Peter Geye: Wintering

ONLY AFTER I poured the coffee did Gus remove his gloves and unbutton his coat. His eyes were fixed on the kitchen window, warning of nothing, though their sadness was plain. Outside, the first snow of the season, which had fallen all night, was finally relenting.

I thought of the townsfolk zipping up and brushing it from their cars. They’d make it to the nine o’clock service at Immanuel Lutheran come what may, choosing the cold and snow over the fires of hell any day. Families marching into church, sitting straight-backed in the pews. The wives and children enthralled by Pastor Nils’s holy words. The men sitting there beside them, heads bowed or turned heavenward. You’d as likely hear his silent prayers as you would his singing voice at hymn time. For some sixty years I’ve lived among these people — all my adult life and the end of my childhood. I know how they make you wait.

So I waited for Gus, my hands warmed by my own mug of coffee. After a time, he shifted his eyes from the ceiling and pulled off his coat.

He spoke slowly, almost as if what he said had been rehearsed, though of course it hadn’t. “You made him very happy, Berit. You made his life worth living.” He paused and looked at me. “Being as he was, though, well, what worth was there in that? I might’ve gone off myself, knowing what was to come. Hell, I’d have strung myself up from the fish-house ceiling.” He put the coffee to his lips but did not drink. “I’m sorry,” he said over the lip of the cup. After a sip he went on. “I must’ve inherited his habit of saying any damn-fool thing that comes to mind.” He tried to smile but just couldn’t do it. “Lately, I’ve wondered quite a lot about what memories were still left. Did anything come to him at all?” Again he paused, and did manage a sort of smile. “If he remembered anything, it was good times with you.”

“You don’t need to butter me up, Gus. I know how it was with him.”

As if I’d not spoken at all, he continued. “When Tom and Greta were babies, I used to walk them to sleep. You know, wander around the house at night, whispering to them, singing them lullabies, telling them everything would be all right. I liked to think they could understand me, that my voice soothed them until they eventually calmed down and fell asleep.” He actually smiled now. “Of course, they didn’t know a damn thing. Only that they were tired and unhappy.” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “I wish to Christ he would’ve said one simple thing before he left. One damn thing.”

“I’m sitting here looking at you, Gus, and thinking you’re his spitting image. But you certainly didn’t get his plainspokenness, did you?”

“You’ll have to pardon me, Berit. I don’t make a lick of sense in the best of times.”

“You said they’re not going to find him.”

“Of course they aren’t.”

“Well, I can sit here all winter with you,” I said.

He looked up at me and smiled and by some legerdemain placed on the table a small moose-hide portfolio. “You just might have to,” he said. “Ruutu found this up on the river.” He slid it across the table.

“What is it?”

“Proof that he never found what he was looking for.”

I picked it up, opened it to the first page, and saw a hand-drawn map of the shore of Lake Superior.

“I don’t know how to talk about this. I don’t know if it makes perfect sense or if my mind is starting to go, too. But maybe you can help me understand, Berit.”

“Understand what, Gus?”

“Why he walked off. What he left behind.” He shook his head. “What happened that winter when I was a kid.”

“I know what happened that winter.”

“No, you don’t. Not all of it.”

I got up to refill our coffee, and when I sat back down I said, “Folks are skipping church this morning to search for your father, Pastor Nils is praying for an old man lost in the snow, and here you sit telling stories to his sweetheart.”

“I told you, they’re not going to find him. They just won’t. Pastor Nils is a good man. One of the best. But his prayers won’t help my father.” His eyes were glassy. “And you? You were more than his sweetheart. You know that as well as I do. You were the only reason he didn’t wander off thirty years ago. Hear me out, Berit. And don’t think for another minute my father’s anything but gone and resting now.” He closed his eyes and looked up. “If rest’s what he found down there.”

I DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT all winter for Gus to start talking. I didn’t even have to wait past that morning. At my kitchen table he started right at the beginning, if that’s what it really was. In any case, he began with a late-autumn morning in 1963, thirty-three years before.

Harry stood over the moose-hide book of maps, the light falling from the lamp above the kitchen table between them. The transistor radio buzzed on the counter. “I’m a damned fool for thinking so much of these,” he said.

“No, you’re not,” Gus said, though they troubled him, those maps. Even then.

“I knew from the day I first copied one of these that I’d use them. Don’t ask me how.” He closed the book and pushed it aside. The Fisher Maps were spread across the table under his elbows, every lake and stream and portage charted with exactitude.

The radio came to life with Monday’s news. National then local then sports, talk of the Yankees and Dodgers’ World Series beginning the next day. Before the weather forecast came on, Harry reached to shut the radio off and then walked across the great room. There, above the mantel, was the picture Lisbet had painted many years earlier. The one she said reminded her of her husband while he was gone. His head bowed under a rain cap, galluses holding his oilskin pants. His boat — which was his father’s boat before him, and as much a part of this town as the Eides themselves — floats on smooth waters. There’s a net roller aft, full of nets. Fishboxes up to the gunwales. The painting, The Nets, was by his mother’s own standards her best.

“Hey, Gus,” Harry said, “come over here.”

Gus pushed his uneaten eggs away and crossed the room.

Harry kept his eyes on the painting as he spoke. “A few months ago, Charlie Aas gets his art collector friend Ruben Mazecki up here. We’d never met the guy before, some shyster lawyer from Duluth. One of Charlie’s cronies. So Ruben’s standing right here, wearing a three-piece suit, and some queer hat he won’t take off’s hanging limp over one eye. He smells like furniture oil. And he says to your mother, ‘I’ll give you five thousand dollars for this painting.’ ” Harry cocked his head as if to inspect more thoughtfully this painting that had for a decade hung above their fireplace. “Five thousand bucks, right?” His voice trailed off and he peered again at the painting.

“Mom told me about that.”

“Of course she did.” He looked at him. “It wasn’t Mazecki’s money. Wasn’t his idea, neither. Did you know that?” He closed his eyes. “Goddamn Charlie. Anyway, Mazecki’s offer, that’s how this whole mess started.” He made a gesture to encompass the whole room. The whole house. He stepped closer to the painting and pointed at the sky in the background. “At least she got the horizon right. Lord knows she’s been watching it long enough.” He put his arm around Gus. “Whatever happens, do not become that man.” He nodded at the man in the painting. “That man will fail you sure as he lives.”

He let go of Gus’s shoulder and stood beneath the painting for several minutes more, still nodding slowly, until he heard the water come on in the bathroom around the corner.