Peter Geye: The Lighthouse Road

When Harry had guzzled it all, Odd laid a blanket across the motor box and changed the boy's diaper. "That's my little fella," Odd said, picking him up and resting him on his shoulder. He burped him and then held him in the crook of his arm.

When they came up on Gunflint it was still light. The sun rested on the hilltop. A breeze had been stiffening for the last hour, and as they rounded the breakwater and headed across the harbor, the roll of the boat on the swells set the bell tolling. It was the song of their coming home, and Odd hoped everyone heard it.

T he shingle above the chandlery door read, eide's boatbuilding & supplies. Every time Odd walked under it, he thought of Sargent and Hosea, the two men he had had to learn from. Both men had hung such shingles over their doors: Hosea at the apothecary, Harald at the boatwright.

That morning he and Harry walked in together an hour before sunrise, a strange, cold wind blowing away a fog bank outside. They went to their desks and poured coffee from matching thermoses and spent fifteen minutes cracking their knuckles and sharpening their tools before either of them spoke.

Odd said, "We've got a letter here. A query about building a canoe."

"I'm not building a canoe," Harry said.

Odd smiled. "I guess you think they wouldn't pay for a canoe?"

Harry took his adze to the skiff he was building. He put his hands on the gunwale the way Odd always did, walked around the boat twice before he set to shaving a bit off the transom.

Odd still sat at his desk, sipping his coffee, watching Harry. He wondered how the boy would be different if he'd been given his mother.

"You'll be done with that in a week," Odd said.

"Less than that."

"Then you can get to work on the canoe."

"All right," Harry said.

Odd watched him for another spell. Long enough that the boy had set down the adze and was stroking the transom with his sanding block. "I don't see why we wouldn't go out and catch some of those morning trout, do you?" Odd said.

Harry gave up that big, boyish smile. He didn't say anything, just smacked the sawdust from his trousers and went to the door to fetch his coat and mitts. He stepped outside, crossed the yard to the fish house, and pulled the toboggan loaded with their ice-fishing supplies from the barn door.

"Let's walk around the point today. Get some of that sunrise on our ugly mugs," Odd said.

"Let's go, Pops."

H ow many times had Rebekah stood at the window as she did that day, her forehead and fingertips resting on the glass? She was watching them walk into the rising wind, out from the point, a sled trailing the boy. They'd been at it often enough since the ice had come to stay in January, and she always watched them go. On some days she stood at the window the whole while they were gone. Others she went to her needlepoint and tried to put them out of her mind.

That morning she would lose hours to the sadness left in their wake. Though she literally could no longer cry, she felt the phantom welling in her eyes. She wondered, H as the boy ever known? Does Odd ever think of me now?

Out on the ice Harry said, "You don't feel it?"

"I don't," Odd said. "You sure it ain't the breeze is all?"

"The breeze coming up through my feet? I don't think so."

"Your tongue ain't getting any duller, is it?" Odd asked. He put his hand on the boy's shoulder and smiled to himself. The smile lasted only a moment.

These mornings ice fishing? The summer mornings when they were at their nets before dawn, the only herring chokers still making a go of it out of Gunflint? Or, back across the isthmus, those mornings in their workshop, building boats side by side? Thousands of mornings if you added them up, all begun with the memory of her looming above him.

If Harry knew of the grief that attended his papa, if he saw it in Odd's bowed head, he at least had the wisdom to witness it in silence instead of badgering his father about it. Odd took pride in his son's stoic silence. The whole world, it seemed to Odd, was garrulous. But not Harry.

Out past the breakwater Odd said, "That is a strange wind."

"And cold."

"Did you ever know a February wind to be otherwise?"

"I'm just saying."

"I know it."

They walked another fifty rods before they stopped. Odd turned to the shore to take measure of where they were. He turned to the lake to do the same. "What do you think?" he asked Harry.

The boy answered by lifting the auger from the sled. He set the blade on the ice and started to drill. He was a long-armed, well-built kid and it wasn't ten minutes before the auger broke through to water. It came splashing up through the hole.

Odd and Harry looked at each other. " Maybe we should go a little closer to shore," Harry said.

Odd inspected the horizon over the lake, the sky above them. He pulled the sleeve of his coat up, took off his mitten, and knelt. He stuck his hand into the hole in the ice to measure its thickness. He stood up. "I think we're all right."

Harry started another hole ten paces from the first. He'd inherited his father's habits of calm and diligence, and he went about the work of making a fishing hole with an old man's patience. When the second hole was augered he brought his papa's stool to it. He brought the small ice-fishing rod and the box of jigs.

"You rig it," Odd said.

"I know."

Odd's hands were worthless in winter. He could hardly tie his boots anymore, let alone jigs onto fishline. So Harry baited his papa's line and handed him the rod. He tied a jig to his own line and in no time at all they were both fishing for steelheads. They'd eaten nothing but trout dinners for two weeks, and still they had a freezer full of fish. Times were better on the ice than in the open water, something Odd brought up every day.

"You give any thought to Veilleux's offer?" Odd asked over his shoulder.

"I give it some thought, sure."

Already Odd had a strike and he set the hook and started reeling. He loosened his drag and then, as though nothing were happening, he said, "It'd be a good move. He's a good man with a good business. His family has been here from day one."

Harry was peering into his own hole on the ice, more intent on hooking a fish than on his papa's pitch. Even still he responded, "You know how much I like fishing and boatbuilding."

"And I can't say I blame you, Harry. But there ain't much of a living to be made any longer. Neither enterprise pays for itself nowadays. Not small operations like ours. You apprentice with Veilleux and you can make money all year long. You could still fish some. Obviously we'd keep filling boat orders. Canoe orders. You'd just have another wagon to hitch your load to."

Odd pulled the fish from the hole, unhooked it, and threw it on the ice a few feet away. He took his knife from this belt and knelt before the fish, thumping it on the head with the hilt before he sliced the guts from it. He threw the offal as far as he could, with the wind. He did this in twenty seconds and in twenty seconds more had his jig back in the water. A colony of gulls descended from the clearing sky and went to work on the fish guts.

"Besides," Odd continued, "you keep telling me how you want to build something out at Evensen's farm."

"I could build it without apprenticing. I ain't talking about a castle."

Odd looked up into the sky, took a gulp of the cold wind, noted the snow squall on the eastern horizon. "You're sure and steady with a hammer and nails, there's no denying that. But there's more to building a house than a hammer and nails. And it ain't like building a skiff. Trust me on this one, buddy."