Peter Geye: Wintering

Then she laughed. “My dad told me I’m done seeing you, but I still wanted to do that with you.”

Gus didn’t say anything.

“Did I hurt you?” She pushed herself up and looked into his eyes. “Your shoulder, did I hurt it?”

He glanced at the small arc of blood. “No,” he said. “Well, maybe a little.”

“Good. Whenever it stings, think of me.” She got up and dressed while the rain lightened outside. “I was your first time.”

Again he said nothing.

“I knew it.” She pulled her shirt on. “I hope you liked it. I sure did.” Then she knelt down and ran her hand through his hair. “I bet I even love you, too, Gus. I never thought I would.” She stood and looked away. “My father told me not to.”

She left without saying anything more, and he was still in the fish house later that night, when Harry arrived. If Harry was surprised to see him there, at that hour, he didn’t let on. Gus was surprised, of course, and stood up guiltily and pretended to be putting some tools away.

“You don’t need to do that,” Harry said.

“Do what?”

Harry came over and stood beside his canoe on the strongback. “I saw the Aas girl leaving. I was right outside.”

Gus turned away, though there was no place to hide.

“Tell me it’s just a fling, eh, bud? Tell me you two aren’t mixed up in something serious.”

“She broke up with me tonight.”

He shook his head knowingly.

“It was Mr. Aas told her she couldn’t see me anymore.”

Gus could remember the look his father gave him then. Tired, fierce, angry. He came over and sat beside him.

“Well, Charlie’s a guy wants to be the lead dog. Trouble is, he’s only good on the cut trail. Know what I’m saying? He sees you’re one who can cut ’em yourself. He doesn’t want his daughter jumping on your sled. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about Cindy Aas. Likely she’d run away with you right now if you’d have her.”

Harry stepped back from his canoe and stood quietly for a long time. Then he said, “I’ve built dozens of these, but this is the prettiest one yet.” He paused to admire her curves, then looked back at Gus. “My old man, there was a man who could build a boat. I guess you’ve heard that story, eh?”

“I guess so.”

Harry went from the canoe to the door, opened the window set in the top half, and stuck his head out for a minute, then turned back around. “The winds are coming,” he said, “bringing that Canadian air on down. The bears are fattening up. My favorite time of year, this.” He turned back to Gus. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What’s your favorite time of year?”

Only then did Gus realize his father had been drinking. He almost never drank. Certainly never got twisted. “What’s going on, Dad?”

Harry smiled and glanced out the window again. “Yep, the winds are coming around.” He closed the window and stepped back to the canoe. “I’ve been thinking, bud. How about we take a little adventure? Who’s to say we’ll ever have this chance again? Who’s to say how quickly this world’s going straight to hell? You and me, we’ll get into our canoes and paddle them up into the borderlands and live like voyageurs this winter. We won’t have to worry about a thing. We’ll be winterers. What do you say?”

“What would Mom think about that?”

“That’s another thing not to worry about.”

It was the first time Gus ever heard him defy his mother’s iron grip on their family, and it seemed to enliven Harry. “We’ll use my maps. Go up the Burnt Wood and through the Minnesota lakes until we cross the Laurentian Divide. From there we’ll get on the old voyageurs’ highway.” He clapped his hands. “Thompson had to winter unexpectedly up on Holy Lake. Rumors are the fort’s still there. Hidden in the woods. We’ll find it. Make a go of it. Just the two of us. We’ll have a hell of a time.”

Gus must have looked doubtful, because Harry said, “What?”

“Isn’t this the sort of trip that needs planning?”

“I’ve been planning this for as long as you’ve been alive. Longer. We’ll leave in two weeks.”

—

“ ‘I’ll go,’ that’s what I said, instinctively. I was certain — who knows how — that my father was at the crossroads of his great dream and his worst nightmare. I knew he would need me.”

Gus looked at the fire for a moment and said, “I’ve recalled that scene in the fish house a thousand times. I can still see the turn of expression on my father’s face, like a photograph in a gilded frame. And even if that picture now has a cautionary caption, there was no such warning then. Or else I didn’t notice it. Or refused to.” He looked over at me. “What did not escape me was the awful mood around our house those days before we left. My father had an unreal focus. He likened our adventure to going to battle, and said we should prepare as though that’s what we were doing. So we did. He bought me a Ruger handgun. He bought powerful binoculars. He dug from the attic the field pants he’d worn in the Ardennes. He never said a word to my mother that I heard.

“And though I had misgivings — obvious ones, too — one overwhelming thing drove me on: on the borderlands, my father would need me as much as I’d need him. That’s what made me so blindly ready to go off with him. What boy doesn’t wait his whole childhood to walk alongside his father on equal terms?”

Gus sat there in my house, staring into the fireplace, the expression on his face — well, he wore it like an old coat he’d inherited from Harry. I could see his memories traveling back as he called them up one by one, willing to speak of them only after he was sure that no errors would accompany them in the retelling. It was all I could do not to fall in love with Harry all over again, sitting there looking at his son in my home.

“What if I’d seen right then the folly of it? I’d already been accepted by four colleges, which was the best built-in excuse I’ve ever had for not doing something else. What if I’d said no, that I didn’t want to go?” Again he looked up from the fire. “You can’t imagine how many times I’ve asked myself that question.”

We sat silently for a minute or two before I offered him another cup of coffee.

“No, thank you. I’d best get moving.” He got up and walked to the door and put on his coat.

“It’s no secret Charlie’s been a lout his whole life,” I said. “No secret about him and your mother. So why mention him at all?”

“To understand why we went in the first place, you need to start with Charlie. In order to understand any of this, you need to know everything about that crooked bastard.”

“He’s the reason you and Harry went north that winter?”

“One of them, yes. Maybe the main reason.”

“What about your mother?”

Gus nodded his head slowly. Was he agreeing with me? He kept nodding and then closed his eyes, as he would do so often in these sessions. Once he opened them, he said, “Why didn’t he just go to you then, Berit? It would’ve been so easy. None of this would ever have happened. Not to him. Not to me.” He nodded yet again, as if the idea was just now taking shape in his mind. “My father and his friends, by then they’d done enough to stop the developers, timber and mining both. I don’t believe that was a danger anymore. My father would’ve known that better than anybody.” He looked at me. “So was Charlie the reason my father took me north? The answer is yes. Absolutely.”

BEFORE CHARLIE was elected mayor, before he went after Harry’s wife, before he sent his daughter to cow Gus, he was just a young bully. I should know, and I can offer an example from the spring of 1942.