by Peter Geye
Smith finally turned his attention away from Thea. He looked at Mayfair. “Sir?” he repeated.
“Enough already with the pleasantries. I asked if you know why you’re here.”
“I reckon it’s got something to do with the cook here.”
“‘The cook here’? Are you crazy, boy? You’re in the custody of an international police regiment. You’re being extradited. Do you know what that means? You’re being taken to Duluth, where you’ll stand trial for crimes that are going to land your skinny ass in the penitentiary for twenty years. The ‘cook here’ is the very least of your problems.”
Smith shrank into himself. “Sir, then what am I doing here?”
“That’s more like it.” Mayfair removed his glasses. “You’re here to give an accounting of what happened up on the Burnt Wood last March. You’re being charged with despoiling Thea Eide. You’re being charged with animal endangerment. Do you catch my drift, Joshua Smith?”
Smith nodded solemnly.
“I’d like you to tell what happened on the night of March the first of this year.”
Smith sat up in the chair. He stole another glance at Thea, who hadn’t moved since he’d entered the room. She couldn’t move. “I can’t say I remember much of what happened the night of March the first,” Smith said.
Though he’d not intended to sound contrary or at odds with Mayfair, he did. Mayfair seized on him. “Allow me to refresh your memory. You tried to feed one of the horses to the wolves, then you feasted yourself on this helpless young lady. Does that course of events sound familiar?”
Smith ran his hands through his hair. “Sir, there’s some truth in that. Some truth, I admit. But that ain’t the all of it.”
A broad and sarcastic smile came to Mayfair’s face. “By golly,” he said, “he’s a slow learner. Mister Smith, why don’t you tell me the all of it, then? Enlighten us.”
“May I have a cup of water?” Smith said. “I’m parched something fierce.”
“For the love of Christ, get the mutton chop some water.” Mayfair threw his hands up, shook his head. While the constable went for a glass of water, Mayfair packed his pipe and lit it. When the constable returned he set the water before Smith, who scooped it up almost as it was set down. He guzzled the water like there was a fire to put out.
The magistrate took a pull on his pipe and through the smoke he squinted and said, “All right now, Smith, let’s have your side of the story.”
Smith wiped his lips with his sleeve and pulled himself up in his chair. “Well,” he began, picking grime from his fingernails, his eyes intent on the task, “you all were here last winter?” He looked up, from the judge’s face to Grimm’s to Selmer’s. When he got to Thea he looked down, then quickly back to the magistrate. “You all felt that cold?”
Mayfair waited silently, still chewing on the pipe stem. The constable went for another glass of water. He returned and set it before Smith and said, “Drink that. If it don’t loosen your lips, we’ll presume what we’ve heard to be true. You can add another twenty years to the sentence you’ll be getting in Duluth. You’ll never see another day of freedom so long as you live.”
Smith drank the water.
“Listen to the constable,” Mayfair said. “And be aware, my patience is about gone.”
“My brother and I, we bought this outfit selling watches and pocket knives to the lumberjacks. Had a little supply office in Duluth and two horses and two sleighs. He took the Wisconsin and Michigan camps, I took the Minnesota camps. Me and that old mare with the suspect hooves. A goddamn sleigh and a map and that winter enough to freeze a man’s reason right out of his head.” He paused, ventured a look in the judge’s direction. “That’s what I mean, you all felt that cold. Colder than this world was ever meant to be.” Again he paused, as though the mere remembrance of those nights was enough to freeze him up.
Thea was not listening to Selmer translate Smith’s testimony. She understood everything he said through her lessening fear. He was pathetic, and she had the strength of her child swimming in her womb to bolster her. She sat up straighter.
“It’s a long way from one of those camps to the next,” Smith continued. “A long ways and a lot of dark. I’m just a man from Duluth looking for the next logging camp. Selling watches to men who spend all their time chopping down trees.” He shook his head. “You know how far it is from Duluth to Gunflint? You know how much wilderness is between here and there? It’s a long way to go just you and a horse. Well, you and a horse and all the sounds in the woods. The shadows. Caribou jumping out of the trailside woods. Ravens everywhere you go, day and night. Enough snow to suffocate you. And the cold. Christ almighty.” Again he paused. “Why do they need watches? They’re crazy about watches. How about a change of drawers? How about new boots? Watches?”
Mayfair interrupted, “With all due respect to your travails, Mister Smith, what bearing does any of this have on your actions?”
“It has everything to do with it. Maybe you sit in your warm office, you light up your pipe without frostbitten hands, you loosen your shirt collar to cool off, maybe you do all that and you forget about what’s there —” he pointed out the window, up the hill, at the trees and the wilderness they held—"and what it all means. What it means."
“Mister Smith, I’ve lived in this town for twenty years. I built the first house, I named the first street. Lectures on how cold the winter is are lost on me. I’ll offer you a last chance to make your case.” He held his index finger up, wagged it at Smith. “One more chance.”
“I had wolves following me day and night. They were after me. Their tracks were on the trail before and behind me. They’d howl. How they’d howl. You put the wolves after the cold, after the wilderness.” He shook his head.
“There are wolves in these woods just as there’s cold in winter, Smith. It’s true.”
Joshua Smith risked interrupting Mayfair. “They were taunting me. I needed them to stop. That’s why I set the horse in the paddock. To feed them. It was me or the horse.”
“Mister Smith, if it’s true the wolves were taunting you, then all the hounds of hell must have besieged you in Duluth. Why else burn a city block? I think we’ve heard enough about the horse. Tell me, what were your intentions when you went to the mess hall?”
“My intentions? I went to the mess hall,” Smith said, speaking more softly now, “because the cook’s beautiful. There’s no great mystery in it. She was kind to me and she’s beautiful and I was a man caught in that season. I don’t know what I expected. I don’t know.”
“I’m sure we’d all agree Miss Eide is lovely to look at, Mister Smith, but I’d venture to guess we’d none of us do what you did. The cold and the wolves and the trees don’t grant permission of that sort. No one does, nothing does.”
“Permission—” Smith began, but Mayfair interrupted.
“Do you know the girl’s enceinte?”
“Enceinte?”
“The girl’s with child, Joshua Smith. While you’re doing your time in a federal penitentiary, she’ll be raising your misbegotten child.”
Smith’s mouth hung open. He leant forward, tried to look at her belly under the table opposite him.
“There are five people in this room with better things to do with their time than listen to your stories about being cold. I’ll write a decision to send with the Mounties.” Mayfair moved papers around his blotter, took his pen from his shirt pocket, and began to write even as he continued speaking. “This world is dreadful enough. It doesn’t need the help of monsters.” He paused in his writing, looked squarely at Smith. “Mister Smith, you are a monster. I can only hope the sight of this woman and the child growing in her belly tames some small part of you.”
To Thea and Hosea and Selmer, Mayfair said, “You’re all free to leave. I’m sorry for the waste of your time.” Then to Thea he said, “Miss Eide, my wife and I pray for you. We pray for your unborn child. People are unkind, but if you can rise above the unfo
rtunate nature of the conception of that babe, and if you can love it with a pure heart, with an unsullied conscience, then the stain of its paternity will fade. The good people of Gunflint will rise above their ignorance and make the child one of us. I promise you that.”
Selmer finished translating Mayfair’s last words and rose. Hosea followed. Then Thea. They stood for just a moment, long enough for Joshua Smith to get a glimpse of Thea’s belly, of the swell that sealed the rest of his life with a barred fate. He knew that much. He knew, also, that he was right about the cold and the trees and the wolves.
XXI.
(December 1920)
Every morning that December Odd woke in the darkness and padded down the hallway of the brownstone they’d rented on East Sixteenth Street. He’d stand over the sink in the bathroom and shave around a lit cigarette dangling from his lips, the wonder of hot running water and the steam it aroused a minor miracle each morning after all those years of hauling buckets of icy water up to the fish house from the lake.
He’d go quietly down the hall from the bathroom to the kitchen and start a pot of water on the stove and while he waited for it to boil he’d patch his lunch together: a cheese sandwich and garlic pickle wrapped in wax paper, a tin of sardines. He’d pack it in his lunch pail and brew the coffee and pour himself a single cup to drink with his oatmeal and pour the rest in his thermos. He did all this in utter silence, mindful of Rebekah still sound asleep. When he finished his breakfast he went back to their bedroom and feathered the hair off Rebekah’s forehead and kissed her, hoping the touch of his lips might impart some contentedness. Might sweeten her dreams.
His morning ritual, conducted in that silence and dim light, made each day seem holy. And each day when he stepped from their home he did so feeling devout. Though Harald Sargent had done his share of proselytizing, he’d failed to convert Odd, who had decided early in that season and in the face of Sargent’s sermons that he’d take his heaven on earth. And he’d found it in his and Rebekah’s domesticity, in their quiet and honest life together. He’d never felt so at peace, not even during his best moments in the skiff.
After he closed the door quietly behind him he’d walk the four downhill blocks to wait for the streetcar on Superior Street. Already in the days before Christmas more than a foot of snow had softened the yards and in those hours before dawn the whiteness cast a ghostly hue on the morning.
When the streetcar arrived — the first of the morning — he’d jump on and drop his token in the fare box and nod hello to the motorman. He’d walk to the smoking compartment on the back of the streetcar and roll a cigarette and while he listened to the plangent clack of the wheels, to the shrieking brakes, he’d watch the snow come up like a wake behind them. Given those early hours he was often the only passenger. But even still — with the sleeping city all around him and Rebekah and the babe in her belly behind him — he felt the world was waiting to happen.
By the time he reached Sixth or Seventh Street the same streetlights that had, for those first few nights in Duluth, shone up into the hotel room at the Spalding Hotel now shone in his eyes, the brooding buildings — rising like a river gorge on either side of the trolley — shadowy behind the light. He might have been in Russia for how foreign it was.
His thoughts inevitably turned to the child, to those days ahead when he’d have a chance to redress his mother’s stolen maternity. Whether here or in Gunflint, whether as a boat builder or fisherman or any other thing, Odd would teach the child, would raise him, would love him. This he vowed solemnly each morning on the trolley. He was desperate for the time to come.
As sweet as the promise of those days was, there remained Rebekah’s melancholy. There were evenings when, upon Odd’s return from his workday, she seemed happy enough. She’d have dinner ready and her hair washed. He might find her sitting on the davenport in the small sitting room, her needlepoint on her lap, ready with a faint smile to meet him. But more often he found her sitting at the kitchen table. Sometimes with a glass of half-drunk whiskey soaking up the amber glow from the electric light. Those nights she was distant and unaffectionate. And Odd did not know what to do.
By the time the streetcar passed the Spalding Hotel and halted at the Union Station stop, he’d exhausted himself with worry and joy. It was at that stop that his morning solitude came to an end, where the stevedores and railway workers and other harbor rats jumped the streetcar and found seats and unfolded their newspapers. In the now crowded trolley he watched the shipyards and loading docks pass. The grandeur of the east end, of the downtown buildings and lights, gave over to the drab harbor on the south side of the tracks and to the shabby houses on the north side of the line.
The terminus of the Oneota-Superior line came at Raleigh and East Seventieth streets. He’d step out the rear door and onto the cobblestones and turn his collar up against the wind off the river. There was a doughnut shop where he paid a nickel for a fritter the size of his hand, and he’d eat that on the way to Sargent’s, which was on the water just past the Zenith Furnace Company. He punched in at six o’clock each morning. He was never once late.
Sargent was paying Odd fifteen dollars a week to pinch oakum into the seams of small boats, a job that left an indelible stink and stickiness on his fingers but one he took seriously and performed with a kind of manic attention. Aside from the sealing work Odd also bent boards, did some finishing, and found himself learning things he wished he’d known when he’d built his own boat.
Sargent had customers all across the Great Lakes, with backorders enough to fill a year of work. He could have added another shift, in fact, but preferred to oversee the building of every boat himself. Each morning he met with his crew before manning the storefront chandlery and setting to work on his accounts. Even still, he passed through the workroom every hour, inspecting and praising the work being done.
They gathered around a table in the back of the shop at noon, where Sargent said a blessing before they all ate in silence. Most of the crew at the boatwright’s had been eight or ten years in Sargent’s employ. They were a hardworking and earnest bunch of men, not given to much conversation. After lunch, however, as they stepped outside for a smoke, Sargent would pass among them, asking after their families in a hushed voice that belied his fierce eyes. But for Odd they were all family men and churchgoers. Between the two subjects and their common vocation they had fodder enough to chat for the length of time it took to smoke their cigarettes.
On Christmas Eve, after a busy week, when half the crew had taken the day off, Sargent found Odd after lunch. Sargent lit his pipe, offered Odd the match.
“How will you and Missus Eide be spending the holiday, Odd?”
Odd, remembering those lonely Christmases at Grimm’s, said, “I suppose Rebekah will cook up a feast. After dinner we’ll sip some of that apple wine you gave us and sing a few carols. How about yourself?”
Sargent turned his eyes into the light snowfall, a smile came to his face. “Ah! The boys will be on the train this evening. No doubt Mother’s got a feast of her own planned.” Now he looked at Odd. “Of course we’ll go to church. Wake to presents under the tree. Mother still spoils those boys rotten.”
“Where are your boys coming from?”
“They’re in college down in Minneapolis. Michael’s a senior, Jonathon a sophomore.”
Odd nodded, took a drag on his cigarette. Sargent looked south, his eyes faraway, as though he might see his boys boarding the train in Minneapolis.
“Sounds like a swell time,” Odd said.
“It’s my favorite time of the year,” Sargent confirmed.
They stood there smoking.
For all the thought Odd had given his own child, he’d not once imagined a Christmas morning with him. Perhaps it was because Christmas had always been the time of year when the pity from the townswomen was most tender and their dotting on their own children made him ache with envy. He felt the same tenderness from Sargent, and, more enchanted with him than ever,
Odd said, “I reckon I’ll be spoiling my own child this time next year.”
Sargent’s head swiveled, his smile broadened. “Congratulations, my friend.”
“Thank you, Mister Sargent.”
“Mother will be so happy to hear your news.”
Odd returned Sargent’s smile. What he saw in that instant and knew with certainty was that here was an empathetic man, a selfless man. He was, Odd realized, a man to model his life after.
“Are you nervous, son?”
“I think Rebekah’s a bit nervous, but I’m pleased as punch.”
“Well, what better gift could she give you?”
“I know it.”
Sargent emptied his pipe bowl and looked again into the falling
snow. He took a deep breath, put his hand on Odd’s shoulder. “Not that you asked, but let me give you a piece of advice, Odd. Someday your child will be full of wants. What they’ll want more than anything, whether they know it or not, is for you to cherish them.” He squeezed Odd’s shoulder now. “I doubt you’ll have much trouble with that.” He took his hand from Odd’s shoulder, reached into his coat pocket, and removed a gift wrapped in Christmas paper. “This is from Mother and me. For you. And Rebekah. And your child now, I suppose. Merry Christmas, Odd.”
Odd held the gift. “Thank you. Thanks for everything.” He paused, looked between the gift in his hand and Harald Sargent.
“What is it?” Sargent said.
“I’ve been wondering, why were you at the boat club that first morning? I can’t quite parse it out.”
“Well, I’ve much business at the boat club.”
“At six o’clock in the morning? On a Sunday?”
“You ask as though you’re suspicious of me.”
“I ain’t suspicious, just curious.”
Sargent smiled. “The truth is, I was there to offer you this job. The boatyard custodian is a neighbor of mine. We met in the alleyway on Saturday night, putting the trash out. He told me about your boat, said I ought to see it. So I came to see it, and here we are.”