William Krueger: Thunder Bay

He was still alive, according to the Internet, and living in Thunder Bay, Canada, where NMM was headquartered. He was a widower with two grown children. And that, according to the Web information, was part of the problem. His wife had died six years earlier, and in the time since, Wellington had become a notorious recluse. Again, the comparisons with Howard Hughes. Speculation was that the industrialist had gone into a deep depression following his wife’s death. Although he was still on the board of NMM, he no longer ran the company, nor did he appear in public. I couldn’t find any recent photographs of him, but I did find several taken earlier in his life. His hair was black, his face angular and high cheeked, his eyes dark and penetrating. Did he look like Meloux? Or like the photograph in Meloux’s gold watch? I honestly couldn’t say.

Near the end, I found one odd, but compelling, piece of information that, as much as anything else, pointed toward a connection between Wellington and Meloux. As a child, one of Henry Wellington’s favorite possessions had been a stuffed cormorant given to him by his mother. The cormorant is one of the clans of the Ojibwe. Henry Meloux was cormorant clan.

By the time I clicked off the computer, Annie had come home and both she and Jo had gone to bed. It was after midnight. Jenny was still out with Sean.

I went to the kitchen and fished a couple of chocolate chip cookies out of the cookie jar on the counter. The jar was shaped like Ernie from Sesame Street. We’d had it since the kids were small. I poured some milk and sat down at the table.

Moths crawled the screen on the window over the kitchen sink, seeking the light. Occasionally, I heard small thumps. The grasshoppers, who seemed never to sleep. Jenny hadn’t left for Iowa City yet, but the house felt different already, emptier.

I could have gone to bed but didn’t feel like sleeping. I was thinking about Meloux, who had a son out there-an old man himself now- who’d been even less than a stranger to his father. And I was thinking about my own children, Jenny especially. I thought I knew them pretty well, but Jenny’s hesitation, if that’s what it was, to step forward into the future she’d worked so hard to open for herself worried me. It wasn’t like her. Sean was pressuring her, I figured. He was basically a good kid. I’d never been unhappy that he and Jenny had decided to date only each other. In my day, we’d called it going steady. Now it was “exclusive.” Whatever. Sean came from a good family. His mother was a math teacher, his father a pharmacist. They were Methodist, not Catholic; no big deal. Good kid and good family notwithstanding, I wasn’t going to stand by and let them make a mistake they’d both regret somewhere down the line. When you live in a town your whole life, you see the arc of those marriages that began with a high school romance. More often than not, when the teenage passion fades, and it always does, they’re left with the realization of all they wouldn’t know about themselves and others-lovers especially-and sooner or later one of them wonders and wanders and the marriage becomes history. Pathetically predictable.

The front door opened. A half minute later Jenny stood in the kitchen doorway.

“Still up, Dad?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Have a good time with Sean?”

“Okay.”

“You’re still on target for Iowa, right?”

She looked at me warily. “Mom said something, didn’t she?”

“We talked.”

I hadn’t touched one of the cookies. I offered it to her. She accepted and took a bite.

“Did he pop the question?” I asked.

“No.”

“Would you go with him to Paris anyway?”

“Dad, I don’t know.” A strong note of irritation.

“And if he does pop the question?”

Her blue eyes bounced around the room, as if looking for a way to escape. “See, this is why I didn’t want you to know. I knew you’d interrogate me.”

“Interrogate? I just asked a question.”

“It’s the way you asked. And it’s only the beginning.”

“Jenny, I’m your father. I ought to be allowed to question your thinking and your actions. It’s what I’ve done for eighteen years. And if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s served us both pretty well.”

“It has.” Her face was intense. Beautiful and serious. “It’s helped make me who I am, a woman capable of making her own decisions.” Each word had the feel of cold steel.

“I never suggested you weren’t.”

“I love him, Dad. He loves me.”

Love? I wanted to say. What do you know about love, Jenny? Do you know what it’s like to hold on by your fingernails through doubt and deception and betrayal and despair? To go on hoping when you’re so exhausted by the struggle of love that giving up would be easy? To believe in the face of all contradiction? To walk alone in the dark — because in all love there are times of heartbreaking darkness — until you find that small flame still burning somewhere? Oh, Jenny, I wanted to say, there’s so much you don’t know.

What I said was, “Will you talk to us before you make a decision?”

“Yes, all right?” she snapped.

She turned away without saying good night and started upstairs, but she stopped. “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I’d like to go with Sean for a drive along the North Shore tomorrow. I asked Jodi to fill in for me. She said she would. Is it okay?”

“Go,” I said.

I listened to her feet hammer up the stairs.

I turned out the kitchen light and trudged up to bed.

Early the next morning I went to the hospital to see Meloux. He was still in the ICU, still looking like he had a toehold in the next world. His eyes were closed. I thought he was sleeping and I turned to go.

“You have news?”

His eyelids lifted wearily. Behind them, his almond eyes were dull.

“Maybe,” I said.

One of the monitors bleeped incessantly. A cart with a squeaky wheel warbled past his door. In another room someone moaned. This had to be hard on Henry. He was used to the song of birds in the morning all around his cabin. If he were to pass from this life, it shouldn’t have been there in that sterile place but in the woods that had been his home for God knows how long.

“Tell me,” he said.

I walked to his bedside.

“I found a woman, Henry. Maria Lima. Her father was a man named Carlos Lima.”

Meloux’s eyes were no longer dull.

“Carlos Lima,” he said. The name meant something to him, and not in a good way.

“She passed away many years ago.”

He didn’t seem surprised. A man as old as Henry probably expected everyone from his youth to be dead by now.

“She was married, Henry. To a man named Wellington.”

From the way his face went rigid, I might as well have hit him with my fist.

“Wellington,” he repeated.

“Maria Lima Wellington had a son,” I went on. “She named him Henry.”

His eyes changed again, a spark there.

“And he was born seventy-two years ago.”

“What month?”

“June.”

He seemed to do the calculation in his head and was satisfied with the result.

“Is he…?”

“Alive? Yeah, Henry, he is. He lives in Thunder Bay, Canada. Just across the border.”

Meloux nodded, thinking it over.

“I want to see him,” he said.

“Henry, you’re not getting out of here until you’re better.”

“Bring him to me.”

“It was a miracle just finding him. Bringing him here? I don’t know, Henry.”

“You did not believe you would find him.”

This was true, though I hadn’t said anything like that to Meloux. Somehow he’d known my thoughts. Typical of the old Mide.