The Lighthouse Road (33 page)

   She lay back on the davenport. " Stand up," she said. "Put that ring away."

   As though Odd were hypnotized, he did as she said.

   "Now, come here," she said.

   When Odd stepped to her, she reached up and unbuttoned his trousers. She tugged them down and lay back again on the davenport.

   "Come to me," she said.

S
he left him alone in the parlor when they were finished.

   He lay there for a long time before he thought to get up and pour himself that drink he'd first craved an hour earlier. On the way back to the sitting room he stopped and found a new pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket. He also found Sargent's gift. He took both to the window and lit a cigarette and took a sip of his whiskey. He looked at the pack age. He looked at Rebekah's dress and hat and undergarments still piled on the floor.

   He felt aged, like ten years had passed since he'd got home from work, like in all that time the world had changed without his knowing. He drank and smoked and looked out on the Christmas Eve. There was the snow.

   He looked over his shoulder, thought of her sleeping—
how could
she sleep
?—back on their bed.

   Almost as though he were surprised, he felt Sargent's gift in his hand. And because he could think of nothing else to do, he tore off the paper. It was a Bible. There was a note, too, written in Sargent's impeccable script: turn to luke. bless you. h. sargent

    Odd opened the book and scanned the names— he might have been reading roll for the old men in Gunflint: Joshua, Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Hosea— until he found Luke and turned to the corresponding page. At first he was put off by the high style of the King James version. It reminded him of those Greek poets he'd been made to read in school what seemed like a hundred years ago. But as he settled into it he found himself in a kind of communion with the gospel.

   And so he read the story of the life of Christ. He read for hours, until the first light of Christmas morning was showing on the edge of the dark sky. When finally he put the book down and laid his head back, he realized that his own sorrow and suffering were nothing next to the world's. If Rebekah would renounce him, if she would renounce her child, he would be father enough when the time came to raise his baby.

   He set the Bible on the floor, stood up and gathered Rebekah's new dress and undergarments from the floor, folded them neatly, and put everything in the department-store box.

I
n an examination room on Ellis Island, an immigration official asked Thea her final destination.

   "Gunflint, Minnesota," she said.

   The Norwegian-speaking immigration officer checked one of a dozen ledgers on his desk. "Gunflint, you say?" He checked another of the ledgers. " There doesn't seem to be a place with that name."

   Thea was of course confused. She told him her aunt and uncle lived there. She gave him their names as though that might prove its place on a map, its place in a ledger.

   "How will you be getting from here to there?" he said.

   She told him she would be taking a train from Hoboken to Chicago. From Chicago she'd take a steamer to Duluth. From Duluth another steamer up Lake Superior to Gunflint. She told him her uncle raised cattle.

   The immigration officer consulted an atlas of Midwestern states. He summoned another official and, after a brief consultation, they settled on Duluth, Minnesota, for Thea's final official destination.

   Five hours later she was on a barge bound for Hoboken. She would not remember these days, or would remember them only as a blur, as though she had passed through the train station in Hoboken in a dream. The locomotive was another dream, and the two days it spent on its way to Chicago were still other dreamlike days.

   In Chicago, at Union Station, she stepped from the train into the strangest world yet, a building so grand and in such contrast to anything she had ever imagined that it frightened her. All that noise and motion and clamor like a taut string about to snap.

   And outside Union Station was another kind of tension, another kind of dream. The buildings above her were shrouded in fog, a kind of rain fell and drenched the penny map she held before her. On Michigan Avenue she walked north to the river and found the docks of the Chicago, Soo & Duluth Line. In the ticket office she bought a third-class berth on the
Sault
for seven dollars. She had only four hours to wait for her three-day cruise to Duluth.

T
he
Sault
passed through the locks onto Lake Superior in the middle of the night. It rode out of Whitefish Bay, the moon on the horizon its lodestar. It was cold and even as the boat sailed ahead, a breeze came up the stern, hitting Thea's face and bringing tears to her eyes. The
Sault
docked in Marquette at midday. For half an hour stevedores unloaded and loaded cargo, a dozen passengers debarked, another dozen boarded. In the dark of night they docked again, this time in Ashland. The same exchange of passengers and goods. Another half hour spent in harbor.

   The following morning Thea stood on the stern deck again. Again she watched the sunrise behind them. Still the stiff breeze trailing. It was fully day when the
Sault
landed at the Chicago, Soo & Duluth Line docks in Duluth harbor. She thought the fledgling city rising before the tall hills looked something like Tromsø. Even the air had an arctic quality, chill and damp.

   The offices of the North Shore Ferry Service were located right on the harbor, behind the livery and the enormous Board of Trade building. Thea entered and waited while a man behind a barred window sold billets to two families in line ahead of her. When finally it was her turn, she approached the window. She had clutched in her hands the phrasebook she'd been given for just such purposes.

   In a halting whisper she said, "Gunflint, Minnesota. Please."

   " Speak up," the man said.

   Thea collected herself and repeated her request.

   "
Opportunity
sails tomorrow at seven a.m. Passage is two dollars twenty cents." He spoke in a loud voice, avoiding her pleading eyes. "Will you take a ticket? There are others awaiting my services here." He gestured to the queue behind her.

   Thea reached for her purse, pulled some crumpled dollar bills from it, and put them on the tray under the bars. The ticket vendor looked at her finally, exhausted. He took a deep breath.

   He shifted his visor and said, "Do you understand the boat leaves tomorrow?"

   She answered with an unconvincing nod.

   He took another deep breath and shifted his visor still again. "Wait a moment." He stepped into an office behind him and returned in a moment with his own phrasebook. He made his best effort to put the same question to her in Norwegian.

   In English she said, "Yes. Tomorrow."

   He nodded and set about preparing her boarding card. He made change for her payment.

   Thea, emboldened by the exchange, added, "I am new in America."

   Without looking up the ticket vendor said, "I'd never have guessed."

S
he walked up Lake Street past Superior Street, dodging the mule-drawn streetcars, slipping on the rain-slicked cobbles. Farther up the hill, on the corner of Lake and First, she paid a quarter for a room in a boardinghouse, another dime for a hot bath. It was her first proper bath since leaving Hammerfest and as she soaked in the tub she was overcome with fatigue. So rather than going out for a hot meal, she finished her bath and dressed in her freshest clothes and, by the light of a window, read her Bible. She read it with a fervency she'd not felt in ages. Starting with First Corinthians. She read for a long time. Even as her eyes felt heavy and the softness of her rented bed called, she read.

   When finally the evening fell and the light from the window waned, she laid herself down and slept, the good book clenched to her heart, for more than twelve hours. When she woke before dawn she felt a moment of panic before she realized where she was. She quickly gathered her belongings, washed her face, pulled her hair back, and donned her bonnet. By six a.m. she was back on Lake Avenue, headed for the docks.

   The
Opportunity
was a two-masted schooner and her crew was drunk and quarrelsome even as the passengers boarded. The rigging and masts were plagued by a colony of gulls and the singing of the lines in the wind was a song that brought Thea back to the harbor in Hammerfest. It reminded her of why she was making this journey. She stood on deck, her bags between her feet, as the
Opportunity
was tugged through the canal and out onto the lake. The sails were raised and they filled and she felt the old pull of a boat borne by the wind.

   The boat moved into a quartering breeze, its progress slow, the roll of the water sharp. The spray rose above the decking, met her waiting face. Four hours later the crew was already lowering the sails. The weather the wind had brought in turned cold and foggy, the conditions worsening the crew's already sour mood. They weighed anchor and dropped a tender and announced Two Harbors. For an hour she stood on deck and watched as the tender made trips in and out of the fogged harbor. Ten travelers debarked, none boarded.

   The rest of the day was slow moving. At sunset they anchored outside Otter Bay. All afternoon Thea had had the strange sensation of going back in time. Whether it was the way the boat moved under sail, the sharpness of the cold wind, or the prehistoric wilderness they were traveling past she could not have said.

   At midnight they stood at anchor outside the settlement at Misquah. The boat's captain told Thea and the three remaining passengers that they would have to wait until morning to sail to Gunflint, so Thea went belowdecks and found a bench to rest on, using her carpetbag as a pillow.

   The ship heaved all night, even as the wind died and the rain began. Sleep was impossible, and not only because of the ship's rolling. She felt, after this long month of travel and tribulation, the relief of being so near her destination. She felt the excitement that should have been accompanying her all along.