Peter Geye - Wintering

Gus told me that, of all the things he’d done in his life, none ever seemed as wonderful as getting his children to sleep. Keeping them warm. Giving his exhausted wife a few hours’ rest herself before it was time to nurse the baby again.

Sitting with his father at the shack after he’d admitted that Fort le Croix was a hoax? That morning, and being with his father, was just as important as those mornings with his own children so many years later. He knew that now.

And he did not — as his father had said — want to hit him. He wanted to hug him.

That morning at the shack, the soundings recorded, Harry explained how the maps came to be. They began as true facsimiles, Harry said. He told Gus how he’d always wanted to follow the old voyageur maps into the wilderness, so he started copying them on long winter nights. But as Signe and Gus got older and as his marriage and livelihood took their dives — fewer fish biting, fewer folks buying his handsome canoes, Lisbet becoming as anxious and aloof and distant as the city she came from — these maps became a means of seeing the world differently. Especially his own place in it. Harry began to imagine everything north of the divide. He so desperately needed to find that world, and to find himself in the bargain.

“I remember watching you at the kitchen table,” Gus said. “Drawing those things. I thought they were so cool. I wanted to be like you.”

“You don’t want to be like me, that’s a fact. Surely you know that now.” Harry looked at him. “And I don’t want you to be, either. That’s why I brought you up here. One of the reasons, leastways.”

“I still don’t understand,” Gus said, meaning that he didn’t understand anything. About the maps, about why they were there, about what was to come, about what his family was anymore.

“Maybe you never will understand. Could be you’ll understand only if you get married and have kids yourself someday.”

Gus gave him a blank look. “You can’t honestly have thought we could survive the winter in a wigwam.”

“Wasn’t long ago that every living soul in this part of the world did exactly that. Winter and summer both. Ten generations of Freddy’s people made out just fine in wigwams before our people showed up.”

Gus walked to the water’s edge, his head hung down.

“Get married and have kids, bud, you’ll think surviving the winter in a wigwam’s not only possible but a dream come true.”

Gus didn’t turn around.

“Anything that came before your wife and kids? That doesn’t mean a damn thing.”

He turned around then and stared at his father.

“I know you’ve been watching your mother and me. You’re old enough to see what’s going on. It must all seem damn crazy. Parts of it are. But just wait a little, and know while you’re waiting that I’d never let anything happen to you. Not ever.” Now Harry walked over and wrapped his arms around him. “I should’ve brought proper maps, I can see that now. I overestimated myself. I’ve got a long history of doing that. But we’re here now. We’re safe. We’ve got a whole new season to figure the rest of it out.”

Gus shook himself free. “We’re up here so you can decide what to do about Mom?”

“Christ almighty, bud, I don’t know. I can tell you that all the horseshit that’s going on between us is as much my fault as hers. That’s usually the case when things get this far gone.” He nodded his head yes, then shook it no. “We’ll have plenty of nights to chew the fat off that bone, I’d guess. What we don’t have is much time to get ready for winter.”

He opened the book of maps and tore a sheet from it. “I made a list of things to do this morning,” he said, handing it to Gus.

Who read: WOOD. CACHE. MEAT. LOOKOUT?

Then Harry ripped out the sheet he’d written his soundings on, folded it up, and slipped it in the pocket of his flannel shirt. “Ready to get to work?”

Too baffled to say anything, Gus just stood there looking at his father.

“One more thing,” Harry said. He smiled, kissed the moose-hide binding of the book, then winked at Gus and threw the maps into the lake.

I REMEMBER ONCE, many years ago, when Claire Veilleux came into the apothecary with her granddaughter. They collected their letters and were ready to leave but met Eleanor Rusk and her newborn daughter at the doorway. Eleanor was then only twenty or twenty-one and this was her first baby. I wasn’t part of their conversation, simply overhead it from my perch behind the counter.

After pleasantries and a word or two about the baby, Claire said, “Yes, well, they do teach us to love in ways we never knew we could, don’t they?” She ought to have known something about loving children, having five sons and five daughters herself.

That comment has stayed with me ever since, and I’ve often wondered what I’ve missed out on by not having any children of my own. I used to watch Gus and Signe gallivant through town and wish they were mine. But that wish, too, was decades ago.

They might have been mine were it not for Lisbet, whose grand entrance into the life of this town quashed my prospects with Harry. Like so many before her, she arrived by water, though not on some ferry or fishing boat. Her father — a law professor at the University of Chicago, president of the Chicago Yacht Club, political confidant of Adlai Stevenson — steered his thirty-six-foot sloop into Gunflint’s harbor like an Annapolis bluejacket. Lisbet and her mother stood topside, looking like breezy models on the cover of McCall’s. Stylish and scrubbed, with a highborn air of invincibility. It wouldn’t be too much to say that at first glance they seemed regal.

That air was shortly dispatched. Once her father docked the sloop in one of the slips along the Lighthouse Road, he went straight to the Traveler’s Hotel and took two rooms. Though the tavern wasn’t open, he offered the hotel manager fifteen dollars to stand behind the bar and pour apple wine. After the first glass, he offered him another ten bucks to leave the bottle on the bar and retrieve his wife and daughter from the harbor. After six hours on that barstool, he hadn’t yet figured out why the string of bartenders weren’t converting the change from American currency into Canadian. He thought he’d docked in Port Arthur.

Lisbet’s mother was perhaps even more striking than her daughter. She left her hotel room only for meals in the Traveler’s Hotel dining room, wore ridiculous gowns, and seemed always on the verge of fainting. Whereas Lisbet — given her parents’ aloofness and her own fierce independence — spent the week freely roaming Gunflint.

I’d noticed her several times. She was uninhibited and loose-lipped and seemed proud that her family’s adventure was dreamed up as a solution to her spell at Passavant Hospital in Chicago, where the plants were plastic and the windows covered with bars. She’d landed there after an episode in which she drank a bottle of her mother’s champagne and stole her father’s Cadillac. She admitted these things to me, standing before the counter while I was sorting the mail.

On the third or fourth day, I saw her sitting on the breakwater with her ubiquitous sketchbook open in her lap. That’s the spot where she first saw Harry Eide, and I watched her watching him. For a long time. Later, standing in front of the counter at the post office again, she told me, “It was the most perfect moment of my entire life, seeing that man. He’s like something out of Homer.”

He’d cruised past her, tipping his cap as he went. He wore oilskin pants and red galluses. He motored around Fisherman’s Point and into Eide Cove, and suddenly it was her solemn vow to have him.