Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

The bank was on the north end of town, and except for two raccoons, its parking lot was empty. He looked at his watch. The bank opened at eight. All morning he’d been feeling mixed up about hastening off with the inheritance. Though it was exhilarating in its way to think about the sudden boon of all that money — how could it not be? — he also thought anyone glancing at the situation would think it peculiar. A father so sick left alone, if only for a morning. An estranged son reaping a financial reward so significant. The simple fact was, he had assured himself repeatedly during the drive, that he’d never once imagined the possibility of an inheritance from the moment his father had called him until the first wad of frozen cash had been pulled from the first jar. Noah knew he could not have rested — much less taken care of the jobs around the house — until the money was safely deposited. His nature would not allow it. The sign before the bank flashed the temperature. Thirteen degrees.

Inside, two tellers stood behind the counter. A receptionist sat at a desk on the right. He walked toward the tellers, passing a table piled with jumper cables. A sign hanging above it enticed people with a free gift for opening a home-equity line of credit. It struck Noah as he hefted the duffel off his shoulder and onto the counter that it must be tough for a bank like this to stick it out, how with people like his father living in the hills above town, business must be difficult. Signs hung everywhere on the walls advertising auto loans, low-interest credit cards, and free ATM withdrawals.

“Good morning,” one of the young women behind the counter fairly sang. Her name, according to the placard before her, was Ellsie. Her cheery disposition seemed misplaced in that sullen town.

Noah explained his situation. “My father’s a customer,” he said. “So am I if he tells the truth. He hasn’t been here in a while. I’ve never been here. I’m not sure if you can help or not.”

She interrupted, “If you’re a customer here, I can help.”

Noah smiled. He nodded as if skeptical. “Here’s the thing, I have a huge deposit to make.”

“Have you filled out a deposit slip?”

“I mean huge. It’s cash.”

“We accept cash deposits,” she said. It took Noah a moment to realize she was joking.

“I have to count it,” he said, unzipping the bag to show her. “I’m sure this looks a little strange, but I promise there’s nothing fishy.”

Without a word Ellsie set a THIS TELLER CLOSED sign before her workspace and asked Noah to follow with a wave of her hand. She led him to an office with an empty desk. She asked him for the account number and his driver’s license. She copied this information on a Post-It note. “Okay,” she said. “You start counting it here, I’ll get the forms we need and fill them out. Put the money in stacks of fifty. Here”—she opened a desk drawer, took from it a box of rubber bands. “Remember, stacks of fifty, I’ll double-check it when I get back.”

For the next hour Noah counted the still cold hundred-dollar bills. Ellsie joined him a few minutes after she’d left. She verified his tally by running the stacks of money through a counting machine. Together they counted two thousand sixty-two hundred-dollar bills. When he explained how the money had ended up on the table, Ellsie assured Noah that stranger things had come to pass during her tenure at the bank. She moved the stacks of money from the table to heavy canvas bags. When they were finished she moved the bags into the vault. He signed the paperwork, inquired about wiring the money to banks in Boston and Fargo, and confirmed with her that his sister had equal access to the funds.

“Great,” Noah said. The transaction felt somehow incomplete, but he thanked her, took his empty duffel from the table, and turned to leave.

A couple blocks back toward the harbor was a place called the Blue Sky Café. He stopped for something to eat, ravenous.

A stack of the Duluth Herald leaned against the cash register. He bought one. In a booth that overlooked the village, he ordered coffee from a waitress whose gray hair rose in three layers of buns to a peak atop her head. Her apron was starched sheet-iron stiff. She brought the coffee on a saucer with sugar cubes and a miniature pitcher of cream. He ordered the Lumberjack: two eggs, pancakes, bacon, steak, juice, coffee. When the waitress asked if there was anything else, he ordered one of the pecan rolls from the bakery case in front of the store.

Seated around a horseshoe-shaped counter, ten or twelve men dressed in hunting gear ate breakfast and drank coffee. Outside, the placid harbor water shone black under the gray sky. He could see the street of boutiques and galleries ringing the harbor, but commerce in late morning was no more enthusiastic than it had been at eight. A woman walked her dog. Three men and a child stood before a pizzeria talking. The trees on the hills above town appeared bronzed, the sky above them offered little illumination.

While he waited for the food to arrive, an uneasy feeling came over him. He attributed it to his being in the café at all while his father rested sick at home. Though there was business to tend to — he had to call the hospital and his sister, and he’d had to deposit the money — it seemed extravagant to him to be back in civilization. He thought about this as his food arrived and he ate voraciously. He drank four or five glasses of water, his juice, and was finally brought a coffeepot for himself when the waitress admitted she couldn’t keep up with him. He buttered the pecan roll, salted the steak, and soaked the pancakes in maple syrup. As he ate he realized that his unease was easily enough explained. The anger and resentment and sadness that had colored the years of their estrangement were absent now. Not just absent but erroneous. What he’d mistaken for feelings of guilt at being in town were actually feelings of longing. He wanted to be back in the cabin, even felt a pull for the too-hot stove and the bland food, for the fishing lines in the water. He knew now that he could venture freely in the full range of his memories. No more caveats next to good times, or whole years’ forbidden recollection.

When he finished breakfast he pushed the plate across the table and spread the paper before him. It was eleven o’clock and he still had an hour before he could call the doctor at St. Mary’s. He skimmed the election coverage and read a feature on the economic doldrums gripping the shipping and steel industries. Everything suffered: taconite production, ship traffic, grain shipments, coal shipments. There were problems with the stevedore union, with the railways, with the mines. The economic implications were far-reaching, of course, to say nothing of grim. The forecast was even grimmer. The mayors of Duluth and Superior — in reelection mode, no doubt — were calling for tariffs on imported steel. Though it was interesting, Noah thought the article little more than a refrain. Some version of this story had been told since the first iron ore was ever mined in Minnesota, since the first ship full of taconite ever left Duluth harbor. Though it would have been impossible for Noah to dismiss the political and economic realities expressed in the article, it was not impossible for him to see that some things never changed.

But some things do, some things had. Something enduring had been built during the past week between him and his father. He could not name it, he only knew that it gave him permission to live the rest of his life. That was it. That huge, teetering part of him that for years had been resting on his resentment had been replaced by the whole story, bitterroot and all.

The bill at the restaurant was ten dollars and twenty-nine cents. He put a twenty on the table, rolled the paper under his arm, and walked back out into the cold hour before noon. He stopped at the Gunflint Trading Post and bought new socks and long underwear, a T-shirt with the words A LOON A TICK screen-printed across the chest, a pair of Carhartt jeans a size too big, and a pair of flannel boxers. He had the tags cut from everything.