Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

Noah did. He placed it before his father.

“This,” Olaf said, making a wide gesture that encompassed the room, the jars on the counter, the two boxes on the table, the house in general, “this stuff all belongs to you two. We have some business to take care of.” He unscrewed a Mason jar. “This is your inheritance,” he said, pulling a block of frozen hundred-dollar bills from the jar. “Round about two hundred thousand dollars. You split it. On top of that, there’s another fifty grand, plus or minus, in the bank. This is all in a file marked ‘Lake Superior Savings and Loan.’ The bank is in Gunflint. You’re both on the account.”

“Jesus, Dad,” Noah said, looking at Solveig, whose face was frozen in shock. “That’s an awful lot of cash to have in the freezer.”

Olaf nodded as if in agreement. “A lifetime of savings,” he said. “I don’t know how it works in terms of claiming the inheritance — tax-wise, I mean — but you two can figure it out. You’re both beneficiaries on a small life insurance policy, too. By small I mean small, probably not worth a bag of bread crumbs.” He furnished another file marked “Life Insurance Policy.”

“Aside from the cash, all I have is the house and the land. People say property values up here are booming, but I have no idea what it’s worth. Anyway, don’t sell it. Your grandpa built this house and it belongs in the family.”

“Slow down a minute,” Noah said. He stood up, looked at the Mason jars lining the counter. He counted them. There were ten. “Hold on.”

“Dad,” Solveig said, her voice uncertain, “this is all very surprising.”

Olaf looked back and forth between them. “What? I’m executing my will. This is something we have to do. Bear up, will you?”

Solveig buried her face in her hands. Noah stood in the middle of the room, equidistant from the two of them. He felt his pulse quickening.

“Sit down, would you, Noah? And stop moping, Solveig. You’ve moped enough, there’s no need for it.”

Solveig persisted. Noah could not move.

“Please,” Olaf said without kindness, “sit down.”

Noah stepped to the chair and sat down beside Solveig.

Olaf cleared his throat. “Listen, you two, there are things you need to know about. Business, all right?” Without waiting for a reply he continued, “This is the deed for the house. Taxes are paid through next year. They were twenty-eight hundred dollars this year. I’m putting all this information in a file labeled ‘Estate.’ ” He held up a brown accordion file, then tied it shut.

“The rest of this stuff is all yours.” He removed from the box something wrapped in newspaper. He tore it away. It was a ski jumping trophy. “CLASS FIVE, FIRST PLACE, 1966,” he read from the engraved brass plate. “CLOQUET SKI CLUB JUNIOR INVITATIONAL.”

It was, Noah remembered, the first trophy he’d ever won. A brass-plated ski jumper in flight sat on a white marble base. He took it from his father. “I remember this. I remember the day. Before I got the trophy you told me I had to shake the man’s hand.”

“There’s a box of these things out in the shed. I pulled this one. I remembered it, too.” He searched the box for a red folder. “This is yours,” he said to Solveig, handing her the folder. Inside was a Chopin score with a pink ribbon stapled to it.

She clearly recognized it.

“You were a freshman in high school,” Olaf said. “Nineteen seventy-nine, third prize at the city competition. I loved to listen to you play.”

He presented each of them with relics of their youth. Old report cards and school projects, acceptance letters to colleges, pictures of prom dates, newspaper articles from the Herald about ski jumping tournaments, piano recitals, commendations for planting trees on Arbor Day. The right person might have fashioned a biography for either of them from the miscellany that now sat spread out on the coffee table. By the time he’d finished unpacking the folders and boxes, his energy was flagging. He had one box left.

“These are your mother’s figurines,” he said, unwrapping a miniature ceramic ballerina. “For the goddamn life of me, I never understood why she liked these things.” He unwrapped another figure, a two-inch-tall man in a tuxedo and top hat. He held it up as if to prove his point. “You get the picture,” he said, wrapping them back in newspaper. “There’s other stuff, too. Just be careful going through it. Who knows what’s hidden in this house?”

Noah said, “Dad, who keeps their life savings in Mason jars? Why isn’t the money in the bank? Why isn’t it invested?”

“Never my thing,” Olaf said, as if the matter had but one simple answer. “You got your paycheck, you cashed it, put a little in savings, a little in checking, otherwise you managed with what you had.”

“We’re talking about two hundred thousand dollars.”

Solveig asked, “What are we supposed to do with all of it?”

“Whatever you want. Solveig, sweetheart, it’s yours now.”

Olaf’s voice, Noah thought, was deteriorating with each word he spoke. No amount of coughing or throat-clearing helped. This lent his words an almost religious timbre that was as hypnotic as it was sad.

“We are not dropping you in the middle of this lake,” Solveig said suddenly, in a voice now controlled. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Absolutely ridiculous.”

“Please listen to me,” Olaf said.

Solveig started again but stopped. Noah could not speak.

“Are you done? If you’re done I’d like to say what I have to say,” Olaf said. He looked at each of them in turn. “When you get to be as old as me, and when you look back on your life, it’s impossible not to regret every other step you took. I do anyway. But you also get to see the wonderful things. The most wonderful of the wonderful things for me were days spent here, with the two of you, when you were little kids, before so much went to shit. The happiest days of my life were our Christmas mornings here. I remember the looks on your faces as you pulled toys and candy from your stockings. And your Christmas oranges. I remember feeling like, My God, these are my children! Sometimes the only good things I can remember are those mornings and the huge feeling that came with them.” He paused, set his chin on his chest in that gesture now familiar to Noah. “If that sounds sad or like I’m feeling sorry for myself, it’s not meant to.

“Anyway, I’m not a religious man. I reckon the nearest we come to an afterlife is how we’re remembered by our children. I figure the more often you think of me when I’m gone, the happier my ghost will be. If I’m here, where I belong, as opposed to some cemetery in Duluth or Fargo where you’d come once every ten years, you’ll remember me a little more often.

“So,” he said, putting his hands together as if to pray, “I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, but a dead man’s a dead man no matter where he rests. I want you to bury me here. The lake is more than a hundred and fifty feet deep over by the falls. Do it there. Nobody will ever know.”

Noah looked at his father. He looked at Solveig. “Since when are you so eloquent?” he asked his father.

“I’ve been practicing that speech for a long time.”

LATER THAT MORNING Solveig put her suitcase in the backseat of her truck. She turned to Noah. “Could you do it?”

Noah closed the truck door. He looked first at the house, then at the shed. “I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine, that’s for sure.”

“Who would come up with a plan like that?” She was thinking out loud more than asking a question. Or so Noah thought.

“How would I explain it to the authorities? It would look suspicious,” he said.