Safe from the Sea (25 page)

After a moment Olaf said, “Your child, name him well.”

“Or her,” Noah said.

“Or her,” he echoed. “And love them.”

“Of course.”

“Tell you what. Take all the love I never gave you and heap it on your child. Maybe you’ll remember me a little more kindly that way.” He picked up the tune right where he’d left off.

“You don’t need to worry about me remembering you kindly, Dad.” He hummed the rest of the song. “My watch is on the nightstand. I want you to have it. Get it fixed.” “I will. I’ll treasure it.”

“I wish we could call Solveig. I should have had a phone line put in here years ago.” Noah got up to look at his cell phone. There was still no service. “I can go into town and call her. Do you want that?” “There’s no time for that. Just tell her that I love her, too. And the kids.” “I will.”

“Is it November yet?” Olaf said.

“It is,” Noah said, again checking his own watch. “November seventh.” “It’s always November,” Olaf said. Now he looked out the window. “Sit down for another minute, would you?” Noah did. Olaf reached up to touch his face. He held his son’s look. He pulled the boy to him exactly as he had thirty-five years ago.
He kissed his forehead. Noah stayed there, close enough that he could feel his father’s breath. He wanted to tell him that he understood now. That he understood how his love had become cruel. He wanted to tell him he loved him. He couldn’t say anything.

Soon his father said, “Go put the food out for Vikar. I’m going to get some rest. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you came back.” Noah sat up. He’d closed his eyes in his father’s embrace but opened them now. When he did the old man was already sleeping again. He slept through the morning and the afternoon. He slept through the evening. He was still asleep when Noah himself dozed off on the chair sometime late at night.

TWELVE

The next morning Noah dressed warmly and shoveled a path down to the lake. Two hours’ labor that proved he’d underestimated the snowfall by half if not more. Again the sun shone and again the whiteness nearly blinded. He looked upon the lake bisected with skim ice, an arc of placid black water disrupted beyond the ice by thin ripples that flared under the cold, stiffening breeze. He felt a moment’s reprieve before he stepped onto the dock. But the ice cracked under the sway of the posts and he realized it was paper-thin, that the rowboat could easily break through it. As for the boat, it was buried like everything else under the snow. He shoveled it out, shoveled the dock, too.

The room had been very cold when he’d awoken. He had not stoked the fire during the night. In that lightness and chill he’d seen his father, seen the quilt not rising. He’d watched, hoping to convince himself that what he knew was wrong, that the light was insufficient or that the old man’s breathing had become that short. When he finally stepped to Olaf and touched his cheek, his knowledge became irrefutable. His father’s face was the same temperature as the air. Noah
simply pulled the quilt up over the old man and knelt beside the sofa. Anyone passing by would have thought he was praying.

Back up in the yard he cleared a path to the shed. The sun did little to warm him, and his fingers and toes grew numb despite his exertion. He first took the wheelbarrow from the shed. Looking down the hill to the lake, at the snow everywhere, he pushed it aside and retrieved instead the old Radio Flyer ski sled from the rafters. He tied a rope to the back end of it. Now he stood before the anchor, the consequences of its purpose beyond any intelligence he possessed. Solveig was not there. Nor Natalie. He put his arms around the old barrel. With great effort he carried it to the sled sitting in the snow. He set it upon the seat, took one of the pieces of tubing in one hand and the rope in the other, and guided it down the hill. At the lake-shore he set it on the dock. He towed the sled back up the hill and retrieved the platform his father had fashioned to sit on the gunwales. By now the sting of the cold on his face drew his skin tightly to his cheekbones. The lobes of his ears had gone numb. He brought the platform to the dock and set it across the boat with some difficulty. The ice around the boat cracked as it had when he’d first stepped on the dock, its sound full in the otherwise silent day.

Finally he returned to the house. He scratched the frost from the kitchen window and read the temperature on the thermometer. It was below zero. He turned to regard his father. For a long time he looked at the shape beneath the quilt. He counted back the time. It had been only some hundred and sixty hours, a simple week ago, that he and his father and Natalie had eaten so festively the Norwegian feast she’d brought. Only three days before that he’d arrived here at the lake. And just two days before arriving he’d received his father’s call. The measuring of those days and hours confounded him in contrast to what lay ahead for the old man now. To what lay ahead for himself.

He stood before the stove blowing into his hands and tapping his toes. The question of whether or not to dress his father now came to him. He walked to the couch. He lifted the quilt. That ratty union suit appalled him. So did the messed hair, the toothless mouth, that pinky half gone. Noah covered him again and went into his father’s bedroom. In the small closet he saw the old man’s wardrobe. A corduroy jacket. Three pairs of woolen trousers sewn by Noah’s mother and distinguishable only by the wear at the cuff, at the knee. A white cotton shirt with a button-down collar. An assortment of plaid flannel shirts. On the shelf above these meager hangings a short stack of sweaters. Noah found the thickest one. He held it up. It had a roll-neck collar and patches on the elbows. He slid a pair of the wool trousers from a hanger. From the top drawer of the small chest in the room, Noah took a pair of red wool socks and went back into the great room.

He pulled the covers back again. With as much difficulty as trepidation he began dressing his father. He lifted the old man’s head and pulled the sweater over it. His rim of hair lay flattened. The lids of his eyes seemed almost translucent. Noah paused to look on them. The skin was the same gray color as his eyebrows and lashes, the same gray color as the sweater.

The sleeves of the sweater presented a problem he’d not expected. His father’s arms were stiff, seemed flexed at his side. It took a modest feat of strength for Noah to bend them at the elbow. He fixed the collar at the old man’s neck. He straightened the sleeves. Next he pulled the wool socks onto the feet. The feet too were stiff. The pants he slid on easily. He thought of putting on boots but was dissuaded by the rigid ankles. Instead he put a hat over his father’s head. He put mittens on his hands. Finally he wrestled the peacoat onto the man. Noah stood back. He stepped again toward Olaf, put his thumbs between
his father’s lips, and pried his mouth open. He retrieved the dentures from their jar on the counter and pushed them into the old man’s mouth. With one hand on top of his father’s head and one beneath his chin, Noah muscled the lips together again.

He thought of hiking up the hill to the truck, of driving into Misquah to call his sister, but decided against it. Instead he removed his mother’s ashes from the shelf on which he’d placed them. He set them on the kitchen counter and stared at them as if she might materialize and give him counsel. His capacity for thought had diminished with his tasks, and when his mother offered no advice he decided to row his father across the lake.

He guided the sled down the hill a last time. On the dock he untied the rope from the sled. He put his father’s hands behind him and tied them together with a length of braided nylon rope he’d found in the shed. The arms resisted as if in protest. He thought how his father might have chastised him for the knot. It satisfied Noah in any case, and he proceeded with the barrel. It weighed more than his father, or so Noah reckoned. He laid the contraption on his father’s chest. He aligned the pieces of tubing with the old man’s legs and crisscrossed the chain behind his back, around his ankles, his father’s instructions returning to Noah unexpectedly. Noah could hardly believe how it all went together. He felt a small sense of pride at his part in its execution.

He managed to load his father onto the boat. He centered the old man and his anchor and stepped cautiously into the boat himself. The oars broke the ice easily. Between pulls he could hear the bow cutting through the ice. Midway across the lake the ice cleared and he was in open water. With his back facing his destination, he used the dock in front of him as his fix, knowing that if he kept in a straight line at about a forty-five-degree angle from the dock he’d end up abutting the cliff in the deep water.

He rowed. The wind bit at his neck and wrists and poured through his coat. He worked with absolute purpose, steadily and smoothly, his father balanced between the gunwales. The labor warmed him. He began to breathe hard. He kept his gaze on the dock, now so small a point of reference in the distance. He figured he was halfway, and when he paused to check saw that he was right. Again he turned, looked toward the dock. He saw upon it his father’s dog—or the ghost of a dog—his nose raised to the wind. Noah wiped his eyes to clear his vision. Then the dog was gone. He put his head down and dug the oars into the lake again.

And then he was at the spot where they’d fished so recently, so long ago. The sun at its apex reflected off the small waves that came with the winter wind. Except for the sound of them against the boat’s wooden hull there was no sound at all. He looked around. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but neither could he find it. He heard Solveig’s voice, her reticence, her declaration that she could not do it. He thought again of his mother’s ashes. He thought of Natalie’s innate confidence in him. Maybe he deserved it, for once. Some version of his father’s plea to bury him here replayed in his mind. There had been such elegance in it. And in the story of the
Rag
as his father had told it. There was his father now: dressed for winter, the afghan trailing in the water like a seining net.

Noah edged his father to starboard. He edged himself to port. The boat rocked. He tilted the platform. His father, rigid, splayed to the anchor, slid almost without a sound into the water. Instantly Noah put a hand into the water. He watched his father cartwheel toward the depths and out of view. It seemed to take forever.

Noah sat. He took the oars again, steered the boat around. He sculled back across the lake, thankful for the blinding whiteness.

EPILOGUE

Natalie still slept as he crested the last rise heading east into Duluth. The sun had just broken and cast its light onto the hills east and north of the city. A sight beyond his capacity to describe, but not to relish, which he did. It was the opposite season of his last arriving here, and the contrast in every way was lovely.

He followed the interstate down into the city. At this hour on a Saturday the roads were nearly vacant. He passed the first neighborhoods, the first industry. His ears popped. The harbor bloomed in the distance, all grays and inky blacks, the water coursing brilliantly and white beneath the sun. At the top of his view he saw the aerial bridge.

He nudged Nat. “Hey, sleepyhead. Look at this.”

She pulled her head from the pillow on which it lay next to the window. Her eyes adjusting to the light, she stretched. “Where are we?”

“Duluth. Breakfast in five minutes.”

She sat up. She scanned the view. “It looks a lot different.”

“It’s April, not November.”

He drove on. They’d planned on having breakfast at Canal Park, so he exited at Fifth Avenue. He turned over the tracks and stopped at Commerce and Railroad Streets. To his right the elevator silos and docks beckoned. “You mind if we make a detour? It won’t take long.”

“What for?”

“I want to show you something.”

He turned right. He passed two vacant slips not fifty feet from the road. The pier that jutted between them was wholly derelict. A little farther six pyramids of taconite five stories tall and black as obsidian rose against the harbor. Natalie asked about them.

“That’s what this town survives on. Or used to survive on. It’s taconite.”

“What your father spent all those years lugging around in his boat.”

Noah looked at her. “The same stuff.”

He turned onto Garfield and drove past a slip on his left with two tugs tied to cleats on the quay. He drove past two more slips. In the third a small freighter was docked under a loading complex. Men were about her deck.

“This is so interesting,” she said. “Look at those barges. What would they carry?”

“I don’t know. Not taconite. Limestone, maybe. Timber.”

They passed three more slips. They drove parallel to railroad tracks and abandoned-looking buildings, warehouses. At an unmarked dirt alleyway he turned left. They stopped at a chain-link fence. He turned off the car. They got out and stood at the fence. In the short distance they saw a minor civilization abandoned by time: train tracks sunk in the iodized soil, scrap yards tangled and twined with heaps of rusted steel, old cement silos unpainted in decades, a shack with windows of broken glass. Not far from the gate a pickup truck rounded
a dirt bend. It stopped. A man opened the door and looked at them. He did not nod. He did not wave. Noah would not have needed to raise his voice to greet him, but neither did he do so. The man wore coveralls and a watchman’s cap. He stepped to the back of his truck and let the gate down. A silver-and-white Siberian husky jumped from the bed and ran to the gate to sniff Noah’s and Nat’s shoes. They were both startled, but the dog turned as fast as it had come and walked away from them, heeling at the watchman’s left. The dog had swollen teats they could see from behind, irrefutable evidence of a new shipyard progeny.

Noah said, “How would you like his job?”

Natalie was still watching man and dog walk away. “What
is
his job?”

“To guard this paradise, I guess.”

Together they surveyed the vista for a few minutes more. Finally Nat said, “I could eat a horse, and I have to pee.”

A
FTER SCONES AND
coffee—decaf for Nat—at a coffee shop in Canal Park, Noah gave her a tour of the city. He drove her past his high school and the house on High Street. He took her to Chester Park and showed her the ski jumps. He drove her around downtown and through the college campus. Finally they drove north, past the mansions along Lake Superior, and out of town.