Peter Geye: The Lighthouse Road

Harry felt a hit on his line but he failed to set the hook. "Shit," he said.

"I don't know how many times I got to tell you don't horse it."

"I know."

"You know."

They sat for a spell jigging in silence. Finally Odd said, "I'm telling you it's a good move."

"I'll go see Veilleux this afternoon. See what he has to say."

Odd said, "You got some saying to do yourself, don't forget that. Sure, he knows you and he's the one offering, but you stand to gain here. Don't go over there acting like you deserve it."

"I wouldn't."

As he spoke Harry hooked a fish. A big one. The short rod arced.

"See? You listen to your old man and good things happen."

Harry was too pleased to say anything back.

But it was moments like this when Odd saw most clearly what his hardheartedness all those years ago had wrought, when their joviality felt most suspect. Good Christ, Odd thought. W hat have I taken from this boy?

J ust as Odd had foreseen, Rebekah had left Duluth back in the summer of '21. On a Sunday morning after she'd fed the four-week-old Harry, while Odd still slept on the Murphy bed, she went. Odd woke hours later to the boy's hungry lamentation— it couldn't have been called a cry— and knew as soon as he stepped out of bed that Harry was his alone.

When the questions started three or four years later, when Harry wondered about his mother, Odd told him what he'd told the townsfolk the autumn they'd returned, that he'd met a sweet gal up in Port Arthur, Ontario, married her, then lost her nine months later when she'd given birth to Harry. That lie and the others it spawned came easily to Odd and he realized that his deceit was different from Hosea's only by degree. He was not proud of this, but neither did he ever tell the truth. Not to his son. And not to anyone else.

If the townsfolk had ever wondered about Harry, if they tried to make sense of the rift between Odd and the Grimms, they did so in the privacy of their own homes. Hardly a suspicious glance had ever come Odd's way along the Lighthouse Road. He'd never heard so much as a snigger.

Maybe this was because of the visit he'd paid Rebekah and Hosea the day he'd returned to Gunflint with Harry. Odd had come down from Duluth, turned into the harbor with his boat bell tolling, tied up on the Lighthouse Road, and marched up to Grimm's. He found them sitting at the kitchen table — the same kitchen table where he'd taken almost all his childhood meals— and held the boy before them.

"Look at you two," Odd said, feeling as sad as he did angry. "Couple of quacks." He shook his head fiercely. "I want you to take a gander at my boy here." When neither of them looked up, Odd said, "All right. You mind your own business. That's good. We'll all mind our own business. From this day forward, don't utter his name. Don't even look at him. If you pass us on the Lighthouse Road, walk on by. If anyone asks about him, about me and Rebekah, you shrug your shoulders and don't know a damn thing. Understand? You never breathe a word about this."

He'd not waited for them to respond, those loonies sitting there holding hands above the linen tablecloth, only cradled the boy and turned and went about his life. And so Harry became, like his father a quarter century before him, Gunflint's motherless son, the heir of their blind-eyed sympathy.

Odd looked over at him and wondered again what his hardheartedness had done to the boy.

"Hey, bud," Odd said. "Hell of a morning for catching fish, ain't it?"

"It's unnatural, the way they're biting."

S he was fifty-seven years old as she stood at the window. Except for that year in Duluth with Odd she'd spent almost forty-four of those years living here, the last ten of them alone. The apothecary had de volved first into a general mercantile, then a clothier, and finally a haberdashery before it became nothing more than a madwoman's madhouse. That was what people thought, anyway. What the high school— aged kids said as they roamed the Lighthouse Road on Friday nights. Sometimes they threw rocks through the big front window, once they painted a large owl on the clapboard siding. She thought nothing of their mischief, was only relieved to know that Harry was not among the vandals.

She looked up and down the shore at the snow in the pines. Some of the trees had grown in the years she'd been there, others had been felled, but the shape of the wilderness had stayed the same. The shape of the lake, too. She took comfort in this, felt some affinity with the years.

But it was a comfort short in lasting. As soon as she settled her gaze back on the ice fishermen, the vagaries of time that a moment ago had provided solace were now as cruel as the wind.

Out on the lake the ice fishermen were hauling them in, one after another, even as the fissures spread like veins through the ice, even as the wind stiffened from the northeast.

Odd said, "That wind is coming around now, ain't it?"

" Maybe we should call it a day."

"Look at that pile of fish. We've never had a day like this."

"Still. The wind."

"We'll be all right."

And because Harry believed every word his papa ever said, he dropped his line into the lake again.

To Gillian van Leuven, Laura Jean Baker, Thomas Maltman, Emily St. John Mandel, and Kevin McColley, my gratitude. Thanks and admiration to Greg Michalson. To Caitlin Hamilton Summie, Rich Rennicks, Rachel Kinbar Grace, Steven Wallace, and all the other fine folks at Unbridled, much appreciation for all your hard work and commitment. Matt and Jenae Batt, I owe you. To Laura Langlie, a bouquet of flowers. Pops, I have another question for you. .

Finn, Mac, and Liese, you're my inspiration.

And to Dana, what thanks could ever be enough?