The Lighthouse Road

by Peter Geye

  After Trond bought the last pocket watch, after Smith loaded his unsold goods back into his haversacks, after the jacks adjourned to the bunkhouse, Smith and the foreman and the bull cook and a pair of company men up for the weekend dealt their first game of seven-card stud. They uncorked a bottle of Canadian rye and passed it around the table

  Abigail Sterle’s croup had worsened, so after supper the Meltmen brothers brought her to Hosea Grimm’s for care. Thea worked all through the evening hours, doing the job of four herself.

  Thea’s hands were wet to the wrist in beaten eggs when she drenched the last of a hundred pork chops in the wash and rolled them in cornmeal. She could hear the Saturday-night accordion and merrymaking from the bunkhouse. The poker game was winding down. Smith’s back was to her, but every other hand he’d turn and leer. A second bottle was being passed around, and a cloud of cigar smoke hung over the table.

  Thea wedged the last pair of pork chops onto the baking sheet — the sixth sheet, each of them loaded — and wiped her hands on her apron. As she did, the card game concluded and the players donned their coats and hats. Smith, his mustache losing its shape, gave her a last drunken grin as the men filed out. She stored the pork chops and stood alone in the mess hall. Exhausted, she thought about retiring for the night but then thought better of it and decided to make the next day’s pies. So she boiled water for tea and kept working.

  She had already spread the dough and lined the pie tins and mixed the apples and brown sugar and cinnamon when she stepped outside for a breath of fresh air an hour later. The snow had stopped and a full, bright moon hung on the edge of the sky. The bunkhouse had grown quiet but for a few last revelers skylarking outside the door. Smith was right, that hell of cold had blown back in. She hugged herself and turned to go in for the night when she saw a strange sight.

  One of the draft horses was being led into the middle of the paddock, snorting plumes of cloudy breath into the night. The handler was nearly invisible in the shadow of the horse, but it was not the barn boss, she knew, for the man pulling the bridle stood at the horse’s shoulder and the barn boss was no more than five and a half feet tall. When the man and horse reached the trough, the handler turned to leave, but only after hobbling the horse. Satisfied, the man loped back to the barn.

  Thea noted what she had seen but thought little more of it until an hour later, when the horse began to scream.

  No longer filtered by the cold and dark, the wolves’ howls came over the ridge, near and frightening, as though each element of that night — the coldness and darkness and stillness, the moon’s bright luster — had its own voice in the discordant choir of the pack. In camp, the jacks stirred. Some came outside for a smoke or to stare up at the sound as though it could be seen. Thea had been readying herself for bed but lit another lantern in the kitchen when she heard the wolves.

  They wailed for what seemed an hour. The jacks returned to their bunks and a silence spilled over the night, eerier in its way than the close song of the pack. It was in that interval of calm that the wolves emerged from the ridgetop pines. The dog, Lodden, greeted the pack even as he retreated to the horse hobbled in the paddock, his hackles and slaver evidence of an outrage a thousand years in the breeding. Lodden moved silently, though, even as the draft horse screamed and snorted and finally collapsed onto the trampled snow.

  Though terrified, Thea could not help but be drawn to the commotion. Against her instincts and better judgment, she hurried to the door of the mess hall with a lantern. As she shouldered the door open, the watch salesman Smith met her. In Norwegian he said, “The wolves have come.”

  He still smelled of hooch even in all that cold and in that first moment of recognition she was actually happy to see him. She felt her spirits rise. But then he took the lantern from her hand and made a great show of extinguishing the light. He set the lantern on the floor and approached her as if inviting her to dance, took her hard by the wrist and ushered her into the kitchen. He pushed her onto the kitchen table, piecrusts scattering, the horrible screaming horse and growling dogs in the paddock a befitting accompaniment to his meanness.

  She tried to kick him as he came toward her, but he grabbed her boot and twisted it off. She opened her eyes and saw his limp face and fierce eyes and that dead tooth. Then she closed her eyes and felt Smith’s hot breath on her neck.

  Now there were men yelling in the bunkhouse and barn. The barn boss had set free the bitch and the Ovcharkas circled the horse as eight wolves whirled about the paddock. They moved to their own ancient choreography, their red eyes in the darkness, their thick pelts shimmering like tinsel under the moon. They were silent, but the dogs understood their intentions. Lodden charged a closing wolf, swatted it with his massive forepaw, and bit with two-inch fangs and the wolf wheeled and growled and circled back into the ranks. In the barn, rifles were loaded with shivering hands.

  And in the mess hall Thea could not breathe under the drunkard, who held her neck with one hand while he pulled up her skirts with the other. She wanted to cry out but could not, neither for his hand around her neck nor her great confusion. He pressed his hips against her and removed his hand from her neck. As if she had just come up from underwater, she took a gulping breath. But then he ripped her stockings off and she was drowning again.

  A desperate yelp came from the night. Lodden chased one of the wolves to the edge of the paddock and broke its hind leg as it attempted to jump the fence. The other wolves continued to circle. At the fence, Lodden set his jaws into the ruff of the injured wolf and sawed into its veins until the blood poured onto the snow. The dog lifted the dead wolf as if it were a pup of his own and carried it across the paddock and tossed it at a trio of its packmates. A warning and boast both. The next wolf Lodden had in his fangs merely rolled over. The dog eviscerated the wolf’s pink belly in a single chomp.

  Then the horse was up and bucking, the hobble kicked free. And

  the jacks came out of the bunkhouse and barn and started firing at the pack, who would not retreat but seemed unwilling to blitz again despite their hunger.

  Thea thought she might faint but was astonished to feel Smith’s wet lips on her ear, to feel the gale of his breath. He clutched her breasts violently, and in that same moment she felt a world of fire in her belly. He grunted with each thrust of his hips, and with each thrust she felt a part of her body leaving her. Like the steam that had earlier that season risen from the jacks in the mess.

  In the paddock the wolves were suddenly wise. As another shot rang from the direction of the barn, they turned and ran for the trees on the ridge. Lodden and Freya chased, and before the pack reached the trees the dogs tackled the last straggling wolf and sank their fangs into his throat.

  Smith’s end came with a sobering shudder and he looked at Thea for the first time since meeting her at the door. For a moment he seemed confused, as though he did not know where he was, but then he pushed himself up off his elbows and buttoned his trousers. Three more rifle shots hollered through the night.

  As he ran out the door, Thea fell from the table onto her knees. She opened her eyes and saw only the darkness of that unholy night.

  XV.

  (November 1920)

  As he motored out of the cove, as his boat rode the gentle swells, he knew he was crossing seiches, knew because there’d been no wind for two full days, knew because the pressure was falling, had been falling all day, the pulsing behind his glass eye his barometer. He was glad of the seiches, they allowed him to feel the water under his boat, feel it come up through his feet and into his legs.

  She moved nicely, his boat. Heavy in the bottom, firm up front. The wheel quick to the rudder. And even as slowly as he went, the boat came out of turns smoothly, found her level quickly. He was dancing with her, learning her manners and mien.

  He straightened, headed due east, pushed the throttle to three-quarters. The lake was barely rippling and the boat planed out as quickly as she accelerated. He turned her full left, north,
came back across his wake and then full right. The water churned up around him as he throttled down, let her bob there in the mess of the wake. He was a quarter mile offshore, facing town. By God, he was about to be gone.

  In the Gunflint harbor he went first to the fuel dock and filled his tank. He put payment and a note in an envelope and dropped it into the harbormaster’s mailbox and climbed back aboard the boat, untied her from the dock, and crossed the harbor to the Lighthouse Road, where he tied up again and waited for Rebekah. The moon was over the hills above town, nearly full and heavy with light. He remembered what Hosea had told him once about how the moon tugged the waters of the oceans of the world. Tides, he called them. Like seiches but without need of wind or pressure. Odd wondered was the moon really capable of that. All he wanted now was the light of the moon to show him Rebekah walking up the Lighthouse Road.

  And it wasn’t long before he saw just that. Saw her silhouette backlit by the moon, as if she were the tide itself, the moon pulling her toward him. Saw Danny laden like a pack mule next to her. Saw her coat flaring out not from a wind but from how fast she was walking. Then saw her face as she stood on the Lighthouse Road above his boat. Saw a look something like pity cast his way, a look cast by the moonlight.

  Odd reached his hand up and helped her into the boat. He escorted her to the bench in the cockpit, told her to sit down, offered a woolen blanket for her lap, knelt before her and tucked the blanket around her legs. He whispered that he loved her. In return she gave him a smile, a faint smile, to be sure, but a smile all the same.

  Then Odd took her belongings from Danny. Two bags stuffed to bursting. A chest that must have weighed eighty pounds, a hatbox, a pillowcase full of foodstuffs. He stowed the bags in the lockers on either side of the cockpit, stashed the chest behind the motor box and lashed it and covered it with a canvas tarp. He asked Rebekah to hold on for a minute and then climbed from the boat onto the Lighthouse Road.

  He looked steadily at Danny. “I set it up with Mayfair that you’re in charge of my property. If anything happens to me, it goes to Rebekah. I’ll be in touch once we’re settled in Duluth, if Duluth is where we end up staying. I’ll send news through Mayfair.”

  “I’ll be careful not to burn the place down.”

  “Hosea’s first stop is going to be my front door.”

  “I’ll have him in for tea,” Danny said, and smiled.

  “He’s a wily old prick.”

  “And I ain’t no northwoods rube. Don’t worry.”

  Odd looked up the Lighthouse Road, over Danny’s shoulder, at the moon now resting on the hilltop. He looked behind him, out over the lake and onto the eastern horizon. The first inkling of light showed clouds. He looked back at Danny.

  Danny said, “There’s safe water in Otter Bay. That’s halfway up the shore. Safe water again in Two Harbors.”

  “You reckon the weather will hold? I got that feeling in my eye.”

  “Get on the water. You’ll find out.”

  “Danny, thanks, brother.”

  Danny clapped him on the shoulder. “The world’s waiting.”

  Odd climbed back aboard his boat. He untied the sternline while Danny untied the bowline and held them to the quay. Odd punched the ignition and the Buda rumbled to life. He was already growing attuned to the sound of it, was already learning the way the vibrations felt in his feet. He was ready to go.

  Odd throttled the boat forward and turned her left and headed along the Lighthouse Road out past the breakwater. He turned south and west and got her up to speed and they were on their way.

  See the sun coming up?” Odd said. They’d been a half hour in the boat and off the portside bow the sun shone dull, half above the horizon, above the water.

  “Hmm,” Rebekah said.

  “We’re on our way, Rebekah. The rest of our lives—” he gestured to the wide-open waters before them “—it’s right out there.”

  She looked up through the cockpit window but didn’t say anything.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  In two hours they motored past the settlement at Misquah, past the mouth of the Birch River and the looming hills through which it ran. There were half-a-dozen fish houses dotting the craggy shoreline, half-a-dozen skiffs upturned for the season. This was as far south as Odd had ever been, and then only once, the summer before, when he had delivered a barrel of whiskey to the Lutheran pastor whose church stood stark white on the hillside.

  They were a mile offshore, nosing into a quartering wind, the lake not much agitated by the southwesterly breeze. The boat ran like she was on a rail, and Odd felt capable of anything.

  He’d piled some of their bags in the cockpit and Rebekah lay on them, her legs under her like a cat, a blanket tucked around her, sleeping. How could anyone sleep on a day like this, Odd wondered. He looked down at her. So lovely, wisps of hair streaming from under her hat, her eyes impervious to the wind and the dull, throbbing sky. He reached down and pulled the blanket over her shoulder. He tucked her hair behind her ear.

  The world through the cockpit window was all lake. Like it was carved from an infinite slab of granite. The feel of his boat beneath him would have been enough at any moment of his life before now, but here she was, sleeping at his leg, with a child in her belly. His child. He could see their life shining back at him, reflected off the water, could see the child coming toward him every bit as real as the next swell. Again he reached down and adjusted the blanket. Until five days ago he’d never once thought of having a child, now the lake wasn’t even big enough to contain the promise of it, the promise of the life he saw taking shape.

  At noontime, six hours up the shore, the sky finally broke above them. They were passing the town of Otter Bay when Rebekah woke without a word. She went to the transom and hiked her skirt up and peed over the back of the boat. She came back to the cockpit and still without a word fetched the bag of foodstuffs. She took a sandwich wrapped in wax paper and passed it to Odd, who smiled and took it. She poured two mugs of milk and brought two apples from the bag and arranged it all on the cockpit dash before sitting back down on the pile of bags.

  Finally she said, “Where are we?”

  “We just passed Otter Bay. We’re halfway gone.”

  She took a bite of her own sandwich and settled back against the cockpit wall. She trained her eyes on Odd’s face for a moment and then shifted them to their wake. She ate her sandwich and Odd ate his and when they were both finished he took the apples from the dash and handed one to her.

  “Another six hours,” he said. “We’ll be getting there in the dark.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  Odd looked down at her. He shook his head.

  “Six hours up the shore and it looks exactly like Gunflint. It’s all the same place.”

  “It ain’t the same place,” Odd said. “I can tell from way out here there’s less bullshit in those woods.” He nodded up at the shore.

  She smiled, so he did too.

  “And Duluth is a real city, Rebekah. They’ve got more than trees

  and fish down there. We can buy a brick house and a Model-T. We’d even have proper roads to drive on.”

  She looked at him for a long time, could see in his face all the faces of his childhood. She could see all his goodness, his glass eye, the weather from all his seasons on the water like a mask. She reached up and touched his coat sleeve. “Are you going to marry me?”

  “I’ll steer this boat into Two Harbors and marry you this day, if it would please you.”

  She smiled again, though the truth was she didn’t want to marry Odd. She didn’t want to have a baby or live in a brick house. She didn’t want anything, nothing she’d left behind, nothing out in front. “Don’t stop in Two Harbors,” she said.

  The threat of weather that had hung over the first half of their voyage gave over to an afternoon more akin to an autumn day than a late-November evening. The temperature was n
ear fifty degrees, the clouds had broken, and now a dusk as pale as snow settled in the east. The sky above them trickled into darkness. They sailed on in silence. Odd never more at ease in his life, his girl and his boat and a pocketful of cash money all right there.

  They passed Two Harbors and Odd lit the lantern and hung it from the cockpit in lieu of running lights. In the moving shadows of the kerosene light they watched Duluth come closer. Still neither of them spoke. The glow from fifteen miles away became clearer with each passing swell. The light spread for miles to the east, to what he knew to be Wisconsin. He’d never seen so much unnatural light. All it held was promise.

  Before long they were passing the east-end mansions, everything coming clear in the night. It was enough even to lift Rebekah from her spot in the cockpit. She stood beside Odd, her hand looped in his arm. The evening hadn’t cooled much. It was still almost muggy. It took a half hour to get from the first houses to the harbor entrance. Danny had told him to go until the lake ended. And that was what it did. Marked by the aerial bridge and the breakwater lights, the city to his right unlike anything Odd could have imagined. He throttled down and passed through the canal at a crawl, the swells rising and falling gently, the boat riding them easily.

  He followed the harbor east, hugging the shoreline, staying clear of the shipping lane. It was a thin spit of land between the harbor and the lake, lined with houses, a well-lit road running its length. After a half mile they came to the Duluth Boat Club, a Victorian-style building not unlike Grimm’s apothecary, with several empty slips and a long dock on the harbor.

  He turned the boat wide and sidled into one of the slips, resting against the fenders that hung from the pilings, then killed the engine and rounded the cockpit to tie the boat to the dock. He came back and tied a sternline as well.