by Peter Geye
In English she said, “Yes. Tomorrow.”
He nodded and set about preparing her boarding card. He made change for her payment.
Thea, emboldened by the exchange, added, “I am new in America.”
Without looking up the ticket vendor said, “I’d never have guessed.”
She walked up Lake Street past Superior Street, dodging the mule-drawn streetcars, slipping on the rain-slicked cobbles. Farther up the hill, on the corner of Lake and First, she paid a quarter for a room in a boardinghouse, another dime for a hot bath. It was her first proper bath since leaving Hammerfest and as she soaked in the tub she was overcome with fatigue. So rather than going out for a hot meal, she finished her bath and dressed in her freshest clothes and, by the light of a window, read her Bible. She read it with a fervency she’d not felt in ages. Starting with First Corinthians. She read for a long time. Even as her eyes felt heavy and the softness of her rented bed called, she read.
When finally the evening fell and the light from the window waned, she laid herself down and slept, the good book clenched to her heart, for more than twelve hours. When she woke before dawn she felt a moment of panic before she realized where she was. She quickly gathered her belongings, washed her face, pulled her hair back, and donned her bonnet. By six a.m. she was back on Lake Avenue, headed for the docks.
The Opportunity was a two-masted schooner and her crew was drunk and quarrelsome even as the passengers boarded. The rigging and masts were plagued by a colony of gulls and the singing of the lines in the wind was a song that brought Thea back to the harbor in Hammerfest. It reminded her of why she was making this journey. She stood on deck, her bags between her feet, as the Opportunity was tugged through the canal and out onto the lake. The sails were raised and they filled and she felt the old pull of a boat borne by the wind.
The boat moved into a quartering breeze, its progress slow, the roll of the water sharp. The spray rose above the decking, met her waiting face. Four hours later the crew was already lowering the sails. The weather the wind had brought in turned cold and foggy, the conditions worsening the crew’s already sour mood. They weighed anchor and dropped a tender and announced Two Harbors. For an hour she stood on deck and watched as the tender made trips in and out of the fogged harbor. Ten travelers debarked, none boarded.
The rest of the day was slow moving. At sunset they anchored outside Otter Bay. All afternoon Thea had had the strange sensation of going back in time. Whether it was the way the boat moved under sail, the sharpness of the cold wind, or the prehistoric wilderness they were traveling past she could not have said.
At midnight they stood at anchor outside the settlement at Misquah. The boat’s captain told Thea and the three remaining passengers that they would have to wait until morning to sail to Gunflint, so Thea went belowdecks and found a bench to rest on, using her carpetbag as a pillow.
The ship heaved all night, even as the wind died and the rain began. Sleep was impossible, and not only because of the ship’s rolling. She felt, after this long month of travel and tribulation, the relief of being so near her destination. She felt the excitement that should have been accompanying her all along.
In the morning they woke to more heavy fog. The lake was now coming in slow undulations. The lines rang up on the masts, the gulls swarmed in the brume, and the crew was hungover and at odds over whether to weigh anchor or wait for the sun, which showed promise in the east, to come burn off the fog.
They waited for two hours, the fog more blown away than burned, and raised sails under a southwesterly breeze that brought as much warmth as it did smooth sailing. They traveled the last thirty miles of shoreline in little more than three hours. As they turned toward shore outside Gunflint Thea saw the town spread sparsely along the harbor: the fish houses, the hotel and apothecary, the church steeple up the hill. From the quarter mile offshore, with the exception of the trees, it looked just like Hammerfest, and as her heart raced it also sank. The boats rowing out to meet them looked exactly like her papa’s fishing skiff, the water was as hard and as cold as the North Sea. The wind, even as it brought a warmer day, had every quality of bitterness that the air back home had. Had she really traveled so far to end up where she’d started?
Rather than dropping anchor again, the crew reefed the sails and turned for harbor. It seemed a difficult maneuver, as the ship was large and the harbor entry narrow, but the crew was practiced and sidled her right alongside the Lighthouse Road. Two of the deckhands jumped ashore with lines and tied her off on the cleats.
On the Lighthouse Road several townsfolk had gathered. Thea, standing behind the mizzen shroud, her heart aflutter, looked from face to face for the welcoming smiles of her aunt and uncle. She panned the crowd twice, each time coming away empty. She sat on a crate on deck, disbelieving.
“Last stop,” one of the crew said. “Gunflint, Minnesota.”
Thea looked at him. He had a wind-worn face, his hair was a tousled mess, his coat was open and sagging on his large shoulders.
“Miss,” he said, as he stepped nearer, “all passengers must get off the boat now.”
Thea understood enough to grab her bags and land. As she rose, clutching her handbag and shouldering her carpetbag, she noticed the man with the camera box standing below her. He had the lens pointed at her and snapped a shot. It was Hosea Grimm, his Kodak at the ready as it was every time a boat landed in Gunflint.
Thea moved to the plank that had been laid down as a gangway. She crossed onto the Lighthouse Road and stood with the Opportunity in the background. Hosea Grimm took another picture, then flashed her a puckish smile.
It was not long after the crowd had dispersed, after the crew of the Opportunity had unloaded their cargo, after Hosea had collapsed his tripod and boxed his camera and arranged delivery of a pallet of dry goods for his apothecary, after the sun had come out full and all the morning’s mizzle had been burned away, it was not long after this that Thea sat on a bench on the Lighthouse Road with her bonnet crumpled in her fists. Her sobs were there for all the world to see and hear. Hosea approached her with his hat in his hands. He had been watching her from the corner of his eye as the crowd scattered, watching as the expression on her face shifted from expectant to nervous to despairing.
He knew all at once that he must help her. Simply help her. So he stood silently before her a long time, his feet surely in view of her downcast eyes. When finally she looked up, Hosea said, “Hello, miss. I trust, based on this attitude of despair, that your landing has not met your expectations.”
She looked back at her bonnet in reply.
“My name’s Grimm. I’m a merchant in town. I’d help. However I might.”
Now Thea met his eyes — an act that spoke as much to her situation as her tears, for she’d long been taught to avoid the gaze of men — and in a tremulous voice said all at once what a horror her journey had been. She talked a full minute before Hosea interrupted her.
“Beg your pardon, miss, but you’re speaking a language I don’t understand. Do you not speak English?”
She returned her blank stare to her bonnet.
“You’ve come from far away, I’d bet. From Norway, I presume. Judging by that gibberish you speak. Or Denmark. Or Sweden.” He was speaking as much to himself as to her, and he kept his chin in his hand as he studied the masts of the schooner tied to the Lighthouse Road. “Probably Norway if you’re staking a claim here.” Now he knelt before her, played his hat brim through his own hands. “Norge?” he said.
Thea looked up. She wiped her eyes dry with the backs of her hands, cleared her throat, and said, “I am new to America.”
Grimm smiled. “Welcome,” he said. Without asking for permission he lifted her carpetbag and said, “Come along with me.” With his spare hand he lifted his tripod and camera box and started up the Lighthouse Road. Thea followed because she knew no other option.
Outside the offices of the Gunflint Ax & Beacon Hosea stopped, set down all that he carried
, and opened the door, holding it for Thea. There were four men sitting at desks, one of them was Selmer Gunnarson, who did the typesetting. He’d been in Gunflint for eight years, before there was a Lighthouse Road or brick building. He’d emigrated from Bergen eight years before that.
“Selmer,” Hosea said, “I need to borrow your old tongue, friend. This here young lady landed at noon, she speaks hardly a word of English.”
Selmer rose from his desk, wiped his huge hands on the apron he wore, and came to stand before Thea. He removed his spectacles and addressed her in Norwegian: “Hosea tells me you’ve just landed. Who were you expecting to meet?”
Feeling a surge of relief, Thea spoke rapidly, “I’ve come from Hammerfest, my uncle is Rune Evensen, I’ve come to help on his farm.” She paused, withdrew a letter from her purse addressed to Mrs. Rune Evensen She offered it as some kind of proof. “My auntie was to meet me.” She paused for a moment, then asked the question she now feared the answer to. “Why wasn’t Auntie here to meet me?”
Selmer looked at Hosea, who stood with his hat in his hands. “The lass is here for Rune Evensen. She’s his niece. She’s come an awfully long way.”
Thea looked from Hosea to Selmer and back again. To Selmer she said, “Is Auntie okay?”
Looking at Thea, Selmer addressed Hosea again. “What should I tell her?”
Hosea stood with his finger tapping his pursed lips for a long moment, then said, “Tell the lass the truth. Tell her how her aunt hanged herself from the barn trusses. How old Rune has lost his mind. Tell her she can stay with me until we figure out what to do.” He paused. “Tell her about Rebekah, that she’ll have a friend.”
She spent two days and nights boarding at Grimm’s. At the end of her second day he put her on the back of a wagon bound for the lumber camp on the Burnt Wood River.
The previous morning Hosea had asked her if she could cook. He did this with the typesetter translating again. When Thea said yes, of course she could cook, he told her that Trond Erlandson needed help at the camp. He told her that for around a dollar and a half a week she could winter upriver. She could take stock in the spring, after her season in the woods, and decide on her future then. All of this, he said, was provided she did not wish to return to Norway presently.
Thea sat there dumb, trying to see herself in the woods. And because she could not return home, and because it was harder to fathom an alternative than the prospect before her, she agreed to go.
XXIII.
(January 1921)
The weeks after Christmas were drudgery for Odd. The days came and went with little more than the small changes in Rebekah’s temper to mark them. It was a temper as bleak as the cast-iron sky.
In the middle of January Rebekah’s belly and breasts started to round. She was tired all the time and fell into a pattern of sleeping during the day and staying awake through the night. During those nights, alone in the world but for Odd’s snoring in the next room, she felt herself coming apart. As she paced the small apartment it began to seem she was chasing herself, that she had literally become two people: the one pacing — worried and weak and vacant — and the one she used to be, a shadow, trying to keep up. She knew she had to close the distance between herself and the shadow. How to do that, though, was entirely beyond her power of imagination.
Finally she went searching for an abortionist. When she found him in a rank office above a harborside warehouse, her misgivings met the squalor of his surgery and she knew enough to leave. But now she carried a new and cumbersome shame around during her insomniac nights. She’d seen plenty of the women in Gunflint lose their minds. She knew what it looked like. It looked like her. But she had enough wits remaining to want to fend it off.
So she did the unthinkable: She wrote Hosea. In all her life she’d never had reason to write a letter, though she had spent many of her days slotting mail into the townsfolks’ boxes behind the apothecary counter. She could see Hosea, standing there in his starched apron, the hat he’d worn every day for twenty-odd years. Was he getting along? Did he think of her? If he did, was it with fondness or that meanness she alone in Gunflint knew?
In the middle of the night she found one of the pencils Odd carried behind his ear. On the back of a brown paper sack, without salutation or date, in her childlike scrawl, Rebekah wrote: I was never who you said I was. But this is not me neither. I am having a baby. A baby. What has happened…
She folded the paper sack and hid it beneath the davenport cushion and continued her restless pacing.
The next morning, hours after Odd left for work, she went to the mercantile on Superior Street and bought envelopes, stationery, and half-a-dozen two-cent stamps. It was the first time she’d left the brownstone in days, and the cold came biting like a small dog on the way back up the hill.
In their apartment she hurried to the davenport, took the folded sack out, and placed it in the envelope. She addressed it the only way she knew how:
Mister Hosea Grimm
Gunflint, Minnesota
and placed the postage in the corner and put the envelope back under the davenport cushion. She hid the stationery and envelopes in one of her hatboxes and went to bed to try for sleep. When it did not come she dressed again and went back to the mercantile to drop the letter for delivery.
Each of the next five nights she wrote another letter to Hosea. They got longer as her confidence grew but never asked for or told much.
If she thought writing the letters would slow her unraveling, or appease her guilt for leaving Hosea, if she thought it would help her understand the bitter feelings she had for the unborn child, she was mistaken. Instead of finding solace she found further proof that there was no reckoning with this life of hers. The sleepless nights grew longer and longer, spilling into the mornings, when her guilt was worst. Until those mornings she had been able to separate the causes of that guilt — leaving Hosea, betraying Odd, abhorring the child — but now it became the only state of mind she possessed. Her guilt ravaged her, and she gave up any resistance.
Meanwhile Odd did his best. He still tried to woo her, brought her things to satisfy the cravings she announced randomly, still spoke to her gently and imploringly. But there was no hope in his plea. He knew better. When he took Rebekah to the Lyceum hoping the troupe might succeed where he failed, and when she became sick from the cloud of smoke in the theater, he decided his only hope was that the child — when he was finally born — would compel her to happiness.
So he got up each morning and took the trolley across town and found his relief in the long, philosophical days at Sargent’s. At night, after he and Rebekah shared their silent suppers, she would retire to her needlepoint and he to the Bible Sargent had given him at Christ mas. He read every night, not because he was becoming a believer but because any story was better than the one he was living.
It was around Saint Valentine’s Day that Odd came home with a dinner invitation from Sargent. Rebekah was sleeping on the davenport, her needlepoint fallen at her feet. He watched her for some time, remembering how he used to revel in her childlike ability to sleep at a moment’s notice, how he’d once loved watching the sleep come over her. What he saw now could hardly have been the same woman. She kept him awake at night, her pacing like she was some kind of caged animal.
She woke with a start to see him there, his hand on his chin.
“Odd,” she said. She sat up as though she’d been dreaming of fire.
“Hey, Rebekah. Didn’t mean to wake you. How you feeling?”
She rubbed her eyes, looked out the window. “You’re home early.”
“Harald gave me the afternoon off. He’s invited us to Sunday dinner. I told him we’d be there.”
“I can’t go to dinner—”
“Nonsense,” Odd interrupted. “You can and you will and we’re not going to hem and haw about it. This Sunday. You’ll behave yourself, too. These are good, upstanding folks. Put on a smile.”
“I don’t have anything to
wear,” she protested.
“We’ll head downtown this afternoon and fix that. Now, go and get yourself together.” He looked at her fiercely. “Now, Rebekah. Up. Let’s go.”
Rebekah rose slowly, paused in front of Odd, and went to their bedroom. She came back out ten minutes later. Odd had not moved.
Sunday they had dinner at Harald Sargent’s home. Rebekah wore her new dress, sitting at Sargent’s bountiful table. Harald wore a heavy woolen suit and necktie, his wife, Rose, an equally heavy woolen dress.
Sargent, his eyes clenched shut, his hands clasped together, intoned the blessing. “Dear God, my savior and my light, with all my love I give thanks to thee. For the bounteous fare set upon this table, for the warmth of this home, for the love of my wife and sons, I give thanks to thee. For my wayward guests, may you show them the way to your heart, may you deliver their unborn child into a world of goodness and show him the way to your love and forgiveness. Yea! May you show us all your love and forgiveness. Amen.” Sargent opened his eyes and smiled at his table, his eyes serene where they’d always appeared set in stone before.
“Amen,” Rose said.
Odd and Rebekah both smiled demurely, seemed almost to blush in unison. “Smells good,” Odd said.
“Thank you, Odd. Help yourself,” Rose said. She handed him a plate of pork cutlets. “Harald insists on pork and gravy for Sunday dinner. I could make it in my sleep after all these years.” She turned to Rebekah, smiled. “A good Sunday dinner is about all it takes to please a man, that’s my free advice to you, young lady.” Here was a woman so cheerful and good-natured that Rebekah indeed felt like a young lady.
“Odd could eat bread and butter for Sunday dinner and not care a whit,” Rebekah said.