Peter Geye - The Lighthouse Road

Odd listened intently, coupling Arne's terse lecture with what Danny's father had told him about the big water. Arne's thirty-second speech was the first of only a few short speeches that season, but what Odd learned that summer would last his lifetime. They rowed an hour offshore to Arne's buoys, where Arne secured his oars and set immediately to hauling the net. Odd knew to sit still at first, to watch, as Arne had put it. Odd likewise knew that as Arne choked the herring through the net it was his job to box them. The fish were cold and slippery and the wind coming up his back might have dissuaded other boys, but Odd relished it from the first moment. The fear Danny had diagnosed that fateful day on the Burnt Wood River never entered his thoughts.

Five hours they hauled, tending fifteen thousand feet of nets at two different sets. They worked in harmony in a way Arne found unbelievable. The boy with the patched eye was as natural under the rolls of the boat as the water itself. When they got to shore that afternoon, after they'd hefted the boxes into Arne's harborside fish house, as Arne gutted and salted the fish and Odd packed them, Arne offered the only praise he ever would. "You've a fisherman's blood," he said.

Odd would have known this without hearing it, but he blushed all the same, the color in his cheeks announcing not only his embarrassment but also his thanks for the chance.

Over the course of that summer Arne taught Odd everything: how the fish ran, what the wind meant, how to judge a lowering sky, how to mend a net. He taught him how to barter with the fishmonger and keep a ledger, how to sew oilskin and make gunnysack anchors. At the end of summer, after a long day on the water and in the fish house, as Arne cooked sausages and onions on the stove, he told Odd to sit down.

"We'll start building you a skiff this winter. There's plenty of work to do in winter without building a boat, too, but together we can manage. Next spring you'll get your first grounds. You'll use my fish house."

Odd nodded.

Arne stirred the sausages, forked an onion into his mouth.

"The grounds won't yield much. They'll be near the shoreline. And you'll still be apprenticing, but you'll be doing it in your own boat. The season after next you'll be on your own. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Now have some grub."

T he leaves were turning by the time Hosea fit the glass eye. Odd sat before a mirror in Hosea's examination room. Though his eye still pulsed and sometimes ached behind the patch, he could tolerate it. He hadn't seen the wound yet, and this fact alone worried him that morning.

"You look just like your mother, Odd," Hosea said.

Odd glanced up in the mirror. Hosea was standing behind him, his arms crossed.

"She'd be proud of the young man sitting here today. Even if he was fool enough to raid a bear den."

Odd smiled.

"Are you ready for this?"

"Where's Rebekah?"

"She's tending the store. You can show her when we're finished."

"All right."

"Okay?"

Odd nodded.

It took a few minutes for Odd to look into the mirror. When he did, all he saw was the sunken lids of his wounded eye. It dawned on him at once that the space where his eyeball once had been looked an awful lot like a miniature version of the cave entrance in which he had lost it. The eyebrow above the wound had grown back darker than the eyebrow above his good eye, and the effect was shadowy. It seemed to set the hole where his eye should have been deeper in his face.

He reached his hand up to the wound. The tips of his fingers dipped into the folds of his eyelids and he pulled them quickly back out.

"Let's see how it fits," Hosea said. "Tilt your head back."

Odd stared at himself for another moment before doing as Hosea said.

The sensation of having the glass eye inserted was a dull one, just the tugging and pinching of skin. It took only a minute.

"How does it feel?" Hosea asked.

Odd didn't say anything. In the years to come Odd had two eyes custom made, but that first was culled from Hosea's ready supply. And though it wasn't a perfect fit it wasn't bad either. Except for some taut ness in the skin there was no sensation at all to having the glass eye in place.

"I believe this will suffice," Hosea said as he pressed the skin around the glass eye with his thumbs. "Are you ready to see it?"

"I am."

Odd sat up and looked at himself. He looked for a long time and didn't say anything. It was himself he saw, but it wasn't. He blinked and despite all his conviction he felt tears welling in his right eye — his good eye. He saw his right eye gloss over. The glass eye stared back brown and too large and dry as chalk.

"The skin around the glass eye will stretch a little. It's like breaking in a new pair of boots."

Odd's right eye was the color of wet blueberries, but the glass eye was brown. "I look like one of Danny's sled dogs," Odd said.

"You'll probably need to have new eyes fit as your skull grows. When you do, we'll have them made so they match your real eye."

Odd said nothing. He put his left hand in front of the glass eye and held it there. The tears welled again.

"It's temporary, lad."

"I heard you," Odd snapped. He used all his will to quell the tears. Blinked hard. And brought his face closer to the mirror.

"Listen to me, Odd: What the eye can't see, your heart will find."

Odd looked up quickly, met Hosea's eyes. "I don't understand," he said.

"Someday you will, son. Someday you will."

T hea was nearly seventeen years old when she saw a tree for the first time, and then only from the rail of the topsail schooner Nordsjøen. The boat was bound for Tromsø, a day and a night out of Hammerfest, and those few on board were cold and tired. The captain and his three-man crew were busy at the rigging, dodging the skerries and shoals, slogging through frazil ice and fog. When the sun began its burn the high fjords and their plunging ridges on either side of the boat came into view.

At first she mistook the tree line for a lowering storm, some sharp front from the east. As the good boat slipped forward, though, she saw it was no storm at all. For all her short life she'd lived in Hammerfest, had never, before yesterday, been out of view of it. The hills in Hammerfest were gradual and bare — arctic desert— and what green there was came by way of the cloudberry boscage and lichen for a few summer months. Now a forest of spruce cascaded down the mountainsides, each minute the lifting of the fog revealed more forest. She'd been told of trees, but not these. No, the trees she'd heard of were still more than a month before her, in Amerika, on the shores of a lake said to equal any ocean.

Strictly speaking, the voyage between Hammerfest and Tromsø was the second leg of her journey. Early the morning before, she'd stood on the rocks while her papa had loaded her belongings into his fishing boat. They had an hour before the ferry would leave Hammerfest quay, and her mama was busy finding anything else she could send. They lived in a sod house on Muolkot, an island in plain sight of Hammerfest. Her papa had a few sheep and a potato garden. He had a skiff that was safe along the shore and in the harbor but not equipped for open water. He was a decent and pious man, a mostly quiet man. He played his hardingfele on Saturday nights and was capable of good humor, though not much recently. He knew he could not offer his daughter much. So he sold a sheep and half of his parcel of land and spent the rest of his life savings on passage to Amerika.