Safe from the Sea (21 page)

Noah looked at his father there on the sofa, bereft of the vitality he had once possessed so abundantly. For the old man’s son there was as much sadness in the moment as relief. He suspected his father felt little of either, was likely unmoved and unchanged. Perhaps emptiness filled the place where once a secret had resided.

“I don’t know,” Olaf said. “It’s amazing, the memories you carry around with you. Never once had I thought of my mother getting ready for church until that night. But there she was. Those memories are in you all the time. On a night like that they’re just hurrying up for one last trip across your mind. I suppose a wise man might have learned something. But what did I do? I ended up wrapped around a tree growing out of the rocks on a frozen beach not sixty miles as the gull flies from where we sit now. You start wondering, why me?” He pointed feebly at his own chest.

Noah wanted to console him but didn’t know how.

“You end up as the line in a poem, as the face in a picture in a museum. Meanwhile, your crewmates are dead and you haven’t talked to your wife—honestly talked to her—in years. And your kids grow to fear you. And instead of making it right you let it ride. You drink in the raunchiest bars in eight states. Jesus, do you drink.” He cleared his voice now and said more loudly than he had said anything in an hour, “And you lose all shame.” In his faintest voice yet he concluded, “Chrissakes, that is some ancient grief.”

Noah stood. He walked over to the sofa and sat down next to his father as if his proximity might ease the pain of the memory, as if the gesture could speak. He put his hand on his father’s shoulder, moved the afghan to make the moment less awkward.

“So there’s your story, Noah. Sorry as it is, that’s it. We washed onto the beach at Hat Point and all I had in me was jetsam and you suffered for it. So did your mother and sister.”

Noah thought,
I wonder if he’s dying right now. In this instant. I imagine this is what it might look like
.

Instead Olaf said, “The morning broke and we could see the shoreline. We rowed like hell to get there. Did you know it was below zero that morning? We were sitting there like we’d just been for a swim, for Chrissakes. We thought about trying to build a fire but the only thing we might have burned on that barren shore was the lifeboat, and it was covered with ice. Bjorn, he was trying to light his coat on fire with his lighter.” He mimicked Bjorn trying to start his sleeve ablaze. “But his thumb was just a lump of ice. Could have used it for a hammer.

“It’s strange, but had we been out on the lake on a clear day, passing Hat Point, I could have given you our coordinates to within a minute each way. But pressed up against those rocks, that cliff looming behind us, snowy as the morning was, I wouldn’t have guessed it
with ten tries. Delirious, that’s what we were, all of us. Hallucinating. We had one blanket among us, from one of the stows in the lifeboat. That was it. We were just waiting to die again.” He paused and scratched his bald head. “And of course Red washed up.”

“Red,” Noah said.

They sat in silence for a moment before Noah continued, “How long before they found you?”

“Seemed like days but it wasn’t long. We didn’t have time to freeze to death, so that tells you something. First a plane circled above us, then we saw a cutter offshore. I tried to get up and wave, but I couldn’t. I think we were all in shock. Everything was blurry. My eyes were coated with ice. None of us could talk. Soon enough an army of highway patrolmen and paramedics were there, coming up the shore like so many dreams.”

“And you were saved.”

Olaf looked at Noah, put his hand on his son’s shoulder now. “That’s one way of saying it. They got us out of our clothes, bundled us up in blankets and parkas and whatever else they had around. First they took us to a lodge, a place in Grand Portage. They worked on us there until the helicopters came to bring us down to Duluth. I asked for a cup of coffee, I remember, like we were getting up for breakfast.” He actually smiled, halfway and to himself, to be sure. “Just like that, the whole thing was over.”

Noah started to say he was sorry but Olaf interrupted him. “Actually, it wasn’t over.” He leaned over the coffee table, traced a line from the black X off Isle Royale to Hat Point. He traced it back. After a few minutes Olaf looked at Noah again. “For most of your life I’ve used that night as an excuse. Not because I wanted or needed one but because I had no control over what it did to me. I should have. Hard as it would’ve been, I should have beaten it.

“I never told anyone any of this before, son. Never told your mother, even though she deserved to know. Never told your sister. Never told any of the guys down at the Freighter, not even on my worst night. I never told it on the bridge of a single ship I later sailed. Hell, I never even told the NTSB or the bosses at Superior Steel the whole story. Everything I just told you, it’s been rotting in me all this time.”

“Why,” Noah said, his own voice now faint, “did you tell me?”

Olaf looked at him. He leaned forward and took off his glasses. “You asked me, Noah. That’s why. And you deserved to know. Aside from your mother, you deserved it more than anyone.”

TEN

Cold the next morning, as cold as it could be in early November. He drove a half hour up the rutted highway to Gunflint with the sunrise, the road unwinding to lake vistas magnificent in the metallic onset of the morning and winter. There seemed equal resolve among both the day and the season.

On the south end of town a pickup truck waited outside the ranger station at the head of the Brule Trail, a solitary man leaning against the bumper smoking a cigarette. Otherwise the town hunkered ghostlike, a few streets along the lake that gave way behind them to an incalculable wilderness. No Wednesday-morning rush hour here. The semblance of a village nestled around the harbor. Cars were filling up at the Holiday gas station. Noah stopped at a traffic signal on Wisconsin Street. Next to him a white-haired woman in a Chevy sedan almost as old as his father’s truck smiled as if expecting the codger. When she saw Noah she waved anyway. He had decided he loved driving that old Suburban and thought he’d never be able to drive his half-electric car again.

The bank was on the north end of town, and except for two raccoons, its parking lot was empty. He looked at his watch. The bank
opened at eight. All morning he’d been feeling mixed up about hastening off with the inheritance. Though it was exhilarating in its way to think about the sudden boon of all that money—how could it not be?—he also thought anyone glancing at the situation would think it peculiar. A father so sick left alone, if only for a morning. An estranged son reaping a financial reward so significant. The simple fact was, he had assured himself repeatedly during the drive, that he’d never once imagined the possibility of an inheritance from the moment his father had called him until the first wad of frozen cash had been pulled from the first jar. Noah knew he could not have rested—much less taken care of the jobs around the house—until the money was safely deposited. His nature would not allow it. The sign before the bank flashed the temperature. Thirteen degrees.

Inside, two tellers stood behind the counter. A receptionist sat at a desk on the right. He walked toward the tellers, passing a table piled with jumper cables. A sign hanging above it enticed people with a free gift for opening a home-equity line of credit. It struck Noah as he hefted the duffel off his shoulder and onto the counter that it must be tough for a bank like this to stick it out, how with people like his father living in the hills above town, business must be difficult. Signs hung everywhere on the walls advertising auto loans, low-interest credit cards, and free ATM withdrawals.

“Good morning,” one of the young women behind the counter fairly sang. Her name, according to the placard before her, was Ellsie. Her cheery disposition seemed misplaced in that sullen town.

Noah explained his situation. “My father’s a customer,” he said. “So am I if he tells the truth. He hasn’t been here in a while. I’ve never been here. I’m not sure if you can help or not.”

She interrupted, “If you’re a customer here, I can help.”

Noah smiled. He nodded as if skeptical. “Here’s the thing, I have a huge deposit to make.”

“Have you filled out a deposit slip?”

“I mean huge. It’s cash.”

“We accept cash deposits,” she said. It took Noah a moment to realize she was joking.

“I have to count it,” he said, unzipping the bag to show her. “I’m sure this looks a little strange, but I promise there’s nothing fishy.”

Without a word Ellsie set a
THIS TELLER CLOSED
sign before her workspace and asked Noah to follow with a wave of her hand. She led him to an office with an empty desk. She asked him for the account number and his driver’s license. She copied this information on a Post-It note. “Okay,” she said. “You start counting it here, I’ll get the forms we need and fill them out. Put the money in stacks of fifty. Here”—she opened a desk drawer, took from it a box of rubber bands. “Remember, stacks of fifty, I’ll double-check it when I get back.”

For the next hour Noah counted the still cold hundred-dollar bills. Ellsie joined him a few minutes after she’d left. She verified his tally by running the stacks of money through a counting machine. Together they counted two thousand sixty-two hundred-dollar bills. When he explained how the money had ended up on the table, Ellsie assured Noah that stranger things had come to pass during her tenure at the bank. She moved the stacks of money from the table to heavy canvas bags. When they were finished she moved the bags into the vault. He signed the paperwork, inquired about wiring the money to banks in Boston and Fargo, and confirmed with her that his sister had equal access to the funds.

“Great,” Noah said. The transaction felt somehow incomplete,
but he thanked her, took his empty duffel from the table, and turned to leave.

A couple blocks back toward the harbor was a place called the Blue Sky Café. He stopped for something to eat, ravenous.

A stack of the Duluth
Herald
leaned against the cash register. He bought one. In a booth that overlooked the village, he ordered coffee from a waitress whose gray hair rose in three layers of buns to a peak atop her head. Her apron was starched sheet-iron stiff. She brought the coffee on a saucer with sugar cubes and a miniature pitcher of cream. He ordered the Lumberjack: two eggs, pancakes, bacon, steak, juice, coffee. When the waitress asked if there was anything else, he ordered one of the pecan rolls from the bakery case in front of the store.

Seated around a horseshoe-shaped counter, ten or twelve men dressed in hunting gear ate breakfast and drank coffee. Outside, the placid harbor water shone black under the gray sky. He could see the street of boutiques and galleries ringing the harbor, but commerce in late morning was no more enthusiastic than it had been at eight. A woman walked her dog. Three men and a child stood before a pizzeria talking. The trees on the hills above town appeared bronzed, the sky above them offered little illumination.

While he waited for the food to arrive, an uneasy feeling came over him. He attributed it to his being in the café at all while his father rested sick at home. Though there was business to tend to—he had to call the hospital and his sister, and he’d had to deposit the money—it seemed extravagant to him to be back in civilization. He thought about this as his food arrived and he ate voraciously. He drank four or five glasses of water, his juice, and was finally brought a coffeepot for himself when the waitress admitted she couldn’t keep up with him. He buttered the pecan roll, salted the steak, and soaked
the pancakes in maple syrup. As he ate he realized that his unease was easily enough explained. The anger and resentment and sadness that had colored the years of their estrangement were absent now. Not just absent but erroneous. What he’d mistaken for feelings of guilt at being in town were actually feelings of longing. He
wanted
to be back in the cabin, even felt a pull for the too-hot stove and the bland food, for the fishing lines in the water. He knew now that he could venture freely in the full range of his memories. No more caveats next to good times, or whole years’ forbidden recollection.

When he finished breakfast he pushed the plate across the table and spread the paper before him. It was eleven o’clock and he still had an hour before he could call the doctor at St. Mary’s. He skimmed the election coverage and read a feature on the economic doldrums gripping the shipping and steel industries. Everything suffered: taconite production, ship traffic, grain shipments, coal shipments. There were problems with the stevedore union, with the railways, with the mines. The economic implications were far-reaching, of course, to say nothing of grim. The forecast was even grimmer. The mayors of Duluth and Superior—in reelection mode, no doubt—were calling for tariffs on imported steel. Though it was interesting, Noah thought the article little more than a refrain. Some version of this story had been told since the first iron ore was ever mined in Minnesota, since the first ship full of taconite ever left Duluth harbor. Though it would have been impossible for Noah to dismiss the political and economic realities expressed in the article, it was not impossible for him to see that some things never changed.

But some things do, some things had. Something enduring had been built during the past week between him and his father. He could not name it, he only knew that it gave him permission to live the rest of his life. That was it. That huge, teetering part of him that
for years had been resting on his resentment had been replaced by the whole story, bitterroot and all.

The bill at the restaurant was ten dollars and twenty-nine cents. He put a twenty on the table, rolled the paper under his arm, and walked back out into the cold hour before noon. He stopped at the Gunflint Trading Post and bought new socks and long underwear, a T-shirt with the words
A LOON A TICK
screen-printed across the chest, a pair of Carhartt jeans a size too big, and a pair of flannel boxers. He had the tags cut from everything.