Peter Geye - Wintering

“What are you doing here, Berit?” She put one hand behind her back and touched my arm with the other. “I didn’t know you were friendly with Harry Eide.”

How could I explain? Even to myself? I had gone up to the hospital because I could not wait a minute longer to see him. When I’d first heard about Harry and Gus paddling up the river, I thought, with some certainty, that I had seen the last of them, a feeling that filled me with regret and shame. So when word filtered through town that they were back, and in such shape as they were, I would not be stopped.

“Of course, you spent so much time with his mother,” Ana said.

I smiled weakly. “What happened to his foot?”

“Hunting accident.”

Harry? A hunting accident? I thought. In January?

She still had one hand behind her back. “His foot is the least of his problems. His body temperature was well below ninety degrees when we admitted him a couple hours ago. We’re warming him slowly, hoping to avoid cardiac arrest. He needs to make it a couple more hours. That’s what’s important now.” She spoke in a whisper and nodded behind the next curtain, where Gus slept like he was on fire. His right hand was wrapped in gauze, his hair a bird’s nest of matted curls, his young man’s beard only an inch long where it had grown in full, and I couldn’t help thinking he resembled a child because of it.

“Has his mother been here?” I asked.

“She left twenty minutes ago.”

“Will the boy be all right?”

“He’s skinny as a newborn fawn. Has a little frostbite of his own, on his hand and up on his cheeks. But mostly he’s just tired.”

“Is it true Freddy and Marcel Riverfish brought them in?”

“Honestly, Berit, it was the damnedest thing you ever saw. Those two and these two, right out of the woods.”

“Where did they find them?”

“I heard they were about to die up on the Burnt Wood River. Not twenty paces from the Devil’s Maw. Their canoe had caught in a snowbank alongshore. A few more feet to the right and they would’ve been swallowed whole.” The nurse looked at Gus for a long time and then back at me. “He looks just like his pops, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he does.”

She patted my arm again and told me to have a seat. When she pulled the curtain to step back to work, she did so with the hand she’d been keeping behind her back. On it was a plastic glove covered in blood.

—

News of Harry and Gus coming out of the woods that January day in 1964 spread through town even faster than reports of JFK’s assassination had two months earlier. Some folks were already calling it a miracle. Others said that fate had smiled kindly on them. Surely it was a bit of both. A few even said that between Thea Eide, Harry’s grandmother, and Odd Eide, his father, the family had endured a generous portion of misfortune, and this was God’s way of evening the score.

But I could have told you, sitting in the corner of that hospital and watching that man’s suffering, that this was a godless business. The only credit I was willing to give providence was for making our winters what they were, and for making Harry the man who he was and his situation as devilish a thing as anyone could ever imagine.

It seems so recently that I sat through that night. So little time since the great happiness of my life came to bloom. It’s true I hardly knew Harry then. And it’s true I didn’t know exactly why I’d gone to the hospital or what I expected to find once I got there. Certainly I had no idea what he’d been through in the months he’d been gone, or any sense of what it was that drove him into the wilderness in the first place, but I did know — sitting there that night — that the care he was receiving in that hospital room would have less to do with his survival than my love of him would. I knew this because of how powerfully my feelings were welling up in me. And I was right.

First I sat there and thought about all the lost time. Not his stint on the borderlands but all the time before that. The years since I’d first laid eyes on him in the winter of 1937 and the day we’d stood there with the butterworts six months later. It pained me to think of what had been squandered to those years. It pained me also to think of what Lisbet had gained instead: Gus and Signe, their beautiful home on the river, all of that time with Harry, all the dusky nights and bright mornings, all the happiness of a full life. I even wished for the spats and sadness and hard and hateful moments that I knew they had and that we, too, would inevitably have shared. All of it should have been mine.

Now, before you judge me I should say that I knew even then what an ugly thing it was to covet. But I had waited. I had been patient. I had lived my life and had done so without objection. Indeed, I had lived it as well as I could. All the friends I had. All the books I’d read. All the quiet and soulful evenings when I’d felt near to bursting because of how beautiful this place was. All the snowfalls and sunrises. All this added up to a life of plenty, that’s for sure. And as I sat there, watching Harry not die, all those things, and everything else, was suddenly larger and more stunning because I saw what I’d always really known — that I would love this man.

It’s an amazing thing — the most amazing, in fact — to sit through a night and know in the morning that you are in love. That it’s not a dream or a fantasy or something to covet, only something to fill you up. There are those people who say it’s a folly or that only fools rush in, but I have lived all three ways — without it, with wanting it, and with it in my hands — and I say the latter’s by far the best.

—

Before it was even light outside, I opened my eyes to old Willem Lundby standing above Gus, holding his notebook mid-inquiry, his badge on his chest. Gus was picking pieces of dried fruit from a plastic bowl. Before Willem noticed I was awake, I closed my eyes again and listened.

“So you never saw Charlie Aas?”

“No, sir.”

“You never saw his plane?”

“No, sir.”

“Because no one has seen Charlie or his plane for coming up on ten days now. The last time someone did see him, he was heading over the hills above town.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. My dad and me, we were just wintering.”

“And where did you say you were wintering?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“You don’t? Really?”

“No, sir. I don’t know exactly. Somewhere up on the borderlands. We got lost.”

“Huh. So you got lost?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And not even Charlie in his plane could find you?”

“Not even God could have found us.”

“What about your old man’s foot over there? He step in a wolf trap?”

Gus looked over at his father. “We had a hunting accident.”

“A hunting accident?”

Gus nodded.

“Your old man never poached a day in his life, so why start now?”

“We had to eat. We were trying not to starve.”

“Had to eat.” Willem shook his head. “Good God almighty,” he said, and shook his head, flipped back through his notebook, tapped his pencil on his mustache. “Most folks figure Charlie went up to find you and your dad. On account of the hot water your old man put him in.”

“How could he find us, though?”

Willem looked up from his notebook. “That’s what I want to know, son. Or, rather, I’m wanting to know what happened when he did.”

“But he didn’t. Nobody could find us. I told you that. We couldn’t even find ourselves.”

On it went like this for some time, Willem sure there was a connection to be made, and Gus, still nibbling on his dried fruit, insisting there was not. In the end, Willem smiled and shook his head and said, “I’ll be damned. You Eides can really tell a story after all.” He pocketed his notebook and pencil and took his brown felt campaign hat off the chair beside the bed and put it on his bald head. “I just hope your old man tells the same story when he wakes up.”