Peter Geye: The Lighthouse Road

"I don't mind her lessons," Odd said. " Those Old Testament stories are about as scary as hell."

"None of it makes the least damn sense. Fire and brimstone and a bunch of things to be scared of. Bunch of impossible rules. And she's ugly as a pile of bear shit."

"That's plain meanness. She can't help how she looks. And her Bible stories ain't that different than those stories your grandpap tells around the fire."

Daniel looked over his shoulder and smiled at his friend. It was his best feature, that smile. It conveyed a minute's speech in a second's time. "Grandpappy never whipped you if you doubted him, though, now, did he?"

Odd tried his turn at a smile.

"Did he?" Daniel persisted.

"No, he did not."

"And besides, you think Miss Huff could tell you a damn thing about these woods? You think there's secret directions in that black book of hers on where to set your traps? Where to tap the maple trees come spring? Where to go ricing?"

"The woods ain't everything, Danny."

Daniel stopped, held his hands palms up. "What else do you see?"

It was true: The wilderness was ubiquitous, in all its guises. From where they stood he could see the cedar swamp east of the lower falls, knew it went from bog to basalt in a few mere steps, the rock rising sharply into bald outcroppings too steep to climb. This late in winter the lichen would have been eaten away by the surefooted caribou, their tracks were all over the place.

The outcropping went on for a mile, and they walked its base in silence until they heard the river falling at the Devil's Maw.

"We'll take a break at the river, eat those biscuits and bacon," Danny said. They each had a pair of sandwiches in the pockets of their wool coats.

"I'm about hungry enough. That gruel Bekah cooks up in the morning is the worst."

"You know, you can come live with us anytime you want."

"I don't think Hosea would like that very much."

"Hosea. Pap says he's two men at once."

"I believe he might be."

They walked through the edge of the woods to the river's shore. Odd said, "It ain't that I wouldn't want to."

"Want to what?"

"Live in the wigwam village."

"It's better than town," Danny said.

"Sure is."

They stood on the shore and unwrapped their sandwiches and drank cold coffee Odd had carried in the deer-hide wineskin.

"You got the land and farm now," Danny said.

"It ain't so bad at Hosea's. Except he makes me go to school."

"Plus you got Bekah."

"Yep."

"Well."

They finished the coffee.

Odd said, "I'm going to apprentice with Arne Johnson in springtime."

"A herring choker? That Hosea's idea, too?"

"Hell, no, it ain't. It's what I want to do."

Daniel Riverfish wore his rascally grin.

"The hell's so funny?" Odd demanded.

"It's just that you're a bit of a chickenshit, is all. I don't see you out on the lake by yourself. Least not when the wind comes on down."

"A chickenshit?"

Still that grin.

"I'm no chickenshit, Danny."

"You mess your britches and run for Bekah when an owl hoots. What's it gonna be like out on Gitche Gumee?"

Odd turned inward, began to think about this, was readying some sharp response. But Daniel spoke again first. "We got a ways to go, let's walk."

So Odd stowed the wineskin in his coat and put his mittens back on and adjusted his hat.

"You make the trail now," Odd said crossly. "I'll drag the sled."

A nd so they climbed the northern rim of the outcropping in silence, Odd sulking, Daniel cutting trail.

It was true Odd was a fearful boy. He was scared of almost everything, but especially of the fact that he'd never had a mother. At night, up in the third-floor apartment at Grimm's, in the closet-sized room, under the down ticking with the moonlight blaring through the window, in his socks and his union suit, he passed his sleepless hours mulling the life he didn't have. He didn't know it, but he was possessed by an old man's fears. He missed his mother— the mother he'd never known— the way an old widower might miss his wife of fifty years, he'd worked his mother up to those heights. Her ghostly presence colored so many of his thoughts.

And because of the hole she left in his life he was timid, and that timidity might have come across as fear.

Odd looked around the woods, at Daniel's back before him, at the enormous sky pitch blue and getting bluer. He had always taken these woods for granted. But in that quarter mile before Thistle Creek he realized that if there was anything to fear it was this wilderness, not his missing mother. He'd heard it said there were thousands of miles of the same woods to the north, and temperatures colder, and colder longer, the farther you went. He knew about the wolves and bears and moose that roamed these trees. He suddenly felt vulnerable.

"I guess I'm afraid of some things," he said from out of the blue.

Daniel Riverfish stopped, turned to face him. "Some things? You flinch at your shadow, bud." He turned to move ahead but stopped. "All I'm saying is that's hellish work, out on the lake. Much harder than trapping or standing behind a counter selling aspirin. I ain't saying you couldn't do it, but—"

"I never thought I was afraid of these woods, but I am. I think."

"Hell, yes, you are. And you should be. These woods are the world and the world ain't an easy place. That's what Grandpap always says. And he ain't ever wrong. About nothing."

"I know it now," Odd said.

"Good."

T histle Creek came down the gully off Peregrine Hill and emptied at the oxbow just north of the Devil's Maw. Daniel's first trap was a hundred paces up the creek and marked by a cedar tree grown out over the frozen water. They stopped at the tree and unlashed their shovels from the toboggan and dug through the snow. The trap was empty, as Daniel presumed it would be. He thought they'd be empty clear up to the pond, two miles upstream. But he was dutiful and they spent three hours digging and resetting traps.

By the time they reached the beaver pond Odd's neck and shoulders were burning and taut and he took the firmness for a sign.

" Watch me be brave," Odd said aloud.

"What do you mean?"

"Just watch."

Daniel smiled. "I will."

W hereas the otter traps were baited with fish, the beaver traps were baited with poplar poles two feet under water. The beavers would find the poplar and as they sat back to eat it fall on the trap and drown. Daniel had a dozen traps in the pond and they worked the first ten of them into the late afternoon. It wasn't until the eleventh trap that they found a beaver, a middling male. Odd pulled him out of the pond and tossed him onto the snow, released the trap, and reset it underwater.

Daniel huzzahed from across the pond, where he'd found a second beaver in the last trap. He likewise released the trap and reset it and joined Odd near their toboggan.

"Ma will love this tail," Daniel said. He could already taste it, fried up in bear fat, so hot it would scald the roof of his mouth.

"I'm coming for dinner," Odd said.

Daniel smiled.

They unsheathed their bowie knives and each of them gutted a beaver, tossing the offal aside for the ravens and wolves. If they were making a living they'd have been poor and disheartened, but because they were only boys in the service of becoming men they were thrilled, and they lashed the gutted beavers to the toboggan and turned down the same trail they'd cut on the way to the pond.