by Peter Geye
“Did he find you?”
Gus lunged on top of him then and tried to punch him but landed only a glancing blow. Harry swept his other arm from under the bearskin to hug him fiercely. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he whispered, even as Gus struggled to get free.
“Pull yourself together,” his father said. “It’s me.”
Gus lay back against the tree again.
“Look at me. You’ve got to tell me, did that asshole find you?”
Gus remembered Charlie’s awful voice, his shocking threats, the gunshots. “I shot him.”
“You what?”
“I hate you.”
“Gus, what are you saying?” He grabbed his son by the front of the coat and pulled him close. “What did you do?”
“I killed him!” Gus shouted.
“Hey,” Harry whispered, slipping his hand over Gus’s mouth. “Calm down, damnit.” He let his hand fall. “Keep quiet.”
“How could you let me?”
Harry pulled the Ruger from where he saw it in the snow, flipped the cylinder open, and saw all six bullets. He closed the cylinder, spun it, opened it again. “Did you reload or something?”
Gus looked at the pistol and then out on the bay. The only relief from its grayness was the line of black trees in the distance beyond. He wiped his eyes and tried again, but Charlie Aas wasn’t there.
“Gus, look at me. You didn’t shoot him. Charlie’s still out there.”
“But the gunshots? I saw him go to his knees.”
“You heard the Remington.” Harry grabbed it and showed him the spent ammo. Only one shot remained in the chamber. “That was me shooting.”
“Who’d you shoot?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Did you kill Len Dodj and Matti Haula?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Just be quiet and listen.”
“We have to hide. If Charlie’s still out there, we’ve got to hide.” The panic wasn’t something he felt as much as he tasted it, bilious and hot. He again imagined Charlie’s bowie knife carving the night apart.
Now Harry slapped him. “Look at me, boy!” This wasn’t whispered. He took Gus’s face in his hands. “Did Charlie find you? Did you really see him? You must have, right?”
“I don’t know,” Gus said.
“You don’t know what?”
“If he saw me. But I sure saw him. He was standing right over there.” He pointed. “I shot him.”
“You did not. You didn’t even fire the gun.”
Gus closed his eyes.
“Look at me, Gus. Tell me, what did he say?”
“He said he was going to kill us, so I killed him.”
Harry let go of his face, then slumped against the tree. “You didn’t kill him, bud. Charlie’s still out there.”
“Then we have to hide. He’s going to kill us.”
“Okay,” Harry said, but not to Gus. Once more he checked the pistol and the rifle, wiped the snow from them, and blew through each barrel.
Gus noticed his father had no pants on, only the threadbare bottom half of his union suit and his boots and snowshoes. He was wearing his coat and his red hat, thank God. His mittens he’d thrown down on the snow.
“Okay,” Harry said again. “Okay.” He took a long look up and down the shore and back into the woods he’d just crawled out of.
“We have to hide,” Gus said again. “Now. We can go back to that tree, where you found me that morning after the bear. We can hole up for a day or two and wait.”
“Wait for what?” Harry stood and wrapped the bearskin around him like a skirt. “Give me your belt. And the holster.”
Gus took them off and watched his father cinch up the bearskin with it.
“We’re going to find Charlie’s plane before he takes off.”
Gus didn’t budge from his spot against the tree. “Who did you shoot?”
Harry knelt and buckled the pack shut, then slung it over his back. “We’re going to find his plane and we’re going to find Charlie. He can’t move that fast, not without snowshoes.”
Gus still didn’t move as his father stood. “Did you kill them?”
“Don’t worry about that.” Harry handed him the Remington. “Carry this. And remember, there’s only one shot left.”
Gus wouldn’t cry in front of his father. He simply would not. He’d vowed that he wouldn’t and he hadn’t and he wasn’t about to now, much as he felt like it. So he bit down and said, “Why didn’t Charlie shoot us when we ran out of the shack? He could’ve shot us right then.”
“Charlie’s a pack of rabid goddamn wolves that ain’t even hungry. That’s why he didn’t kill us then. He didn’t shoot us for the same reason he burned our meat. For the same reason he sicced his daughter on you last fall.” He looked squarely at Gus. “Charlie thinks the world exists for his amusement, and his thoughts are every bit as crooked as the Burnt Wood River. Bear that in mind till all this is done.” He took a frantic survey of the woods around them before turning back to his son. “Plus, he’s been outed. Everybody in Gunflint knows his game now, so whatever crookedness he didn’t know he had in him, well, it’ll come to the surface now. He’ll play this like a man with nothing to lose, which is what he is. And that’s why we have to get after him.”
Gus thought of Charlie’s first claim out on the bay, that now was when the fun really started. “To kill him?”
“You’d rather he killed us?”
Gus didn’t answer.
“Because he will, sure as the day is long. And he’ll take insane pleasure in doing it. So I suggest you listen up and clear your head. Get it straight. We’re going to find Charlie, and we’re going to end this. We’ll start with his goddamn plane.”
Harry stood up, adjusted the Duluth pack, and rested a hand on the pistol. “I heard his plane come from the north last night. Likely he landed on the south end of the lake, so let’s get down there.”
“You go.”
“Gus?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Get up, bud.”
“You’re a liar.” He spoke softly. “You’re as crazy as he is.”
“Do you have your mittens? Put them on,” Harry said. “You get frostbit, your hands’ll be worthless. Put your mittens on and get up.”
Gus jumped to his feet and sprang again at his father, punching him in the chest with both fists. Harry stumbled but didn’t fall and instead stepped right back in to Gus. He took him in his arms and hugged him so tight it squeezed the breath out of him. “Someday you’ll understand all of this. You will. I promise. You have no reason to, but right now you’ve got to trust me.”
Gus pushed him away. “I don’t trust you. I hate you. I hate all of this.”
“I do, too. I do. But we’re in it now, right up to our necks. And I’m not about to leave you here.”
Gus sat back down and leaned against the tree.
Harry knelt again. “Do you remember, way back when, that I said you were my advantage?”
Gus didn’t so much as look up.
“This is what I was talking about. You are my advantage now.”
“What’re you talking about?” He put his hands up over his ears. “I can’t listen to you anymore. Go. Jesus Christ, get away from me!”
“He wants us split up, Gus. That’s the only chance he’s got left.”
“Why don’t you ever listen? I couldn’t care less about your fight with Charlie. I don’t even care what happens next. Just leave me alone.”
“You can’t stay here, Gus. We have to get the hell moving. Listen to me, bud!”
“You listen.” Gus finally looked up at him. “Go to hell. Just go to hell.”
“You have to come, Gus. You can’t stay here. This is no place to be.”
“Well, it’s where you brought me.”
Harry took the pack from his shoulders, pulled the sleeping sack out, and tossed it to him. Then he handed him the belt and holster. “Don’
t move. Don’t start a fire.” He buckled the pack again, put it on his shoulders, shook his head, and slipped it off again. “If you have to run, take the pack. Better still, stay here and don’t move. I’ll be back.”
I VISITED Rebekah Grimm the day before she died. She had a private room at the rest home, a single bed pushed up against one wall. A small black-and-white television on a shelf under a window that overlooked a grassy, man-made knoll where Norway pines had died not long after they were planted. There was a painting of a schnauzer dog hanging on the wall above her bed, a mirror hanging over a small chest of drawers. Hairbrushes and bottles of lotions and perfumes sat atop the chest, giving off a lovely fragrance. Getting to her room was always a relief, as other rooms reeked of soiled bed linens and heaping ashtrays, the stench leaching into the hallway.
The day before she passed, she was sitting in her bed and staring out the window. A sorry view, compared with the one she’d had for so many years from the third floor of the apothecary. Even though she was fully blind by then, this irrelevant fact saddened me more than any other about her condition and situation.
She always kept herself neat. Whereas most of the folks waiting out the last years of their lives here were happy to spend all day in their pajamas, or even less, Rebekah dressed every day, bathed twice a week, and, when Bonnie Hanrahan’s daughter came for just this purpose, had her hair done each Saturday. But the day before she died she was especially done up, in a pink cotton dress and a white cardigan sweater and the pink cloche hat she saved for only the best occasions. Her fingernails had been painted to match the hat. She held a black patent-leather purse in her hands.
“Well, aren’t you a picture of pretty?” I said.
“I wonder if you’ll take me to lunch, Miss Lovig.” All those years after we met, that’s what she still called me.
“Are you sure?” I said. “Did you run this past Janice?” This was the head nurse at the home.
“Am I a prisoner here?”
“Of course you aren’t.”
“Then I’d like you to take me to lunch at the Traveler’s Hotel.” She lifted herself from the bed and into her wheelchair, which was required in the halls of the home. “If you would.”
Once we were seated, she ordered tea and rabbit stew and spread her napkin across her lap.
“This is the first time you’ve been out in a long while,” I said.
“I don’t feel the need all that often.”
“Until today.” And this was a question.
She fingered the napkin on her lap and turned her eyes up to the window. They were as milky as the pitcher of cream waiting beside her tea. “When I die,” she said, “I would like to be buried in the cemetery, under a marble pillar with the words ‘I Have Loved’ inscribed beneath my name. Lenny’s boy, Mace Washburn, has been paid for this. He understands my wishes.”
I didn’t—couldn’t—respond.
“Is that too much to ask?”
“Why are you talking about this now?”
She wiped the corners of her mouth with her napkin. “Miss Lovig, I’m as old as the town itself. If I don’t die tomorrow, I will soon enough. I’d like to have this settled before then.”
“Of course.”
She sipped her tea and wiped her lips again. “And please make sure my grave is as far from Hosea’s as possible. Would you do that?”
“I will.”
“When I’m buried, make sure I’m well dressed. I’d prefer to be wearing a hat—this hat, my pink cloche.” She reached for her purse on the edge of the table, opened it, felt inside, and pulled out a photograph. “Make sure this goes down with me.” She handed me a snapshot of her and Odd Eide standing outside a brick building, dressed to the nines. The resemblance between generations—Odd, Harry, Gus, and his son, Tom—was uncanny. They were all the same men, just wearing different shirts and trousers. “It will be in this purse, which will be in my closet. That is my final wish.”
The waiter brought Rebekah’s stew and set it before her, then laid my salad in front of me and offered to refill our teacups. Once he left, Rebekah felt for her spoon with one hand and the rim of the bowl with the other. Before taking a bite, she lifted her blank eyes to me and said, “Thank you,” then chewed slowly, her eyes closed. When she opened them, she said, “Miss Lovig—Berit—you’ve been very good to me. I couldn’t have lived as well as I did without you.”
She didn’t eat another bite of her stew, and when I finished my salad we left. She asked me to walk her down the Lighthouse Road. It was warm and breezy and she covered her hat with her hands. Once we got to the lake, she just stood there. No easy thing for her. I asked if I could help but she shushed me. She waited there for a minute, feeling the wind on her face.
“Will you take me back, please?” she said.
And I did.
The next morning I woke to the telephone ringing. It was Janice from the home. Could I come quickly? When I hurried there, Janice was at the front door. She squeezed my hands and walked me down the hallway to the room where Rebekah lay in her bed, the sheet pulled up to her neck. Her eyes were closed. She was still as a stone.
“She passed away about an hour ago,” Janice said.
I dropped to my knees at the bedside, and reached under the sheet for her hand, which was still warm.
“She asked that we call you when this happened,” Janice explained. “You were the only person who ever visited her, Berit.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re a saint. She would’ve died five years ago if not for you.”
I looked out that sad window, at the dead trees and the emerald-green grass on the knoll. “Isn’t it strange,” I said, “how different our men and women die?”
“Most of the folks here, men and women alike, they sit around all day begging to die. They’ve had enough. They don’t want to eat or sleep or go to the bathroom. They certainly don’t want to be sick anymore. They don’t even care to be visited.” She moved her hand from my shoulder and pushed a lock of hair from Rebekah’s forehead. “This one, she did want to live. Fiercely, in fact. And we all loved her for it. She was never sick. Never had headaches or colds or indigestion. The doctor came once every year, but there was never anything wrong. She had the constitution of a hunk of granite.”
“Then how did she die?”
“Without complaint.”
—
I called Harry from the front desk. “Rebekah Grimm has passed away.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line before he said, “Today?”
“Yes. Around seven o’clock this morning.”
Another pause. “I guess she couldn’t stand the thought of another bowl of the oatmeal they serve up there.”
“I guess not.”
“You’re there?”
“I am.”
More silence. A deep breath.
“I was with her yesterday. We had lunch at the Traveler’s.”
“Gus mentioned seeing you.”
Now we were both quiet for a moment. “Yesterday, she gave me all her instructions. It’s like she knew she was about to go.”
“She knew everything, didn’t she?”
“Harry, stop. There’s no need for that today.”
“No need. You’re right.” He took a slow, deep breath. “Is there anything you’d like me to do?” It was as if he was at the market, offering to pick up a pound of butter.
“Do you want to come up here?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Harry, love, your mother just died. It’s just you and me talking now.”
“Let me know if there’s anything I need to do,” he said. “I’ll be happy to pay for any arrangements. Just say the word, eh? In the meantime, I’ll be down at the fish house.”
“Harry. She’s your mother.”
“I never had one of those,” he said, and hung up the phone.
—
My first instinct was to scold him. To march right down to the fish house and give
him a good talking-to. But as that morning moved along—first the doctor, then Mace Washburn from the mortuary—I became less and less judgmental. I remembered when my own mother passed away. This was some five years before Rebekah’s death. Harry came with me, stood at my side, offered his handkerchief when I cried. He said he was sorry and put his strong arm around me.
The strange thing was, standing beside my mother’s open coffin, I couldn’t really see her. All those years I lived only a hundred miles up the lakeshore, even as often as we saw each other, which was pretty frequently, she had become someone else. She became a person I only used to know, and not very well at that. My father was an even more distant memory.
And so I became as much Rebekah’s daughter as theirs. Two days after I got that call from Janice, we buried Rebekah in the hillside cemetery. Her coffin was silk-lined. We put her pink cloche on her gray head. We dressed her in a beautiful gown. Down in the cellar at Mace Washburn’s mortuary, I slid the picture of her and Odd Eide into her hand before he closed the coffin lid.
Merely a handful of reliable citizens gathered in the cemetery. I stood among them, huddled against a faint summer rain. I remember looking up the hill and seeing Harry and Gus and Signe. She’d come home for the occasion. They all stood beside Odd’s grave marker, looking down as Rebekah was lowered into the earth. It was nearly gallant, Harry’s being there at all.
I watched Harry and his children as the pastor spoke of dust and life eternal. I thought solemner words had never been whispered on that hillside. But of course more solemn words were just waiting. They always were. They always will be.
EVERY PERSON, I have come to believe, has a moment or a place in life when all four points of the compass converge, from when or where their life finally takes—for better or for worse—its fated course. For some, like myself, whose moment came when Harry Eide knocked on my door with a handful of butterworts, it’s a quiet moment. I knew, or anyway hoped, that the very scene that did come to pass eventually would. I had imagined it a thousand times. I had believed in it. And, most luckily, I knew it when I saw it and lived the rest of my life accordingly.