Peter Geye - Wintering

“The way he told it, there was no choice in the matter. The hand of God reached down and gave him a shove. He didn’t regret it.” Harry finally took the bearskin from his shoulders and spread it across the foot of his bunk. “Christ if I know why he did it. Why do we do any of the things we do? Why’d you shoot that bear? Probably you did it for the same reason.”

“I shot the bear because we’re going to need food. A lot of it.”

“You shot the bear because I told you not to. You shot the bear because you wanted to see what it was like.”

He picked up his coffee cup and got out of his bunk and went to the pot on the stove. He shook the coffeepot, discovered it was empty, and put it down hard. “Which isn’t to say I don’t understand. I do. We’re men. We need to see ourselves against the world. Against our fathers. I did. No doubt you do, too.”

“I bet you never defied your father. I bet you were a perfect son.”

“Far from it.”

“But a better son than me.”

“No chance of that.”

“So did you ever defy him?”

“Nope.”

“See, you were better.”

“I had a better father, that’s all.”

Gus was old enough to carry his share of the load into that wilderness, old enough to kill the bear and harvest the wood, but he felt like a child when it came to understanding the nature of men. He felt, too, that he would never be old enough to manage to.

“The difference between my father and me,” Harry said, “or one of the differences, is that he never would’ve gotten us in this tangle. He would have squared it all up over a beer at the Traveler’s. He had more trouble with those Aas boys than I ever did. That’s a certifiable fact.”

More confused than ever, Gus wondered how a livelihood mattered more than a marriage. And what the difference was.

“My old man had a saying,” Harry told him. “Well, not a saying, exactly, but a question. He asked it of himself and he asked it of me and he asked it of anyone who came to him with trouble: ‘Can you get ahead of it?’ The answer, for him, was always, always yes.” Harry stood in the middle of their small shack, holding his hair back off his forehead. “I should’ve thought about that before I sicced the goddamn dogs on Charlie.”

“Charlie’s a killer. He killed his brother.”

“And a crook and a thug and a cheat. I know.” Harry walked slowly back to his bunk and sat down on the edge. “But the reason I went after him has nothing to do with him killing his brother. It has nothing to do with him stealing from the church coffers. Hell, it doesn’t even have to do with his big plans to plunder these wilds.” He ran his hands through his hair once more.

“If old Marcus Aas had come after my father’s gal, you know what would’ve happened? He’d have walked right up to Marcus’s door and asked him to step outside. He would have told him the jig was up, that if he saw her again there’d be hell to pay. And if Marcus had kept at it, my father would’ve rolled up his shirtsleeves and gone three rounds with him. If things weren’t square after that, he’d have set the bastard’s house on fire.”

“You said your only chance against Charlie was to get him out here, though. You said that this was a fair place to fight.”

Harry looked at him as though at a simpleton. “The reason my father went into the bear den was because Danny Riverfish called him a chickenshit. My father knew, even then, as a boy, that being a chickenshit was about the worst thing you could be in this world.” He stared at Gus then for a long time. “I say again, he was twelve. I’ve got gray hair.”

Gus remembered sitting in the shack waiting for his father to say more. Of course, there was nothing more to be said.

EARLY MORNINGS I went to the apothecary and sorted through the miscellany that Bonnie and Lenora found stashed in every box and drawer and hidden cranny in that old building. There were coded ledgers, correspondence from as far away as France and New Zealand, a passel of letters to and from Chicago and San Francisco, several dozen from Montana. Piled waist-high on the floor, a stack of folios that could best be described as books of spells. Some of the recipes in them called for the blood of wolves in heat or ground stag antlers or the dried wombs of rabbits. There were hundreds of photographs, maybe a thousand, in dozens of warped and yellowed albums. One morning Bonnie brought me eight red-rope legal files, full of documents even young Curtis Mayfair III, Esquire, couldn’t decipher. There were boxes and boxes of medical records, including the notes for perhaps two hundred births, among them Odd Eide, Gus’s grandfather. All of these the records of Hosea Grimm, who built the apothecary and whose influence lived on long after his death, which came before I arrived here in Gunflint.

Mostly I filed things in bankers’ boxes and set them aside, and at the end of a morning Bonnie or Lenora would cart them down to the cellar, where wire shelves had been built and arranged like those in a library. But occasionally something stood out and was set aside as an artifact that might warrant inclusion on the walls or in the glass cases we had ordered to furnish the old sales floor of the apothecary.

One such item was a poster-sized graph of the water level of the Burnt Wood River at the Main Street Bridge for the year 1899, as recorded every day. It charted not only the water level but the phases of the moon, the sunrise and sunset, the direction of the wind at each mealtime, the day’s precipitation, and, in winter, the particular quality of the snow, whether heavy or light, dry or wet. As with all of Hosea Grimm’s notes and documentation and correspondence, the information was recorded in elaborate and very beautiful calligraphy. The graph itself was hand-drawn and perfect, an accomplishment unto itself. What’s most intriguing about it, though, is the note at the bottom of the page, with an asterisk before it: “Aristotle said that venerable and most ancient sage — old Thales of Miletus — decreed all matter and all form were first and last WATER. A fool’s metaphysic, as our measure of April One, Eighteen and Ninety-nine, brought with it him who was most decidedly NOT water, but went by the given name of Rune Evensen. Drowned and dead and fished FROM the water.”

Everything about the graph speaks to this place. To our need to order that which is chaos and could never be ordered. To our thoroughness in most — if not all — matters. And of course to our feebleness beside this wilderness. When I showed the chart to Gus, he put on his reading glasses and studied it carefully, as though the minute changes in water level nigh a hundred years ago were of great interest and importance.

He took his glasses off. “I’ve always heard it said Marcus Aas pulled Rune Evensen from the river. That Marcus believed the Evensen property was his by dint of that universal law we now know as finders keepers.” He looked up and smirked and sat on the stool opposite the counter. “It’s hard to imagine that kind of meticulousness, though, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s foolishness. To measure a river that way. A sounding a day.”

“It’s not so strange,” I said. “He was a scientist, after all.”

“If Hosea Grimm was a scientist, I’m the king of Norway.”

“Well, he certainly was meticulous, whatever else he was. A couple days ago we came across the notes he made after your grandfather was born. There were notes for every child he delivered here. Most every letter he ever wrote had a duplicate copy. His record of boats coming and leaving the harbor is more thorough than the lighthouse keeper’s.”

“Any first-grader can count boats.”

“But most don’t. I understand you’d deny him any admiration, but he was a man with interesting qualities.”