Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

Finally he returned to the house. He scratched the frost from the kitchen window and read the temperature on the thermometer. It was below zero. He turned to regard his father. For a long time he looked at the shape beneath the quilt. He counted back the time. It had been only some hundred and sixty hours, a simple week ago, that he and his father and Natalie had eaten so festively the Norwegian feast she’d brought. Only three days before that he’d arrived here at the lake. And just two days before arriving he’d received his father’s call. The measuring of those days and hours confounded him in contrast to what lay ahead for the old man now. To what lay ahead for himself.

He stood before the stove blowing into his hands and tapping his toes. The question of whether or not to dress his father now came to him. He walked to the couch. He lifted the quilt. That ratty union suit appalled him. So did the messed hair, the toothless mouth, that pinky half gone. Noah covered him again and went into his father’s bedroom. In the small closet he saw the old man’s wardrobe. A corduroy jacket. Three pairs of woolen trousers sewn by Noah’s mother and distinguishable only by the wear at the cuff, at the knee. A white cotton shirt with a button-down collar. An assortment of plaid flannel shirts. On the shelf above these meager hangings a short stack of sweaters. Noah found the thickest one. He held it up. It had a roll-neck collar and patches on the elbows. He slid a pair of the wool trousers from a hanger. From the top drawer of the small chest in the room, Noah took a pair of red wool socks and went back into the great room.

He pulled the covers back again. With as much difficulty as trepidation he began dressing his father. He lifted the old man’s head and pulled the sweater over it. His rim of hair lay flattened. The lids of his eyes seemed almost translucent. Noah paused to look on them. The skin was the same gray color as his eyebrows and lashes, the same gray color as the sweater.

The sleeves of the sweater presented a problem he’d not expected. His father’s arms were stiff, seemed flexed at his side. It took a modest feat of strength for Noah to bend them at the elbow. He fixed the collar at the old man’s neck. He straightened the sleeves. Next he pulled the wool socks onto the feet. The feet too were stiff. The pants he slid on easily. He thought of putting on boots but was dissuaded by the rigid ankles. Instead he put a hat over his father’s head. He put mittens on his hands. Finally he wrestled the peacoat onto the man. Noah stood back. He stepped again toward Olaf, put his thumbs between his father’s lips, and pried his mouth open. He retrieved the dentures from their jar on the counter and pushed them into the old man’s mouth. With one hand on top of his father’s head and one beneath his chin, Noah muscled the lips together again.

He thought of hiking up the hill to the truck, of driving into Misquah to call his sister, but decided against it. Instead he removed his mother’s ashes from the shelf on which he’d placed them. He set them on the kitchen counter and stared at them as if she might materialize and give him counsel. His capacity for thought had diminished with his tasks, and when his mother offered no advice he decided to row his father across the lake.

He guided the sled down the hill a last time. On the dock he untied the rope from the sled. He put his father’s hands behind him and tied them together with a length of braided nylon rope he’d found in the shed. The arms resisted as if in protest. He thought how his father might have chastised him for the knot. It satisfied Noah in any case, and he proceeded with the barrel. It weighed more than his father, or so Noah reckoned. He laid the contraption on his father’s chest. He aligned the pieces of tubing with the old man’s legs and crisscrossed the chain behind his back, around his ankles, his father’s instructions returning to Noah unexpectedly. Noah could hardly believe how it all went together. He felt a small sense of pride at his part in its execution.

He managed to load his father onto the boat. He centered the old man and his anchor and stepped cautiously into the boat himself. The oars broke the ice easily. Between pulls he could hear the bow cutting through the ice. Midway across the lake the ice cleared and he was in open water. With his back facing his destination, he used the dock in front of him as his fix, knowing that if he kept in a straight line at about a forty-five-degree angle from the dock he’d end up abutting the cliff in the deep water.

He rowed. The wind bit at his neck and wrists and poured through his coat. He worked with absolute purpose, steadily and smoothly, his father balanced between the gunwales. The labor warmed him. He began to breathe hard. He kept his gaze on the dock, now so small a point of reference in the distance. He figured he was halfway, and when he paused to check saw that he was right. Again he turned, looked toward the dock. He saw upon it his father’s dog — or the ghost of a dog — his nose raised to the wind. Noah wiped his eyes to clear his vision. Then the dog was gone. He put his head down and dug the oars into the lake again.

And then he was at the spot where they’d fished so recently, so long ago. The sun at its apex reflected off the small waves that came with the winter wind. Except for the sound of them against the boat’s wooden hull there was no sound at all. He looked around. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but neither could he find it. He heard Solveig’s voice, her reticence, her declaration that she could not do it. He thought again of his mother’s ashes. He thought of Natalie’s innate confidence in him. Maybe he deserved it, for once. Some version of his father’s plea to bury him here replayed in his mind. There had been such elegance in it. And in the story of the Rag as his father had told it. There was his father now: dressed for winter, the afghan trailing in the water like a seining net.

Noah edged his father to starboard. He edged himself to port. The boat rocked. He tilted the platform. His father, rigid, splayed to the anchor, slid almost without a sound into the water. Instantly Noah put a hand into the water. He watched his father cartwheel toward the depths and out of view. It seemed to take forever.

Noah sat. He took the oars again, steered the boat around. He sculled back across the lake, thankful for the blinding whiteness.

Natalie still slept as he crested the last rise heading east into Duluth. The sun had just broken and cast its light onto the hills east and north of the city. A sight beyond his capacity to describe, but not to relish, which he did. It was the opposite season of his last arriving here, and the contrast in every way was lovely.

He followed the interstate down into the city. At this hour on a Saturday the roads were nearly vacant. He passed the first neighborhoods, the first industry. His ears popped. The harbor bloomed in the distance, all grays and inky blacks, the water coursing brilliantly and white beneath the sun. At the top of his view he saw the aerial bridge.

He nudged Nat. “Hey, sleepyhead. Look at this.”

She pulled her head from the pillow on which it lay next to the window. Her eyes adjusting to the light, she stretched. “Where are we?”

“Duluth. Breakfast in five minutes.”

She sat up. She scanned the view. “It looks a lot different.”

“It’s April, not November.”

He drove on. They’d planned on having breakfast at Canal Park, so he exited at Fifth Avenue. He turned over the tracks and stopped at Commerce and Railroad Streets. To his right the elevator silos and docks beckoned. “You mind if we make a detour? It won’t take long.”