William Krueger - Purgatory Ridge

Far out of place among all that memory, a thought came to John LePere-the dry suit he kept stowed in the compartment in the cabin of the Anne Marie.

His eyes snapped open. “Jesus,” he said. “Of course.”

He leaped up and fought his way through the deckhouse. The Anne Marie was listing severely, her stern ready to disappear beneath the swells. As he reached the companionway down to the forward cabin, the lights flickered, but they didn’t die. Lindstrom no longer lay on the floor. He’d managed to crawl partway up the steps to the deckhouse. He looked dead and LePere simply stepped over him. In the forward cabin, LePere threw open the storage compartment door. The diving suit lay folded on a shelf, wet from the deep water in the cabin. As LePere made his way back to the companionway, he saw that Lindstrom wasn’t, in fact, dead. The man was watching him.

“They got away,” LePere said with satisfaction. “Your wife and boy and O’Connor’s family. They all got away. All this for nothing.”

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” Lindstrom mumbled. He looked at the dry suit.

“For O’Connor,” LePere explained. “I think he’s got a chance.”

“No chance.”

“We’ll see.”

LePere didn’t waste any more time on Lindstrom. Up top, O’Connor had flopped over with the tilt of the boat. He was struggling to keep his head above water. LePere grasped him under his arms and began to pull him toward the bow, as far as possible from where the lake spilled over the stern.

“Listen to me, O’Connor,” LePere shouted. “You have a chance. I’m going to put this dry suit on you. It will keep the lake off you. The Coast Guard will come, I promise. This will probably hurt. I’m sorry.”

O’Connor stared at him and LePere didn’t know if he understood at all. He undid the life vest and removed it. He took off O’Connor’s shoes. Then he began the arduous task of pulling the tight vulcanized rubber over Cork O’Connor’s body and zipping it in place. He could feel the bow rising, the boat slipping deeper as he worked. He tugged the hood over O’Connor’s head, then began to work the life vest back on. At first, O’Connor had moaned in pain, but by the time the dry suit and vest were in place, he was limp and silent.

Christ, LePere thought, I’ve killed him.

At that same moment, the lights of the Anne Marie died.

In a flash of lightning, LePere saw O’Connor’s eyes spring open, and he felt a hard tug on O’Connor’s body, as if an invisible power were trying to pull him under the water that had followed them up the deck. LePere was confused. The water should have lifted O’Connor’s life vest and O’Connor with it. Instead, he was being dragged down. In the unfathomable black of the stormy night, LePere felt along the man’s body, down his legs, searching for what had snagged him. His hand touched a cold hand, touched icy fingers gripped hard around O’Connor’s ankle. In the next explosion of lightning, he saw Karl Lindstrom climbing from the lake, using Cork O’Connor to save himself.

“No you don’t, you son of a bitch,” LePere cried. He pried loose the fingers, and he grasped Lindstrom in his own strong arms. He worked his way to the port side of the bow well away from O’Connor, then undid his belt and buckled himself to the brass railing of the Anne Marie. “When she goes,” he shouted to Lindstrom, “you and me go with her.” Lindstrom struggled weakly, but LePere held him fast.

In little more than a minute, the boat went under and began its own long journey to the bottom of the lake. LePere held his breath as he was dragged deep into the black water. Lindstrom fought briefly, then was still. LePere maintained his grip on the man’s body a while longer, just to be certain, then let go.

Alone, John Sailor LePere continued down. As the boat swiftly descended, he felt his chest tighten, as if he were now in the grip of something enormous and overpowering, something that had always been waiting to embrace him. His lungs seemed ready to explode, and he became afraid, suddenly desperate not to release his hold on life. He reached down, fumbled with the buckle on his belt, but it was much too late. As the water pressure crushed his ribs, he opened his mouth to cry out. In that instant, Kitchigami filled him and took him into itself.

Cork was inside something thick, something that dulled his thinking, something he could not crawl out of. Even so, he knew what John LePere had done. He understood the sacrifice.

And he understood that now he was alone.

He felt the boat slip from under him. For a moment, the suck of it as it went under tried to pull him down, but the vest lifted him. His hands and his feet were cold. His face was cold. Sometimes when he tried to breathe, he swallowed water and coughed. The coughing hurt. He kept his eyes closed against the surge of the waves. That was easy. He had no strength to open them.

He sank into darkness often, and for long periods he was aware of nothing. Then he was suddenly staring up at a sky full of stars and a moon. The lake didn’t feel angry anymore. He was tired. It was night. He wanted to sleep.

He dreamed. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he went someplace where he could always have gone if he’d known the way; then he came back.

He opened his eyes and stared into the brightest light he’d ever seen, so bright it blinded him, yet he could not look away. Somewhere in the thick of his thinking, he remembered death came as a bright light, and he wondered, Am I dead?

A dark shape eclipsed the light. Cork saw that it was Jo’s face. She was so beautiful with the light behind her like a halo. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her, but he could not speak. So he smiled. The smallest of smiles. All he could muster before he felt himself begin to yield to darkness, to the sweet pull of oblivion, thinking his wife’s face was a good last vision, a good final gift to take with him into forever.

JO O’CONNOR STOOD in ash that covered the ground like snow. Around her as far as she could see, the bare, blackened trunks of pine trees rose up and scraped against an empty sky.

The rain had helped firefighters control and eventually extinguish the multitude of blazes that, for weeks, had been burning large areas of the North Woods. The old-growth white pines known as Our Grandfathers, sacred to the Ojibwe Anishinaabeg of the Iron Lake Reservation, had not been spared. With every breath, Jo took in the smell of char, of senseless destruction. She felt, as she had so often lately, a deep sense of loss and grieving.

“What a tragedy,” she said, then sighed.

Henry Meloux, who was among those who’d accompanied her to view the devastation, looked where she looked. His old face was soft and wrinkled. His brown eyes seemed amazingly calm. “Who can say what Kitchimanidoo is all about? We see little and understand less.”

Grace Fitzgerald had walked ahead of them with Scott and Stevie. Stevie looked back often to make certain his mother was still there. At a fallen pine, he stopped and bent down. Scott stooped beside him, and they peered intently at something on the ground.

“Mommy.” Stevie waved for Jo to come. “Look,” he said. “A flower.”

It was true. A small flower had thrust its yellow blossom up through the scorched earth and the ash.

“It’s like magic,” Stevie said.

“Not magic,” Meloux told him. “The way of Grandmother Earth. Come with me, Makadewagosh. I’ll show you other ways Grandmother Earth reveals her heart.”

Stevie grinned proudly at the name the old man now called him by. Meloux had kept a promise he’d made several weeks before when the boy and his father visited Crow Point. He’d bestowed upon Stevie another name, an Anishinaabe name. He called him Makadewagosh, which meant “silver fox,” for that was the name Meloux had dreamed. To Jo, who remembered her small son bathed in silver moonlight and slipping through the dark at Purgatory Cove to save them all, the name rang so true. Meloux led the two boys away a distance, pointing out things and talking softly as they walked.