Wintering

by Peter Geye

  I looked at him, waiting.

  “Ready to keep going. If I’d felt otherwise, we might’ve stopped then and there. We might have avoided everything. But I didn’t want to. I took a couple steps forward into the river’s earliest, feeble currents and mistook their weakness for my strength. When my father hauled up next to me he said nothing, only pointed up the lakeshore. There, standing among the duckweeds and watermeal, in water up to its belly, its dewlap dripping, its huge antlers lit up, was a moose. He was beautiful. And furious, I could tell.

  “I said, ‘Why isn’t he running away? He ought to fear us. I could shoot him right now. He should know that.’

  “My father, he only said, ‘Yes, I suppose he should.’ ” He mimicked Harry’s voice—a perfect imitation—and then fell silent for a moment. “Good Christ, Berit. The things I didn’t know.”

  I KNOW WHAT some of the folks around here used to think, that for years the worst of them labeled me a boondagger because I could lift a fifty-pound sack of U.S. mail and had no husband. The fact is, there’s only been one man in all my years and I simply chose to wait for him. Through the end of my first winter here, then through what seemed an eternity.

  Harry was the first person in Gunflint to show me a special gentleness. This was one warm summer morning after I’d strolled the shoreline, plucking flowers from the cracks in the bedrock. He’d been out at his nets, just a sixteen-year-old boy already making a living for himself. He was tying his boat to a cleat on the Lighthouse Road. “You got a fistful of carnivorous flowers there, Miss Lovig,” he said.

  “Beg your pardon?” I said, surprised to hear his voice at all. More surprised to hear him saying my name.

  He finished his knot and stood and offered his hand. “I’m Harry Eide,” he said. We shook hands and he continued, “Butterworts.” He nodded at the flowers in my hand. “That’s what you’ve got there. You’d have to walk a long way to find them anywhere else.”

  I looked down at the purple flowers, then up at his fresh and boyish face. He ought to have been smiling. Later he would tell me he hadn’t spoken in months. Since February. Which seemed hard to believe then and still does, though I never—not once—had reason to doubt anything he ever said.

  “What do you mean by carnivorous?” I asked him.

  “They eat bugs. Honest to God.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My old man taught me.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I guess everyone knows that by now.”

  “My given name’s Berit,” I said.

  He smiled, or, rather, half-smiled, the right side of his mouth curling up, his right eye squinting. “Berit Lovig. Right. It’s nice to meet you. Get those flowers in a vase.” He took a step to leave, then paused and said, “Butterworts. They only grow here. This kind of butterwort, leastways. Here along the water.” He paused a second more, looked as though he was about to say something, but then went up the Lighthouse Road toward the Traveler’s Hotel, where he took his lunch each day. Years later he would tell me how hard it had been to leave without saying more. Without saying thanks. Without asking me to join him for lunch. But he didn’t do any of those things, and those few minutes on the Lighthouse Road would be our only proper conversation for more than twenty years. I knew from that moment, though, that he was my man. I knew I’d wait for him however long I had to. And I did.

  Which is not to say that others didn’t come calling. Some did. Charlie Aas, for example. But he was rotten from the word go, and rottener still with each day of his life.

  By the time he was elected mayor in 1960 he presided over this town like a drunken lord. Through his strong-arming and sleight of hand he’d hidden his past, one that included charges of poaching and animal cruelty, both beaten, and a short stint in the juvenile correction facility in Duluth for terrorizing that autistic Bargaard child. No doubt there were other transgressions, large and small. I can say that because I experienced Charlie’s thuggery myself, and no one but Rebekah Grimm and I ever knew about it.

  By 1960 he was known for his mink coat and penny loafers in a town where every other man—even Mr. Nelson, the music teacher at Arrowhead High—wore work boots. Charlie was educated, his degree from the University of Minnesota one of only three or four in Gunflint back then. He was council president at Immanuel Lutheran. A real-estate baron. A bush pilot. A father of four, a daughter and three sons. He was respected because he was feared. Corrupter. Corrupted. Embezzler. Womanizer. Most folks knew all this. Or at least some of it.

  But more than anything—and this is why he got away with so much—Charlie was third-generation. His grandfather put a fish house on the harbor shore in 1891. His father, Marcus, used to tussle with Harry’s own father for whiskey dollars during Prohibition. All of which is to say that he had pedigree in these parts, crazy as that sounds, and despite his failings. Nothing has ever meant more to people up here than bloodlines.

  Charlie parlayed his into public office. Being mayor around here never meant much before Charlie, but he was determined to change that. Partnering with the mining and lumber companies, he made a fortune just for saying we ought to open the borderlands, not protect them. As Harry put it, Charlie’s goal was to pillage the wilderness and get rich from the wreckage. Harry’s hundred acres along the Burnt Wood River were in the wrong spot. That was part of their problem. But the larger impediment was Harry’s integrity and his own clout with the townsfolk.

  For a year after he was elected, Charlie fought fair. Or at least out in the open. He and Harry shouted at each other across the church basement, where the town meetings were held in those days, and I was there for many of them. Charlie and his accomplices wore hundred-dollar suits and silk ties, while Harry and a few others sat there in flannel shirts with contrary views. Charlie loved trotting out phrases like “eminent domain” and “the good of the people” and was always talking about jobs. But Harry—whose name had always meant more than Charlie’s, despite his office and money—wouldn’t budge. And he found allies.

  So Charlie reared back. For years he tried to gain the upper hand, buying friends as fast as he made enemies. He was as deft at one as he was at the other, and at times it looked like he and his Republican cronies would have their way with the wilderness. But they never did. Not then. Not ever.

  —

  The summer of ’63, when Gus and his father weren’t out hoisting mostly empty gill nets, they were in the fish house, building their canoes. Harry told Gus he wanted to teach him one true thing before he got out of this place, and the canoes were it. Most nights, after fishing all day and dinner at the Traveler’s Hotel, the two of them would put a Bill Monroe record on the turntable and settle into their gentle and quiet labor. It was during those hours that Gus learned about Harry’s own father’s genius with boats, for every lesson—every word—had its root in something Odd had once said. Odd being Harry’s father.

  Gus recalled those hours as some of the best of his life. But he also recalled being anxious for their nights in the fish house to end, so he could steal away to meet Cindy Aas at Eddie Riverfish’s house.

  She was Charlie’s only daughter, Gus’s age and in the same high school class, and her shine for him was as unexpected and unlikely as snow in August. He’d known her his whole life, of course, and all that time they’d been strict opposites if not outright enemies. A cheerleader and homecoming queen and mediocre student, she liked to drink and smoke. The sort of girl mothers warned their sons about. Gus was quiet, a straight-A student, a letterman on the cross-country ski team, a member of the Chess Club. Those differences would have been enough to lock them in opposite circles, even without the rift between their fathers, and their grandfathers, too.

  What they had in common was music. Cindy played the piano at church when her mother wasn’t able to, and in the high school band she was first flute. Gus played the guitar in band and could strum any instrument with strings. Those old crones in the church basement used to wh
isper about the sounds the two of them could make together, but in all their lives Cindy and Gus had hardly spoken to each other.

  After graduation that summer, Gus found himself sitting next to her on the deck out back of Eddie’s house. It was late enough that the party, stoked all night by beer and marijuana, was finally petering out. Cindy didn’t say much. Maybe she didn’t say anything, but he remembered her looking up at him and kissing him, as though they’d been going steady for years. And he remembered the great whorling in his gut. And not being able to push her away even though he knew he should.

  There in my kitchen, he wasn’t comfortable talking about this, even so many years after the offense.

  They spent the whole summer sneaking around. Swimming in the cove on the hottest nights, fooling with each other in her friend’s basement, driving up to Long Finger Lake with a fifth of vodka and a pack of Pall Malls. She was showing Gus things he’d never seen before, and he loved it. He could still hear the songs on the radio, still remember how her hair gleamed with the moonlight behind it.

  It would be months before Gus learned she was ordered into his life. He admitted that that fact complicated the story. But he still felt with absolute certainty that, on those nights up at Long Finger Lake, she was there because she wanted to be, never mind that unexpected wrinkle.

  It was on such a night at Long Finger Lake that she told Gus about his mother and her father. They passed a bottle back and forth, toyed with the radio dial between long kisses, talked about friends and music. After a lull in the conversation, Cindy said, “My dad’s screwing your mom.” Then she laughed, her eyes wide and wild. “Isn’t it scandalous?”

  Before he could answer she reached across the car seat and unzipped his jeans.

  He wasn’t sure he believed her. Not at first. For all the fun they were having, she was moody and prone to lying. But because of their intimacy—and because intimacy can make the blind see, if not the reverse—he did choose to believe, for the rest of the evening, that what was happening between them was at least as important as whatever his mother and Charlie Aas might be up to. Which is not to say that he wasn’t curious. So he started investigating.

  He had no idea, though, what he was looking for. His parents had never seemed happy, much less in love. He couldn’t recall a single kiss, or a tender word, ever passing between them. As for his own experiences in affairs of the heart, that summer with Cindy was his initiation.

  Still, he saw changes at home. Lisbet became glib with Harry, almost mocking. She bought new dresses. Started smoking again. Listened to loud music and spent countless hours on the telephone in hushed conversations with a friend in Chicago. And she started painting again. Feverishly, and sometimes all night long.

  And his father? He became more obsessed than ever with his maps. He’d hunker down at the kitchen table with a pot of coffee and his books and pore over them as if the world itself could not impart the truths hidden within those pages. For him this was, Gus thought, a strange posture, to sit anywhere with such focus for so long, especially at their kitchen table, and Harry now reminded him of a wounded animal. Which it turns out he was.

  They didn’t talk much that season, father and son, but when they did—out tending the nets, or bent over their canoes in the fish house—Harry started telling Gus his war stories. The Hürtgen Forest. The Ardennes. Surprisingly, they had little to do with the men he fought beside or against, or the carnage he saw, though he told of these things, too. What he remembered most was how cold those nights were. Even worse, he said, than he’d grown up with in Gunflint. Gus was of course entranced. He listened with unwavering attention, though he was convinced even then that he didn’t truly understand what he was being told, much less why. Any hours he spent alone were given over to questions of what it meant to be a man, and if he was one. Wondering if he had to go to war himself in order to cross that threshold. No doubt he’d have the chance if he wanted it. Maybe even if he didn’t, given what JFK was calling the communist threat in Vietnam. He’d heard it was hotter than Hades in the jungles over there.

  —

  Things with Cindy came to a head near the end of summer, after Gus overheard his mother on the phone one night. He’d been out with Cindy, half drunk and full of lust. Lisbet was sitting by the fire, drinking a glass of wine, unaware that he’d just come in.

  “I guess all the Aases are slumming it this summer,” she said, then listened for a moment to what her friend was saying. She took another pull of wine, nodded emphatically, and said, “Yes, of course. But that little trollop will flat wreck Gus. He’s no match for her.” It was only then she noticed Gus, staring at her from across the room. She only smiled and turned back to her conversation.

  Cindy didn’t wreck him, even if she was supposed to.

  They spent their last night together waiting out a thunderstorm in the fish house. It would be the first and only time they made love, a detail that sent Gus to blushing as he told me. When they finished she lay beneath him, her mouth on his shoulder. He remembered her hand in his hair, the sweat pooled in her belly, how she’d bitten him after he said he loved her, hard, right on the shoulder blade, enough to draw blood.

  Then she laughed. “My dad told me I’m done seeing you, but I still wanted to do that with you.”

  Gus didn’t say anything.

  “Did I hurt you?” She pushed herself up and looked into his eyes. “Your shoulder, did I hurt it?”

  He glanced at the small arc of blood. “No,” he said. “Well, maybe a little.”

  “Good. Whenever it stings, think of me.” She got up and dressed while the rain lightened outside. “I was your first time.”

  Again he said nothing.

  “I knew it.” She pulled her shirt on. “I hope you liked it. I sure did.” Then she knelt down and ran her hand through his hair. “I bet I even love you, too, Gus. I never thought I would.” She stood and looked away. “My father told me not to.”

  She left without saying anything more, and he was still in the fish house later that night, when Harry arrived. If Harry was surprised to see him there, at that hour, he didn’t let on. Gus was surprised, of course, and stood up guiltily and pretended to be putting some tools away.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Harry said.

  “Do what?”

  Harry came over and stood beside his canoe on the strongback. “I saw the Aas girl leaving. I was right outside.”

  Gus turned away, though there was no place to hide.

  “Tell me it’s just a fling, eh, bud? Tell me you two aren’t mixed up in something serious.”

  “She broke up with me tonight.”

  He shook his head knowingly.

  “It was Mr. Aas told her she couldn’t see me anymore.”

  Gus could remember the look his father gave him then. Tired, fierce, angry. He came over and sat beside him.

  “Well, Charlie’s a guy wants to be the lead dog. Trouble is, he’s only good on the cut trail. Know what I’m saying? He sees you’re one who can cut ’em yourself. He doesn’t want his daughter jumping on your sled. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about Cindy Aas. Likely she’d run away with you right now if you’d have her.”

  Harry stepped back from his canoe and stood quietly for a long time. Then he said, “I’ve built dozens of these, but this is the prettiest one yet.” He paused to admire her curves, then looked back at Gus. “My old man, there was a man who could build a boat. I guess you’ve heard that story, eh?”

  “I guess so.”

  Harry went from the canoe to the door, opened the window set in the top half, and stuck his head out for a minute, then turned back around. “The winds are coming,” he said, “bringing that Canadian air on down. The bears are fattening up. My favorite time of year, this.” He turned back to Gus. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What’s your favorite time of year?”

  Only then did Gus realize his father had been drinking. He almost never dran
k. Certainly never got twisted. “What’s going on, Dad?”

  Harry smiled and glanced out the window again. “Yep, the winds are coming around.” He closed the window and stepped back to the canoe. “I’ve been thinking, bud. How about we take a little adventure? Who’s to say we’ll ever have this chance again? Who’s to say how quickly this world’s going straight to hell? You and me, we’ll get into our canoes and paddle them up into the borderlands and live like voyageurs this winter. We won’t have to worry about a thing. We’ll be winterers. What do you say?”

  “What would Mom think about that?”

  “That’s another thing not to worry about.”

  It was the first time Gus ever heard him defy his mother’s iron grip on their family, and it seemed to enliven Harry. “We’ll use my maps. Go up the Burnt Wood and through the Minnesota lakes until we cross the Laurentian Divide. From there we’ll get on the old voyageurs’ highway.” He clapped his hands. “Thompson had to winter unexpectedly up on Holy Lake. Rumors are the fort’s still there. Hidden in the woods. We’ll find it. Make a go of it. Just the two of us. We’ll have a hell of a time.”

  Gus must have looked doubtful, because Harry said, “What?”

  “Isn’t this the sort of trip that needs planning?”

  “I’ve been planning this for as long as you’ve been alive. Longer. We’ll leave in two weeks.”

  —

  “ ‘I’ll go,’ that’s what I said, instinctively. I was certain—who knows how—that my father was at the crossroads of his great dream and his worst nightmare. I knew he would need me.”

  Gus looked at the fire for a moment and said, “I’ve recalled that scene in the fish house a thousand times. I can still see the turn of expression on my father’s face, like a photograph in a gilded frame. And even if that picture now has a cautionary caption, there was no such warning then. Or else I didn’t notice it. Or refused to.” He looked over at me. “What did not escape me was the awful mood around our house those days before we left. My father had an unreal focus. He likened our adventure to going to battle, and said we should prepare as though that’s what we were doing. So we did. He bought me a Ruger handgun. He bought powerful binoculars. He dug from the attic the field pants he’d worn in the Ardennes. He never said a word to my mother that I heard.