by Peter Geye
A ribbon of beguiling fog curled up the trail from the lake, and he followed it down. Pockets of complete darkness still haunted the woods on either side of the path, heavy, wet, and eerie in a polka-dotted dawn. He could see the lightness above the lake and the still-black water exhaling mist. He thought again of Natalie’s arriving today.
When he came to the beach he walked to the edge of the water and kicked at a clump of limp grass. He wore only a sweatshirt and his boxers, and the cold air gripped his legs. He flexed his body to stave off the chill. All around the rim of the lake the woods hoarded a darkness that didn’t seem to make sense—coming, as he had, down the faintly lit path—but when he turned around to look back at the house, it too was gone in the darkness.
Across the lake, above the rolling treetops, the sky was turning a muted red that faded upward, seamlessly, through a hundred shades of pink and back to black. He stepped onto the dock, the planks and pilings creaking under his weight. The boat sat in the water, tied to the dock by two expert knots that appeared ready to hold the old thing there forever. Noah tiptoed into the boat and sat on the splintered thwart, watching the ripples roll out on the otherwise placid lake. Natalie will love this place, he thought. He could picture her on a warm summer afternoon, sitting on the beach with a magazine and sun hat under the shade of an umbrella. She would squint at him and smile and lick her thumb before turning the page. At lunch she would tell him peaches were out, blueberries in, according to the latest health craze she’d just finished reading about. He’d make himself a summer-sausage sandwich and look at the kids, two of them—twins, he’d decided—three years old and sitting in the clearing in the yard, on a picnic blanket in the sun. Fair-skinned and straight-haired, they picked at a caterpillar. He’d touch Nat on her knee and bowl into the sunlight, arms wide, to scoop them up. The kids would jump up and scream happiness and stutter-step in circles until he captured them. Nat, clearing the paper plates, would watch them, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand.
A fish rolled lazily out of the water beside the boat, a big fish, and Noah’s reverie was lost. She’s sleeping, he thought, looking at his wrist for the watch not there. She’ll be on her way soon. In that instant he realized—almost as if he’d always been aware of this fact—that his father’s story mattered only if Noah could someday tell it himself, to a son or daughter, to another Torr who could keep it alive—here, on a blustery November night—for a third generation. He stood up, thankful for Nat’s fortitude, and started back toward the house.
Midway up the path, though, he froze. The trees swayed and murmured, and when they went silent he heard something else in the distance. It was faint, lilting, and it stopped almost as soon as it started. He took another step and froze again, turned back toward the lake, and heard it again, louder and more mournful this time. A howl, a wolf’s howl. One wolf usually meant many.
He tried to move in a lull after the second cry but couldn’t—he was spellbound. The light had come fully up but was still drab. A third cry went up, and he walked back to the beach. God, it’s beautiful, he thought. And no sooner had he thought it than the howl was answered. The wolf song permeated the air, seemed even to warm it. He fixed his eyes on the shoreline, scanned it from the cliff face they’d fished off the other day to the impenetrable spruce stand on the north shore of the lake. He couldn’t see them, but the howling had entered him. It filled him the way the foghorns had as a child.
They sang for a long time. He wondered if the hunt was over and they were celebrating their kill, or if they’d simply been lost in the night and were calling each other back to the den. Maybe there were pups, maybe it was a long call to danger.
When they stopped he started back for the house. He considered its black windows as though from a distance they might let onto something other than what was really there. He saw a light flicker on in one of the windows and his father’s head appear. It looked like a scene from an Impressionist painting. But the image only lasted for a second before the old man turned and disappeared from the light.
“BRIGHT-EYED AND BUSHY-TAILED,” Olaf said. “You hear the wolves?”
“I looked for them.” Noah stopped in the kitchen.
“There’s a pack in the neighborhood. Their turf comes right up to the shore across the lake. Far as I can tell anyway. If you’re quiet and sit still long enough, sometimes you can see them watering themselves in the morning.”
Noah filled the kettle and put it on the stove.
“I saw you down there listening. Awfully brisk morning to be out in your skivvies.” His father’s union suit hung on him, and he had the afghan slung over his shoulders like a shawl. “Twenty-eight degrees according to the thermometer.” He pointed out the kitchen window.
“I’ll bet it’s five degrees colder once you get away from this house. You’re killing me with these fires.”
“I can’t feel it,” Olaf said, dropping back on the sofa. “I can’t get warm enough.”
“That why you slept on the couch last night?”
Olaf nodded, settling back under the quilts. “The bedroom gets so cold.”
Noah sat in the chair. “I’ll get back at that tree in the gulch today. We’ll restock this place with firewood yet. And I’m going to get that chain. I’ll leave as soon as I finish the coffee. You want to come with?”
“I’ll stay put. But you can take my truck again if you want. Knutson’s opens at seven. Better fill the gas can, too.”
“I will.”
Olaf laid his head down on the pillow and let out a long, quiet sigh. “I feel better today, out here on the sofa. Like I’m on vacation or something. A night at the Ritz.”
“If only we could call for room service,” Noah said, getting up. “I could use one of those breakfasts you were talking about last night.”
“They’ve got good cinnamon rolls at the Landing. Bring a few back with you.”
“I’ll do that. Don’t go anywhere.”
A smile turned up half of Olaf’s mouth.
AT THE HARDWARE store a half-dozen men, all as old as Olaf, milled about a deer stand that, according to a handwritten sign, had just arrived in stock. Each of the men had a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand and wore a plaid or blaze-orange hunting vest. Noah walked to the back of the store and rang the service bell on the counter. One of the men in the group excused himself and hustled back to help Noah.
“ ’Morning. What can I do for you?”
“I need a length of chain.”
“Any particulars?”
“Is there such a thing as three-quarter-inch . . . something? Polyurethane coated? I need twenty feet of it.”
“Let me show you what we’ve got,” he said, motioning with his long arm for Noah to follow.
A couple of aisles over several spools lined the shelf. “This what you have in mind?” the old man said. “It’s your standard high-test, shot peened, poly coated. What do you need it for anyway?” He put his nose up in the air and looked at Noah through the lenses of his reading glasses.
“I don’t know exactly. It’s not for me, but it looks like it’ll do.”
“If it doesn’t work, bring it right back and we’ll get you what does.” He hollered toward the back of the store, and a tall teenager with a baggy Gunflint football jersey hanging on him stepped from behind a door. “Cut me twenty feet of the three-quarter-inch poly, all right?”
“Sure thing, boss.” The kid hurried behind the counter for a chain cutter.
“He’s a good worker,” the old man said. “Hard to find up here.”
“Good help’s hard to find anywhere,” Noah said, meaning to sound conspiratorial.
“Of course, you’re a Torr. I’ve been trying to figure it out since you walked in. All you Torr fellas are twelve feet tall. But I must’ve known you when you were knee high to a grasshopper.” He cleared his throat. “Your grandpa bought everything he needed to build that place from my pop, one of our first big customers. He used to play poker with
him right back there.” He gestured to an office behind the counter. “How’s your dad doing anyway? Haven’t seen him in a while.”
“He’s okay.”
“Tell the old codger Knut says hello. Tell him to come down and have coffee some morning.”
“I’ll do that.”
The kid brought the chain and set it on the counter. Knut put it in a paper bag and took eight dollars from Noah. “Remember,” he said, “if that doesn’t work for you, bring it back.”
“I appreciate it,” Noah said. “And I’ll tell the old man you say hello.” The bag seemed to weigh a hundred pounds.
At the Landing he filled the gas can and the truck before he went inside. The empty gravel parking lot and old-fashioned gas pumps finally made the place seem as remote as it was, and he imagined everything buried in snow. He pictured himself clamping his feet into a pair of cross-country skis and getting back to the cabin by way of fresh tracks in the spring corn. He imagined the labor, sweat, and reward. He could hear the fresh klister wax singing under the skis.
When the tank was full he went inside to pay and pick up the box of cinnamon rolls his father had requested. A bell chimed as he opened the door and walked into the deserted store. No cashier greeted him, only the smell of baking bread thick in the air. In the bakery case pastries as big as his feet lined the shelves. They looked better than anything he’d ever seen.
OLAF STOOD IN the middle of the yard wearing his ancient pea-coat, mukluks, wool cargo pants with pockets ballooning on either leg, and a pair of worn choppers. He held a thermos in one hand and an unlit cigar in the other. Noah parked the truck, took the bag with the chain from the seat beside him, and met Olaf in the yard.
“What are you going to wear when it starts getting cold?” he asked.
Olaf smiled. “Any luck with the chain?”
Noah held the bag up. “Knut says hello. Nice guy. There’s not much you couldn’t find in that store of his, either. It’s doubling as the local coffeehouse. Told me to tell you to come down some morning and join him for a cup.”
Olaf lifted the thermos. “I make my own coffee. But he runs a good business, been around since the Voyageurs.” He looked in the bag.
“That going to work?”
“This is fine,” Olaf said.
“Where are you headed anyway? Looks like you’re ready for a polar expedition.”
Olaf suddenly seemed bashful. He slapped his hand against his thigh, turned to look toward the shed, made a tentative step in its direction but stopped and faced Noah. “Come here,” he said.
The padlock on the shed wasn’t locked. Olaf took it from the hasp, hung it on a nail pounded into the siding, and tugged the warped door open. He stepped into the shed and pulled aside the curtain, barely illuminating the heaps of junk everywhere. Car parts and oil cans occupied a whole wall of shelves. There were mildew-stained cardboard boxes, splintered canoe paddles, busted lawn chairs, a step-ladder missing every other rung, a mattress and box spring leaning against the back wall, two pairs of Noah’s childhood skis propped in the corner, vintage life preservers hanging from hooks on the wall to his right, and on the left a table that must have been his father’s workshop, as evidenced by the hacksaw, the stainless-steel tubing, and the mayonnaise jar full of nails and screws atop an oak door that spanned two sawhorses. The place stank like ripe, wet wood.
Where, Noah thought, disgusted, could her ashes possibly be in this mess? “This place is a sty,” he said, stepping over a stack of magazines.
Olaf was clearing his toolbox from an old wooden barrel that sat on the floor beside the makeshift table. He shrugged. “You and your sister used to sleep out here. There’s a nice breeze in the summer.” He pointed the hacksaw at the cracked window. “Comes up off the lake.”
“It could use a breeze now. It smells awful in here.” Noah was trying to figure out how to ask about his mother’s ashes.
Olaf poured a cup of coffee from the thermos. “You recognize this?” He pointed at the barrel.
“This? Yeah, I sure do.”
Olaf pried the lid off, exposing thousands of taconite pellets.
“Your mother hated these things. Thought they were messy. She hated a mess.”
Noah picked a handful from the barrel and rolled them around in the palm of his hand. “They were,” he said. “They still are.” He showed his father the black smudges on his fingertips.
“I used to bring a pocketful of these home for you each run. Like they were goddamned lemon drops.”
“I remember that,” Noah said.
“You loved it. You thought it was the neatest damn thing.”
Noah wanted to smile at the memory but couldn’t. “Where are her ashes?” he said.
Olaf had turned his attention to the chain and didn’t look up when he said, “Somewhere. It’s been a long time since I had them out.” He slung the chain over his shoulders. “I used to keep them in the house but got scared I might use them instead of flour to bread the trout.”
“You’re joking.”
Olaf set the chain on the workbench and said nothing, only smiled.
“And now they’re lost.”
Olaf sat down, took a piece of the stainless-steel tubing, and threaded the chain through it. “They aren’t lost. They’re somewhere here. You can spit from one wall to the other, wouldn’t take long to find them.
“Anyway, forget about the ashes for a minute. I need help getting this down to the lake.” He kicked the barrel at Noah’s feet, finally looked him in the eye. “And there’s something else. All this stuff”—he gestured toward the workbench—“it’s for an anchor. The chain, it’s for an anchor.”
“What anchor?”
“For my burial in the lake.”
Noah looked at him for a hard moment. “Have you gone completely nuts? Your burial?” He raked his hair back and shook his head in disbelief.
“Settle down, would you? I know what’s going on here”—he put his hands to his stomach—“I know what’s happening to me. I’m not a fool.”
“You’re wrong about that. You’re exactly a fool.” Noah stepped toward his father. “First of all, we can take you to the doctor. We can get help for whatever’s happening to you. They cure this stuff nowadays. I mean, you don’t even know what’s wrong. And don’t tell me we covered it already,” Noah insisted, anticipating Olaf’s retort. “Let’s be reasonable instead.” Now he took the chain from his father’s shoulders and let it slink to the floor.
In a firm voice Olaf said, “I’ve lived a long time and deserve this much.” He bent to pick up the chain. “I know you think it’s ignorant or selfish or nuts, I guess, but the simple fact of the matter is that after you’ve lived as long as I have, after you’ve come to terms with everything you’ve wrecked in this world, everything you’ve loved, once it’s all tucked away and measured out, six more months or a year don’t matter anymore.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you anymore.” Now Noah sat down. “Do I understand you? Do you really believe the things you’re telling yourself ?” He shook his head in disgust and in sadness. “Listen, there’s no way I’m going to chain you up and drop you out with the fish. You can’t ask for something like that. I’m glad I’m here and can help. But this is out of the question. You can just forget it.” Noah stepped to the door. “Don’t ask me again.”
Inside the house Noah tore through his bag, put on a flannel shirt, took his dirty jeans from the bedpost and a pair of leather gloves from a shelf by the door, and headed back outside, only stopping long enough to fetch the chainsaw and the full gas can from the back of the truck.
He hurried to the fallen oak. When he reached the tree he paused and looked down into the creek bed. He swung into the gulch, tugged on the cord, set the chain against the trunk of the tree, and pulled the trigger.
He worked first with the saw above his head. Balancing against the steep incline of the gulch’s wall, he let the saw rip through the oak as it rained sawdust on him. Whe
n the saw slipped through the top side of the trunk he flinched, expecting the tree to shift or fall when the first bole fell. It didn’t.
On the bank of the gulch ropy stalks of bramble grew from the clumps of rusty soil, and he used them to pull himself up. There had to be an easier way of doing this. He stepped onto the trunk. He started the saw again and tiptoed backward out onto the tree. It couldn’t have been much more than eight or ten feet above the ground, but it seemed much higher, especially when he looked toward the lake.
Measuring off a foot and a half, he set the saw onto the tree and hit the trigger. From this angle the saw worked much more easily. In less than half the time it had taken him to make the first pass from the underside, it cleaved the first stump. He made eight or ten more stumps from the trunk, and when he choked the saw off and looked behind him, he saw that he was a solid quarter of the way across and suspended above the nettle as if he were on the bowsprit of a ship.
His body thrummed with the lingering vibrations from the saw. He caught his breath, tightened the gloves on his hands, and brushed the sawdust from his sleeves. Now the hard part, he thought. He dropped back into the gulch, set the saw on the bank, and stacked the stumps into a pile at the base of the incline. Then he began hoisting them out of the creek bed. The first, narrower half of the bunch were light enough that he could toss them up. The second half required a plan. He managed to get the first big stump onto his shoulder. The thick bark bit his face as he crawled up the embankment. His feet churned in the loose soil. Laboring, the stump sliding around his neck—it must have weighed seventy-five pounds—the bark burning his neck, he imagined it crushing his ankle. He strained against the stump, finally rolled it up over the edge.
He collapsed onto the bank, half standing and half sitting, and felt his pulse throbbing in his wrists. Breathing heavily and sweating profusely again, he eyed the remaining half-dozen pieces of oak. If not right now, he thought, I’ll never finish. Besides, the wind funneling up the gulch felt fine. He took off a glove, felt the back of his neck, and saw blood on his fingertips. He stanched it with the collar of his shirt. After he caught his breath he hefted the other stumps from the gulch. When he rolled the last one over the lip, he crawled out himself.