Authors: Peter Geye

The Lighthouse Road (39 page)

She only looked at him fearfully.

He proceeded in Norwegian, reading from the notes he'd prepared late the night before, notes he hoped would convey not only his sense of urgency but his profound affection for her and her boy. "Miss Eide, I am your friend. I have tried to help you. And your boy." He paused, judged the look on her face, and took a step closer.

"Thea, I was helping your boy yesterday." He paused again, looked at his prepared remarks, looked at Thea, still clutching Odd on the bed, her eyes swollen with tears and lack of sleep, and thought he loved them both. He wished he could tell her, wished he could convey the honesty of his feelings. Instead he returned to his remarks.

"Thea, you are sick. Postpartum melancholia. You must get well. If you don't, you will be unable to care for the boy."

This last made her clutch Odd tighter still.

"I would like to perform a surgery called Battey's Operation to remove from your body what's causing your morbid condition. I will remove your ovaries. It will cure you. Do you understand what I'm proposing?"

She only looked more frightened.

"Miss Eide, without this surgery, you will go insane." This last he said in English as he shook his solemn head.

A
nd so two days later Hosea Grimm held a sponge to Thea Eide's nose. She breathed in the chloroform and went into a catatonic sleep and he, with his sure hands, removed his scalpel from a bath of carbolic solution, took measure of her
linea alba,
and made a small incision from which he removed the first of her ovaries. He stanched the flow of blood and stitched the incision. He gave her another dose of chloroform and made a matching incision on the other side of her abdomen and repeated the procedure within and without. An hour later, after Thea woke vomiting and feverish, he injected a dose of morphine into her thigh and set a cold compress on her forehead.

He stood back, wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt, and believed honestly that his methods were sound and that Thea Eide, asleep again on the table, awaited a kinder fate thanks to his steady surgical hand.

I
f Thea had spent her life in prayer and devotion in hope of finding God's grace, and if God's grace meant everlasting life in heaven's gentle glow, then what she found in her fever dreams those ten days after her surgery were her hopes dashed. Whatever bacillus took root in her womb was swift and voracious. A riotous fever set in, and in her delirium there were no trumpets, no bronze altars, no jasper and carnelian, no unapproachable light. There was only the Cimmerian wilderness of her fever and Odd's howling. She wanted to reach for him, wanted to take away his sorrow, but she was too weak to say so, much less do it.

Odd's care had fallen to Rebekah. And Eleanor Riverfish, who became Odd's amah, and who visited five times a day to nurse the boy. It was in this way that Odd Einar Eide and Daniel Joseph Riverfish became brothers, and it was in Eleanor's arms that he forgot the warmth of his mother's lap and the soothing sound of her singing voice.

The only song that remained was the dirge of her final hours. She sang in time to her slowing heart her last true words:
My boy, my boy,
my love.
Odd would never hear those words, though one day he'd learn them in his own way.

Finally her fever boiled and her brain burst and she left him. She left all the world. And wherever else her sorrow scattered in the hereafter it went first to Odd's infant heart and found shelter there.

XXVI.

(June 1921)

T
he first time Odd saw Rebekah with the child, he read the end of their story in the look on her face. Her gaze rested on the boy with the same vacant ambivalence she used to train on butchered capons before roasting them. The child lay in her arms, stunned, staring through the slits of his own eyes upon a mother he would never know.

Odd had been at work, finished with lunch and back at the steam box bending planks for the lapstrake hull he was working on. During his time at the boatwright his responsibilities had grown, and now, seven months later, he was as close to a foreman as the shop had.

Sargent was in the chandlery office when the call came. Odd could see him talking into the telephone mouthpiece, could see him turn quickly and motion with his elbow. Odd pulled one of his mates to the steam box and hurried to the chandlery office as Sargent put the telephone earpiece back on the hook.

"Grab your lunch pail, Mister Eide. Your wife is in labor."

Odd stood there dumb.

"Hurry, now. I'll drive you." Then Sargent put his head into the workshop, "Willy! Get over here, man the chandlery while I bring Odd to the hospital." He turned back to Odd, put his hands on his shoulders, and said, "The Lord has blessed you this day." There appeared almost to be tears in his eyes. "Now, let's go. You'll want to be near your wife."

They climbed into Sargent's flatbed— the same truck Hosea owned— and started up Raleigh.

Sargent said, " Would you like to pray?"

"You pray for me," Odd said. "Pray for Rebekah and the child, too."

So they drove in silence across town.

Sargent parked the Ford on the street in front of the hospital. Together they hurried up to the third floor, where Doctor Crumb's office and Odd's fate awaited. Sargent sat in the reception room while a nurse led Odd into the surgery. It was there he found Rebekah and the child, there he saw the look on her face.

It was Doctor Crumb who spoke first. "Mister Eide, meet your son."

Odd stood where he was, looking now on the child. "My son," he said or thought, he didn't know which.

"He's big as a bear, Mister Eide. I've never seen one bigger."

Odd took a pair of unsteady steps toward the surgery table, toward Rebekah and the big boy.
A boy.

"He's well?" Odd finally managed.

"I'm surprised the lad didn't come out with teeth. Or hair on his chest. He's nine even pounds according to my scale. And he's fine, way ahead in the race and only just in it."

Odd walked to Rebekah. "And you?" he asked, knowing with unwelcome certainty the answer to his question.

Rebekah, confirming all, said nothing, only lifted the baby to Odd's hands.

He'd never held a child before, never suspected that something that had weighed so heavily in his mind could be so light in his hands. But as he looked down on the boy, on his puckered lips and pale skin, Odd felt a preternatural strength rising in him. He felt as though someone could have handed him a bowl with all the water of Lake Superior in it and he would still have been able to bear it.

"I've a few details to attend to," Doctor Crumb said. "If you've a name for this one, the time to tell me is now."

Odd kept his eyes on the boy, said to Rebekah, "Any ideas?"

"He's your son. You name him."

Her words felt like a punch, but he'd been sure of the boy's name for months. "We'll call him Harald Einar Eide."

Doctor Crumb said, "He'll live up to his stature with a name like that."

"I hope so," Odd said.

Odd walked the boy to the window. It was late afternoon and the summer sky was squally. Odd knew surely there was a thunderstorm up there, might have been able to say the exact hour at which it would begin to rain. He whispered to the boy, "Look up there, son. You see? That's a thunderhead. Means rain."

Together they stood at the window looking at the weather. Odd pictured his own mother, recalling that photograph on the windowsill in the brownstone. The picture of him in his mother's arms. He saw that beatific look in her eyes and knew the same look came now from him. From his good and his bad eye both. After a few minutes Odd returned to Rebekah's bedside and looked down on her with all the courage he had to spare.

F
ive days later Rebekah and little Harald came home from the hospital. It was a hot and low-down day, the first heavy weather of summer. The humidity stuck for a week, and whether it was because of the atmosphere or Rebekah's disposition, the first few days of having the baby home were some of the unhappiest of Odd's life. The only sounds that made their way around the flat were the hungry yowls of the boy and Rebekah's sullen sighs. She seemed to have a complaint for everything. Her sincerest and most regular grievance came whenever it was time for the boy to eat. Her breasts were sore and engorged, her nipples cracked, and Harry, unnaturally big as he was, demanded regular suck.

The looks she cast on that boy. His hunger, his fear and vulnerability, all of it like a badge he wore. And still she looked at him as though he were a cancer. He'd spit her nipple, grab at her breast, wail. And Rebekah with that poisonous and unforgiving stare would scold him. Odd wanted to help, would have done anything, but was always in the way, making Rebekah more agitated.

On the occasions Rebekah could slake the boy's hunger, he'd fall into a heavy infant slumber. Rebekah would call Odd, hand Harry to him, and lie down on the davenport, shielding her eyes from everything with her arm.

"My breasts feel like they're going to catch right on fire," she said one June evening after Harry had eaten and was sleeping in his papa's arms.

"I sure am sorry, Rebekah."

She looked up at him from under her arm. "What are you sorry for?"

" Sorry you're not feeling well. Sorry you're so tired. All that stuff."

"All that stuff . . ."

Odd had walked Harry to the window. Together they stood looking at the Norway pines on the side of the house.

"It was so easy for your mother. When you were a baby. To feed you. You latched right on and ate like there was no tomorrow." She might have groaned, Odd couldn't tell. "I can't stop thinking what a twisted-up thing this is."

"Haven't we about covered that?" Odd asked from the window, not even turning to look at her.

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