Peter Geye - Wintering

He sat there for a long time. When he looked up again he noticed that several of the younger oaks were dead. No leaves clung to their branches. The bark on their trunks was duller than the living trees’. He crawled over to one and began swinging the hatchet. Slowly and empty-minded at first but then faster, madly. The sun rose above the tree he was chopping, shining down through the skeletal limbs without warming the morning at all. He chopped through a quarter of the tree with the hatchet, then took up the saw and started on the opposite side.

With only the hatchet and saw it took an hour to fell that tree. Why he did it Gus never could fathom, not then, not years later. Not ever. But it was down, and he stood over it, his hands blistered, his sweater soaked through with sweat. It would take another two hours to shear the branches from it and a full day to get the trunk back to the lake without a horse and sled. Splitting the hardwood would be brutish work, much harder than splitting birch. But he resolved that somehow he’d get that wood back to the shack, that they would live off the warmth it provided.

He walked up one side of the fallen tree, started back down the other, and noticed there on the ground a pile of bear scat bigger than his boot.

—

He canoed only one load of birchwood back to the shack that day, six trunks as fat as his leg. He unloaded them and checked inside for his father. Harry was gone, but there was a pot of warm coffee on the stove. He’d repaired the door and built a table barely large enough for two plates and two cups. He’d unpacked their foodstuffs and the kitchen implements. For all their enormous weight over the portages and through the scrub, the supplies looked pathetic on the shelves. Gus poured himself a cup of coffee and stepped outside. He stacked the logs against the shack’s lee wall.

It had been his intention to fetch more birch, but when he gave his canoe a pull across the shallows he saw, fluttering underwater not far from shore, the book of maps. He fished it out with the tip of his fishing rod, brought it back to the shack, and laid the maps page by page across the boards overhead on the joists, where his father wouldn’t see them.

—

They ate hunks of jerky and after dinner sat on either side of the little table, their legs crossed, sipping coffee. The cribbage board sat between them but they didn’t play.

“Have we got enough gun for a bear?” Gus asked.

“What do you want with a bear?”

“I saw a pile of scat big as your head in a stand of trees over there.”

Harry smiled. “How you gonna bait a bear?”

He couldn’t say why, but he didn’t tell his father about the bur oaks and acorns. He didn’t tell him about chopping down one of the dead oaks. Didn’t tell him about finding the maps, either. He wanted secrets of his own, Gus did. He wanted his own discoveries. He wanted there to be things his father simply didn’t know.

“Have we got enough gun?”

“Sure we do. But the bears’ll be going to bed soon, and we’ve got a few things to do before we start hunting. That pile of wood you brought home today might not get us through the night.”

“We’ll have wood.” Gus went for more coffee and poured them each a cup. “The bears won’t go into hibernation for a few weeks yet. It’s been warm. Almost no snow.”

Harry nodded. “I admit, a few pounds of bear fat might be good for the larder. I found a bushel of mushrooms today. Fry those things up in bear fat and we’d be the happiest shitheads this country ever saw.” He nodded again. “Get some wood, then get yourself a bear if you can. Even a small boar’s, what, seventy-five pounds of meat? We could use that.”

“We’ll have the neighbors over for a barbecue,” Gus said, leaning back on his stool and putting his hands behind his head. “But I guess we’re not expecting company.”

The dopey smile Harry had been wearing since they’d found the shack vanished all at once. “Well,” he said, picking a piece of jerky from his teeth, “that’s the thing.”

Gus sat up. Put his hands flat on the table. Even all these years later, he could still feel his pulse quicken to think of it. “What’s the thing?”

Harry took a long sip of coffee and looked over Gus’s head, his eyes lighting on the windows on either side of the door. “We might have company yet,” he said. He reached over his shoulder for the coffeepot and filled his cup with the dregs. “I should’ve saved a bit of the hooch for this.” He set the coffeepot on the floor and feigned a smile. “This all happened years ago. Before you and your sister were born. Before your mother even came to town. Before I knew a damn thing.” He got up with his cup and took a step in each direction but then stood by the stove. “Me and Charlie and Charlie’s big brother, George, and Freddy Riverfish, all night we’re at a card game in the fish house. Finished a jar apiece of old man Hakonsson’s home-burnt. We’re all potted and quarrelsome and I’d lost my ass in the stud game, so I offer the boys a wager: ten bucks a man I’ll go down into the Devil’s Maw.”

“The Devil’s Maw?”

“Why, hell yes, they’ll take that wager.” Harry sat back down and wedged his boots off. He set them under the stove and pulled his socks off, too. “We come falling out of the fish house at sunup. Stumble down to the boat slide. Freddy’s looking up at the sky. It’s already eighty degrees and promising nothing if not more heat. He says he’ll buy me breakfast if I’ll quit this nonsense. But I’m primed. Ready to go. And so’s Charlie. He tells Freddy to pull his skirt up.

“So here we go. Out the cove and around the point and up the Burnt Wood. But before we even make it to the highway bridge, the water craps out and we have to beach the boat. The hoppers go scattering like buckshot, and by now Freddy and George have pooled six bucks and the promise of steaks at the Traveler’s if we quit.

“But Charlie, he’s not ready to call it a day. He’s got to get his brother up to the falls. He says, ‘You goddamn welshes. Get your pants wet.’ So we start walking. Ropes and a lantern and a fresh jar of home-burnt for the morning’s task. The four of us marching up the shallow river.

“Christ almighty, were we a haggard bunch. George Aas was almost a friend. Hell, he was one. Very different than his old man and brother. George’s the one who brought his brother along to that card game. George, just back from Iwo Jima minus an arm and jumpy as a June bug, but a good man.” He rubbed the knuckles of each of his forefingers into his eyes. “George had joined the marines the minute he could. Went off to Fort Pendleton despite his old man’s being against it. He trained as a flamethrower, George did, and he was in the first wave of soldiers to hit the beach on that goddamn island.” Again he rubbed his eyes. “Georgie said he thought it was abandoned, just a ghost island. They marched across that beach without so much as a whisper from the Japs. Not until they reached the first line of defense did the bullets start flying. And did they ever. He said it was like waking from a dream. Turns out the Japs were all dug in, had miles and miles of tunnels and bunkers, goddamn gophers. And there’s Georgie, blasting his flamethrower into one of the holes in the ground. He turns around and, rat-a-tat-tat, some Jap in another hole blows his arm right off. He lays there for half of a day, bleeding out, before he got found and tended to by the medics. A real hero, which is not something to be said lightly. Not ever. Anyway, it wouldn’t have taken that. Georgie could always see the forest for the trees, which his brother just couldn’t stand.

“Then there’s Freddy Riverfish. He’s mean as a badger and always was. I’d been on a ship on the Atlantic a month earlier, the sound of Sturmgewehrs still came to me every time I shut my eyes. Of course, Charlie’s the exception in our crew. Pretty as a French maid, Charlie was. Wearing a goddamn golf shirt. His hair done up in pomade.” Harry looked like he’d just swallowed a glassful of sour milk. “Or maybe with the devil’s own spit, for Chrissakes. Anyway, there’s your crew, and we’re dragging ass up the Burnt Wood. Water’s cold and we’re passing the jar back and forth and before I pour the last drops down my gullet we’re standing under the Devil’s Maw. Even as light as the water’s running, it’s still too much. So Charlie says, ‘We’ll have to dam it.’