by Peter Geye
“I’ll get Danny over here.”
Rebekah put a piece of pie in front of Hosea, who tucked his napkin back into his shirt collar and took his first bite of pie. He said, “Rebekah, have you been over to see Odd’s boat?”
Her breath caught. “No.”
“You should come over and have a look,” Odd said. He winked at her.
“His motor arrived yesterday. From the looks of things, just in time. Winter has arrived.” And Hosea pointed out the window. The winds had finally come down from the north, bringing cold and snow. It came in curtains now. The season was changing.
Hosea continued, “I’d venture to guess we’ve seen the last of our ferrying friends up shore. We’ll be set in harbor ice soon.”
Rebekah asked Odd, “Would you tell me about the motor?”
“It’s a Buda four-stroke. I bought it because the catalog said, ‘Buda marine engines embody no freakish ideas or experiments.’ Guess I figured there was enough freakishness already laid into her curves and lines.”
“What in the world does that mean?” she said.
Odd tipped another finger of whiskey into his cup, filled it with coffee.
“I think what Odd means,” Hosea said, “is that he is building an unconventional vessel. He’s taking risks in the interest of satisfying his curiosity.”
Odd couldn’t help but smile. “I’m taking risks, all right.” From the corner of his eye, he could see Rebekah press the blush from her cheeks.
“How fast will she go?” Hosea asked.
“Not more than fifteen knots,” Odd said, sipping his coffee. “Not more than fifteen knots with a stiff breeze on her tail.” He set his cup down. “But I didn’t build her for speed.”
“When will she be finished?” Hosea asked.
Odd gave the question serious consideration. “All that’s left is the motor. And a last coat of varnish. If it came down to it I could launch her in a couple weeks but I’ll let her set the season in the fish house. I’ll put in the water come ice-out. I’ll set my first nets next spring over her side.”
“That’s exciting,” Rebekah said. “Will you take me on her maiden voyage?”
“Does that not go without saying?” Odd said.
They finished their pie and digestifs and Hosea adjourned to his sitting chair beside the fireplace in the parlor. Rebekah and Odd cleared the table and washed the bone-china plates and cups and saucers. As they replaced them in the sideboard, Odd said, “Come over. Tell him you want to have a look.”
“Okay,” she said
Odd walked to the water closet.
In the kitchen Rebekah hung her apron behind the door, hung the dishrag over the faucet, and pushed her hair behind her ears. She walked into the parlor. “You look like you’re about to fall asleep,” she said.
Hosea was indeed drowsy. He set the book he was reading on his lap. “You prepared a wonderful feast this Thanksgiving.”
“I’m going to see Odd’s boat,” she said.
“I would join you, but I’m well spent.”
“We’ll be busy tomorrow. You should go to bed.”
Hosea closed the book on his lap. “You’re right.”
Rebekah hated these conversations, hated that the two of them could fall into the trappings of domesticity like this, hated that they could seem fond of each other. “Odd will walk me back, I’m sure.”
Odd came through the house holding the picture frames and the bell. He went to the top of the staircase and said, “Thanks for the eats. Thanks for remembering my birthday. I guess Rebekah’s going to have a look at the boat.”
“Happy birthday, lad. I hope you and Danny can get to the motor soon.”
“We will. Tomorrow, if I can get the truck through the snow.”
Hosea nodded approvingly. “Wait for Rebekah downstairs. I’d like a word with her.”
“Good night, then,” Odd said, and walked down the stairs.
When Hosea was sure Odd had descended the second staircase, he looked at Rebekah. “Your gift to Odd, it was wonderful. Thank you for talking me into finding those old pictures.”
“I’m glad he was pleased.”
“And the bell? You think he liked it?”
“It pains me to say it, but yes, I believe he liked the bell.”
“Pains you?”
“Oh, never mind.” She took her cloak from the front closet. She sat on the divan and laced her boots, then stood to leave. “Good night,” she said and turned to leave.
“Rebekah?”
She turned again. “What is it?”
“Your innocence is not unlike Thea Eide’s ever was. I meant to say that over dessert.”
“I’ve never been innocent a day in my life, you’ve seen to that.”
Hosea sat up in his chair. “Don’t bare your teeth at me like that. I was feeling generous. Be grateful.”
She said, “I’m sorry.”
Hosea stared at her for a long moment. “Very good. Go ahead over to Odd’s.”
They walked up the Lighthouse Road, the hypnotic sound of the waves on the breakwater in the distance. The snow fell slantwise. They passed the hotel and turned up the alleyway and found the lakeside trail that led to Odd’s fish house. There were already four inches of snow on the ground — the first real snow of the season — and Odd kicked a path clear for Rebekah as he went along.
When they came to the gravel beach on the cove, Odd walked to the water’s edge and stood looking out at the lake beyond the point. Rebekah waited up on the knoll, shivering from the wind. She wanted to go inside, had so much to tell Odd. After a minute she said, “Come up, Odd. Let’s go inside. I’m cold.”
He turned to her. “You go in. I’ll be there in a second. Rekindle the fire in the stove.” And then he turned back to look at the water.
The pictures of his mother, now tucked inside his coat, held in place by his hand in his coat pocket and the waistband of his trousers, had awakened something inside him. Was it sadness? Surely the look on her face in those pictures conveyed nothing if not sadness, even the picture in which she held him. Was there another word for this feeling? If he dove into the winter water, would it wash away? He shuddered at the thought of the lake and turned to look up at the fish house, the window in the door now glowing amber from the table lamp she’d lit inside. A kind of beacon. Follow it on in, he thought.
She was unlacing her boots by the warmth of the woodstove. She looked up at him. “My boots are full of snow.”
“I guess winter decided to come after all.” He set the bell by the door, took off his coat, and crossed the fish house. From its hook on the wall he took down the lantern and lit it. He set the pictures on the ledge above his bunk and looked at them for a moment before he turned.
She was crying.
He walked quickly to her, knelt, and said, “Hey, hey, now. What is it?”
“I have to show you something, Odd. Another picture. I have to show you this and then I have to tell you something. You have to listen and I don’t want you to say anything. Do you understand?”
Odd nodded. He pulled his three-legged stool from beneath the boat, which sat in its bracings.
She reached into the pocket of her skirt and withdrew a postcard that she kept palmed in her hand. He could tell she was steadying herself. Steeling herself. Though for what reason he could not fathom.
“I’m showing you this because I want you to know everything. Because what I have to tell you will change a whole lot, and you need to know this in order for that to happen.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Shh,” she snapped. “I said I want you to listen. I don’t want you to say anything until I’m finished.”
Now she stood and put the postcard to her lips. Then, as though pushed, she reached between them and handed him the postcard and turned away. She did this in one motion and stood with her back to him, her hands at her mouth.
“Don’t say anything. Do you understand? Do not say an
ything. Let me figure this out.”
Odd looked up from the postcard and waited for her to turn around. He waited three full minutes, his mind clamoring for a clear thought.
“Hosea rescued me, in a way. And he was always — always — perfectly honest with me. Before we left Chicago he told me exactly what would be expected of me.” Now she turned to face Odd. “That,” she said, pointing at the postcard, “is the price I have had to pay. A small price compared to the one I might have. The price I would have.”
She walked back over to Odd. “I know he can be a brute. And I wish he wasn’t. But if I’d stayed in Chicago it would have been much worse for me. Sometimes Hosea is as kind as a preacher. Others, well, he’s got his ways.” She paused, looked down at him. “I guess you know all about him.”
She shook her head and closed her eyes. “Dear God, how am I supposed to tell you this?”
“Tell me what?”
She reached down, took the postcard from his hand, and walked to the woodstove. She opened the door and put the postcard in the flames, closed the door, and walked back to him. She knelt before him and took his hands. “I’m pregnant, Odd.”
Rather than some emotion rising in him, Odd saw instantly his own bunched face in the photograph with his mother. He saw his eyes, just slits then, the old-man lines coming off his baby’s eyes. He would have given anything to know how he’d felt when that picture had been taken, in his mother’s arms. Maybe that was what it was, the feeling that had been plaguing him since he’d left Grimm’s. He reached up and felt the lines coming off his eyes, he closed them, regained the moment, and looked at her. At her waiting face. He saw only his love for her in what looked back.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said, her voice hardly audible.
“Rebekah,” he whispered. “Baby.” And he reached down and picked her up and held her on his lap.
“I’m too old to have a baby,” she said into his shoulder. “I’m nearly twice as old as you.”
“I guess this is the first moment that ever mattered.”
“It matters because I’m pregnant.”
“I can’t tell you whether or not you’re too old to have a baby. But it seems to me if you’re young enough to get that way, you’re young enough to see it through.”
“We were like a brother and sister, Odd.”
“We sure were, right up till that day at the farm. Right up till that day up in the flat.”
She took a deep breath. “What have I done?”
“I guess we did it together.”
She ran her hand through his hair. “Hosea will be so upset if he finds out.”
“This ain’t Hosea’s business, it’s ours.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Odd. But I live with him. That’s my life over there at the apothecary.”
“Not anymore,” Odd protested. “Now it’s you and me. And our baby.”
She sat up, looked at him. “What? We’re to live in a fish house? On what you make fishing? We’ll be disgraced. No one in town will so much as glance our way. For that matter, who will deliver the baby? Hosea?”
“We’ll get out of here, then,” he said. He could hear desperation in his voice.
“And go where?” she asked. “And live how?”
“We can go wherever the hell we please,” he said. “We can live however we want.”
She looked at him now and smiled, though her face was full of sadness. “There’s not a way I don’t love you, but I don’t think I can have this baby.”
“What are you talking about, not have the baby?” He set her down, stood up, paced a few steps. “You think I didn’t know about the postcards?” Now he felt helpless. “Why’d you show me the postcard, anyway? If you’re going to get rid of the baby, why’d you feel the need to put that under my nose?” He pulled his tobacco and papers from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette over the counter. The snow was spitting against the window.
“How did you know about the postcards, Odd?”
He turned to face her. “You think I just sat on my hands all those years? While you and Hosea were downstairs tending to the shop, I was supposed to practice my grammar lessons up in that house of secrets? Honestly?” He ran his hands through his hair, took a long drag on his cigarette, looked out the window onto the darkness of night, the lightness of falling snow. “You have me pegged a fool, don’t you?”
Now her voice rose. “You’ve known all this time and never said anything?”
“What in the world was I supposed to say?”
There was no answer to that question, and they both knew it. He stood at the window trying to think this whole thing straight. But he couldn’t. Something was nagging him. “He’s still taking pictures?”
“Oh, Odd. He hasn’t taken a picture of me in years.” She stood up, walked over to him. “I’m forty-one years old. Too old for just about anything. Too old to have a baby.”
He turned to face her, there were tears streaming down his cheeks but his voice was perfectly calm. “Don’t you see? Your whole life you’ve been his captive. He ain’t got rights. You’ve paid your dues.”
“He was as much a father as I ever had, Odd. He gave me a place to live. He bought me nice clothes. He taught me how to read.”
Odd swung around. “I’ve got to think,” he said. “Give me a minute to think.”
And so he did, as he marched around his boat, into the dark reaches of the fish house and back into the lamp and lantern light. Rebekah sat with her head in her hands, unable to face the young man she had loved from the first moment of his life. This man she had loved in ways she hadn’t known were possible.
He must have made ten laps around the boat. After five minutes he stopped and rolled another cigarette and lit it and took a coffee can from under the fish counter before he resumed the stool in front of Rebekah. “When will the baby be born?”
“I suppose the baby would come sometime next summer.”
“Okay. All right.” He flicked the cigarette ash. “I ain’t gonna beg you. I ain’t gonna tell you the hundred reasons Hosea ought to be shot for the way he keeps you under his thumb. But I will tell you what we’re gonna do.”
She shook her head sadly, said, “Oh, Odd.”
“I listened to you when you asked. You do the same for me.” He pulled a bunch of twine from the coffee can, under which lay a wad of cash, which he also withdrew. “I got upwards of a thousand dollars here. I got a boat that only needs the motor put in it.” He put the money back in the can.
“We’ll leave as soon as the ice-out—”
“I’ll be five months pregnant by then. My belly will be out to here,” she interrupted. She held her hand six inches in front of her stomach.
“All right. Hold on, now,” Odd said. He took another lap around the boat, looked in at the motor box, did a little figuring. Then he looked back across the fish house at her. “Then we’ll leave next week. Before the cove freezes. Danny and I will get to work on the motor first thing tomorrow morning.” He nodded, felt sure of himself.
He walked over to her. “We have to get out of here. Start fresh. Give this baby a chance.” Now he put his hand on her stomach.
“Where would we go. Odd? How?” Her voice was full of doubt.
“We’ll take my boat. We could go up to Duluth. Or on down to Canada. Cross the lake to Michigan. We could go all the way down to the Soo, and then anywhere in the world from there. I’m a young man. I can get a job anywhere.” He took her chin in his hand and raised her face to his. “Haven’t we talked about this? Ain’t it true that you’ve asked me a hundred times to get you out of this place?”
She smiled another of those sad smiles and felt the tears welling in her eyes. “What about the fish house, Odd? What about the farm?”
“They ain’t going anywhere. I’ll see if Danny wants to live here. He can look after it. Maybe buy it from me. I’ll talk to Mayfair. See about selling the farm. None of that’s important anyway.” He was talking faster than
he could think.
She shuddered, did not know what to say, much less what to think.
“What do you say, Rebekah? We could make a start of it.”
XII.
(January 1896)
Trond urged his horse across the shallow, half-frozen Burnt Wood River. The horse was as weary as the rest of the world, and he moved through the snow and brittle boscage with complete resignation. The steam blowing from his nostrils blended with the fog blowing in off the lake.
Trond had his collar turned up against the wind, his chin tucked to the shoreward side of the trail. He’d never been to the wigwam village and was frankly daunted by his errand. He knew Joseph Riverfish, knew him as a fine and good man, a family man, a superb woodsman and fisherman. What Trond didn’t know, among a hundred such details, was how one called out in greeting, how one would sit in the wigwam, whether the settlers were even allowed in the wigwam, for that matter. Upon Hosea Grimm’s suggestion, he carried in his saddlebags a sack of candies for the children and a warm pint of Canadian whiskey for Riverfish himself.
When Riverfish’s dogs caught the horse’s scent they sent up a randy yammer. The village was in a crescent-shaped meadow, bordered on the north by a forest of spruce and on the south by the lake. The dogs were staked in a line along the western edge of the village, and as Trond passed them on his horse, they lunged playfully, pulling their chains to their limits. There were a dozen of them, Spitz breeds from some arctic part of the world.
The village was six wigwams. A plume of gentle smoke rising from each. Four canoes were tipped over, half covered with snowdrifts. The dogs must have alerted Joseph Riverfish because he stood at the entrance of the nearest wigwam, a bear pelt over his shoulders like a shawl.
“Hello!” he shouted and waved. “Hello, there!”
Trond raised a hand in greeting and rode the last hundred feet and swung off the horse, which he patted on the withers. “Hello, Joseph,” he said.
Riverfish spoke three or four languages — among them German and English — but each with the heavy accent of his native Ojibwa. “It be a cold day for horseback riding, no?” he asked.