by Peter Geye
He stood before the stove blowing into his hands and tapping his toes. The question of whether or not to dress his father now came to him. He walked to the couch. He lifted the quilt. That ratty union suit appalled him. So did the messed hair, the toothless mouth, that pinky half gone. Noah covered him again and went into his father’s bedroom. In the small closet he saw the old man’s wardrobe. A corduroy jacket. Three pairs of woolen trousers sewn by Noah’s mother and distinguishable only by the wear at the cuff, at the knee. A white cotton shirt with a button-down collar. An assortment of plaid flannel shirts. On the shelf above these meager hangings a short stack of sweaters. Noah found the thickest one. He held it up. It had a roll-neck collar and patches on the elbows. He slid a pair of the wool trousers from a hanger. From the top drawer of the small chest in the room, Noah took a pair of red wool socks and went back into the great room.
He pulled the covers back again. With as much difficulty as trepidation he began dressing his father. He lifted the old man’s head and pulled the sweater over it. His rim of hair lay flattened. The lids of his eyes seemed almost translucent. Noah paused to look on them. The skin was the same gray color as his eyebrows and lashes, the same gray color as the sweater.
The sleeves of the sweater presented a problem he’d not expected. His father’s arms were stiff, seemed flexed at his side. It took a modest feat of strength for Noah to bend them at the elbow. He fixed the collar at the old man’s neck. He straightened the sleeves. Next he pulled the wool socks onto the feet. The feet too were stiff. The pants he slid on easily. He thought of putting on boots but was dissuaded by the rigid ankles. Instead he put a hat over his father’s head. He put mittens on his hands. Finally he wrestled the peacoat onto the man. Noah stood back. He stepped again toward Olaf, put his thumbs between his father’s lips, and pried his mouth open. He retrieved the dentures from their jar on the counter and pushed them into the old man’s mouth. With one hand on top of his father’s head and one beneath his chin, Noah muscled the lips together again.
He thought of hiking up the hill to the truck, of driving into Misquah to call his sister, but decided against it. Instead he removed his mother’s ashes from the shelf on which he’d placed them. He set them on the kitchen counter and stared at them as if she might materialize and give him counsel. His capacity for thought had diminished with his tasks, and when his mother offered no advice he decided to row his father across the lake.
He guided the sled down the hill a last time. On the dock he untied the rope from the sled. He put his father’s hands behind him and tied them together with a length of braided nylon rope he’d found in the shed. The arms resisted as if in protest. He thought how his father might have chastised him for the knot. It satisfied Noah in any case, and he proceeded with the barrel. It weighed more than his father, or so Noah reckoned. He laid the contraption on his father’s chest. He aligned the pieces of tubing with the old man’s legs and crisscrossed the chain behind his back, around his ankles, his father’s instructions returning to Noah unexpectedly. Noah could hardly believe how it all went together. He felt a small sense of pride at his part in its execution.
He managed to load his father onto the boat. He centered the old man and his anchor and stepped cautiously into the boat himself. The oars broke the ice easily. Between pulls he could hear the bow cutting through the ice. Midway across the lake the ice cleared and he was in open water. With his back facing his destination, he used the dock in front of him as his fix, knowing that if he kept in a straight line at about a forty-five-degree angle from the dock he’d end up abutting the cliff in the deep water.
He rowed. The wind bit at his neck and wrists and poured through his coat. He worked with absolute purpose, steadily and smoothly, his father balanced between the gunwales. The labor warmed him. He began to breathe hard. He kept his gaze on the dock, now so small a point of reference in the distance. He figured he was halfway, and when he paused to check saw that he was right. Again he turned, looked toward the dock. He saw upon it his father’s dog—or the ghost of a dog—his nose raised to the wind. Noah wiped his eyes to clear his vision. Then the dog was gone. He put his head down and dug the oars into the lake again.
And then he was at the spot where they’d fished so recently, so long ago. The sun at its apex reflected off the small waves that came with the winter wind. Except for the sound of them against the boat’s wooden hull there was no sound at all. He looked around. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but neither could he find it. He heard Solveig’s voice, her reticence, her declaration that she could not do it. He thought again of his mother’s ashes. He thought of Natalie’s innate confidence in him. Maybe he deserved it, for once. Some version of his father’s plea to bury him here replayed in his mind. There had been such elegance in it. And in the story of the Rag as his father had told it. There was his father now: dressed for winter, the afghan trailing in the water like a seining net.
Noah edged his father to starboard. He edged himself to port. The boat rocked. He tilted the platform. His father, rigid, splayed to the anchor, slid almost without a sound into the water. Instantly Noah put a hand into the water. He watched his father cartwheel toward the depths and out of view. It seemed to take forever.
Noah sat. He took the oars again, steered the boat around. He sculled back across the lake, thankful for the blinding whiteness.
EPILOGUE
Natalie still slept as he crested the last rise heading east into Duluth. The sun had just broken and cast its light onto the hills east and north of the city. A sight beyond his capacity to describe, but not to relish, which he did. It was the opposite season of his last arriving here, and the contrast in every way was lovely.
He followed the interstate down into the city. At this hour on a Saturday the roads were nearly vacant. He passed the first neighborhoods, the first industry. His ears popped. The harbor bloomed in the distance, all grays and inky blacks, the water coursing brilliantly and white beneath the sun. At the top of his view he saw the aerial bridge.
He nudged Nat. “Hey, sleepyhead. Look at this.”
She pulled her head from the pillow on which it lay next to the window. Her eyes adjusting to the light, she stretched. “Where are we?”
“Duluth. Breakfast in five minutes.”
She sat up. She scanned the view. “It looks a lot different.”
“It’s April, not November.”
He drove on. They’d planned on having breakfast at Canal Park, so he exited at Fifth Avenue. He turned over the tracks and stopped at Commerce and Railroad Streets. To his right the elevator silos and docks beckoned. “You mind if we make a detour? It won’t take long.”
“What for?”
“I want to show you something.”
He turned right. He passed two vacant slips not fifty feet from the road. The pier that jutted between them was wholly derelict. A little farther six pyramids of taconite five stories tall and black as obsidian rose against the harbor. Natalie asked about them.
“That’s what this town survives on. Or used to survive on. It’s taconite.”
“What your father spent all those years lugging around in his boat.”
Noah looked at her. “The same stuff.”
He turned onto Garfield and drove past a slip on his left with two tugs tied to cleats on the quay. He drove past two more slips. In the third a small freighter was docked under a loading complex. Men were about her deck.
“This is so interesting,” she said. “Look at those barges. What would they carry?”
“I don’t know. Not taconite. Limestone, maybe. Timber.”
They passed three more slips. They drove parallel to railroad tracks and abandoned-looking buildings, warehouses. At an unmarked dirt alleyway he turned left. They stopped at a chain-link fence. He turned off the car. They got out and stood at the fence. In the short distance they saw a minor civilization abandoned by time: train tracks sunk in the iodized soil, scrap yards tangled and twined with heaps of
rusted steel, old cement silos unpainted in decades, a shack with windows of broken glass. Not far from the gate a pickup truck rounded a dirt bend. It stopped. A man opened the door and looked at them. He did not nod. He did not wave. Noah would not have needed to raise his voice to greet him, but neither did he do so. The man wore coveralls and a watchman’s cap. He stepped to the back of his truck and let the gate down. A silver-and-white Siberian husky jumped from the bed and ran to the gate to sniff Noah’s and Nat’s shoes. They were both startled, but the dog turned as fast as it had come and walked away from them, heeling at the watchman’s left. The dog had swollen teats they could see from behind, irrefutable evidence of a new shipyard progeny.
Noah said, “How would you like his job?”
Natalie was still watching man and dog walk away. “What is his job?”
“To guard this paradise, I guess.”
Together they surveyed the vista for a few minutes more. Finally Nat said, “I could eat a horse, and I have to pee.”
AFTER SCONES AND coffee—decaf for Nat—at a coffee shop in Canal Park, Noah gave her a tour of the city. He drove her past his high school and the house on High Street. He took her to Chester Park and showed her the ski jumps. He drove her around downtown and through the college campus. Finally they drove north, past the mansions along Lake Superior, and out of town.
“How long does it take to get to Misquah? I don’t remember.”
“A couple hours, maybe a little more,” Noah said. “We’re meeting Solveig and Tom at noon at the Landing. We have plenty of time.”
So they drove again the Superior coast. The trees were in that instant before budding, and beautiful. The lake, when they turned upon it, churned not at all. They talked all morning of possibilities. After their weekend at the cabin they were going back to Duluth to see if Nat could stand living there. Noah had planned it this way, hoping for a few days of kindly spring weather to trick her into loving his native city. He wanted to move back, wanted to start everything anew. Natalie, amazingly, had not rejected the idea outright, though she needed to be convinced, no doubt. Noah had a strategy. So far the weather was cooperating.
They stopped along the way at the Split Rock lighthouse, up among the trees, resting atop a cliff one hundred feet above the water. The image was fit for a tourist brochure. They stopped also at Tettegouche. They walked up the well-tended trails and marveled at the flowing water of the Illgen Falls. Noah told her about the bear and moose that drank from this river five miles upstream. She nodded, teased him about being a Boy Scout.
He slowed at the enormous loading facility at Taconite Harbor. Again great cones of taconite stood at the roadside. His father’s ships had loaded here, he told her, and at countless other such harbors. She listened intently.
In Misquah they met Solveig and Tom. They lunched in the little café. Noah told Nat how he’d stood outside talking to her on the pay phone. Solveig reminisced about the taffy their mother would buy for her every time they stopped there. Natalie described stopping here before heading up to Lake Forsone. After lunch they drove to the cabin.
There were still small mounds of snow beside the shed and at the top of the hill, where the plow had piled it all winter long. The eaves trough along the front of the house had come free of the roofline and hung to the ground. Icicles, Noah thought—it had been a snowy winter—and age.
They all stood in the yard, silent for a spell.
“This is how I left it,” Noah finally said.
“And you think you can fix this place up?” Solveig asked. She pointed to the gutter.
“That gutter’s nothing to fix,” Tom said.
“It’d be nothing for you to fix, honey.”
“Hey, I’ll manage,” Noah said. “Don’t worry.”
Nat took his arm, squeezed it.
“I’m going to turn the shed into a guesthouse. I already ordered the windows. The plumber just sent me an estimate for running a water line from the well to the house. By this time next year I’ll be running a four-star lodge here.”
“Just show me where the hot spot is on that lake,” Tom said.
The sound of birds erupted from a treetop. Ravens. They lifted into flight, arced once, and disappeared.
“Well?” Solveig said.
“No time like the present,” Noah said. He stepped to the trunk of his car. Neatly packed in a canvas book bag was his mother’s urn. He took the bag from the trunk and led the three of them down the path to the lake.
The last time Noah had trodden that path he’d done so with the weight of his deed as his only load. On that November afternoon he’d rowed back across the lake. The wind stiffened with each stroke of the oars so by the time he reached the dock there were whitecaps curling beyond the lee of the shore. It was as if the wind were rushing toward the deep water on the other side of the lake. As if to make it deeper still.
When he stepped onto the dock he accidentally shoved the boat. He made one grab for it but could only watch as it scudded away. He watched for a long time. Then he walked back up the hill.
Inside, he tried to conjure from the dusky heat of the stove some vision of his father’s ghost. All he found was sadness. But there resided in it a confused bliss for all that had come to pass. Their reconciliation. Late in the afternoon he trudged through the snow up to the county road. A plow had already been through and buried the truck. All he could see was the faded green roof. Expecting as much, he’d brought a shovel. In the last hour of daylight he dug it out. He drove into Misquah and called his sister.
In much the same way that she’d once orchestrated a response to their mother’s death, she began to instruct Noah. It was as if she’d thought of nothing else since she’d left those days ago. In the background Noah heard Tom’s voice. His usual gaiety was replaced with an earnestness Noah had never suspected. Tom reminded Solveig of details she’d forgotten in their scheme.
Noah was to report his father drowned. Man overboard trying to net the last fish of the year. A tragedy. Noah interrupted, described the rowboat adrift in the lake. Solveig related this to Tom, who took the phone from Solveig. “Then it’s a mystery, Noah. Call the police. Tell them your father is missing. Tell them you saw the boat floating empty in the middle of the lake. Tell them he’d gone fishing. It’s actually more plausible this way.”
Noah stood dumb in the wind. He did as he was told.
Solveig never so much as questioned Noah’s undertaking, not then, not ever.
After he’d talked to the sheriff’s office, Noah called Natalie. “My father passed away this morning,” he said, looking over each shoulder in the darkness of the vacant parking lot at the Landing. “I put him in the water.”
Natalie said nothing for a moment. Then, “You did the best thing, Noah.”
Now Noah answered her with silence.
“You did,” she reiterated. “You did, and I love you. And you’re braver than I thought. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
She would be.
It was late when the sheriff’s deputy arrived. One man coming down the road on snowshoes with a flashlight’s beam bouncing before him. His name was Ruutu, or so his badge said. He was a brawny Finn with a blond mustache and feathered gray hair. Noah invited him in, offered coffee. He described the false scene.
After the story, as Ruutu sipped coffee, he looked around inside. He kept licking the tip of his pencil but never marked anything in the notepad he’d taken from his shirt pocket. “Can we have a look down at the lake?” Ruutu asked.
“Of course.” Noah put on his boots and coat. He took the flashlight from its spot on the shelf. They walked down to the dock.
Ruutu panned the lake with his flashlight. He shone the light up the path. In the flicker of the light Noah could see ice on the deputy’s mustache. Ruutu stepped to the end of the dock. Noah joined him. The sky was luminescent with stars.
“That path down from the house is pretty well traveled,” Ruutu said.
“I was up and down it a doz
en times. I was frantic,” Noah said, horrified at his own lie.
Ruutu nodded his head as if he understood. “Awfully damn cold to be going fishing. What was he fishing for, anyway?”
“Trout, I suppose.”
“You say you saw the boat empty? That’s when you came to call us?”
“That’s right.” Noah could not meet Ruutu’s stare.
Ruutu put his pencil and notepad in his shirt pocket. “Trout season ended in September.” He gave Noah a knowing look. “We can come back and search in the morning. You want us to do that?” Before Noah could respond Ruutu continued, “Listen, I knew your pop. Just a class-A man. A hell of a life he led.” Now Ruutu fished a cigarette from his coat pocket. He offered one to Noah, who refused, and Ruutu lit his smoke. He exhaled over his shoulder. “We all knew he was sick. Not that he told us, but we knew. One of us would stop by of a Saturday to check on him now and again.” He took another drag on the cigarette. He pinched the glowing end of it. “We’ll call it an accidental drowning if that suits you. Anyone asks, I gave you the third degree. The third and the fourth.” He turned to the lake. “There’s some awfully deep water out there. But you probably knew that. Your pop would have made sure of that.” He took a deep breath, coughed, and looked up at the stars.
“That’s right, anyone asks, you tell them I asked a lot of questions. You tell them I came back tomorrow morning, that I had a look around the lake. That’s how I’ll write it into the report. In the meantime, I’m sorry.”
MIDNIGHT HAD COME and gone by the time Noah stood again in front of the potbellied stove. The ashes radiated the last of their heat. He tried to imagine the list of necessary actions for closing the house for winter. He took the food from the refrigerator and loaded it into a garbage bag. He scrubbed the kitchen basin and counters. He swept the floor and wood box. He tidied the porch. He covered the piano with the sheet he’d been sleeping on those several days. He checked the windows and the back door to see they were locked. He packed his bags. Finally he put what dog food remained into the ice-cream bucket and set it outside for Vikar.