Wintering

by Peter Geye

“Hear that?” Harry said as his canoe slid beside Gus’s.

  “Yup.”

  “Sounds heavy.”

  Now Harry pulled out his compass, took his measure, and looked up at the sky. Their canoes came together and Gus made them trice by hooking his paddle over his father’s gunwale. The air was as still as the inside of a church. They sat in that stillness for a moment before Gus noticed that their canoes were being pulled slowly toward the sound of the rushing water.

  They put ashore well above the falls. Gus could see the mist rising downstream. Harry was hunched over the strap of his Duluth pack, and when he stood he had the book of maps in a grip so tight Gus thought the veins in his hands might burst.

  They walked the rocky shoreline to the sault. The first chute dropped five feet into a roiling white pool before spitting out into a hundred yards of churning water, its narrow path pocked with boulders and laced with fallen trees. At the end of the view, where the water veered west, it also appeared to slow down and smooth out.

  Harry looked back toward the big lake behind them, tapping the moose hide onto his freshly shaven chin. “How in the hell did we miss it?”

  “Miss what?” Gus said.

  “The divide, Gus. The height of land.” He thumbed through the pages and mumbled something Gus couldn’t understand. Then Harry shook his head fiercely, glanced heavenward, squatted, and cupped a handful of water up to his mouth. When he stood back up, he said, “Maybe it’s time we turned around, eh, bud?”

  Gus spun to face him. “You mean go home?”

  Harry arched his eyebrows.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “We’re in a spot here. A hell of a spot. This”—he pointed down at the water, spread his arms toward the forest and sky above, and shook the book of maps like a pastor wielding the Bible—“is not where we are.”

  “Of course this is where we are,” Gus said. “It’s where we’re supposed to be, too.” Though they were back on course, where they wanted to be, Gus recognized it as the most dangerous place he’d ever been. He felt charged, electric, like some current as strong as the river’s was coursing through him. “The mouth of the Balsam River. Right on course.”

  Harry pocketed the maps and turned to face the rapids. “I do reckon this is the Balsam, Gus. But think about how we got here. It’s blind goddamn luck. Right now, from here, we can feel our way home. Before we get into real trouble.”

  Gus laughed. “Haven’t you been talking all this time about the authentic experience? About La Vérendrye and Thompson and the voyageurs? You and me. Right here. Unsure of our maps? Winter nipping at our heels? ‘We’re winterers!’ you said. You must have said it fifty times.” He said all this at once and didn’t wait for his father’s response. Instead, he pushed past him and marched back up the shoreline. When he reached his canoe he hefted the first Duluth pack from it, shouldered it, pulled the tumpline over his forehead, walked toward the edge of the sault, and dropped it. Harry hadn’t moved except to cross his arms over his ragg-wool sweater. When Gus passed again, Harry whispered his name but did nothing to stop him.

  Gus passed him twice more. Once with the second pack and then with his canoe. Under the first chute, with a longer view of the rapids, he studied them for a route that obviously wasn’t there. The course was too narrow, with too many downed trees.

  Harry had come to his side, holding the book of maps again. “There used to be a portage here,” he said.

  “I guess some trees must’ve grown in the last hundred years,” Gus said.

  “Might’ve been more than a portage. Could even have been an old logging road.”

  “There was never a logging road here.”

  “Gus, bud.”

  “What?”

  “We need to slow down. Take stock.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re right where we’re supposed to be. You’re right. But we’re also lost.”

  “We’re not lost. We’re fucking vanished.”

  Harry didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned and walked the edge of the river back up past the sault.

  Gus studied the rapids again. I can float it, he thought. Fix a line, scrabble along the shoreline. As soon as he thought it, this much was settled.

  He was fixing a bowline when he saw his father come tentatively around the sault. He set his pack on the shore, winded, bent over.

  “You want some help?” Gus said.

  “No.” Harry went back for the rest of his gear.

  Gus had never seen his father overmatched before, and the sight of it spooked him even more than his own outburst had. Before he could make sense of any of it, he looped the rope over his shoulder and cinched it tight.

  He pushed his canoe into the water and hadn’t taken ten steps before he realized he was at the mercy of the stream. Between the current and the heavy canoe before him, he had no recourse. His legs couldn’t keep up with the flow, and in seconds he was pulled under. The rope twisted and he was on his back on the streambed, looking up through the coursing water. He felt relief rather than panic, even found a moment to think how beautiful the blur above was before he rolled over and got to his feet. He felt electric again, as if he could have lifted from the surface of that stream like a hatching mayfly.

  Now the water was waist-deep. As cold and swift as snowmelt under the Devil’s Maw. Gus searched for better footing, grabbed hold of a deadfall branch jutting from the shore, and heeled the canoe. He untangled the rope from his waist and pulled himself into shallower water. He was only halfway down the rapids but already they were losing their vigor. The water slowed and widened into a river.

  When he reached the bend, the canoe settled on the river bottom and he looked back at his father, still standing under the falls. It was the greatest distance between them since they’d left home, and Gus relished it. He relished, too, that his hour’s hard work was done while Harry still had hell to pay. This, he knew, was a dangerous thought.

  He turned to look west, where the river was wide and flat. The terrain climbed again on the northern shore, and white pines towered on the ridge. On the southern shore, the water seeped through duckweeds and water lilies to a muskeg thick with cedar trees. Gus opted for the northern shore, where he beached his canoe and unpacked dry clothes. When he reached into the cargo pocket of his wet pants, it was empty. No compass.

  IT WAS ALMOST Christmas, and Gus had helped me up to the third floor of the apothecary. We stood at the window, looking down on the Lighthouse Road, its streetlights strung with garlands and white bulbs. The morning was shadowy, brooding, the lake still holding the darkness of the night before. We stood at the window for some time before he turned and examined the empty room.

  “What’s it like being back here?” he said.

  I was still looking out the window. “I’ve been back a few times already, and each time seems like it was long ago.”

  “Everything seems to have happened long ago.”

  “You’re not old enough to talk like that,” I told him.

  He had his satchel over his shoulder. He wore a tweed coat. By every report he was a fine teacher. Every student’s favorite. He put his hands deep in his coat pockets.

  “Why did you love him, Berit? What was it about him?”

  “He was gentle. And funny. He was plain to see, even if most of him was hidden.” I glanced out the window again. “He loved me back. His love made me feel alive. That was very important. He was strong. I adored his strength.”

  “You had that in common, eh?”

  “Don’t ever mistake age for strength.”

  Gus smiled his father’s smile again. They were the same, those two. Every time Gus smiled I could have taken his face in my hands and kissed him and been a younger woman again.

  “I hate this place,” Gus said after a while. “I hate it because he did. Everything I love or hate. Everything I know. Everything I don’t know. It’s all because of him.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “It
’s true of the things that matter most.”

  We looked out at the lake for a few more long minutes.

  “You’re really going to make it into a museum?” he said.

  “A historical society.”

  He shook his head. “Sure, because this place needs its history on display.”

  “Isn’t that what all these talks are, Gus? Your own history on display? For me, at least?”

  “History and memory aren’t the same thing.”

  “How are they different?”

  He faced me. “History doesn’t abide acts of the imagination but memories depend on it. And memories are as much what we’ve forgotten as what we recall. History cannot be forgotten.”

  “You don’t seem to have forgotten much.”

  “I spend more time remembering than most, I guess.”

  “And all this remembering, it’s taking a toll on you, isn’t it?”

  He turned away. “Even though it feels good to talk about it. Isn’t that how it goes?”

  “So often, yes.”

  “Is it the same for you, being here? The memories?”

  I looked around the room. I could picture Rebekah sitting in her rocking chair, the kitchen across the hall, could smell the herring frying in the skillet. I could see the basket of yarn and the amber light of the floor lamp. I thought of how much harder it was to stand beside him and listen to his stories, to be reminded in so many ways of his father, than it was to stand here looking at an empty room. “I don’t have any strong feelings about this place. But why would I? It was just where I waited for my life to happen. And when it finally did happen, that was somewhere else.”

  “How in God’s name did you pass all that time here?”

  “I worked. I looked after Rebekah. I read books. Lots of them. You should see the boxes still down in the basement.” I paused. Should I say more? What I spent most of my time waiting for? “I spent more time than was right wondering if I was becoming Rebekah. Middle-aged. Alone. Lonely. Waiting for something to change—for someone to come. I thought about your father. I thought about what a life with him would be like. I pined away for him because I got a feeling around him. I was right about it, too, but I spent nearly half of my life quite sure I might have to let that feeling drift away. I didn’t want to do that. There was too much to it. Too much happiness waiting to be had. I knew that for certain, so I waited. Lord, did I wait.”

  “For a long time.”

  “It was worth it.”

  Again he smiled. A minute passed before he said, “The last time I saw you, I was talking about the Balsam River?”

  “You were. About the sault and losing your compass.”

  He nodded. “I wanted to tell you something else. Something that happened soon after that. It was important.

  “I’d quit counting days by then. Even though my father notched them into his calendar each night, I’d quit. However many days had passed since we washed out of the Balsam and onto those islands of Kaseiganagah, we were by this day properly and irrefutably lost. And because it had been raining more or less since we cleared the last of those islands—and because I had neither compass nor any inclination to wonder—I couldn’t have said if we were lost north or west.

  “My father was no longer singing his chansons. He’d hardly spoken in days. He’d stashed the red hat in favor of his poncho’s hood, and he paddled through those days like the angel of death.”

  Gus put the heels of his hands over his eyes and held them there. “The day I’m talking about, I paddled on his starboard flank. Watched the eddies trail his canoe. Watched them as they caught the rain and funneled down into the depths.” He lowered his hands. “The lake was black with rain. Like the lake out there.” He nodded out the window. “And just as cold.

  “My father, he seemed to have a new and manic resolve to move ahead. Even if it meant floating into oblivion.” He paused yet again, staring through the window at the lake. “From here, I can see that’s just what was happening. My father was discovering the wilderness in himself. It must have seemed as large and unaccommodating as the lands we were traveling through.”

  “Oh, Gustav,” I said.

  “What I didn’t know, and what makes it all so much more unfathomable—what ought to make it unforgivable—is that he knew not only where he was headed but also what would come after us. Who would come after us. And why.”

  I wished that there was a place to sit, that the old davenport was there in front of the window. It was one thing to listen to him talk about his father, to watch the memories working on him. It was another thing altogether to revisit my own lovesickness. Every word about Harry from his lips found a deeper and darker place in me. A feeling I didn’t like. It exhausted me. But there was nowhere to sit up in the apothecary’s attic. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Gus?”

  There might have been tears in his eyes. “I’ve spent so many nights between then and now wondering why he dragged me along with him. I’ve been angry. Appalled. Sad. But I’ve spent just as many days giddy with excitement. Like a little boy. So I’ve always said to myself: Let the sleeping dog lie. And I have. At least some of the time. Christ, I have Sarah and the kids as proof that I’ve been able to put it behind me. But now, telling you all of this—I don’t know, Berit. I’m scared.”

  “To tell me?”

  “No. To look back anymore.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re a father yourself. Or because you’re afraid you’re becoming your father.”

  “That’s what Sarah said.”

  “Can we both be wrong?”

  At this I could tell he wanted to smile. He didn’t, though. “There are so many similarities between him and me, I can see that,” he said. “But what I think really scares me are the countless ways I’m not like him. And because the past is getting farther and farther behind me, and the end coming closer and closer, I’m afraid I’ll never meet the man in myself that I saw in him.”

  “Everyone’s past disappears. That’s only natural.”

  “Parts of it do. You’re right. But other parts don’t. You know that as well as I do. There are things that can never be forgotten, no matter how hard we try to.”

  I caught his eyes in the reflection of the window. “You have your children, Gus. And Sarah. You don’t need to become your father.”

  He closed his eyes and turned his head toward the ceiling.

  “You’d better help me down the stairs,” I said.

  And he did. I put my free hand through his arm and he walked slowly beside me, step by step. When we got outside, the morning was warmer than it looked. The sun was coming out from behind the low clouds. We stood there on the porch.

  “Here’s what I wanted to tell you. A few days beyond the Balsam River, a cold, rainy day, we turned into the heavy waters of some swamp. My father paused to take his pointless reckoning, and the rain turned to snow by degrees so deliberate and measurable it seemed to be happening out of time altogether. He pulled his hood back and looked up into the snow. And my father—the same man you knew, Berit—he wept. I was stunned. Too stunned to say a word. I just watched him. And after a moment he turned to me and said, ‘We’ll never find our way back.’

  “I felt no fear or anxiety. None at all, even though I was certain we’d die in that wilderness. That I’d die without so much as a compass in my pocket. That we would never be found. What a thing for a boy my age to know. Or for a man to carry around his whole life.”

  I took his hands in mine.

  “How can I convey any of this, Berit? How can I tell Sarah and our kids that our whole life, all of our happiness, it’s all been make-believe, because my father and I died up on the borderlands?”

  I squeezed his hands tightly.

  “We died over and over and over again.”

  I’D BE LYING if I said my talks with Gus didn’t fill me with a kind of purpose. Maybe even hope. I loved to be so daily reminded of Harry, both bodily and in Gus’s manner of speech—how
carefully he chose his words, the pauses between them, his conscience plain to see. Harry had been the same in every respect.

  But our talks troubled me, too, and the hours after we’d part—when I was left alone with the stories he’d told me, sorting them out, remembering my own version of Harry, writing things down—troubled me even more.

  That morning in December, after he guided me down the stairs at the old apothecary and helped me into my truck, after I’d driven through town and turned up the Burnt Wood Trail toward home, I got to thinking about what he’d said about our being able to forget some things. It was easy to see he was right, even though I’d never thought of it exactly like that before. All I had to do was conjure the image of Harry’s face. The sweet lines around his eyes. The mess of hair that framed it. The soft lips that ought to have been anything but. My God, how I missed him. How I remembered him. But what had I already forgotten? And where had it gone?

  When I got home I went to my bureau and opened the top drawer and took from it the only picture that was ever taken of Harry and me together. His shirt collar askew. His eyes cast off to the side as if there were some imminent danger he’d just noticed. He looked nervous. Caught. I know because he told me that the expression mimicked his feelings on that day. In the photograph we’re standing outside the Normandy Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. It was one of only a handful of trips we ever took.

  That expression is the one he always wore in public when I was around, which is why most of our time was spent in private, mostly nights here, at my house by the river. We’d have dinner together. Play cribbage by the fire, sipping Harry’s aquavit. All our time together felt stolen, clandestine. It did then, and does even more so now. That would be troubling enough, but now there’s this: All of those nights together—some thirty years of them—have dissolved into one. Or what I remember as one. Time is already doing its job.

  Thank goodness for the photograph. It seems to be almost like evidence that we were together. I studied it closely that morning and realized that our love was in its final act. I’d spent nearly as much time waiting for him as I had with him, and now he was gone. But how would the rest of it go, without Harry here to be a part of it? Or part of it only in my memory—what there was of it—and in the stories his son was telling me?