Peter Geye - The Lighthouse Road

Thea understood enough to grab her bags and land. As she rose, clutching her handbag and shouldering her carpetbag, she noticed the man with the camera box standing below her. He had the lens pointed at her and snapped a shot. It was Hosea Grimm, his Kodak at the ready as it was every time a boat landed in Gunflint.

Thea moved to the plank that had been laid down as a gangway. She crossed onto the Lighthouse Road and stood with the Opportunity in the background. Hosea Grimm took another picture, then flashed her a puckish smile.

I t was not long after the crowd had dispersed, after the crew of the Opportunity had unloaded their cargo, after Hosea had collapsed his tripod and boxed his camera and arranged delivery of a pallet of dry goods for his apothecary, after the sun had come out full and all the morning's mizzle had been burned away, it was not long after this that Thea sat on a bench on the Lighthouse Road with her bonnet crumpled in her fists. Her sobs were there for all the world to see and hear. Hosea approached her with his hat in his hands. He had been watching her from the corner of his eye as the crowd scattered, watching as the expression on her face shifted from expectant to nervous to despairing.

He knew all at once that he must help her. Simply help her. So he stood silently before her a long time, his feet surely in view of her downcast eyes. When finally she looked up, Hosea said, "Hello, miss. I trust, based on this attitude of despair, that your landing has not met your expectations."

She looked back at her bonnet in reply.

"My name's Grimm. I'm a merchant in town. I'd help. However I might."

Now Thea met his eyes— an act that spoke as much to her situation as her tears, for she'd long been taught to avoid the gaze of men— and in a tremulous voice said all at once what a horror her journey had been. She talked a full minute before Hosea interrupted her.

"Beg your pardon, miss, but you're speaking a language I don't understand. Do you not speak English?"

She returned her blank stare to her bonnet.

"You've come from far away, I'd bet. From Norway, I presume. Judging by that gibberish you speak. Or Denmark. Or Sweden." He was speaking as much to himself as to her, and he kept his chin in his hand as he studied the masts of the schooner tied to the Lighthouse Road. "Probably Norway if you're staking a claim here." Now he knelt before her, played his hat brim through his own hands. "Norge?" he said.

Thea looked up. She wiped her eyes dry with the backs of her hands, cleared her throat, and said, "I am new to America."

Grimm smiled. "Welcome," he said. Without asking for permission he lifted her carpetbag and said, "Come along with me." With his spare hand he lifted his tripod and camera box and started up the Lighthouse Road. Thea followed because she knew no other option.

Outside the offices of the Gunflint Ax & Beacon Hosea stopped, set down all that he carried, and opened the door, holding it for Thea. There were four men sitting at desks, one of them was Selmer Gunnarson, who did the typesetting. He'd been in Gunflint for eight years, before there was a Lighthouse Road or brick building. He'd emigrated from Bergen eight years before that.

"Selmer," Hosea said, "I need to borrow your old tongue, friend. This here young lady landed at noon, she speaks hardly a word of English."

Selmer rose from his desk, wiped his huge hands on the apron he wore, and came to stand before Thea. He removed his spectacles and addressed her in Norwegian: " Hosea tells me you've just landed. Who were you expecting to meet?"

Feeling a surge of relief, Thea spoke rapidly, "I've come from Hammerfest, my uncle is Rune Evensen, I've come to help on his farm." She paused, withdrew a letter from her purse addressed to Mrs. Rune Evensen She offered it as some kind of proof. "My auntie was to meet me." She paused for a moment, then asked the question she now feared the answer to. "Why wasn't Auntie here to meet me?"

Selmer looked at Hosea, who stood with his hat in his hands. "The lass is here for Rune Evensen. She's his niece. She's come an awfully long way."

Thea looked from Hosea to Selmer and back again. To Selmer she said, "Is Auntie okay?"

Looking at Thea, Selmer addressed Hosea again. "What should I tell her?"

Hosea stood with his finger tapping his pursed lips for a long moment, then said, "Tell the lass the truth. Tell her how her aunt hanged herself from the barn trusses. How old Rune has lost his mind. Tell her she can stay with me until we figure out what to do." He paused. "Tell her about Rebekah, that she'll have a friend."

S he spent two days and nights boarding at Grimm's. At the end of her second day he put her on the back of a wagon bound for the lumber camp on the Burnt Wood River.

The previous morning Hosea had asked her if she could cook. He did this with the typesetter translating again. When Thea said yes, of course she could cook, he told her that Trond Erlandson needed help at the camp. He told her that for around a dollar and a half a week she could winter upriver. She could take stock in the spring, after her season in the woods, and decide on her future then. All of this, he said, was provided she did not wish to return to Norway presently.

Thea sat there dumb, trying to see herself in the woods. And because she could not return home, and because it was harder to fathom an alternative than the prospect before her, she agreed to go.

T he weeks after Christmas were drudgery for Odd. The days came and went with little more than the small changes in Rebekah's temper to mark them. It was a temper as bleak as the cast-iron sky.

In the middle of January Rebekah's belly and breasts started to round. She was tired all the time and fell into a pattern of sleeping during the day and staying awake through the night. During those nights, alone in the world but for Odd's snoring in the next room, she felt herself coming apart. As she paced the small apartment it began to seem she was chasing herself, that she had literally become two people: the one pacing— worried and weak and vacant— and the one she used to be, a shadow, trying to keep up. She knew she had to close the distance between herself and the shadow. How to do that, though, was entirely beyond her power of imagination.

Finally she went searching for an abortionist. When she found him in a rank office above a harborside warehouse, her misgivings met the squalor of his surgery and she knew enough to leave. But now she carried a new and cumbersome shame around during her insomniac nights. She'd seen plenty of the women in Gunflint lose their minds. She knew what it looked like. It looked like her. But she had enough wits remaining to want to fend it off.

So she did the unthinkable: She wrote Hosea. In all her life she'd never had reason to write a letter, though she had spent many of her days slotting mail into the townsfolks' boxes behind the apothecary counter. She could see Hosea, standing there in his starched apron, the hat he'd worn every day for twenty-odd years. Was he getting along? Did he think of her? If he did, was it with fondness or that meanness she alone in Gunflint knew?

In the middle of the night she found one of the pencils Odd carried behind his ear. On the back of a brown paper sack, without salutation or date, in her childlike scrawl, Rebekah wrote: I was never who you said I was. But this is not me neither. I am having a baby. A baby. What has happened. .