Peter Geye: Safe from the Sea

When he turned to his father the old man was already tying a bucktail jig onto Noah’s line. “It’s still enough we won’t drift much,” Olaf said, handing him the rod. “Cast up against the cliff, let it sink, crank her in. The water’s cold enough the lakers are out of the depths. They’re spawning now.”

Noah took the rod, thinking, You could be dying, but still you’re baiting my line? I know how to bait a line, I remember . He stared at his father, who cast his own line up the shore. It hissed in the otherwise silent morning and then splashed as the jig hit the water. The old man rubbed his nose and combed his beard with his fingers again, looking past Noah and out over the still black water.

“We’re poachers now. Trout season ended more than a month ago. And you with no license on top of it all,” Olaf said softly, working the jig with quick jerks of his rod. “I hope the DNR is busy with the bow hunters.”

Noah could not take his eyes off him. For the first time since he had arrived that morning he really looked at the old man. The gaze must have made Olaf uncomfortable because he glanced away, hurried his line in, and cast again.

“Well, it won’t be long,” Olaf said.

“What’s that?”

Olaf shifted his weight, picked something from his teeth, and shrugged. “The fish. We’ve got to be quiet if we want to catch fish.” He looked at Noah. “They aren’t stupid. They can hear us.”

Hear us , Noah thought, suddenly overcome by the significance of being there, by the sickness practically radiating from the old man. He leaned toward his father and whispered, “Who cares about the fish?”

“No fish, no dinner.”

“Dinner is easy enough to come by. I can get in the car and be back in half an hour with dinner.”

“Chrissakes, you want potato chips and bologna sandwiches, why’d you come all the way up here?”

“I came because you’re sick. I came to figure out what we’re going to do. I came to give you a hand.”

“Well, right now the best thing you could do for me would be to shush. I want to catch some of the fish swimming around down there. Maybe spare me your bologna sandwich. What do you say? How about you bring us back in a little closer?”

Okay , Noah thought, we can fish today. He put the oars in the water for two pulls toward the palisade. He cast his jig onto the placid water, ripples widening in perfect circles as he waited for the lure to reach its depth. As he made the first crank on his reel he heard the hiss of his father’s drag. He looked over, saw the old man’s rod arcing from his hand. His face looked serene.

Olaf caught three lake trout — the first was as long as Olaf’s forearm — enough fish for dinner that night and three meals stored in the freezer. Noah didn’t catch a thing.

“That’s just rotten luck,” Olaf said as they rowed back toward the cabin.

Noah pulled harder on the oars and felt the skin on his hands toughen.

AFTER THEIR FOUR o’clock dinner of cracker-crusted trout, instant mashed potatoes, and creamed corn, they sat at the table and talked for an hour about the things Noah could help with around the house. Olaf was most concerned about his woodpile, a concern Noah could not comprehend given the bounty of split boles stacked, seemingly, everywhere. Olaf mentioned that the hearth needed some mortar work, that the eaves trough spanning the roofline on the front of the house required repair, that there were shingles missing on the shed. He also said he wanted to get the dock out of the water this winter. Noah insisted, despite his misgivings and certainty that he would be unable to repair any of it, that anything Olaf needed, he would do.

Noah got up and cleared the table. Standing at the kitchen counter he said, “We’ve got our chores lined up, now what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You said you were sick.”

Plainly, Olaf said, “I’m dying.”

Noah felt the word— dying —like a punch in the gut. He returned to the table and sat down. “What? How do you know? What have the doctors told you?”

“I haven’t been to the doctor.”

A guarded hope entered Noah’s mind: How could his father know he was dying ? “How do you know what’s wrong?”

“I’ve done my research.”

Noah looked at him, puzzled. “Research?”

“At the library. Up in Gunflint.”

“The library? Dad, if you’re sick enough to die, you’ve got to go see someone. You’ve got to get help.”

Olaf put his hands palm down on the table and cleared his throat. “I want you to listen to me,” he said patiently. “I know what I’m doing. I know what I want. I’m not going to the doctor and the reasons are simple: I’m sick, I’m going to die. Whether it’s tomorrow or six months from now hardly seems important. What is important is that I don’t prolong my misery, don’t hold on and end up in a nursing home with a bunch of old ladies reeking of Listerine and playing goddamn bingo. This is going to happen on my terms, understand?”

Noah buried his face in his hands. “Who said anything about a nursing home? All I’m saying is you need to see a doctor. You’re in no position to diagnose yourself, even if you’ve read every book in the library. Is there still a hospital up in Gunflint?”

Olaf stood heavily and looked Noah squarely in the eyes. “I will say it one more time — I am not going to the doctor. It’s final. Now, I’d like nothing better than to have you help me get the place ready for winter, but I will not be lectured.”

He lumbered into his bedroom, closing the door behind him.

Noah’s first impulse was to anger. But as he sat there alone, the seriousness of his father’s health now a certainty, his anger subsided, was replaced instead with an unnatural calm. There was a new light cast on his being there, one that complicated even as it made clearer.

Noah walked to the door and looked out into the yard, now being swallowed by the gloaming. Thinking to call Natalie, he took his cell phone from his pocket. But there was no signal, there hadn’t been since he was twenty minutes north of Duluth.

So now what? he thought as rain began to fall.

The next morning Noah woke early and headed toward the lake. The overgrown trees dripped rainwater. The giant bedrock boulders shouldering the path were covered with feathermoss and skirted with bunchberry bushes. Mushrooms and reindeer lichen grew among the duff and deadfall on the trailside.

At the lake Noah turned left and walked along the water’s edge. A hundred feet up the beach he came to the clearing in the woods, a clearing he’d all but forgotten in the many years since he’d last seen it.

When Noah turned five years old his father and grandfather built a ski jump on the top of the hill just east of the house. They cleared a landing hill on the slope that flattened at the beach. Back in Norway Noah’s Grandpa Torr had been a promising young skier. He had even competed at the Holmenkollen. When he immigrated to the States, he became a Duluth ski-club booster and helped build the jump at Chester Bowl, where Olaf himself twice won the junior championship.

Each Christmas Eve morning Noah’s grandpa and father would boot-pack the snow on the landing hill and scaffold before grooming it with garden rakes. On Christmas morning they would sidestep the landing hill with their own skis and set tracks for Noah. Olaf would stick pine boughs in the landing hill every ten feet after eighty, and by the time Noah turned nine he was jumping beyond the last of them, a hundred twenty or a hundred twenty-five feet.

Looking up at the jump he remembered the cold on his cheeks, his fingers forever numb, his toes, too, the exultation of the speed and flight. And his skis, the navy-blue Klongsbergs, their camber and their yellow bases and the bindings his grandfather mail-ordered from a friend still in Bergen. They were the first skis his father bought for him, the first not handed down. He remembered the way his sweater smelled when wet and the way it made his wrists itch in that inch of flesh between the end of his mittens and the turtleneck he wore underneath it.