Wintering

by Peter Geye

  But I could have told you, sitting in the corner of that hospital and watching that man’s suffering, that this was a godless business. The only credit I was willing to give providence was for making our winters what they were, and for making Harry the man who he was and his situation as devilish a thing as anyone could ever imagine.

  It seems so recently that I sat through that night. So little time since the great happiness of my life came to bloom. It’s true I hardly knew Harry then. And it’s true I didn’t know exactly why I’d gone to the hospital or what I expected to find once I got there. Certainly I had no idea what he’d been through in the months he’d been gone, or any sense of what it was that drove him into the wilderness in the first place, but I did know—sitting there that night—that the care he was receiving in that hospital room would have less to do with his survival than my love of him would. I knew this because of how powerfully my feelings were welling up in me. And I was right.

  First I sat there and thought about all the lost time. Not his stint on the borderlands but all the time before that. The years since I’d first laid eyes on him in the winter of 1937 and the day we’d stood there with the butterworts six months later. It pained me to think of what had been squandered to those years. It pained me also to think of what Lisbet had gained instead: Gus and Signe, their beautiful home on the river, all of that time with Harry, all the dusky nights and bright mornings, all the happiness of a full life. I even wished for the spats and sadness and hard and hateful moments that I knew they had and that we, too, would inevitably have shared. All of it should have been mine.

  Now, before you judge me I should say that I knew even then what an ugly thing it was to covet. But I had waited. I had been patient. I had lived my life and had done so without objection. Indeed, I had lived it as well as I could. All the friends I had. All the books I’d read. All the quiet and soulful evenings when I’d felt near to bursting because of how beautiful this place was. All the snowfalls and sunrises. All this added up to a life of plenty, that’s for sure. And as I sat there, watching Harry not die, all those things, and everything else, was suddenly larger and more stunning because I saw what I’d always really known—that I would love this man.

  It’s an amazing thing—the most amazing, in fact—to sit through a night and know in the morning that you are in love. That it’s not a dream or a fantasy or something to covet, only something to fill you up. There are those people who say it’s a folly or that only fools rush in, but I have lived all three ways—without it, with wanting it, and with it in my hands—and I say the latter’s by far the best.

  —

  Before it was even light outside, I opened my eyes to old Willem Lundby standing above Gus, holding his notebook mid-inquiry, his badge on his chest. Gus was picking pieces of dried fruit from a plastic bowl. Before Willem noticed I was awake, I closed my eyes again and listened.

  “So you never saw Charlie Aas?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You never saw his plane?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Because no one has seen Charlie or his plane for coming up on ten days now. The last time someone did see him, he was heading over the hills above town.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying. My dad and me, we were just wintering.”

  “And where did you say you were wintering?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “You don’t? Really?”

  “No, sir. I don’t know exactly. Somewhere up on the borderlands. We got lost.”

  “Huh. So you got lost?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And not even Charlie in his plane could find you?”

  “Not even God could have found us.”

  “What about your old man’s foot over there? He step in a wolf trap?”

  Gus looked over at his father. “We had a hunting accident.”

  “A hunting accident?”

  Gus nodded.

  “Your old man never poached a day in his life, so why start now?”

  “We had to eat. We were trying not to starve.”

  “Had to eat.” Willem shook his head. “Good God almighty,” he said, and shook his head, flipped back through his notebook, tapped his pencil on his mustache. “Most folks figure Charlie went up to find you and your dad. On account of the hot water your old man put him in.”

  “How could he find us, though?”

  Willem looked up from his notebook. “That’s what I want to know, son. Or, rather, I’m wanting to know what happened when he did.”

  “But he didn’t. Nobody could find us. I told you that. We couldn’t even find ourselves.”

  On it went like this for some time, Willem sure there was a connection to be made, and Gus, still nibbling on his dried fruit, insisting there was not. In the end, Willem smiled and shook his head and said, “I’ll be damned. You Eides can really tell a story after all.” He pocketed his notebook and pencil and took his brown felt campaign hat off the chair beside the bed and put it on his bald head. “I just hope your old man tells the same story when he wakes up.”

  —

  Maybe Harry had been awake during Willem’s questioning of Gus. Maybe they’d talked it through before, on those days they spent escaping from the wilderness. Maybe he simply knew through their consanguinity what Gus would have told Willem or anyone else like him. Maybe—and least likely, I think—he actually was amnesiac and simply couldn’t remember the details of their last days. Maybe their story was merely telling itself. Whatever the case, when Harry woke the next morning and Willem came back to put his campaign hat on the chair beside his bed, the story did stay the same, what parts of it he could remember, anyway.

  Ana assured Willem that it was natural Harry could have lost some of his memory. Hypothermia did that, stripping things from your mind. And even if the hypothermia hadn’t, the shock and trauma of their experience might well have. Indeed, that was likely, too. So Willem left again, the story still the same.

  A week after Freddy and Marcel Riverfish delivered them to the emergency room, they came back to drive them home. Or to what was left of it. Lisbet had moved into the same attic apartment where I’d spent so much of my life, an irony that’s still not lost on me. (It wouldn’t be long before she left Gunflint altogether, a divorcee headed back to Chicago and whatever might have been there.)

  The whereabouts of Charlie Aas was the only thing Gunflinters talked about the rest of that winter. Many folks were ready to believe that he’d merely skipped the country and had flown his plane into Canada to avoid his local legal troubles, which were by then considerable. The authorities would find it impossible to prove he’d killed George, but all the rooting around they’d done investigating that charge had unearthed dozens of other crimes on top of the good work the Tribune reporter had done. By the time Charlie left Gunflint for the last time he’d already had his real-estate license revoked, he’d been placed on unpaid leave as mayor, and his wife—long-suffering—had filed for divorce. His daughter, Cindy, hadn’t spoken to him in months, not since she’d been brought down to Duluth to get better in the psych ward at St. Luke’s.

  There were others who believed his last flight was a suicide mission. These were predominantly the same people who blamed the Cubans for JFK’s assassination. Folks like Len Dodj, who, instead of being with Charlie on the borderlands, was mopping the floors at the hospital where Harry and Gus ended up. Matti Haula was seen plenty around town, usually plunked down at the Traveler’s Hotel, and he had his own theories about where his pal had disappeared to.

  But no one knew, not even Lisbet. She told Willem first and then the federal authorities who came later that when Charlie left on that January morning she knew neither where he was going nor who was with him. I never doubted the veracity of this. No one else did, either.

  —

  It wasn’t until early April that the speculation came to an end. A Canadian trapper on a lake called Hagne—deep in the Quetico—found Charlie’s Ces
sna, undamaged and empty but for a pack of American cigarettes, a box of rags, and three empty Mason jars. A twenty-gallon jug of airplane fuel sat on the ice outside the plane.

  The trapper reported his find to the ranger at the Cross Lake Station two days later, and in turn he dispatched a party to retrieve the plane. Because by then air-traffic restrictions were already in place for the entire borderlands wilderness, Charlie’s plane being where it was at all made this a criminal investigation from the outset. But the search lasted only one day and included only the three men whom the ranger had sent out there. By the time the plane was linked to Charlie, and Willem and the federal investigators were alerted, he’d been given up for dead.

  Charlie Aas, and the two men who’d been with him, left no trace.

  —

  “This is your first time back here?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about when you were searching for your father?”

  “I stopped below the lower falls that night.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder as though to say, Down there.

  “Is it strange?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” He stepped up to the railing on the lookout and peered over the edge. “In a way it’s like I never left. Lately, it sometimes feels like that.”

  There was still snow in the woods, and ice knurling from the fissures above and below the falls, but the birch trees upriver were greening.

  “Do you think it’s true that people have thrown pianos and cars down there?” Gus said, pointing at the Devil’s Maw.

  “I’ve heard those stories, too.”

  He looked around. “How could you even get a piano up here?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know whether to hate you or thank you, Gus.”

  He looked at me like I’d slapped him.

  “I know you meant no harm. I’m just certain of that. But you have to understand something about all that you’ve told me.”

  He stepped away from the railing, toward me. “What is it, Berit?”

  It was only as I stood there looking at the falls that the notion had come to me at all. Rather, it was only by standing there that I was able to start making sense of it myself. “We almost never talked about that year, your father and I. When we first started seeing each other I asked him what happened up there. He told me only what he’d always told the authorities. He said the story was out there for anyone who wanted to hear it. As though the whole thing had been written in some book.”

  Gus now wore the expression of a scolded child.

  “I believe there was only one other time,” I continued. “This was maybe five years ago. I asked him about it after Charlie’s wife, Maddy, passed away. In fact, I didn’t even ask him about that winter, simply what he thought had happened to Charlie.” I looked at Gus, who was standing so near I could’ve reached up and touched his cheek. “Your father said that Charlie probably got lost in the woods and froze to death up on the Îles des Chasseurs. He said he hoped he’d died slowly.”

  He had such an expectant look on his face, Gus did. Like I held the secret answer to the whole riddle. He seemed almost to be tipping over. So much that I put my hands up as though to catch him. “I don’t understand,” he finally managed to say.

  I took a step back. “We were together for more than thirty years, Gus. Think of that. He knew me better than anyone. A hundred times better.”

  He still looked at me like he couldn’t understand.

  “And all that time,” I explained to him, the falls rushing, the falling water rising again in cold mist, “I did not know him. Actually,” I said quickly when he raised his hand to object, “I meant to say I didn’t know one of the most important things about him. His secret, if you will. All you’ve told me, it’s got me wondering if it changed who he was—if it changed who we were together?”

  There’s a little wooden bench up there on the lookout, and I sat down on it. I felt dizzy. I put my hand to my head and tried to press the whirling sensation out of it with my fingertips.

  Gus sat down beside me. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It seemed wrong for him to apologize, and I told him as much.

  “I didn’t give enough consideration to how this story would affect you,” he said. “I really didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  I looked at him and saw that boy in the hospital bed all those years ago. For a long time I kept looking. Also seeing someone else.

  When he started talking, I could barely hear his voice above the river. “When we got back, after Dad got home from the hospital, I used to sit around the house with him. Just waiting and hoping he’d say something. Anything. An apology, sure. That’s what I wanted most. But eventually I would’ve happily taken a simple glance.”

  He scooted even closer to me now. “I had no idea what was happening, since my mom and Signe were staying down at the apothecary—it was only me and Dad. Not so different, really, than it had been in that shack.

  “In my memory he never spoke at all, but he must have. Just not about what had happened. So it was mine to live with, that winter, as it turned into spring. Mine alone. It began to seem—and I’m sure this sounds crazy—like he wasn’t even there. That I was alone again up on the borderlands.” Now he paused and took my hands, exactly like he had the morning after Harry disappeared, back in November. “I should’ve been more thoughtful, Berit. Should have considered how hard it would be for you to hear all this. I didn’t, and I am truly sorry.”

  “I was never anxious to know much about the things your father kept to himself. He never told me about the war. I know very little about his marriage to your mother. At least not as told by him. He was intent to remember the good times, the happy times, of his life.”

  “My God. I’m such a fool.”

  “That’s not true.”

  He let go of my hands and gazed down between his feet for a long time. I thought of so many things in those moments. I thought of Harry, of course. Of how much I missed him and how much I loved him and how much I would’ve given to have him sitting there next to us. I would’ve gladly traded whatever time I have left on this earth for one more hour with him. But I also thought about Gus and his adventures up there—I glanced above the falls—and how it still wasn’t finished. It never would be. And anyway, weren’t my memories as much a part of Harry as he was of them? Especially now? I could let it all be. Could leave it all just as it had been. That was my prerogative, right?

  I turned to Gus. “Don’t fret about it, please. Nothing could change how I felt about your father. Nothing in this world, much less something that happened so long ago.”

  When it was time to go Gus stood and offered me his hand, helped me up, and said, “Are you ready for the long walk back?”

  “I guess I’d better be.”

  We took one more long look down at the Devil’s Maw and turned to go.

  —

  What I didn’t tell Gus as we walked through the woods back home—what I might have told him, and maybe should’ve—was that I’d been up here myself only a week before. The walk had been even harder than I knew it would be, especially for an old girl like me, but I’d wanted to make it alone. To be the first to visit.

  I didn’t bring flowers, as I perhaps should have, but only that pompom from Harry’s red hat. I brought it along with the last bits of my anger and threw it all into the river above the maw. I watched them funnel into the chute that dropped into the hole and saw them disappear. And I was content that my final gifts would find the bottom and be gone forever. And that maybe Harry’s spirit or his soul or some such might see the pompom and know that I’d not stopped thinking of him. And that I never would.

  THE DAY BEFORE the ribbon cutting, I walked down to the outfitters on the end of the Lighthouse Road. In the back of the shop, behind the Duluth packs and cook kits, they keep a supply of maps. One of the kids who work there came back to help me.

  “Miss Lovig,” she said. I think she was one of the Veilleux girls. “Are you planning a canoe trip?”<
br />
  “I’ve never set foot in a canoe,” I said, hoping I sounded playful, as I’d meant to.

  “Most folks looking at the maps back here are planning a trip. That’s all.”

  “Once upon a time I might’ve tried it. But these days I prefer my feet on solid ground.” Now I smiled, trying to assure her I wasn’t the old crank people so often mistake me for. “But I am looking for a map. Maybe you can help me.”

  “Of course.”

  “There’s a lake up in the Quetico called Hagne. I’d like to see it on a map.”

  If this girl knew that lake had any significance, she didn’t let on. “I’m not sure where that is, but we can figure it out.” She pulled a map from one of the slots below, one of the yellow Fisher Maps. E-15, it read in the upper right-hand corner. “This is the whole boundary waters–Quetico wilderness.” She smoothed it atop the rack. “Almost all of it, anyway. You said it’s in the Quetico? What’s its name again?”

  “Lake Hagne. Or Hagne Lake. It’s a big one.”

  She ran her finger across the map. It was painted red, her fingernail, and it went right to a spot in the middle of the map. “Hagne Lake.” Now she reached below for another map, F-18. “This is the map of that area.” She laid it beside the other. “Here’s Hagne Lake.” Again with her red fingernail.

  “Thank you,” I said. She didn’t leave, so I said “Thank you” again.

  Then she did step away, saying that if I needed anything else I should give her a shout. Before I’d even looked back down she stopped and added, “I can’t wait to see the history place. Our whole family’s coming.”

  I looked over at her and smiled. “That makes me glad. Pray for some sunshine.”

  She went off toward the front of the store.

  First I studied the map of the whole wilderness and noted, in the key, that each inch equaled two miles. Therefore, the full map from west to east covered eighty miles, fifty miles from north to south. Four thousand square miles. Was that right? There must have been a thousand lakes. A hundred streams and rivers. In the middle of it all was Hagne Lake, my eyes drawn back to it from everything else like it had a magnetic pull.