Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

In a firm voice Olaf said, “I’ve lived a long time and deserve this much.” He bent to pick up the chain. “I know you think it’s ignorant or selfish or nuts , I guess, but the simple fact of the matter is that after you’ve lived as long as I have, after you’ve come to terms with everything you’ve wrecked in this world, everything you’ve loved, once it’s all tucked away and measured out, six more months or a year don’t matter anymore.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you anymore.” Now Noah sat down. “Do I understand you? Do you really believe the things you’re telling yourself?” He shook his head in disgust and in sadness. “Listen, there’s no way I’m going to chain you up and drop you out with the fish. You can’t ask for something like that. I’m glad I’m here and can help. But this is out of the question. You can just forget it.” Noah stepped to the door. “Don’t ask me again.”

Inside the house Noah tore through his bag, put on a flannel shirt, took his dirty jeans from the bedpost and a pair of leather gloves from a shelf by the door, and headed back outside, only stopping long enough to fetch the chainsaw and the full gas can from the back of the truck.

He hurried to the fallen oak. When he reached the tree he paused and looked down into the creek bed. He swung into the gulch, tugged on the cord, set the chain against the trunk of the tree, and pulled the trigger.

He worked first with the saw above his head. Balancing against the steep incline of the gulch’s wall, he let the saw rip through the oak as it rained sawdust on him. When the saw slipped through the top side of the trunk he flinched, expecting the tree to shift or fall when the first bole fell. It didn’t.

On the bank of the gulch ropy stalks of bramble grew from the clumps of rusty soil, and he used them to pull himself up. There had to be an easier way of doing this. He stepped onto the trunk. He started the saw again and tiptoed backward out onto the tree. It couldn’t have been much more than eight or ten feet above the ground, but it seemed much higher, especially when he looked toward the lake.

Measuring off a foot and a half, he set the saw onto the tree and hit the trigger. From this angle the saw worked much more easily. In less than half the time it had taken him to make the first pass from the underside, it cleaved the first stump. He made eight or ten more stumps from the trunk, and when he choked the saw off and looked behind him, he saw that he was a solid quarter of the way across and suspended above the nettle as if he were on the bowsprit of a ship.

His body thrummed with the lingering vibrations from the saw. He caught his breath, tightened the gloves on his hands, and brushed the sawdust from his sleeves. Now the hard part , he thought. He dropped back into the gulch, set the saw on the bank, and stacked the stumps into a pile at the base of the incline. Then he began hoisting them out of the creek bed. The first, narrower half of the bunch were light enough that he could toss them up. The second half required a plan. He managed to get the first big stump onto his shoulder. The thick bark bit his face as he crawled up the embankment. His feet churned in the loose soil. Laboring, the stump sliding around his neck — it must have weighed seventy-five pounds — the bark burning his neck, he imagined it crushing his ankle. He strained against the stump, finally rolled it up over the edge.

He collapsed onto the bank, half standing and half sitting, and felt his pulse throbbing in his wrists. Breathing heavily and sweating profusely again, he eyed the remaining half-dozen pieces of oak. If not right now , he thought, I’ll never finish . Besides, the wind funneling up the gulch felt fine. He took off a glove, felt the back of his neck, and saw blood on his fingertips. He stanched it with the collar of his shirt. After he caught his breath he hefted the other stumps from the gulch. When he rolled the last one over the lip, he crawled out himself.

The wheelbarrow was parked where they’d left it. In its rusty, dented bottom, shallow pools of water had formed. Noah carted it to the edge of the gully and muscled the two biggest pieces of sawn oak into it. The trail, with its tree roots, potholes, and rocks, made steering the barrow difficult. But he managed eight trips. On the last he stopped midway back and looked up at the ski jump. Several times since he’d been back he’d thought of climbing the rickety old thing, but each time the thought crossed his mind he’d been distracted. Now he set down the empty wheelbarrow and kicked his way through the overgrowth to the lopsided steps that led up to the base of the scaffold. There were four telephone poles supporting the top of it and two more midway up the inrun. On the left side of the ramp thirty steps made of two-by-fours were pounded into the plywood floor under the handrail. He took them two at a time.

When he got to the top he stood for a minute looking down the inrun. The wind — a headwind he fondly recalled — blowing almost violently now, caused the scaffold to sway. Beyond the takeoff, on the left, the coaching deck his father and grandfather used to huddle on had completely sunk in the overgrowth. It was easy to imagine them standing there, their hushed voices carrying up to him as he latched his boots into the cable bindings and lowered his goggles over the rim of his white leather helmet. It was the flattery he overheard on those mornings that gave him his first sense of vanity, though neither could tolerate his lack of concentration.

He had no trouble concentrating now. It looks so damn big , he thought. Though the jump was awfully small in contrast to the Olympic-sized jumps he’d competed on as a teenager, the years of forgetting almost entirely about the sport had skewed his perspective. The landing hill was overgrown with new trees and thistle, and the takeoff was buried in the scrub, but he could easily imagine the whole scene packed with snow. Even though the lake frothed in the wind, he could see ski tracks narrowing in the distance.

The brightness of the sun glinting off the snow, the cold toes and windburned cheeks, none of it was lost after all. His skis squeaking against the hard snow at the top of the jump before he pulled himself onto the inrun, the speed gained as he hurtled down the ramp, the serenity and silence of the flight, the camber of both his skis and his body in flight, the exultation of flight. The perfect instinct to land and the explosion of consciousness in landing. . none of it had been forgotten.

He looked back toward the house. Why had he been so quick to condemn the old man’s project in the shed? Why had he been so quick to deny him this favor? Didn’t the million mornings standing on that coach’s platform in the wicked wind and chill of the Minnesota winter add up to something?

For all his horror at the thought of dropping his old man in the lake, the idea was not altogether unbeautiful. Again he thought about the story his father had told him the night before, this time pausing to reflect on the type of eternity his father had so narrowly avoided. Maybe the will to be buried in the lake was born of the notion that it was his honest fate, not merely some screwball’s version of an interminable penance. None of which meant, Noah thought, that he’d be able to carry out the old man’s wishes.

He wheeled the last load of wood back to the yard, noticed the door of the shed still open. He saw his father working, could see, through the papery curtain and dirty glass, that the old man had somehow managed to lift the barrel of taconite onto his workbench.

The sight of it made his entire morning’s labor seem feigned.

SPANNING SIX OF the barrel staves, the words SUPERIOR STEEL & STEAMSHIP COMPANY were branded black. The barrel must be a hundred years old , Noah thought as he rubbed his thumb through the tarnished grooves of the lettering. He imagined piles of these barrels in the hull of an old turn-of-the-century bark, loaded with iron ore. He remembered this particular barrel hidden behind the furnace in the house on High Street.