Peter Geye - Wintering

“That’s where I found the antlers,” he said, as though they’d just been talking about this.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

Harry held out his index finger. “I’m thinking we should cross the lake and go north up that shoreline.”

Gus had no intuition of his own. “Okay.”

“It’ll leave us wide open for the time it takes to get across.”

Now Gus looked all around. There were hiding places galore in those woods. He felt a moment’s panic but subdued it. “I guess we’re pretty much out in the open anywhere.” He checked around again. “Do you think they’re close by?”

“No, I don’t. I think they’ve probably left.”

“For now,” Gus said, and felt childish about thinking out loud.

“Right. For now.”

They began crossing the lake in the tracks of Charlie’s gang. Midway, they veered north, and father and son paused. The snow was deep and tough going even in snowshoes and Harry said, “Maybe just keep following the tracks, eh?”

Gus answered by turning into the already trodden snow.

After half an hour they found the grooves of the plane’s floats, which spun for the flight out with two parallel sets. There the men’s tracks stepped into packed snow, and Gus noticed how their strides lengthened. He and Harry stepped into the tracks, too, and before long they came to the last of them. More cigarette butts were scattered over the ground here, and Harry muttered that Charlie was a complete pig and then turned and looked back from where they’d come. “I reckon that’s a three-mile walk, eh?”

Again Gus didn’t answer. He felt somewhat better since they were gone for now and because his father had been correct in predicting they would be; then he tamped the feeling out and told himself to remember exactly what had happened last night. That thought was bad enough, but then he imagined all that was still to come.

THOSE LETTERS had put a stutter in Gus, and a week passed without my hearing from him. Then it was his wife who called. “Come over for dinner tomorrow,” Sarah said. “Gus has been wandering around here like Harry did in the end. I can’t stand it. Could you maybe help him get his bearings back? And, Lord knows, I could use the sound of another woman’s voice around here. What do you say?”

I should’ve guessed how much those letters would shake him up. Though I could plainly see Gus’s reckoning would require visiting more than his and his father’s past, I don’t think he did yet. And so those letters pushed him right off course. Got him thinking about older blood. People he’d not thought were involved with the story he was telling.

My initial notion was to decline Sarah’s invitation. It was one thing to sip a morning’s cup of coffee with Gus at the kitchen table, another altogether to dredge up so many feelings in the evening. But after all the time I’d spent in the shadow of Sarah and Gus’s domesticity, sitting vigil by Harry and his sorry thoughts, it would’ve been rude to say no. So I walked over the next evening.

I should add that Sarah’s one of the best ladies this town has. Not only does she keep their woodpile stacked and their home impeccable, not only has she raised two valedictorians of Arrowhead High and kept her husband in starched shirts for twenty-odd years, managed to finish law school at the age of twenty-three, and gotten elected a sixth-district judge right here before her kids were done with grade school, but she did all this without ever crossing another living soul. More than that, she treated folks with a kindness that few of us can even aspire to, let alone reach. She’d certainly been kind to me. More than once she brought me a dinner plate while I sat at Harry’s bedside. On the hardest nights — when he was aggrieved and howling like a loon, when his anguish truly found its pitch — she would insist I share a cup of tea with her before I left. She never asked me one question I didn’t want her to, either, which might say more about her goodness than anything else.

We were always friendly, but until Harry took to bed we’d never wined and dined each other. Nor even after he did. Sarah and I, we’d say our hellos at the market or the odd social gathering down in town, and wave when our cars passed up and down the Burnt Wood Trail, and we exchanged Christmas cards. But we were not bosom friends. Perhaps this was due to our difference in age or the strangeness attending the fact that I was her father-in-law’s ladylove. Certainly it wasn’t because I didn’t find her charming in every respect. Even so, I admit I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to her home for dinner that night.

Gus was shoveling off their deck when I arrived, their house smelling equally of the fire in the hearth and the soup on the stove. Mushroom, turned out. How she could have known it’s my favorite I don’t know. But that’s another of her gifts.

“It’s so nice to have you in our home again,” she said. “It’s criminal, I know. All winter you’ve been keeping Gus company and I haven’t mustered the courtesy to thank you for it until now.”

“Gus and I are just keeping each other company. The pleasure’s been as much mine as his.”

The table was set as though she were expecting the governor: linens and fine stemware and cloth napkins folded into the shapes of swans, three of each. She knew to mix me a toddy, which she was doing at the counter. She knew to play the music quietly, my hearing not being what it once was.

“Well, there’s no excuse in any case.” She offered me the toddy. “But you’re here now.”

I took the glass from her hand.

“Gus told me how much you enjoyed them. I mulled lemon zest rather than simply squeezing a wedge in there.” She smiled. “I hope it suits you.” She picked up her glass of red wine and raised it. “To righting a wrong. I’m looking forward to this evening.”

“Me, too,” I said, then took a sip. “Mmmm,” I hummed.

She ushered me into the great room and gestured to the chair beside the hearth.

“If I sit there you’ll need a crane to get me out,” I said, and this was true of the bonded-leather chair as brown as a beaver’s pelt and deeper than Lake Superior, sitting under the floor lamp next to the fireplace.

Sarah smiled. “That’s Gus’s reading chair. He wouldn’t admit it, but he very nearly needs his own crane to get out of it these days.” She walked to the sofa instead.

I sat down, but before Sarah did, she pulled the screen aside and added two birch logs. The fire flared as she plopped down on the ottoman and took a sip of her wine. She was tapping her toe to the sounds coming from somewhere behind us.

“The music,” I said, “it sounds nice.”

“That’s Gus and Davey Blum. They recorded a CD in Davey’s basement some time ago. I guess boys will always be boys, right?” She smiled and had another sip of wine. When I followed suit, she looked straight at me. “I remember what it was like the first few weeks after Greta left for college. Tom, of course, was already gone. I remember how quiet the house was. How strange it was to be here without either of them. Like there was something missing.” She smiled again. “Well, something was missing. But we got used to it. Gus started talking more, though it took him a long time to find his voice. The one meant only for me. I think he’d admit that. He started playing more music. That’s how he found his bearings. By playing his guitar.” She took another deep breath and cocked her head. “I love the sound of a guitar, don’t you? And when it’s played by a handsome man?” She fanned herself with her open hand.

It did sound nice, his guitar and Davey Blum’s banjo turning melodies together. But it got me to thinking about how Gus would often bring out his guitar while Harry was still here. Usually late at night, while Sarah and I sat on the deck with a cup of tea. Sometimes the guitar was the only thing that could quiet him down enough that he could finally fall asleep. I looked at Sarah, at her beautiful, smiling face, and understood she’d meant the music as a special kindness. “Yes,” I said, “I love the sound of a guitar. Thank you for putting it on.”