by Peter Geye
“Last time I tried to get in there Hosea caught me. He gave me the strap.”
“Did you look into this room last night?” she repeated.
“No. I did not. I only saw the lights flashing and heard you talking.” He looked away. “Will you tell me what a bub is?”
“Oh, dear,” she said. She bit her lower lip and took a deep breath. “Let’s see. Do you and Danny ever talk about girls?”
Odd looked back at her. “What do you mean?”
She took his hands, held them over the tangle of their feet. “You know, are there girls in school that you talk about? Pretty girls?”
“Danny says Sarah Veilleux’s pretty.”
“Do you think Sarah Veilleux’s pretty?”
“I don’t know. She’s not as pretty as you.”
Rebekah blushed.
“Danny says you’re pretty, too. Everyone thinks you’re pretty.”
At this the blush washed from her cheeks. “Yes. Well.” She paused, bit her lip again. “People don’t know much.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re only ten years old,” she said.
Odd knew she was just thinking out loud, something she did all the time.
“Ten years old, raised by a misfit and me.” She put her hand on his chin and raised his face. “You hardly have a chance, do you?” She shook her head.
“Why do you and Hosea keep saying things like that?”
“You’re a very fine young man. And so sweet. Maybe too sweet, I think that’s what I mean.”
“You still haven’t said what’s a bub.”
“You’ll learn about bubs soon enough.”
“What’s in there?” Odd said. Again he pointed at the door. “Why ain’t I allowed to see it? How come you can go in there?”
Rebekah stood up, she offered Odd her hands and pulled him to his feet also. “For once I agree with Hosea. You don’t need to see the grown-up things in these rooms. Not now. Not yet.”
“That’s stupid,” he said. He was angry and confused and tired of all the roundabout talking.
“Trust me, sweetheart. It’s not dumb.”
“Quit acting like I’m stupid and a kid.”
He turned to stomp off but Rebekah caught his arm. “You are a kid, Odd. That’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. I never got to be a kid.” This last she said in that way of thinking out loud again. She let go of his arm and he went away as quickly as he had the night before.
It was three days later that he broke into the room. A Wednesday, in the evening. The days were just beginning to seem like summer. Odd had rejected Hosea’s invitation to dinner with Rebekah and him at the Traveler’s Hotel with a snide and impetuous “I’d rather eat alone.” Hosea hadn’t even tried to persuade him.
Odd, as he had the Sunday morning before, stood at the window looking down onto Wisconsin Street. He watched as Hosea and Rebekah turned onto the Lighthouse Road, watched as they stopped outside the hotel to talk with Curtis Mayfair and his wife, the rose-colored sunset from above the hilltop faintly lighting their faces. When they walked into the hotel Odd ran downstairs. He fished the filched skeleton key from the pocket of his dungarees. The key fit easily into the keyhole.
He stood on the threshold. It was a windowless room. Dim. Even if it was oddly arranged, if all the furniture was pushed to one side of the room, nothing seemed overly queer. There was a davenport along the back wall, a floor lamp with a lacy shade, a rug on the floor, the divan Odd had heard mentioned the other night. He stood there for a moment, looking around in disappointment. But as the light from the hallway gathered, as Odd’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, he stepped into the room and began to see the curiosities. He lit the sconce on the wall and shut the door behind him.
Along the wall to his right were dozens of wigs, a birdcage filled with faux flowers, a rocking horse built for an adult, a rack of silky undergarments and another of strange costumes. A coat stand draped with furs. There was a chest full of lifelike animals. When he looked closer, Odd saw they were indeed real animals. Dead and stuffed and piled in the chest. A fox, an otter, a beaver with his tail stiff behind him. He walked over to the wigs and inspected one of them. He set it back on the shelf and looked across the room.
Hosea’s photographic equipment was stored along the opposite wall. There were shelves with cameras and jugs of who knew what. Next to the shelves was a closet door. Odd crossed the room and opened the door. The closet was lined with shelves and the shelves were lined with boxes. Each box was the same size. Each had a typewritten label taped to the front of it. Odd took a box labeled beaver / december 1905 from the shelf and walked back into the room. He stood under the light of the sconce.
Until that moment he’d only been confused. Such an odd assortment of bric-a-brac Odd had never seen, but taken together it seemed merely peculiar. Another of Hosea’s strange hobbies. It wasn’t until he opened the box that everything came together.
It was full of postcards. Odd took one from the box and looked at it for a long time. There was Rebekah. She lay on the divan, wearing one of the wigs that he quickly identified on the shelf across the room. She was naked, her breasts full and lying across her chest. One hand was behind her head, the other held the stuffed beaver on her leg. A caption stamped in gold lettering under the photograph read, the beaver trapper.
Even as he tried, he could not take his eyes from the postcard. He looked at the faraway cast of her eyes, the lilt of her chin. He couldn’t say she appeared sad, though there was an undeniable quality to her expression. Or at least a quality to the look in her eyes. Like she could see from where she lay the full bright moon.
He switched his stare to her breasts and it was then he felt his pulse quickening. Just like that. From a glance. And once his pulse started strumming, his vision went blinky and he had to sit down, which he did in the light from the sconce. His guts stirred and he closed his eyes, rested his head against the wall. Why the beaver? Why was she lying that way at all? Why was there a picture of it? And, most confusing of all, why did he have this feeling? He put the picture back in the box and sat there for some time. By some simple instinct he knew that what he’d seen was beyond his capacity to understand, so rather than trying to make sense of it, he pondered the simpler question of how he could keep it a secret.
And so it happened that Odd — only ten years old — passed from childhood. During the following days, he no longer wanted to spend the rainy days sitting on the davenport reading storybooks with Rebekah. He no longer thought it a lark to help Rebekah mix a batch of cookie dough and while away an afternoon eating the cookies as fast as they came out of the oven. He no longer challenged Hosea to chess matches after supper. And he was no longer willing to abide by the rules of the house. His chores went unfinished. He did not eat what didn’t taste good. He no longer trusted the felicity of his young years, no longer trusted much of anything.
In the years to come he would sneak into the closet whenever the chance arose. He went despite his shame. The way a beaten dog will still take scraps from the flogger’s hand.
XXV.
(November 1896)
Those first days and nights of their life together it was hard to tell who was newborn. Odd would nuzzle and fuss and by purest instinct stretch for Thea’s breast, where he would give suck until he was exhausted. Then he’d fall into a fitful and unsated sleep because Thea’s milk had not come in yet. She would hold him on her belly, swaddled in a blanket, a knit cap on his small and misshapen head, until he’d writhe again, still hungry or hungry again, and she’d put him back to her breast. And despite the new winter seeping through the windows, despite the frost left on the panes each dawn, the child was like a hot stone in her lap. When she was alone, or when Rebekah was there, asleep on the other side of the room, Thea would remove her nightdress and rest her babe’s soft face on the sweat-damp flesh in the crook of her neck.
For four dreamlike days and sleepless nights this continued, the child ne
ver really at rest, until the fifth day, when she felt first a tingling and then a weightlessness in her breasts and the nursings that had once lasted an hour lasted fifteen minutes, after which Odd fell into an engorged sleep. Her happiness in those hours, with the contented boy in her arms, was her new religion, their communion her new salvation.
Sitting in her bed under the window, looking out over the isthmus that separated the harbor below her and the cove to the north, looking out over the great lake and her shimmering waters, she thought often of who she used to be. It seemed, in those sleep-deprived daydreams, with her boy on her lap, that the travails of the last year were trifles beside her feelings for Odd. He was her reward for the loneliness she’d endured. This thought filled her with peace. She saw the distance between Hammerfest and Gunflint as the way to this peace and so her regrets and misgivings dissolved in the warmth between them.
Though the look back was clear, the one ahead was dark as the devil’s lair, and thoughts of the easiness of her love inevitably gave way to worries about what would come in that darkness. She had every cent she’d made at the Burnt Wood Camp saved in her purse. Seventy-five dollars in all, though what it amounted to she had no idea. She’d been told that returning to the camp on the Burnt Wood was not possible. She would have known it without having been told. She knew finding a husband would be nearly impossible now, too. She knew, finally, that she could no sooner return to Hammerfest than resurrect her childhood. It was as though the way back had been swallowed by the wakes of the boats that had brought her.
Hosea’s generosity had saved her more than once, but she knew she could not live with him forever. She would not ask for so much. She’d shift her view from the water to the buildings on the Lighthouse Road. Perhaps she could become a shop girl. Or a cook at the Traveler’s Hotel. Perhaps she could even work for Hosea, alongside Rebekah. But where would she live? And how could she take care of her boy while she did any of these things? This last was the question furthest from an answer, the one that cast the darkest pall on her days ahead. It was also the question on which she inevitably turned her thoughts.
She wrote letters to her mother and father, not from a sense of duty but because it spared her any reckoning with the future. Instead of giving them to Hosea to post she folded them and stacked them on the bedside table. She read her Bible without deliberation. She tried to sleep but couldn’t. Her days and nights bleeding into each other, her mind wrestling itself, her only clear thoughts arriving when she studied her boy.
His eyes were not often open, but when she caught their glint she marveled at their blueness. In the daylight they were almost transparent, the color of cold, cold snow. At night, with only the bedside lamp glowing, his eyes looked fathomless and dark. She always wished to see them, so she’d feather his full hair back from his forehead. When he did not stir, she’d bend her lips to his face and kiss each of his sleeping eyes. She’d feel her own eyes glossing over with the tears that came at will and without her even knowing.
When his eyes opened he’d search for her and look intently at her as she’d say, “You’re my beautiful boy.” Her voice would send him back into his blessed sleep. What had he seen, looking up at her? And why could she not stop weeping, with all her joy?
Hosea had begun to wonder the same thing. He’d cosseted her from the hour of Odd’s birth, stopping in her bedroom every morning before he went down to the shop and again each evening before dinner. He’d check her abdomen and feel her forehead and then switch his attention to the babe.
“How’s the wee lad this morning?” Hosea might say, not expecting an answer.
Thea would not even look up.
“Dear me,” Hosea would say, checking the boy’s forehead. “I’m worried about you, Thea.”
Down in the shop, during the late-morning lulls, he was consulting Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Charles Daniel Fox’s Psycho pathology of Hysteria. He’d made a preliminary diagnosis of postpartum melancholia but knew such a diagnosis wasn’t complete. There was no question she cried often, almost incessantly. She talked to herself, he knew from passing her room, and she seemed to have no eagerness to rejoin him and Rebekah at table or in ordinary conversation. She was overly protective of the boy, seemed paranoid, was even twitchy at times. Yet despite these symptoms, he was mystified by what he could only think of as an aura. Though she’d always seemed, in some way or another, angelic, in those first days after Odd was born she literally had a sheen about her, a radiance that as much as lightened the air around her.
When two weeks passed with no change in her aspect — two weeks he’d spent immersed in his books, mulling options for her cure — he decided something had to be done. Before he went downstairs to open the shop he stopped in to Thea’s room.
“Good morning, Thea.”
She adjusted Odd’s cap.
Hosea thumbed the wee boy’s little toes, spoke his baby gibberish, then stood up and looked down at Thea. In his clumsy Norwegian he said, “Has two weeks of rest given you your strength back?”
Thea did not answer.
He continued in Norwegian, “You’ve hardly spoken at all since the child was born. Are you feeling well? Are you happy?”
She turned her attention back to the child, touched his face gently, then looked back at Hosea. “Very happy,” she said.
Hosea stepped forward and knelt at her bedside. He put his hand on her arm. “Join Rebekah and me at supper tonight.”
Thea nodded, smiled.
“Very good!” Hosea said in English now. “Rebekah will prepare a feast.”
And she did, fish soup and buttermilk biscuits, apple strudel for
dessert. Thea came to the table for supper with Odd in her arms. She appeared sleep-starved and nervous, and when Rebekah asked — as she’d been instructed to — if she could hold the boy, Thea shook her head and held him closer.
“Now, Thea, you can’t hold him forever,” Hosea said in Norwegian, his voice jolly, his line rehearsed. “Rebekah wants a turn with the little one.”
“Sleepy,” Thea said in English. “Odd. Sleepy.”
“Okay, child,” Hosea said, his tone full of sympathy.
By the time Rebekah served the strudel, the boy was indeed asleep. Thea held him close while she nibbled on the baked apples, tending constantly to the blanket wrapped around him, to the knit hat he wore on his head.
“I’ve got something for Odd,” Hosea said, setting his empty coffee cup on the saucer. He stood and wiped his mouth with the napkin off his lap. He went into his bedroom and returned a moment later lugging a birch-wood bassinet. He set it down next to Thea. “A place for the boy to sleep,” he said, rearranging the muslin canopy. There was a scalloped skirt hanging under the ticking.
Thea leaned forward, looked into the bassinet, at the plush bedding. She looked doubtful, seemed to be holding the boy closer.
Hosea did not hold much hope she would put the child to bed properly. “You must get some rest. Your humors are not well.” And with those words Hosea left Thea and the boy at the table, carried the bassinet across the flat.
Rebekah stayed up late that night. She trimmed the apothecary with holly and mistletoe, with candles in all the windows and a ten-foot spruce covered in tinsel and strung cranberries. When she came upstairs after midnight Thea was changing Odd’s diaper. He was fussing, sending up his little howls, punching the air with his balled fists. After Thea finished wrapping his bottom and straightening his layette she lifted him and started to sing.
Her voice was lilting and faint and it put the boy at ease. She went to the rocking chair next to the window and lifted her nightdress. Her full breast shone in the winter moonlight. Odd as much as lunged for it, and in an instant Rebekah could hear him suckling.
Thea began another song, her voice even fainter from across the room.
“What does it mean?” Rebekah asked, her voice upsetting the deep silence enough that Odd pulled off Thea’s breast.
Thea guided his head b
ack to his feast. “A bear sleeping,” she said softly.
“It sounds pretty. You sing nice.” Rebekah could see Thea’s smile in the moonlight, could see her glassy eyes. “It’s a lullaby. A song you sing your baby. It’s called a lullaby.”
“Lullaby,” Thea repeated.
“You’re making me sleepy.”
Again Thea smiled.
Then there was only the sound of Odd suckling, of Odd catching his breath when he was finished. Thea put him over her shoulder and stood and walked around the room as she patted his back. She stopped at the window and stood there with her son, the moon gone higher but still shining through the glass.
Rebekah watched them for what might have been an hour. Long enough that the moon no longer gave them light. When Thea finally returned to her bed with the sleeping boy, she did so still whispering the lullabies. She fluffed her pillows and lay down. She pulled the bedding up over her legs and sang to him more.
And Rebekah might have fallen asleep listening to Thea sing but she was intent on enforcing Hosea’s will. So she struggled to stay awake. When no sound had come from the other bed for some minutes, Rebekah slid from her bedcovers, crossed the room, and stood above Thea and her son. It was the first time she’d seen Thea sleep since the child had been born. Odd lay in her limp arms, wrapped in his blanket, the cap falling off his head, his hair winging out after his bath earlier that night.
Neither Odd nor Thea woke when Rebekah picked up the boy. She held him as she’d seen Thea, setting him in the crook of her arm, holding his head with her free hand. His lips puckered and he reached for his face with his bunched hands and she was sure he’d wake bawling but he only settled deeper into her arms. The floor creaked as she stepped off the carpet, into the whispered light from the window.
Thea slept soundly, her head fallen on her shoulder, her breathing slow and tremulous. There were no dreams there. And there were none in the boy, either. She could see that. All of that sleep absent of dreams saddened Rebekah deeply. She laid the boy in the bassinet and tiptoed to bed, thought she might conjure dreams for all of them. Lord knows she had them.