by Peter Geye
Her voice turned grave. “Now that you’re in the middle of the woods, I’m finally going to ovulate again. Of course.”
He could hear her crying and felt an impulse to hang up the phone, not because he didn’t want to hear what she said but because he knew that whatever he replied would be monumentally wrong.
“Okay,” he began cautiously. “I know the timing is terrible, I know it stinks, and I wish I were there—”
“But you’re not,” she interrupted. “I thought this would be the month. I wish you were here.”
“I know, me, too. But we might have to wait until next time.”
“What if there isn’t a next time?”
A next time. Since their most recent failure, an ectopic pregnancy that had taken Natalie months to recover from, she had come to suspect that the reason things weren’t working—the reason their efforts had yielded nothing but endless fretting, thousands of dollars in fertility-clinic bills, and a terminal attitude—was that they hadn’t been doing everything together. “You go to the clinic at eight in the morning to drop off your sperm, and I go at noon to be inseminated between a tuna-fish sandwich and a conference call—I mean, how could we expect anything? It’s just unnatural,” she had said, ignoring the fact that their course of action couldn’t be anything but unnatural. So they’d decided they would make their clinic visits together, sure that the next time things would be different. The next time was now.
He tried again. “I know this hasn’t been easy.”
“Hasn’t been easy? Noah, they had an easier time putting a man on the moon than they’ve had getting me pregnant. Keeping me pregnant anyway.” She blew her nose. “Maybe you could overnight it.”
He could practically see her, sitting behind her desk at work, looking out the fourteenth-story window. The tears, he’d not often seen them for any other reason.
“There’s an OB/GYN at St. Mary’s hospital in Duluth. You’d have to go down there, but I bet we could make arrangements. They could still inseminate me tomorrow.”
Inseminate, the sort of word that had become stock in the parlance of their infertility. All the words—prescription, ovulation, suppository, uterus, fallopian, cervix, endometriosis, laparoscopy, motility—made the whole thing feel like a science project.
“I’m sure I could make an appointment.”
“So we could overnight it? Nat, honest to God.”
“What?”
“Let’s be reasonable.”
“Injecting myself with a syringe full of fertility drugs every night is reasonable?”
“Is it the end of the world if we have to wait another month?”
“What if you’re there for three months, what happens then?”
This startled him, and he looked across the dining room at his father, whose chin was on his chest. He must have been sleeping. “I’m not going to be here for three months. Listen, I just got here. I can’t very well leave tomorrow. My father needs me right now. He’s not well, remember?” Across the dining room Olaf twitched, his head bobbed up, and he looked around the restaurant, confused. “He can hardly get his feet off the ground.”
“What’s wrong with him? Where is he now?”
“He’s sitting across the dinning room here at the lodge.”
“You’re out to lunch? You went fishing?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“I’ve made a list,” she continued, the tone of her voice suddenly businesslike, “trips to the doctor’s office for fertility-or pregnancy-related visits: fifty-two. Number of prescriptions filled for fertility-or pregnancy-related drugs: no fewer than thirty. Number of injections: roughly two hundred. Cumulative full days missed at work: fifteen. Number of times you’ve had to jack off over some dirty magazine in the doctor’s office: eight. Number of miscarriages: three. Number of ectopic pregnancies: one. Number of dead fetusus: five.” She paused. “Number of hours spent in paralysis, bawling my pathetic eyes out: a million. Do you get the idea, Noah? I need you to come home. If it doesn’t work this time, I can’t go through it again. This is it.”
Noah looked at his father. He squeezed his eyes shut and pictured the old man laboring up the hill from the lake.
“Are you listening to me, Noah? I have a scar on my arm from where they’ve drawn blood the last three years. I have permanent bruises on my thighs from the injections.”
“My father is dying. He lives alone in the woods. He has to drive eight miles just to use the nearest pay phone.”
“He’s dying?”
“That’s what he says.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He won’t go to the doctor.”
“But he can go fishing?”
“I know. I said it’s hard to explain.”
“Would leaving for one day matter?” she persisted, though clearly she was less emphatic.
The truth was, he did think one day was going to matter. He thought an hour mattered now. But he didn’t say anything.
“Then I’ll come there,” she said after a moment.
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll get a flight on Friday. I’m in meetings the rest of today. I have to go.”
“You’re coming here?”
“On Friday.”
“It’s not an easy place to find,” he said.
“I’ll MapQuest it.” And before he could protest she hung up.
He stood there in stark amazement, the idea of her coming to Misquah sinking in slowly. This sort of impulsiveness was not one of her character traits—though conviction of this magnitude was—and he realized again how single-minded she had become. He tried to imagine her sitting in his father’s cabin but could not see it.
Before he went back to the table, he called his sister. When she did not answer, he hung up, realizing any news of his being at their father’s house would alarm Solveig.
AS THEY MADE the slow drive back to the house Olaf looked at Noah and said, “You always did wear it around on your sleeve.”
Noah had been studying the roadside. “What’s that?”
“Whatever’s troubling you.”
Noah turned to his father. “I hope you don’t mind more company.”
“What do you mean?”
“Natalie’s coming.”
“She is?”
Noah turned his attention back to the woods. “It’s hard to explain. It’s ridiculous, really. And embarrassing.”
“Out with it already.”
“Well, she’s ovulating.”
“Ovulating?”
“Like now’s the time she could get pregnant.”
Olaf slowed the truck, pulled over, and stopped. “She’s coming here to get pregnant.” A smile spread across his slack mouth. “You’re a lucky man.”
“We’ve been trying for years.”
“That’s one of the best parts of marriage,” Olaf said, persisting with his sailor’s wit.
Noah thought to turn the conversation but realized his father was trying to make things easier for him. It was a gesture of simple kindness. Now a smile spread across Noah’s face. “I guess you’re right about that.”
THREE
The blunt head of the splitting maul, stuck in the oak stump, looked like clay. Noah had his hand on the smooth ash handle. “I’m falling behind,” Olaf said, sweeping the back of his hand lazily toward a pile of sawn oak.
“How much more do you need?” Noah asked, looking around at what seemed an unending supply of wood.
“It needs time to cure. That pile there”—Olaf pointed at a four-foot-tall by eight-foot-deep pile of split wood as long as Noah’s rental car sitting beside the shed—“it won’t be ready until next year.”
“It won’t burn?”
“Of course it’ll burn, just not very well.”
Noah jerked the maul free of the stump. He swung it up onto his shoulder.
“There are a couple of trees down in the gulch. They blew over this spring. One’s an oak, the last on the lot, I
think. I’d like to get them up here before it snows.”
“We can do that.”
Noah measured the distance between the log on the block and the head of the maul in his extended arms, swung the handle over his right shoulder, and let the steel head fall square on the balanced log. The wood split with a clap, and the two pieces landed four feet away on either side of the stump.
“We’ll get the city boy out of you yet,” Olaf said.
“That felt good,” Noah said, still feeling the reverberations in his shoulders.
“Let’s get at that oak,” Olaf said.
“All right.”
They emptied the wheelbarrow in the yard, and Olaf fetched a chainsaw, a gas can, and two pairs of gloves from the shed. They started toward the gulch, Noah in front and pushing the wheelbarrow.
“I called Solveig,” Noah said over his shoulder. The wheelbarrow bounced over the roots and pine saplings that had overrun the path. “I left her a message.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, she ought to know what’s going on.”
“Aaah,” Olaf grumbled. “What does she need to hear about it for?”
“Maybe,” Noah said, setting the wheelbarrow down and turning to face him, “she just deserves to know. Maybe she would want to know because you’re her father, after all, and people tend to worry when their father is sick.”
“Do me a favor and don’t call her again. She doesn’t want to see me like this.”
Noah took a deep breath and rolled his neck over his shoulders. He turned back for the wheelbarrow.
They followed the path slowly for another five minutes before they reached the oak, which had fallen across the whole expanse of an old creek bed so that it formed a kind of bridge between the two sides. The sinewy roots hung like dead willow branches on the other side of the ravine.
“Must have been some wind,” Noah said.
Olaf agreed. He explained the chainsaw, said it’d be easiest to work on the branches first, that he should approach the job as if he were whittling a stick. He warned Noah about how, when cutting off a particularly large branch—and he pointed out half-a-dozen examples—he had to be careful because the tree’s balance might shift. Finally he pulled the cord and the saw fired up. He handed it to Noah. Olaf sat down with his long legs hanging over the edge of the gulch and pointed at Noah to get going.
The saw whined with the first squeeze of the trigger, pulling Noah toward the tree. He trimmed the first branches, the finer treetop limbs still thick with dried leaves. He ripped through them, moving quickly, the branches falling into the gulch, until he had worked halfway down to the thicker limbs. After fifteen minutes he looked back at the pile of branches lying on the bank of the gulch. The air smelled of sawdust, and his ears rang from the shrill saw.
He kept at it until the only thing left was the spotted trunk spanning the two sides of the creek bed. Olaf sat there, his shoulders draped over his chest, his hands folded on his lap, like a child. Noah flipped the power switch and the saw choked off. The muscles in his arms and back stung and twitched.
“Oh-hohh!” Noah hollered. The air had gone silent when he turned off the saw, but his ears still buzzed. “That’s work!”
Olaf smiled.
“Now what, just start on the trunk?”
“We’ll leave that for tomorrow. It’s getting dark.” Olaf turned his attention to the sky. “The days are so goddamn short this time of year,” he said.
Noah looked back at the tree, wanted to continue but said, “You know best.”
They left the wheelbarrow and started back for the house.
They were almost to the cabin when Noah saw something moving close to the ground in the yard. It had crawled out from under the truck. Noah flinched, dropped the saw on a pathside rock, and froze. “What the hell is that?” he whispered.
“What?” Olaf said, startled himself by the thud of the saw on the stone.
“That,” Noah whispered again, pointing at the bushy shadow. “Is that a wolf?” he asked. He bent down and picked up the saw. “Is that a goddamn wolf?” he asked again, this time in a louder whisper, turning his head but not taking his eyes off the shadow in the yard.
“What are you talking about?” Olaf said.
“There. Sitting right there, by the firepit.”
“That’s not a wolf,” Olaf said, elbowing Noah aside. “That’s my dog. That’s Vikar—come here, Vikar.” And he whistled. The dog came bounding around the truck and ran a circle around them.
“Jesus Christ,” Noah said, all of his held breath coming out in one relieved rasp. “Jesus,” he said again, watching the huge dog roll on his back as Olaf scratched its stomach. “Where has he been?”
“Wandering around the woods, I’d guess. Comes home when he wants. Must’ve heard the chainsaw.”
The dog was enormous, a malamute or husky a hundred and fifty pounds or more. It had long, coarse hair and ears and forepaws the size of Noah’s own hands. “He scared the shit out of me,” Noah said. “I thought it was a wolf.”
“That’s what you said.”
Noah let the dog sniff his hand.
“How long have you had him?” They were standing in front of the house now, the dog jumping and twisting under Olaf’s snapping fingers.
“Couple years.”
Noah sat on the step and the dog came up to him, eye level, ears submissively fallen, to be petted. “Any more surprises?” he asked, scratching the dog behind its ears.
“Surprises?” Olaf replied. He stepped behind Noah, onto the porch, took the top off a tin garbage can, and filled an empty ice-cream bucket with dog food. He put it down beside the steps and the dog set to eating.
“DO YOU REMEMBER your mother playing the piano?” They sat in the rusted steel lawn chairs on the grassy beach, an oar’s length from the lapping water, darkness cascading down the sky. Vikar lay at Olaf’s feet, his legs outstretched, a stream of groans muttering from his black lips.
“Of course I do,” Noah said.
“She played beautifully.”
“It used to drive me nuts.”
“Why?” Olaf asked, his chin on his shoulder, his long white beard pointing out toward the lake.
“Because I could never listen to my records.”
She used to play the Acrosonic upright for hours at a time, in summer especially, when her long evenings alone went on endlessly. Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Grieg were always drifting through the house on High Street while Noah and his buddies pitched pennies outside against the garage door. Solveig played, too, in her mother’s style but without any of her elegance.
Olaf was teasing a sprig of brown grass. He sighed, cleared his throat, and put the grass between his lips. “She always wanted to play at your wedding.”
“My wedding,” Noah said, stiffening at the mere mention of it. “I’m surprised you’d bring it up.”
“That was a long time ago, Noah.”
“Five years now,” Noah said, feeling his anger rising. His father’s worst performance ever had come on the eve of Noah’s wedding. He hated to remember it. And here was talk of his mother again, Noah’s sacred subject.
“You know, I was on my way home when she died,” Olaf said, seemingly oblivious.
“I remember when she died,” Noah said, wondering now if his father really was looking for a fight.
“That’s the only time I’ve ever been on a plane in my life. I had to leave my boat in Toledo, take a bus to Detroit and get the plane. It cost a hundred bucks.”
“A regular hero.”
Olaf turned away, set his chin back on his chest. The sky sparkled with stars, lightening and darkening simultaneously as it got later and the moon rose.
“Your mother wanted you to play the piano,” Olaf said.
Noah sneered incredulously, nearly stood up to leave.
“She did,” Olaf said.
“What difference did it make who played the piano?”
“None,�
�� Olaf said. “I’m just trying to remember.”
“Why are you doing this? You can’t even face it now, can you?”
“Chrissakes, Noah.”
Noah had to clench his teeth to keep from saying more.
When, one night early in their relationship, Natalie had asked Noah how his mother had died—they were eating oysters and drinking Pimm’s at a place out on Marblehead Beach—Noah had said loosely but with conviction, “Of a broken heart.”
His mother had, in fact, died of heart failure, of a heart attack brought on, Noah always imagined, by an excess of longing.
“They called you on Saturday. You got to port on Sunday morning. You didn’t get back to Duluth until Thursday. For four days you knew how sick she was, and still you didn’t get home? And somehow you were a hero for getting on a plane?”
“It’s not that simple,” Olaf said.
“She was dying.”
“We didn’t know that then.”
“Are you kidding me?” Noah stood up, walked to the edge of the water, picked up a rock, and threw it out into the lake.
“I didn’t expect her to die, Noah.”
“What did you expect, huh?” He threw another rock into the lake and turned to face his father. “We were fucking kids.”
“Your mother and I, we were hardly speaking to each other by then.”
“You had two kids, too. Did you forget about us?”
“I didn’t forget about anything.”
“You know what?” Noah said, stepping back toward his father. “That only makes it worse. We needed you and you weren’t there. You were never there.”
“The story is a lot more complicated than you remember,” Olaf said.
Noah dropped back into the chair and ran his hands through his hair. “What part of the story am I forgetting, Dad? All we wanted was for you to come home and tell us that the world hadn’t ended, that’s all you would have had to do.”
“The world ended long before that night,” Olaf said.
Noah heard a note of resignation in his voice, a pitiful, sad, thoughtful timbre that he’d never heard before but that he didn’t quite believe. “Don’t you get it? Mom had just died. Whatever tragedy you suffered shouldn’t have mattered. It still doesn’t matter. You had a responsibility, and you blew it.”