The Lighthouse Road (37 page)

   "Last time I tried to get in there Hosea caught me. He gave me the strap."

   "Did you look into this room last night?" she repeated.

   "No. I did not. I only saw the lights flashing and heard you talking." He looked away. "Will you tell me what a bub is?"

   "Oh, dear," she said. She bit her lower lip and took a deep breath. "Let's see. Do you and Danny ever talk about girls?"

   Odd looked back at her. "What do you mean?"

   She took his hands, held them over the tangle of their feet. "You know, are there girls in school that you talk about? Pretty girls?"

   " Danny says Sarah Veilleux's pretty."

   "Do you think Sarah Veilleux's pretty?"

   "I don't know. She's not as pretty as you."

   Rebekah blushed.

   " Danny says you're pretty, too. Everyone thinks you're pretty."

   At this the blush washed from her cheeks. "Yes. Well." She paused, bit her lip again. "People don't know much."

   "What do you mean?"

   "You're only ten years old," she said.

   Odd knew she was just thinking out loud, something she did all the time.

   "Ten years old, raised by a misfit and me." She put her hand on his chin and raised his face. "You hardly have a chance, do you?" She shook her head.

   "Why do you and Hosea keep saying things like that?"

   "You're a very fine young man. And so sweet. Maybe too sweet, I think that's what I mean."

   "You still haven't said what's a bub."

   "You'll learn about bubs soon enough."

   "What's in there?" Odd said. Again he pointed at the door. "Why ain't I allowed to see it? How come you can go in there?"

   Rebekah stood up, she offered Odd her hands and pulled him to his feet also. "For once I agree with Hosea. You don't need to see the grown-up things in these rooms. Not now. Not yet."

   "That's stupid," he said. He was angry and confused and tired of all the roundabout talking.

   " Trust me, sweetheart. It's not dumb."

   "Quit acting like I'm stupid and a kid."

   He turned to stomp off but Rebekah caught his arm. "You are a kid, Odd. That's not a bad thing. It's a g
ood
thing. I never got to be a kid." This last she said in that way of thinking out loud again. She let go of his arm and he went away as quickly as he had the night before.

I
t was three days later that he broke into the room. A Wednesday, in the evening. The days were just beginning to seem like summer. Odd had rejected Hosea's invitation to dinner with Rebekah and him at the Traveler's Hotel with a snide and impetuous "I'd rather eat alone." Hosea hadn't even tried to persuade him.

   Odd, as he had the Sunday morning before, stood at the window looking down onto Wisconsin Street. He watched as Hosea and Rebekah turned onto the Lighthouse Road, watched as they stopped outside the hotel to talk with Curtis Mayfair and his wife, the rose-colored sunset from above the hilltop faintly lighting their faces. When they walked into the hotel Odd ran downstairs. He fished the filched skeleton key from the pocket of his dungarees. The key fit easily into the keyhole.

   He stood on the threshold. It was a windowless room. Dim. Even if it was oddly arranged, if all the furniture was pushed to one side of the room, nothing seemed overly queer. There was a davenport along the back wall, a floor lamp with a lacy shade, a rug on the floor, the divan Odd had heard mentioned the other night. He stood there for a moment, looking around in disappointment. But as the light from the hallway gathered, as Odd's eyes adjusted to the dimness, he stepped into the room and began to see the curiosities. He lit the sconce on the wall and shut the door behind him.

   Along the wall to his right were dozens of wigs, a birdcage filled with faux flowers, a rocking horse built for an adult, a rack of silky undergarments and another of strange costumes. A coat stand draped with furs. There was a chest full of lifelike animals. When he looked closer, Odd saw they were indeed real animals. Dead and stuffed and piled in the chest. A fox, an otter, a beaver with his tail stiff behind him. He walked over to the wigs and inspected one of them. He set it back on the shelf and looked across the room.

   Hosea's photographic equipment was stored along the opposite wall. There were shelves with cameras and jugs of who knew what. Next to the shelves was a closet door. Odd crossed the room and opened the door. The closet was lined with shelves and the shelves were lined with boxes. Each box was the same size. Each had a typewritten label taped to the front of it. Odd took a box labeled beaver / december 1905 from the shelf and walked back into the room. He stood under the light of the sconce.

   Until that moment he'd only been confused. Such an odd assortment of bric-a-brac Odd had never seen, but taken together it seemed merely peculiar. Another of Hosea's strange hobbies. It wasn't until he opened the box that everything came together.

   It was full of postcards. Odd took one from the box and looked at it for a long time. There was Rebekah. She lay on the divan, wearing one of the wigs that he quickly identified on the shelf across the room. She was naked, her breasts full and lying across her chest. One hand was behind her head, the other held the stuffed beaver on her leg. A caption stamped in gold lettering under the photograph read, the beaver trapper.

   Even as he tried, he could not take his eyes from the postcard. He looked at the faraway cast of her eyes, the lilt of her chin. He couldn't say she appeared sad, though there was an undeniable quality to her expression. Or at least a quality to the look in her eyes. Like she could see from where she lay the full bright moon.

   He switched his stare to her breasts and it was then he felt his pulse quickening. Just like that. From a glance. And once his pulse started strumming, his vision went blinky and he had to sit down, which he did in the light from the sconce. His guts stirred and he closed his eyes, rested his head against the wall. Why the beaver? Why was she lying that way at all? Why was there a picture of it? And, most confusing of all, why did he have this feeling? He put the picture back in the box and sat there for some time. By some simple instinct he knew that what he'd seen was beyond his capacity to understand, so rather than trying to make sense of it, he pondered the simpler question of how he could keep it a secret.

   And so it happened that Odd— only ten years old— passed from childhood. During the following days, he no longer wanted to spend the rainy days sitting on the davenport reading storybooks with Rebekah. He no longer thought it a lark to help Rebekah mix a batch of cookie dough and while away an afternoon eating the cookies as fast as they came out of the oven. He no longer challenged Hosea to chess matches after supper. And he was no longer willing to abide by the rules of the house. His chores went unfinished. He did not eat what didn't taste good. He no longer trusted the felicity of his young years, no longer trusted much of anything.

   In the years to come he would sneak into the closet whenever the chance arose. He went despite his shame. The way a beaten dog will still take scraps from the flogger's hand.

T
hose first days and nights of their life together it was hard to tell who was newborn. Odd would nuzzle and fuss and by purest instinct stretch for Thea's breast, where he would give suck until he was exhausted. Then he'd fall into a fitful and unsated sleep because Thea's milk had not come in yet. She would hold him on her belly, swaddled in a blanket, a knit cap on his small and misshapen head, until he'd writhe again, still hungry or hungry again, and she'd put him back to her breast. And despite the new winter seeping through the windows, despite the frost left on the panes each dawn, the child was like a hot stone in her lap. When she was alone, or when Rebekah was there, asleep on the other side of the room, Thea would remove her nightdress and rest her babe's soft face on the sweat-damp flesh in the crook of her neck.

   For four dreamlike days and sleepless nights this continued, the child never really at rest, until the fifth day, when she felt first a tingling and then a weightlessness in her breasts and the nursings that had once lasted an hour lasted fifteen minutes, after which Odd fell into an engorged sleep. Her happiness in those hours, with the contented boy in her arms, was her new religion, their communion her new salvation.

   Sitting in her bed under the window, looking out over the isthmus that separated the harbor below her and the cove to the north, looking out over the great lake and her shimmering waters, she thought often of who she used to be. It seemed, in those sleep-deprived daydreams, with her boy on her lap, that the travails of the last year were trifles beside her feelings for Odd. He was her reward for the loneliness she'd endured. This thought filled her with peace. She saw the distance between Hammerfest and Gunflint as the way to this peace and so her regrets and misgivings dissolved in the warmth between them.

   Though the look back was clear, the one ahead was dark as the devil's lair, and thoughts of the easiness of her love inevitably gave way to worries about what would come in that darkness. She had every cent she'd made at the Burnt Wood Camp saved in her purse. Seventy-five dollars in all, though what it amounted to she had no idea. She'd been told that returning to the camp on the Burnt Wood was not possible. She would have known it without having been told. She knew finding a husband would be nearly impossible now, too. She knew, finally, that she could no sooner return to Hammerfest than resurrect her childhood. It was as though the way back had been swallowed by the wakes of the boats that had brought her.

   Hosea's generosity had saved her more than once, but she knew she could not live with him forever. She would not ask for so much. She'd shift her view from the water to the buildings on the Lighthouse Road. Perhaps she could become a shop girl. Or a cook at the Traveler's Hotel. Perhaps she could even work for Hosea, alongside Rebekah. But where would she live? And how could she take care of her boy while she did any of these things? This last was the question furthest from an answer, the one that cast the darkest pall on her days ahead. It was also the question on which she inevitably turned her thoughts.

   She wrote letters to her mother and father, not from a sense of duty but because it spared her any reckoning with the future. Instead of giving them to Hosea to post she folded them and stacked them on the bedside table. She read her Bible without deliberation. She tried to sleep but couldn't. Her days and nights bleeding into each other, her mind wrestling itself, her only clear thoughts arriving when she studied her boy.

   His eyes were not often open, but when she caught their glint she marveled at their blueness. In the daylight they were almost transparent, the color of cold, cold snow. At night, with only the bedside lamp glowing, his eyes looked fathomless and dark. She always wished to see them, so she'd feather his full hair back from his forehead. When he did not stir, she'd bend her lips to his face and kiss each of his sleeping eyes. She'd feel her own eyes glossing over with the tears that came at will and without her even knowing.

   When his eyes opened he'd search for her and look intently at her as she'd say, "
You're my beautiful boy."
Her voice would send him back into his blessed sleep. What had he seen, looking up at her? And why could she not stop weeping, with all her joy?

   Hosea had begun to wonder the same thing. He'd cosseted her from the hour of Odd's birth, stopping in her bedroom every morning before he went down to the shop and again each evening before dinner. He'd check her abdomen and feel her forehead and then switch his attention to the babe.

   "How's the wee lad this morning?" Hosea might say, not expecting an answer.

   Thea would not even look up.