The Lighthouse Road (9 page)
Read The Lighthouse Road Online
Authors: Peter Geye
A
nd so they climbed the northern rim of the outcropping in silence, Odd sulking, Daniel cutting trail.
nd so they climbed the northern rim of the outcropping in silence, Odd sulking, Daniel cutting trail.
It was true Odd was a fearful boy. He was scared of almost everything, but especially of the fact that he'd never had a mother. At night, up in the third-floor apartment at Grimm's, in the closet-sized room, under the down ticking with the moonlight blaring through the window, in his socks and his union suit, he passed his sleepless hours mulling the life he didn't have. He didn't know it, but he was possessed by an old man's fears. He missed his mother— the mother he'd never known— the way an old widower might miss his wife of fifty years, he'd worked his mother up to those heights. Her ghostly presence colored so many of his thoughts.
And because of the hole she left in his life he was timid, and that timidity might have come across as fear.
Odd looked around the woods, at Daniel's back before him, at the enormous sky pitch blue and getting bluer. He had always taken these woods for granted. But in that quarter mile before Thistle Creek he realized that if there was anything to fear it was this wilderness, not his missing mother. He'd heard it said there were thousands of miles of the same woods to the north, and temperatures colder, and colder longer, the farther you went. He knew about the wolves and bears and moose that roamed these trees. He suddenly felt vulnerable.
"I guess I'm afraid of some things," he said from out of the blue.
Daniel Riverfish stopped, turned to face him. "Some things? You flinch at your shadow, bud." He turned to move ahead but stopped. "All I'm saying is that's hellish work, out on the lake. Much harder than trapping or standing behind a counter selling aspirin. I ain't saying you couldn't do it, but—"
"I never thought I was afraid of these woods, but I am. I think."
"Hell, yes, you are. And you should be. These woods are the world and the world ain't an easy place. That's what Grandpap always says. And he ain't ever wrong. About nothing."
"I know it now," Odd said.
"Good."
T
histle Creek came down the gully off Peregrine Hill and emptied at the oxbow just north of the Devil's Maw. Daniel's first trap was a hundred paces up the creek and marked by a cedar tree grown out over the frozen water. They stopped at the tree and unlashed their shovels from the toboggan and dug through the snow. The trap was empty, as Daniel presumed it would be. He thought they'd be empty clear up to the pond, two miles upstream. But he was dutiful and they spent three hours digging and resetting traps.
histle Creek came down the gully off Peregrine Hill and emptied at the oxbow just north of the Devil's Maw. Daniel's first trap was a hundred paces up the creek and marked by a cedar tree grown out over the frozen water. They stopped at the tree and unlashed their shovels from the toboggan and dug through the snow. The trap was empty, as Daniel presumed it would be. He thought they'd be empty clear up to the pond, two miles upstream. But he was dutiful and they spent three hours digging and resetting traps.
By the time they reached the beaver pond Odd's neck and shoulders were burning and taut and he took the firmness for a sign.
" Watch me be brave," Odd said aloud.
"What do you mean?"
"Just watch."
Daniel smiled. "I will."
W
hereas the otter traps were baited with fish, the beaver traps were baited with poplar poles two feet under water. The beavers would find the poplar and as they sat back to eat it fall on the trap and drown. Daniel had a dozen traps in the pond and they worked the first ten of them into the late afternoon. It wasn't until the eleventh trap that they found a beaver, a middling male. Odd pulled him out of the pond and tossed him onto the snow, released the trap, and reset it underwater.
Daniel huzzahed from across the pond, where he'd found a second beaver in the last trap. He likewise released the trap and reset it and joined Odd near their toboggan.
"Ma will love this tail," Daniel said. He could already taste it, fried up in bear fat, so hot it would scald the roof of his mouth.
"I'm coming for dinner," Odd said.
Daniel smiled.
They unsheathed their bowie knives and each of them gutted a beaver, tossing the offal aside for the ravens and wolves. If they were making a living they'd have been poor and disheartened, but because they were only boys in the service of becoming men they were thrilled, and they lashed the gutted beavers to the toboggan and turned down the same trail they'd cut on the way to the pond.
When they reached the Burnt Wood River and the Devil's Maw Odd finally spoke. "You think you can just decide to change?"
"Yes. Someways."
"I believe I can do it. I believe I will. No more chickenshit."
"Grandpap would tell you be careful."
"Be careful—"
O
dd saw it first, heard or saw it, he couldn't say. Just under the Devil's Maw, about a hundred paces off the eastern shoreline of the river, from somewhere along the craggy cliff face came a plaintive cry just above Daniel's whistling and the river purling beneath the ice. The cliff was lit with the setting sun, blazing really, but for the dark re cesses of the shallow caves that dotted the river's edge. Daniel was well behind him, pulling the sled. The cry grew with each step until Odd found himself slowing, then finally stopping twenty paces short of a curious declivity in the rock. He looked back, saw Daniel still trailing.
He felt himself welling up, recognized the feeling as faintheartedness, and bit down. He walked to the opening in the stone and felt his heart running as there rose from the rocks a musky odor he'd never smelled before. He took a half step back and tried to place the scent but could not. The bawling had stopped. Now only a kind of whimper came from the rocks.
Years later, whenever he tried to reconcile the defining moments of his childhood with the man he had become, he thought of that moment on the precipice as a divine one, when he became, for better or worse, the person he would always be. He would recall with utter clarity Daniel's voice telling him no, would recall his dizziness and the imaginary hand he felt pushing him as he knelt and removed his snowshoes, as he took his shotgun from over his shoulder and laid it against the cliff wall, as he shifted his bowie knife hanging from his belt to the small of his back. It would be strange to think about in later years, the way he knelt on the rocks without thinking, the way he crawled to the sound from the cave, the way he could never have done it again, how he had acted on the most animal level, curious in a way he'd never be again, not even the first time he made love with Rebekah. Strange to think there were moments when you could live completely outside your mind, stranger still to think how seldom those moments came to pass.
He crawled closer to the sound, to the cave, and then slithered into it. He noticed first the warmth and then caught the smell, rank now, whereas from above it had only been faint and musky. Taken together, the warmth and stink made his already swirling mind swirl more.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and what it held. In that time he felt and heard the chthonian rhythms: the coursing waters, the earth's beating heart, his own pulse heavy in his head, the bears' slow, slow breath. They were two, a sleeping sow and her yearling, awake with the warm day. It must have been the yearling's cry he'd heard, for the cub's small white eyes were on him, wide and in a frenzy, its murmur grown to a full yell. A desperate yell.
And there was no way to explain what Odd did next. He reached his hand across the distance between them and touched the sleeping sow's shoulder. She was the source of all the warmth in the world, and that warmth was his now, too. For a moment he left his hand there, leaning closer and closer toward the bears as though drawn by some magnetic force. The yearling's screaming had become everything with the warmth. Everything until the sow woke as though from a warning dream. She rolled over and in a single motion came up at his face with her right forepaw. She swiped the side of his head with such force that he was thrown back into the light of day, a bleeding hole where his left eye had been.
Daniel was upon him, his shotgun raised to his shoulder while Odd scrambled up, screaming, his unmittened hand plugging the hole in his face. The bears were both screaming now, the earth rumbling. Daniel hurried Odd onto the sled, shouting, "Let's go, let's go, let's go!" as he pulled the lead ropes of the toboggan with one hand even as he kept his shotgun ready. He told Odd to hold on. To hold on tight. And he ran with the sled behind him, ran away from the sound in the earth, his best friend half blind.
VII.
(August 1920)
H
e had spent a month watching the white pine not dry fast enough, the pitch bleeding like icicles dripping from an eaves trough.
e had spent a month watching the white pine not dry fast enough, the pitch bleeding like icicles dripping from an eaves trough.
At the end of the month he rented the horse again and dragged the log up to the mill, where for two dollars he had it kiln dried. He had felt, as he stood in the lumberyard smoking half-a-dozen hand-rolled cigarettes, like a cozener; like having the lumber dried was a desecration of his vision. But he'd also spent enough nights with Rebekah to know that time was more important than principle.
Since that day at the mill he'd lived as a hermit. He tended his nets and ran the barrels but otherwise spent his time in the fish house: by day working on the keel and, on those lucky and unforeseeable nights, in the company of Rebekah. The rhythm of that season was unlike anything he'd ever known. It was almost as if the long, steady work with his saws and adze continued in the dark with Rebekah, and since he took as much pleasure in one as the other, there were nights his felicity seemed endless. Boundless. And so he mistrusted it even as he gorged himself.
Now he had the keel on a strongback, leveled with shims on the floor of the fish house. He'd built the temporary ribbands and he could see, as he stood back with a fifth cup of coffee on those hot August nights, the bones of it, could see with his eye what he'd seen in his mind for years. He had a flitch of cedar sitting under a tarpaulin where the keel had sat before, he'd built a steam box of planks sawn from the white pine and fashioned a steamer from an old five-gallon kerosene bucket and hose line ordered from the automobile-parts catalog Hosea received each spring and fall. He'd also ordered two dozen C-clamps and a hundred dollars' worth of tools— rabbet planes, chisels, wooden mallets, nippers, a spokeshave, a sharpening stone, an assortment of ball-peen hammers and bucking irons and wrenches and screwdrivers— from Arneson's Hardware. On the fish counter a dozen well-fingered boat-motor catalogs sat beneath the plans, which were hand-drawn by Odd on huge sheets of onionskin paper. There were pencils and rulers scattered on the counter, and a new lamp shining down on it all.
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