerries and shoals, slogging through frazil ice and fog. When the sun began its burn the high fjords and their plunging ridges on either side of the boat came into view.
At first she mistook the tree line for a lowering storm, some sharp front from the east. As the good boat slipped forward, though, she saw it was no storm at all. For all her short life she’d lived in Hammerfest, had never, before yesterday, been out of view of it. The hills in Hammerfest were gradual and bare — arctic desert — and what green there was came by way of the cloudberry boscage and lichen for a few summer months. Now a forest of spruce cascaded down the mountainsides, each minute the lifting of the fog revealed more forest. She’d been told of trees, but not these. No, the trees she’d heard of were still more than a month before her, in Amerika, on the shores of a lake said to equal any ocean.
Strictly speaking, the voyage between Hammerfest and Tromsø was the second leg of her journey. Early the morning before, she’d stood on the rocks while her papa had loaded her belongings into his fishing boat. They had an hour before the ferry would leave Hammerfest quay, and her mama was busy finding anything else she could send. They lived in a sod house on Muolkot, an island in plain sight of Hammerfest. Her papa had a few sheep and a potato garden. He had a skiff that was safe along the shore and in the harbor but not equipped for open water. He was a decent and pious man, a mostly quiet man. He played his hardingfele on Saturday nights and was capable of good humor, though not much recently. He knew he coul
d not offer his daughter much. So he sold a sheep and half of his parcel of land and spent the rest of his life savings on passage to Amerika.
The voyage had been more than a year in the planning. A year of strict saving and hoarding, of frugal and meager living. Thea’s belongings were paltry. In her carpetbag she carried only an extra dress, two scarves, her summer bonnet, a pair of stockings, and her mittens. It was cold enough passing through the fjord that she already wore her winter cloak and hat. She also had a basket of food, one meant to last her entire voyage. It contained three jars of soused herring, lefse, pickles, a pound of gjetost cheese, two jars of sheep’s milk, two jars of cloudberry jam, and a small burlap sack of pears already bruised and mealy. Who could say where the pears had come from? Sewn into the skirt of her dress was a secret pocket, and in this she kept her purse. It held fifty American dollars and ten Norwegian kroner. When she got to Kristiania, she was going to put her papers in this same secret place. Last was her handbag, woven in the last days by her mother. It was filled with essentials: her Bible, diary, English phrasebook, and a hairbrush.
Slight as she was, Thea had no problem carrying her belongings. When the Nordsjøen reached the dock in Tromsø she had already re trieved her baggage from her bunk. She stood at the rail waiting for the gangplank to be dropped from the dock, first in a queue of ten weary travelers.
By the time she debarked and stopped in a harborside café for bread and cheese and coffee, it was already time to find her next boat, which would bring her to Kristiania. She boarded the Port av Kristiania at noon, two days of starts and stops along the western shore under steam ahead of her.
The Port av Kristiania arrived at her final destination in the middle of the night. Thea was sleeping in her bunk when she felt the ship’s definitive stop. She found her bags and joined the crowd and by the time she reached the main deck she was wide awake and consumed by a new awe: Kristiania — even at night, perhaps especially at night — sprawled all around her. The gas streetlamps flickered near and far, those on the yonder hillside a kind of greasy mirage that might not have been light at all, might have been only an impossible reflection. There were warehouses on the waterfront three times larger than the ship she was now stepping off. Everywhere the sounds of harbor life thrummed: the grinding and shrieking of train and trolley tracks, the clatter of horses’ hooves on the dock’s planks, the moaning of loading cranes, and above and below all of it the sound of human voices.