Peter Geye - Wintering

“She passed away about an hour ago,” Janice said.

I dropped to my knees at the bedside, and reached under the sheet for her hand, which was still warm.

“She asked that we call you when this happened,” Janice explained. “You were the only person who ever visited her, Berit.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “You’re a saint. She would’ve died five years ago if not for you.”

I looked out that sad window, at the dead trees and the emerald-green grass on the knoll. “Isn’t it strange,” I said, “how different our men and women die?”

“Most of the folks here, men and women alike, they sit around all day begging to die. They’ve had enough. They don’t want to eat or sleep or go to the bathroom. They certainly don’t want to be sick anymore. They don’t even care to be visited.” She moved her hand from my shoulder and pushed a lock of hair from Rebekah’s forehead. “This one, she did want to live. Fiercely, in fact. And we all loved her for it. She was never sick. Never had headaches or colds or indigestion. The doctor came once every year, but there was never anything wrong. She had the constitution of a hunk of granite.”

“Then how did she die?”

“Without complaint.”

—

I called Harry from the front desk. “Rebekah Grimm has passed away.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line before he said, “Today?”

“Yes. Around seven o’clock this morning.”

Another pause. “I guess she couldn’t stand the thought of another bowl of the oatmeal they serve up there.”

“I guess not.”

“You’re there?”

“I am.”

More silence. A deep breath.

“I was with her yesterday. We had lunch at the Traveler’s.”

“Gus mentioned seeing you.”

Now we were both quiet for a moment. “Yesterday, she gave me all her instructions. It’s like she knew she was about to go.”

“She knew everything, didn’t she?”

“Harry, stop. There’s no need for that today.”

“No need. You’re right.” He took a slow, deep breath. “Is there anything you’d like me to do?” It was as if he was at the market, offering to pick up a pound of butter.

“Do you want to come up here?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Harry, love, your mother just died. It’s just you and me talking now.”

“Let me know if there’s anything I need to do,” he said. “I’ll be happy to pay for any arrangements. Just say the word, eh? In the meantime, I’ll be down at the fish house.”

“Harry. She’s your mother.”

“I never had one of those,” he said, and hung up the phone.

—

My first instinct was to scold him. To march right down to the fish house and give him a good talking-to. But as that morning moved along — first the doctor, then Mace Washburn from the mortuary — I became less and less judgmental. I remembered when my own mother passed away. This was some five years before Rebekah’s death. Harry came with me, stood at my side, offered his handkerchief when I cried. He said he was sorry and put his strong arm around me.

The strange thing was, standing beside my mother’s open coffin, I couldn’t really see her. All those years I lived only a hundred miles up the lakeshore, even as often as we saw each other, which was pretty frequently, she had become someone else. She became a person I only used to know, and not very well at that. My father was an even more distant memory.

And so I became as much Rebekah’s daughter as theirs. Two days after I got that call from Janice, we buried Rebekah in the hillside cemetery. Her coffin was silk-lined. We put her pink cloche on her gray head. We dressed her in a beautiful gown. Down in the cellar at Mace Washburn’s mortuary, I slid the picture of her and Odd Eide into her hand before he closed the coffin lid.

Merely a handful of reliable citizens gathered in the cemetery. I stood among them, huddled against a faint summer rain. I remember looking up the hill and seeing Harry and Gus and Signe. She’d come home for the occasion. They all stood beside Odd’s grave marker, looking down as Rebekah was lowered into the earth. It was nearly gallant, Harry’s being there at all.

I watched Harry and his children as the pastor spoke of dust and life eternal. I thought solemner words had never been whispered on that hillside. But of course more solemn words were just waiting. They always were. They always will be.

EVERY PERSON, I have come to believe, has a moment or a place in life when all four points of the compass converge, from when or where their life finally takes — for better or for worse — its fated course. For some, like myself, whose moment came when Harry Eide knocked on my door with a handful of butterworts, it’s a quiet moment. I knew, or anyway hoped, that the very scene that did come to pass eventually would. I had imagined it a thousand times. I had believed in it. And, most luckily, I knew it when I saw it and lived the rest of my life accordingly.

But for others, perhaps most, the moment is blindsiding. Not only do they fail to see it coming but also might never even catch its trail or notice at all that it has passed. I cannot say if one way of recognizing that moment is preferable to another, or if there are cases when the profit is in never knowing. But I count Gus among those whose moment was missed. A pity, too, considering how fateful it was.

That morning when Harry went after Charlie, Gus stepped into the sleeping sack and arranged the Duluth pack under him and sat back against the tree again. To wait for something he couldn’t truly imagine. He hated his father. He’d established that much. But as soon as Harry was gone he wanted him back. Gus was exhausted after no sleep. He was cold. The snow still fell.

And Charlie was near to hand.

Something like half an hour went by. During his months on the borderlands, Gus had become an expert keeper of time. He knew the hour by the sun and by feel and even in his distress of that morning he marked the minutes as they marched by. He was an Eide, after all. In fact, he was more intent on the movement of time than he was on movements in the woods, and at first he mistook the shifting trees for the snow playing devil with him. Three times the forest blurred and then refocused, and the fourth blurring was accompanied by Charlie’s voice. This wasn’t Charlie shouting from thirty yards away on the bay, but behind one of those tripping trees not thirty feet from where Gus sat in the sleeping bag.

“What kind of a father would leave his son out here?”

Gus could see Charlie’s long gray fur coat, half of it anyway, the hem of which met his leather galligaskins. Gus could see one of his eyes and the brim of his black hat. He could see one hand and the fingerless gloves and the blueing of the.38 Special held in it. He saw all of that and also the cigar hanging half chewed from Charlie’s red face.

“Don’t shoot your dick off with that little popgun sitting on your lap. You move one muscle and I’ll put a bullet right between your eyes.”

“I could have shot you last night,” Gus said, his voice cracking.

“You should’ve. You missed your chance. Seems to be a common refrain among you Eide assholes. Always missing the fucking chance.”

Gus looked down for only a second, and when he looked up again Charlie had moved to another, closer tree. Now he had his.38 Special raised in his right hand and with his left he lit his cigar.

“Smells good, don’t it?” He blew a long stream of smoke toward him. “I’d offer you one, but you won’t live long enough to enjoy it.”

For the second time in five hours there was a gun between the two of them, a thought that was, to Gus, as incredible now as it was then. And no less horrifying in either decade. He was sure of that.