by Peter Geye
The wheelbarrow was parked where they’d left it. In its rusty, dented bottom, shallow pools of water had formed. Noah carted it to the edge of the gully and muscled the two biggest pieces of sawn oak into it. The trail, with its tree roots, potholes, and rocks, made steering the barrow difficult. But he managed eight trips. On the last he stopped midway back and looked up at the ski jump. Several times since he’d been back he’d thought of climbing the rickety old thing, but each time the thought crossed his mind he’d been distracted. Now he set down the empty wheelbarrow and kicked his way through the overgrowth to the lopsided steps that led up to the base of the scaffold. There were four telephone poles supporting the top of it and two more midway up the inrun. On the left side of the ramp thirty steps made of two-by-fours were pounded into the plywood floor under the handrail. He took them two at a time.
When he got to the top he stood for a minute looking down the inrun. The wind—a headwind he fondly recalled—blowing almost violently now, caused the scaffold to sway. Beyond the takeoff, on the left, the coaching deck his father and grandfather used to huddle on had completely sunk in the overgrowth. It was easy to imagine them standing there, their hushed voices carrying up to him as he latched his boots into the cable bindings and lowered his goggles over the rim of his white leather helmet. It was the flattery he overheard on those mornings that gave him his first sense of vanity, though neither could tolerate his lack of concentration.
He had no trouble concentrating now. It looks so damn big, he thought. Though the jump was awfully small in contrast to the Olympic-sized jumps he’d competed on as a teenager, the years of forgetting almost entirely about the sport had skewed his perspective. The landing hill was overgrown with new trees and thistle, and the takeoff was buried in the scrub, but he could easily imagine the whole scene packed with snow. Even though the lake frothed in the wind, he could see ski tracks narrowing in the distance.
The brightness of the sun glinting off the snow, the cold toes and windburned cheeks, none of it was lost after all. His skis squeaking against the hard snow at the top of the jump before he pulled himself onto the inrun, the speed gained as he hurtled down the ramp, the serenity and silence of the flight, the camber of both his skis and his body in flight, the exultation of flight. The perfect instinct to land and the explosion of consciousness in landing . . . none of it had been forgotten.
He looked back toward the house. Why had he been so quick to condemn the old man’s project in the shed? Why had he been so quick to deny him this favor? Didn’t the million mornings standing on that coach’s platform in the wicked wind and chill of the Minnesota winter add up to something?
For all his horror at the thought of dropping his old man in the lake, the idea was not altogether unbeautiful. Again he thought about the story his father had told him the night before, this time pausing to reflect on the type of eternity his father had so narrowly avoided. Maybe the will to be buried in the lake was born of the notion that it was his honest fate, not merely some screwball’s version of an interminable penance. None of which meant, Noah thought, that he’d be able to carry out the old man’s wishes.
He wheeled the last load of wood back to the yard, noticed the door of the shed still open. He saw his father working, could see, through the papery curtain and dirty glass, that the old man had somehow managed to lift the barrel of taconite onto his workbench.
The sight of it made his entire morning’s labor seem feigned.
SPANNING SIX OF the barrel staves, the words SUPERIOR STEEL & STEAMSHIP COMPANY were branded black. The barrel must be a hundred years old, Noah thought as he rubbed his thumb through the tarnished grooves of the lettering. He imagined piles of these barrels in the hull of an old turn-of-the-century bark, loaded with iron ore. He remembered this particular barrel hidden behind the furnace in the house on High Street.
One of the pieces of stainless-steel tubing was already attached to the barrel with a dozen finely placed bolts. In a pile on the table another dozen bolts appeared ready for the same purpose, and the second piece of tubing was apparently being shortened by something less than an inch. At least the hacksaw blade halfway through it suggested as much. Noah wrapped his arms around the barrel and lifted it off the workbench. It took all his strength. Though he could not imagine how the contraption might work, he admired the old man’s vision. No doubt he had a plan, and no doubt that plan would work. Had he not been a sailor, Olaf might have made a fine life as a builder. Noah had often wished for his father’s advice while in agony over how to install a new toilet or hang a chandelier from the dining room ceiling. Any of a hundred household tasks at which he inevitably failed. Long weekend afternoons with hammer-bruised thumbs. He smiled now, well removed from them.
The old man was at his afternoon nap. Later today than the day before.
Noah walked outside and crossed the yard. He began stacking the wood around the splitting stump in the yard. He thought of Nat, on her way now. He thought back through the travails of their childlessness. He remembered how the first couple years of trying had been almost magical in their ability to bring the two of them closer together. There had been such solidarity of purpose, such a marveling at prospects. It wasn’t until after the first pregnancy and miscarriage that things had actually started to seem both urgent and unlikely.
He could remember that morning vividly. He had startled himself awake from a deep sleep and found her side of the bed cold and empty. He could hear the sound of the bathroom faucet and in the grainy light could see Nat’s bare legs beneath the sink. Under the stream and splashing of water, he heard her unappeasable, almost silent, sobbing. When he stumbled into the hallway and stood in the bathroom door, she didn’t even look up. “No, no, no, no,” she muttered above her sobbing. He tried to console her, tried to hug away her quivering, but for the first time in their lives together she rejected him.
The other miscarriages had been worse in their ways—one had been twins, miscarried two days apart—but it was the first that had taken the deepest stab at their hope. The late-night talks about rearing the wonder child disappeared, her explanations of the tests and procedures her doctor was performing to isolate the cause of her infertility also ceased. So did talk of next steps. Over the next two years their inability to have a child had come to seem like an illness. It was mired in an unremitting despondency that might pop up at any time. They’d see a duckling in the pond at the park, and Nat would fall miserable for three days. If they saw a pregnant woman in the grocery store Nat would forget what they were there for. It was her sadness that had come to matter most to him, he realized. She’s somewhere near, he thought as he headed for the lake. She’ll be here before dark.
Down at the lake steely clouds mixed in the sky. The wind-whipped water curled up in waves that washed on the beach. He stepped onto the dock and bent to untie his boots. He took off his jeans and shirt, his socks and drawers, and stood naked at the end of the dock. Instantly the sweat that only a few minutes earlier had been dripping from him dried—seemed almost to encase him—as the wind curled around him. He stood there, distracted by the cold air, and had only a single moment of clarity, of apprehensive panic, before he jumped feet-first into the lake.
From the instant he went under he could feel the water seizing him. Although he’d been anticipating something like it, he could never have expected the grip of the water. If he hadn’t kicked and pulled for the surface the instant he was submerged he might have ended up sunk.
Crazy though the idea of the bath had been, both his father and grandfather had been inclined to take late-autumn and even early-winter baths. It was a point of pride between the two men. Noah could remember watching them—their long arms and lean, muscular legs, their hairy chests and long beards—as they dove into the water while the early-winter snow whitened the sky. It was a rite of passage Noah had not grown up fast enough for. As he climbed onto the dock he took a cracked bar of Ivory soap from its wooden nook on the dock, wetted it, and began lathe
ring himself. The air felt warm in contrast with the water, and he washed away the day’s hard work and grime. He scrubbed his underarms, legs, and feet. He wetted the soap again and lathered his hair and face, his neck and arms. He washed his back. And before he could fear it, he dove back into the lake. He experienced the same convulsions, the tightening in his lungs, the stardust behind his closed eyes, but he needed a second to rinse himself, so he messed his hair with his hands and kicked wildly while he watched the soap disperse in the dark water.
Back on the dock he stood in the bracing wind as water puddled at his feet. He dried himself in the gale. Nat would not have known him there. He could not have known himself. He was—if only for a few long minutes—more his father than he had ever been. More than ever he was his son. A sense that ought to have brought with it a feeling of benevolence brought instead a pale choler. Nat would be here soon—was perhaps already up at the cabin—willing herself and Noah into parenthood with her resoluteness alone, stopping literally at nothing to add a branch to the Torr family tree. And here Noah stood, half an orphan for most of his life. He’d learned to live without his father, almost without the memory of him. He’d reinvented himself in a fashion with Nat’s help, had evolved as a man even as his father had receded ghostlike into the Minnesota wilderness. Thoughts that should have been spent on memories of the old man, on anticipating times to come, had been spent on what instead? He toed the soap back into its nook.
Aside from Nat—from their life together—and these few other things, what did he even think about? Of their childlessness, sure, but less and less even of that. Was he not entitled to recompense for the void? Would it have been better if his father had died on that night all those years ago? Whether this last was said or only thought he did not know, but soberer for it having crossed his mind, he forgave the old man all at once. Forgave him everything. He wondered whether his father would forgive him.
In the spirit of being his father’s son, he walked back up to the cabin in his boots alone.
SEVEN
I leave you alone for a few days and this is what I come to find?” Nat stood at the kitchen basin, scrubbing a bunch of radishes, staring at her naked husband. She was trying to make light of things, Noah knew, but the effort felt stilted. She seemed unsure of her own presence. “Hurry and dress. Soup’s on.” In the middle of the great room, before the now tempered woodstove, the card table was prodigiously set. Noah took a piece of cheese, sniffed it, tasted it. “Brown cheese,” he said, then stepped into the bedroom.
When he emerged again Nat was helping Olaf to a seat at the table.
Noah said, “When did you get here?”
“About a half hour ago.”
Olaf ladled creamy gruel from a plastic container.
“What’s that?” Noah said.
“This is black pot,” Olaf said. “What your grandmothers would have called sort gryte.” “I’m dying to hear about this,” Noah said, heading for the refrigerator. He added the smoked salmon to the feast.
“There’s not much to hear. I found this place online.” She searched for a paper bag under the cluttered countertop. “It’s called Kafe Forny. ‘Kafe’ with a K. I’m afraid it’s all cold.” She handed Noah the bag and an open bottle of beer. She offered Olaf a bottle, but he declined with a turned-down chin.
The label on the bag had a Duluth address under a Norwegian-flag logo. The beer bottle read, HANSA-BORG’S BORG BOKKøL. Noah tasted the beer. He looked at his father spooning the soupy black pot into his slack mouth, the look on his face giving away a deep satisfaction. “So you left Boston this morning, stopped at a Norwegian deli in Duluth, drove up here, and now you’re serving me a beer and something called black pot.” “And lutefisk, lefse, that cheese, krumkake for dessert.” “And radishes.”
“And radishes,” Nat confirmed. She set a plate of them on the table.
“Chrissakes, this is good eating,” Olaf said.
Natalie sat next to Noah. “Dig in,” she said.
A taste for these flavors had long been lost to Noah, but when he saw Natalie sprinkling sugar onto a buttered sheet of lefse, when he saw her slicing another piece of Gjetost cheese onto her plate, even when he saw her daring a quivering spoonful of lutefisk taken from a pan atop the stove, his appetite became tremendous. He ate everything. Olaf ate everything. Noah drank one and then another bottle of beer. Olaf suggested they turn on the radio, which they did, but when they found no station in the twilight hours they settled on old stories told around the table. Food stories all. Natalie recalled the always overcooked pork and dumplings stewed in cans of storebought soup from her childhood. Neither Noah nor Olaf could imagine it. Noah’s memories settled on Christmas cookies so fine they defied his power of description. And for Olaf it was Thanksgiving turkeys cooked in the cavernous roasting pans of steamship ovens; his own mother’s lefse, made of nearly rotting potatoes for their sweetness; her own antique krumkake irons; and finally her homemade butter on the lutefisk she made every Friday night.
Natalie, despite her labor in setting the table and the still too-warm room, wore her favorite sweater of Norwegian wool. She looked wholly native to this spot in the woods, so far from Boston and their life and her cautionary and conservative upbringing. She looked, Noah thought as he sat back for the last sip of his beer, more like his wife in that instant than in any other moment of their life together. It wouldn’t have been possible for him to say that he loved her any better, but neither could he remember a moment in their history to match the intensity of his conviction that here was the woman whose wisdom in all things made him a finer man, finer for the life with her and finer for the child she would—he was suddenly convinced again—bear to this world and to their lives. With this thought came another: that whenever that child did come, Noah would no longer reign in the boundlessness of her love, that that domain was forfeit to the child.
When Nat unpacked the krumkake and offered to make coffee, both men declined. Instead they nibbled at the cookies with waning enthusiasm, Olaf admitting that his mother’s old recipe had nothing on the cookies from Kafe Forny. Enough food still lay on the table for another such feast, the black pot congealing in its cream, the gelatinous lutefisk in the pan, the lefse stacked like tortillas in a plastic bag.
They talked for an hour as if such gatherings were a weekly occurrence. Natalie was the most garrulous, telling Olaf about her work with her usual seriousness on the subject. Her intelligence was on fine display, and Noah could see that Olaf was impressed. When the subject of Noah’s business came up—and when Olaf circled back to his original skepticism about the very idea of an antique map—Natalie offered her opinion, reiterating Noah’s point about them being artistic more than utilitarian but also explaining how purchasing the business fitted into their retirement years down the road and how, most importantly, it made Noah a happier man. Noah could tell her explanation was far more satisfying than his own had been those few days before.
It was well past dark when the conversation wound down.
“Well,” Olaf said, laboring up from the table after a lull in the conversation, “if I were younger, now’s the time I would have gone outside for a smoke. Might have finished the night with a finger of hooch. But I’ll be goddamned lucky to make it to bed. Natalie, I don’t have thanks enough. I’m off to bed if you two will clean this mess up.” He took a couple of steps toward his bedroom door, turned. “Noah could tell you how early I rise, but I sleep like I’m dead until then. Good night.” Noah and Nat said good-night together.
“Where does a girl go to the bathroom around here?”
“The outhouse is in the woods, up a path behind the shed. I’ll get the flashlight and go with you.” “You don’t need to go with me, just point me in the right direction.” WHILE NOAH CLEARED the table and put the food away, Natalie sat on the sofa with her feet tucked beneath her, a glass of water in her hand and the sweater folded beside her. She commented quietly on the inventory of the cabin. “What does he do
up here?” “So far he fishes and tells stories.”
“Can you imagine living here?”
“There’s a radio show he listens to in the morning sometimes. I guess he reads a lot.” “Wouldn’t you get lonely?”
“Of course I would, but I’m not him.”
Nat looked at him. “You two aren’t so different.”
“Really?”
She looked at him again, a look to quell further comment if he read her right. “He was so sweet, Noah. While you were down at the lake we just sat here and talked like long-lost friends. We talked about everything. He’s got me scared of the bears and wolves. Did you know he makes himself pasties every Sunday night? I don’t even know what a pasty is.” Noah finished cleaning. He leaned on the counter, listening.
“He’s glad you’re here. That’s plain to see.” She took a small wooden box from the shelf behind the sofa. She opened it. Within were photographs, a pipe, a skeleton key. An old fountain pen.
Noah sat down next to her. “My grandpa carved that box, I’m sure of it. I think it was a gift for my mom. Maybe it was for Solveig.” Nat handed him the pictures. They were all of Noah’s mother. So beautiful. One of his parents on their wedding day. One with Solveig on her mother’s lap, little more than an infant. “Jesus, the things I’m finding around here,” Noah said. He put the pipe in his mouth.
Natalie took the pictures from him. She took the pipe. She re-packed the box and set it back on the shelf. She sipped her water. “So you’re not mad, are you?” Noah put his arm around her. “I’m sorry.”