by Peter Geye
“Good morning,” one of the young women behind the counter fairly sang. Her name, according to the placard before her, was Ellsie. Her cheery disposition seemed misplaced in that sullen town.
Noah explained his situation. “My father’s a customer,” he said. “So am I if he tells the truth. He hasn’t been here in a while. I’ve never been here. I’m not sure if you can help or not.”
She interrupted, “If you’re a customer here, I can help.”
Noah smiled. He nodded as if skeptical. “Here’s the thing, I have a huge deposit to make.”
“Have you filled out a deposit slip?”
“I mean huge. It’s cash.”
“We accept cash deposits,” she said. It took Noah a moment to realize she was joking.
“I have to count it,” he said, unzipping the bag to show her. “I’m sure this looks a little strange, but I promise there’s nothing fishy.”
Without a word Ellsie set a THIS TELLER CLOSED sign before her workspace and asked Noah to follow with a wave of her hand. She led him to an office with an empty desk. She asked him for the account number and his driver’s license. She copied this information on a Post-It note. “Okay,” she said. “You start counting it here, I’ll get the forms we need and fill them out. Put the money in stacks of fifty. Here”—she opened a desk drawer, took from it a box of rubber bands. “Remember, stacks of fifty, I’ll double-check it when I get back.”
For the next hour Noah counted the still cold hundred-dollar bills. Ellsie joined him a few minutes after she’d left. She verified his tally by running the stacks of money through a counting machine. Together they counted two thousand sixty-two hundred-dollar bills. When he explained how the money had ended up on the table, Ellsie assured Noah that stranger things had come to pass during her tenure at the bank. She moved the stacks of money from the table to heavy canvas bags. When they were finished she moved the bags into the vault. He signed the paperwork, inquired about wiring the money to banks in Boston and Fargo, and confirmed with her that his sister had equal access to the funds.
“Great,” Noah said. The transaction felt somehow incomplete, but he thanked her, took his empty duffel from the table, and turned to leave.
A couple blocks back toward the harbor was a place called the Blue Sky Café. He stopped for something to eat, ravenous.
A stack of the Duluth Herald leaned against the cash register. He bought one. In a booth that overlooked the village, he ordered coffee from a waitress whose gray hair rose in three layers of buns to a peak atop her head. Her apron was starched sheet-iron stiff. She brought the coffee on a saucer with sugar cubes and a miniature pitcher of cream. He ordered the Lumberjack: two eggs, pancakes, bacon, steak, juice, coffee. When the waitress asked if there was anything else, he ordered one of the pecan rolls from the bakery case in front of the store.
Seated around a horseshoe-shaped counter, ten or twelve men dressed in hunting gear ate breakfast and drank coffee. Outside, the placid harbor water shone black under the gray sky. He could see the street of boutiques and galleries ringing the harbor, but commerce in late morning was no more enthusiastic than it had been at eight. A woman walked her dog. Three men and a child stood before a pizzeria talking. The trees on the hills above town appeared bronzed, the sky above them offered little illumination.
While he waited for the food to arrive, an uneasy feeling came over him. He attributed it to his being in the café at all while his father rested sick at home. Though there was business to tend to—he had to call the hospital and his sister, and he’d had to deposit the money—it seemed extravagant to him to be back in civilization. He thought about this as his food arrived and he ate voraciously. He drank four or five glasses of water, his juice, and was finally brought a coffeepot for himself when the waitress admitted she couldn’t keep up with him. He buttered the pecan roll, salted the steak, and soaked the pancakes in maple syrup. As he ate he realized that his unease was easily enough explained. The anger and resentment and sadness that had colored the years of their estrangement were absent now. Not just absent but erroneous. What he’d mistaken for feelings of guilt at being in town were actually feelings of longing. He wanted to be back in the cabin, even felt a pull for the too-hot stove and the bland food, for the fishing lines in the water. He knew now that he could venture freely in the full range of his memories. No more caveats next to good times, or whole years’ forbidden recollection.
When he finished breakfast he pushed the plate across the table and spread the paper before him. It was eleven o’clock and he still had an hour before he could call the doctor at St. Mary’s. He skimmed the election coverage and read a feature on the economic doldrums gripping the shipping and steel industries. Everything suffered: taconite production, ship traffic, grain shipments, coal shipments. There were problems with the stevedore union, with the railways, with the mines. The economic implications were far-reaching, of course, to say nothing of grim. The forecast was even grimmer. The mayors of Duluth and Superior—in reelection mode, no doubt—were calling for tariffs on imported steel. Though it was interesting, Noah thought the article little more than a refrain. Some version of this story had been told since the first iron ore was ever mined in Minnesota, since the first ship full of taconite ever left Duluth harbor. Though it would have been impossible for Noah to dismiss the political and economic realities expressed in the article, it was not impossible for him to see that some things never changed.
But some things do, some things had. Something enduring had been built during the past week between him and his father. He could not name it, he only knew that it gave him permission to live the rest of his life. That was it. That huge, teetering part of him that for years had been resting on his resentment had been replaced by the whole story, bitterroot and all.
The bill at the restaurant was ten dollars and twenty-nine cents. He put a twenty on the table, rolled the paper under his arm, and walked back out into the cold hour before noon. He stopped at the Gunflint Trading Post and bought new socks and long underwear, a T-shirt with the words A LOON A TICK screen-printed across the chest, a pair of Carhartt jeans a size too big, and a pair of flannel boxers. He had the tags cut from everything.
He took a room at a harborside motel and unpacked his new clothes on the bed. He began to undress. He clicked the television on and watched the weather report. The forecast called for continued cold and snow, possibly heavy, later in the week. The thought of it appealed to Noah.
The hotel soap smelled of almonds, the shampoo like a fourth-rate barbershop. He took a long, scalding shower, washing and rinsing and washing again. He would have liked to shave but he had no razor. He toweled off.
In the nightstand drawer was a Cook County phone book. He looked in the yellow pages for a piano tuner. There were two listings, both in Gunflint. He called the first and made arrangements for him to come the next day at lunchtime and have a look. Noah gave careful directions. Then he turned the TV off. He fished from his pocket the doctor’s business card. He looked at his watch. It was noon.
A one-sided and dispiriting conversation passed between Noah and the doctor, whose authority and competence seemed as unquestionable as the news was bad. She informed Noah that though not all the tests had been completed, she nevertheless had no doubt about the severity of his father’s illness. She spoke brusquely but with compassion of biopsies and polyps, of tumors and blood, and of stages of sickness, particularly of a stage designated Duke’s D. A terminal stage, she assured him. She told him the cancer was spreading rapidly and out of control. She said surely his father was in extraordinary pain. She did not mention treatment. “Under normal circumstances,” she concluded, “I’d suggest your father visit us again immediately. That you make hospice arrangements. Though I understand that’s not likely.”
Noah agreed.
“The truth is, it doesn’t matter much. If he were admitted he wouldn’t leave again. His sickness is that advanced. The drugs we prescribed won’t do for the pa
in what we would do here, but I suspect your father might not want them regardless. He may as well be at peace where he is.”
She asked Noah whether he was able to stay with Olaf. She reminded Noah to give him the drugs, said he might not be able to watch his father if he didn’t. She warned him of the possibility of hallucinations and of the suddenness with which things could turn. In the end she apologized for bringing such news. Noah might have said ten words during the entire conversation.
His conversation with Solveig required more speech, and he left no detail unsaid. She assured Noah she’d be back soon, as early as Friday if everything went as planned with Tom’s folks and the kids. Maybe even Thursday if Tom could clear a court date. She told Noah to go back and take care of their father. When Noah asked her if she’d had any epiphany about the anchor in the shed, she admitted to none.
WHEN HE’D FINISHED on the phone with Solveig he dressed quickly in his new clothes. He paid the hotel receptionist for the phone calls. He nearly flooded the truck while starting it and drove out of town with white plumes of smoke huffing from the tailpipe.
The truck didn’t handle the sharp curves of Highway 61 very well. It would lurch and slide and grumble when Noah braked hard midcurve, then sputter when he’d step on the accelerator coming out of one. Rounding one of the steep, uphill curves, he came upon an awesome panorama of the lake and skies. A battlement of cinder-colored clouds broke and the sun reflected off the water in a million different directions. The lake was well below him, down a granite cliff, and the distance eclipsed the reflection. He could stare right at the sun’s image off the lake.
He stopped at the Landing before heading back up to Lake Forsone. He bought kitchen matches and lantern mantles. He bought coffee and hot dogs, oatmeal, roasted peanuts, and bread. He asked for ibuprofen, antacid, ChapStick, and Gold Bond from behind the counter. He asked for two Hudson Bay blankets. He stocked up on batteries and candles and toothpaste. When it was all loaded in the back of the truck, he drove back to the cabin.
A pall draped the house. Noah could sense it more than see it. The midday light settled more like dusk. He rushed to park the truck and hurried into the house.
Olaf knelt on one knee before the stove, adding wood to the fire. The only light in the room came through the windows. He looked over his shoulder when Noah walked in. It was as though he had aged five years since Noah had left that morning.
Olaf said, “The fire’s out.”
“The fire is not out, Dad. It’s a hundred degrees in here.”
Olaf tried to raise himself off the floor but stumbled onto his elbow in the effort.
Noah helped his father to his feet, ushered him to the sofa, and helped him to sit. After he spread the afghan over his father’s legs, Noah went back and closed the stove door.
“Look at the ice on the goddamn windows,” Olaf said.
Noah looked at the frost that had formed in the corners of the window panes. “It’s going to snow.”
“Sure it will.”
“I mean it’s in the forecast. We might get socked.”
“Socked,” Olaf said.
“What do we do about the road?”
“Laksonenn,” Olaf said. “Laksonenn plows.” Each word seemed a triumph from the old man.
“Someone named Laksonenn plows the road?”
“He does.”
During the next few minutes Noah watched the old man’s lips puckering and his face twitching, an expression between pain and exhaustion. Olaf fell back to sleep, to what terrible dreams Noah could not guess.
IN WHAT REMAINED of that day Noah trimmed the house. He refilled the ten-gallon buckets at the well. He restocked the wood box. Olaf slept motionless on the chair. Before dusk Noah went to the shed. He stood in the doorway and tried to imagine the spot his mother’s ashes occupied. He may even have hoped that some ghost or ghost’s messenger would present itself, would guide him in the looking. Instead he began where he stood, on the threshold of that welter of junk. He kicked over stacks of magazines, he moved unmarked boxes filled with old tools, truck parts, fishing tackle old enough that the barbs had rusted. He picked a lure from among many, held it to the dying light, and when he flicked the hook with his finger it disintegrated into dust.
He cleared a path to the back wall, and here he went through the contents of an old dresser. Clothes from his childhood. A kitchen mixer. A ledger marked 1972. Here Olaf’s blocked scrawl tallied the year’s receipts coming and going, a column for each. Noah studied the expenditures: groceries, oil to heat the house on High Street, electricity, clothes. There were two columns marked “Allowance,” one for his mother, one for himself. This, Noah thought, is how you end up with two hundred thousand dollars in your freezer.
Noah saw a metal box beneath the dresser. He lifted it from the floor, set it on the dresser, and studied it. The moment felt religious. The box appeared to be waterproof, it was clasped shut tightly, un-rusted. Clearly something made to last. He unlatched the clasp. Within a Ziploc bag her ashes were interred. They appeared almost to sparkle. Why he could not imagine, but he sniffed them. Only the other smells of the shack. He closed the box and brought it with him into the house.
His father still slept. Noah set the ashes on the coffee table. At six o’clock he ate a few crackers and half a jar of pickled herring. He thought of waking Olaf but didn’t. The old man’s sleep was fitful. He’d hiccup and sigh and his face would twist and fold in a hundred unnatural ways, all the while his hands fidgeted in the afghan and his feet kept time to some dream song. Twice during Noah’s light supper Olaf’s eyes plunged open and he stared at Noah, but as quickly they’d close again and whatever afflicted his sleep would begin again.
Noah himself fell asleep soon. When he woke at midnight he put another blanket over his father and went into his bedroom. He awoke at five-thirty to check on his father again. During the night Olaf had moved from the chair back onto the couch. He slept peacefully now, his chest rising under the mound of blankets, a silent snore from his hang-jawed mouth.
It was another sunless, sooty morning. Noah went to the shed. He wanted to study the anchor. He wanted to be prepared for whatever he might do.
Noah inspected the bolts that fastened the first piece of tubing to the barrel. He saw that holes had already been drilled for the second. He finished sawing through the tubing and began to fasten it to the barrel. He worked for an hour, breaking midway to look in on his father. When he’d attached the last piece, he puzzled the chain through the contraption. It looked, as he stopped on the way out to inspect it one more time, like a torture device from some earlier century.
Finally his father was awake. He stood at the sink basin rinsing his empty mouth with a glass of water. He had dressed himself in wool pants and a sweater thin at the elbows. The clothes fairly hung on him.
“Some sleep,” Olaf said.
“I’d say.” Noah looked at his watch. It was almost eight o’clock. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve had better mornings.”
“You want something to eat?”
“I don’t think I could eat.”
“How about more water? Could you drink? You should take these pills.”
Olaf consented. Rather than expecting his father to swallow the pills—some were the size of almonds—Noah ground them on the counter with a spoon and stirred them into the water. Even drinking looked difficult. When he’d finished Olaf let out a soft burp. He handed the glass to Noah and went to the chair, his walk across the room a feat unto itself.
Olaf pointed at the box on the coffee table. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said.
“I found those out in the shed. I hope it’s okay I brought them in.”
His father replied with a look of deep regret, or what Noah took for one. “At least it explains my sleep last night.” He sighed. “I always meant to bring them in. I knew it was a crime to leave them out in the shed.”
“They’re here now.”
Olaf agreed. “
She was beautiful,” he whispered, his voice cottony with the memory.
“Always,” Noah said.
“She was the love of my life.”
These words startled Noah. Not because he was surprised at their meaning but because he’d never expected to hear his father say them. He’d always known it, he guessed. “She was mine, too, for a long time.”
Now Olaf smiled. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he laid his hands across his lap the smile disappeared. “What I did to her.” He shook his head. “She broke my heart, Noah.” The words were like something spoken years before.
“There were a lot of broken hearts back then.”
“There still are,” Olaf said, looking Noah square in the eyes. “But I guess it’s a small price to pay. Everyone pays it one way or another.”
“What do you mean?”
“A small price for the memories. Broken hearts or none, we all have them.”
Noah thought about that. “You know what scares me more than anything? That I’m going to end up an old man without Natalie. That I won’t have all the memories I want. Sometimes I don’t care about anything but making it to old age with her. I see folks in restaurants or walking down the street and I get terrified we’ll end up apart. It’s a terrible feeling.”
Olaf listened with a look of intense concentration. “You feel that way because you figure once you’ve made it to old age, the hard times will be behind you. You’ll have made it.” He paused. “I think I used to believe that, too, when your mother and I were young. But our lives changed. Those thoughts of mine changed. Hers, too, if she ever had them.”
“I know she did.”
This put another smile on the old man’s face. “The problem with your mother was she was too smart for her own good. She was so much smarter than me. It was impossible sometimes.”