Wintering (2 page)

I
DIDN'T HAVE TO WAIT
all winter for Gus to start talking. I didn't even have to wait past that morning. At my kitchen table he started right at the beginning, if that's what it really was. In any case, he began with a late-autumn morning in 1963, thirty-three years before.

Harry stood over the moose-hide book of maps, the light falling from the lamp above the kitchen table between them. The transistor radio buzzed on the counter. “I'm a damned fool for thinking so much of these,” he said.

“No, you're not,” Gus said, though they troubled him, those maps. Even then.

“I knew from the day I first copied one of these that I'd use them. Don't ask me how.” He closed the book and pushed it aside. The Fisher Maps were spread across the table under his elbows, every lake and stream and portage charted with exactitude.

The radio came to life with Monday's news. National then local then sports, talk of the Yankees and Dodgers' World Series beginning the next day. Before the weather forecast came on, Harry reached to shut the radio off and then walked across the great room. There, above the mantel, was the picture Lisbet had painted many years earlier. The one she said reminded her of her husband while he was gone. His head bowed under a rain cap, galluses holding his oilskin pants. His boat—which was his father's boat before him, and as much a part of this town as the Eides themselves—floats on smooth waters. There's a net roller aft, full of nets. Fishboxes up to the gunwales. The painting,
The Nets,
was by his mother's own standards her best.

“Hey, Gus,” Harry said, “come over here.”

Gus pushed his uneaten eggs away and crossed the room.

Harry kept his eyes on the painting as he spoke. “A few months ago, Charlie Aas gets his art collector friend Ruben Mazecki up here. We'd never met the guy before, some shyster lawyer from Duluth. One of Charlie's cronies. So Ruben's standing right here, wearing a three-piece suit, and some queer hat he won't take off's hanging limp over one eye. He smells like furniture oil. And he says to your mother, ‘I'll give you five thousand dollars for this painting.' ” Harry cocked his head as if to inspect more thoughtfully this painting that had for a decade hung above their fireplace. “Five thousand bucks, right?” His voice trailed off and he peered again at the painting.

“Mom told me about that.”

“Of course she did.” He looked at him. “It wasn't Mazecki's money. Wasn't his idea, neither. Did you know that?” He closed his eyes. “Goddamn Charlie. Anyway, Mazecki's offer, that's how this whole mess started.” He made a gesture to encompass the whole room. The whole house. He stepped closer to the painting and pointed at the sky in the background. “At least she got the horizon right. Lord knows she's been watching it long enough.” He put his arm around Gus. “Whatever happens, do not become that man.” He nodded at the man in the painting. “That man will fail you sure as he lives.”

He let go of Gus's shoulder and stood beneath the painting for several minutes more, still nodding slowly, until he heard the water come on in the bathroom around the corner.

He turned his attention to his son's wondering eyes and smiled. “You should eat your breakfast and shower up. Make it a hot one. It'll be your last for some time.” He checked his watch. “We'll leave in an hour.”

Later that morning Gus watched his father loading the canoes. Mist rose off the river. His mother came onto the deck, set her coffee on the deck railing, and lit a cigarette.

A moment passed before she said, “You don't have to go.”

“Why wouldn't I go?”

“I guess there are about a hundred reasons. You know most of them.” She took a sip of her coffee. “For God's sake, how's he going to survive up there? He walks like an old man now.”

“He walks like a man who's been bent over the side of a boat all his life.”

“Bent over a barrel, you mean.” She looked over to the river for a long time. “He walks as if he's given up.”

“Or been beaten.”

“You always were his great defender.”

Gus looked out across the clearing and blinked slowly three times. “I thought you'd be happy we're leaving.”

She said nothing, just stood there staring at her husband, first through the ribbons of cigarette smoke, then through the cloud of fog over the clearing between their house and the river. She stubbed her cigarette and dropped the butt in her empty coffee cup. “Whatever happened to your father was a long time ago. Before you were born. Even before he met me.”

Gus wanted to slap her. Instead, he said, “I know what happened to him. Everyone does.”

“You might think you do.” Again she stared across the clearing. When she looked back at Gus she had tears in her eyes.

“Oh, please,” he said.

“You need to go to college, Gus. The world's not about to wait on your father's shenanigans. You read the newspaper. The world's going to hell in a handbasket. Don't be a fool.”

“I'm not afraid of what's going on.”

She wiped her tears, which looked even more fake now that they were gone. “And you think playing around in the woods with him will be good practice? That he can teach you everything you need from his own vast experience?”

Gus just shook his head.

“My God, you are his son, aren't you? The two of you won't see the ice come in up there.” She kissed him on the forehead. “You'll be back in a week, that's what I think.” She turned and walked into the house.

Gus heard the radio come on inside and his mother tuning the dial, looking for the music station. It took a clear morning for that, though, and after a minute or so she turned the radio off.

On that morning, Gus was eighteen years old and a summer removed from high school graduation. As broad-shouldered as his father.

Harry watched him walk across the clearing and said, once he got to the canoes, “Where'd the kid you used to be go?”

Gus still felt his mother's stinging words. “We all set?”

Harry squatted, grabbed a handful of pebbles from the shore, and let them sift through his big hand. “I should give you one more chance to balk. There are plenty of excuses to stay here.”

“I'm not balking.”

Harry pointed up at the house. “Head back up there and call one of those colleges that accepted you. Quit this place for good. Farther than you can paddle and walk, leastways.”

“I'm not balking. Besides, who would sing you those songs? Who'd catch you your fish?”

“All right, then. You got your compass? Matches?”

Gus patted the hip pocket of his army pants.

“Said goodbye to your mother?”

“Something like that.”

“Is your sister awake?”

“I told her goodbye last night.”

“Me, too.”

Gus looked into the canoes. “Everything loaded?”

Harry stepped beside him and they stared into them. Each held two number-four Duluth packs. In Gus's the extra paddle and Remington were tied under the thwarts, as were the fishing rods and the ax and pick handles and saws in his father's canoe. In both, cross-country skis and poles were strapped to the tumblehome. Snowshoes hung from two of the packs.

“I think so,” Harry said, then looked at the house, upriver, and at his wristwatch in quick, quiet succession. “Gus, buddy, where we're going, well, better men than you or I have gotten lost there.”

The waters alongshore were still, the trees coming to light with the morning. Gus was full of fear, because he knew not only what sort of wilderness lay beyond the oxbow in the river, but also that they were risking something else, and that they were leaving something unspoken behind. Despite this fear, he looked back at his father's waiting face and felt almost nothing but a boy's excitement. “If we get lost,” he said, “then we'll be doing it together, right?”

Harry's smile was wide. He took a pinch from his tobacco pouch and pushed his canoe into the river.

It wasn't more than a half hour before they reached the lower falls. During the hot summer months, Gus had spent countless hours in these pools, dropping dry flies in the lee waters, swimming with his friends. But when he and Harry stepped out into the shallows now, the water felt as though it had fallen from the moon. That's how cold it was.

They portaged the falls. First the packs, then the canoes yoked over their shoulders. When they put back in above, Harry said, “We might've packed a little lighter.”

Gus could see his father's chest heaving under his flannel shirt. Harry worked the snuff loose from his lip and spit it out.

“We could dump your shaving kit,” Gus said.

“And live like animals? How about we ditch your little guitar?”

“It's a mandolin.”

“That's what I said.”

“Or you could just bear up,” Gus said.

Harry smiled broadly again and nudged Gus's canoe with the tip of his paddle. “That I could.”

Not another half hour passed before they reached the Devil's Maw, where the Burnt Wood split atop the falls. One chute rushed through a jagged stone trough forty feet long before it churned back on itself with a force equal to its own falling. The other ran water into the maw itself. For generations it had been a place of lore and legend that was regarded as being as holy as Immanuel Lutheran. They were still downstream, holding their canoes into the current.

“It's been a while since I've been up this far,” Harry said, looking left and right at the gorge walls rising sheer above them.

“She's running light,” Gus said. “We were fishing up here this spring and couldn't get close to the falls.”

“Fish make it past the lower falls?”

“The big ones do.”

“The big ones? Hope your braggadocio don't come back to bite us on the ass. We'll need some big fish, come the months ahead.”

Harry rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then stared back up at the falls, maybe wondering if something about them would change. He shook his head. “Who could ever imagine this water might be tamed? Look at it.” Even with the slow, autumn flow it was deafening. “Does that look like water that wants to be dammed? Like there's enough dynamite in the world to widen those stone walls? And for what purpose?” He shook his head again. “Men like Charlie are never satisfied until they have more. And then they're still not satisfied.” Now he looked at Gus. “Don't matter. He'll have bigger problems than how to dam this river when he wakes up tomorrow.”

Gus had of course heard about this nonsense. We all had. Damming not just the Burnt Wood, but half a dozen others leading up into the borderlands. The plans had been whispered about for years. The promise of more iron ore and lumber and copper, lately of hydroelectricity. Harry had long been among the townsfolk who went to meetings to shout about it. Charlie Aas was always shouting back.

“This'll be more work than the lower falls,” Harry said.

“I've been up these falls a hundred times.”

“With eighty pounds on your back?” Harry surveyed the options. “You want to take the long way around or split the chutes?”

“It'll take half an hour to go around.”

“In the scheme of things, that won't amount to much.” Harry looked up at the falls again. “One misstep and our adventure's over.”

“I know it,” Gus said.

“And our lives.” Harry studied the clearing in the woods and the bottom of the trail that led up and around the falls. That would have been the prudent route, and they both knew it. “But we're fresh, eh?”

Harry dug his paddle into the current and steered for the slick talus between the pool at the bottom of the chute and the maw. Gus fell in line, and by the time they'd nosed their canoes onto the shelf they were both damp with brume. Harry stepped out, pulled his boat out of the water, and heaved a Duluth pack over his shoulders, then turned back to Gus. “Stay to the right, bud.”

“Like I need to be told that?”

Harry scrabbled up the steep rock steps, using his hands and arms as much as his legs. Gus followed behind, his face at his father's bootheels. Midway up at the Devil's Maw, Gus paused and gaped into the precipice, feeling its cold, sharp exhalation, a breeze with a metallic tang. Suddenly dizzied, he gripped the rocks and pulled himself up and away. The footing was of course chancy and the water hauling over the falls thunderous, so loud that he couldn't hear his own heavy breathing. But as they neared the top, the water quieted beneath them and he heard his father singing.

At first he mistook it for some alien sound coming off the water or out of the earth, some whistling from the treetops up on the ridges. But the longer they climbed the more certain Harry's voice became. Deep and loud, as if he'd just found it along their route. Words of a song Gus had never heard, sung in a language he'd spent four years of high school learning and only one short summer forgetting:
“À la claire fontaine m'en allant promener, / J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle que je m'y suis baigné. / Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, / Jamais je ne t'oublierai….”

They made camp on the shore of Borealis Lake that evening. They'd been ten hours paddling up the Burnt Wood with only those few short portages and a half hour for lunch ashore. When Harry unfolded himself from his canoe he was stiff as a jackknife. He cracked his back slowly and turned to Gus. “Not a bad first day's paddle, eh?”

“If they're all that easy, I'll be disappointed,” Gus said. He meant it, too.

Harry gave him a sly smile. “Oh, you won't be disappointed.” He cracked his back again. “How was your boat?”

Gus stroked the smooth cedar gunwale. “Stalwart,” he said, because that had been Harry's mantra and prediction for all the months they'd spent building them.