A lesser light, p.23
A Lesser Light, page 23
“You’ll be sun-kissed red if you don’t put that bonnet on,” Willa said.
“It’s too hot.”
“Better to be warm out here on the water than to cook all night in bed.”
Silje sat up and put her feet on the burden boards and dipped her tin cup into the lake, bringing it out and taking a long draught before dipping it again and offering it to Willa, who paused in her rowing, drank it down, and handed it back.
“That was thoughtful,” Willa said.
Silje shrugged, remembering how her mother had trained her to help when she could. Her mother would also have demanded she wear her bonnet. So, Silje removed it from her pocket and donned it and tied it beneath her chin.
“You’ll be glad of that choice,” Willa said.
Silje shrugged again.
“What’s troubling you?”
“I saw Fenrir again this morning. That makes twice in the last week.”
“I’d be right shaken if I thought a wolf was following me around.”
Silje thought to say, “There are wolves all around,” but didn’t. Instead, she said, “I wish we were going to Two Harbors or Gunflint instead of Otter Bay.”
“Oh?”
Willa had an even, almost elegant stroke at the oars. Her narrow shoulders and thin arms belied a strength that revealed itself as the boat scudded across the flat water.
When she didn’t offer more, Silje added, “I would like to eat in a café.”
This apparently delighted Willa, who smiled mischievously. “I made a pot of soup today and all I thought the whole time I was at it is that I wished to be at the Palm, eating beef bourguignon with my father.”
“What’s beef bourguignon?”
“Oh, it’s a delectable dish. A stew, more or less. But not the kind you’re used to. Beef bourguignon has wine and mushrooms. It simmers with a bouquet garni. There are onions galore. And bacon. My mouth waters just thinking about it.”
“What’s the Palm?”
“The Palm Dining Room in the Spalding Hotel. My father would take me there sometimes. Just the two of us.”
“Your father, he’s kind?”
“My father’s like yours, Silje.”
“Gone?”
“Gone.”
Silje dipped the tin cup into the lake again, but sipped it this time as if it were a hot cup of tea. “When did he go?”
She could see Willa counting back, the expression of astonishment that it didn’t take long. “It’s been less than a year. Eight months only.”
“Eight months seems like a long time,” Silje said.
“Yes. It certainly does.”
By the time they rounded the headland Silje called Lisbon Rock, she’d fallen back into her own thoughts. Of the wolf, mostly, whose pawprints she’d seen so many of lately in the peat behind their cabin. That day, while she stood on the back stoop tossing out the dishwater after breakfast, she noticed a shift in the shadowy trees. A twitch, really. Down in the deadfall and just-greening forest floor. He sat as was becoming his custom: his teeth pointing from his black lips, on his haunches, his back toward her, his tail twitching, looking over his left shoulder through the birch-colored fur of his coat. His black eye could have been a knot in the tree he sat beside, so still was he.
Her feeling about the wolf had changed since her encounter with Hosea Grimm just more than a week ago. Whereas before Fenrir had seemed like an aloof, occasional pet, she now saw his teeth as weapons. When she daydreamed about him, his claws always arrived first, leaping into her consciousness out of nowhere.
That morning, behind the cabin, he made no movement at all. Not even when Silje banged on the pot and shouted at him. So, she left instead. Turned back into the kitchen and finished her chores, and when she cracked the door and checked for him again ten minutes later, he was gone. Even if that spot among the base of the birch trees seemed darker for his having been there.
“What do you think’s a wolf’s favorite thing to eat is?”
“Well, not beef bourguignon,” Willa said, smiling at her cleverness.
“Moose, is what I think.”
“I’ve heard that. Why do you ask?”
Silje took a drink from the tin cup. “Just wondering.”
Willa sculled on. They passed the Black Granite Brook, halfway to Otter Bay, and Silje could see the smoke now from the mill in town. What she didn’t tell her friend is that ever since she’d been cornered by Hosea on the day of the grand opening jubilee, ever since that dread feeling had swamped her, she’d declared that she would trap Fenrir. She would trap him and train him and use him as a weapon. This trip to Otter Bay was the first step toward that outcome. It was also her chance to fire a salvo at that sinister old apothecary, in the form of the letter she felt for in her dress pocket.
She’d written it that morning, after her uncle went out fishing. Calling up all her scant learning, she’d taken pencil to paper in the fish house. So carefully had she considered and planned the missive, staying up most of the night before thinking about it, she’d committed it to memory.
To mister Grim, I am an expert with knifes. I can carve chain links from a birch log. I can gouge a wolfs teeth so you’d see each one like you were in its mouth. I tell you this because you should know if you ever come near me again.
I should also tell you I know a wolf. A wild one. I will sic him on you if you ever come close to me again. Fenrir can kill you with his mean stare alone.
Also if you ever do anything awful to my friend Odd, or to Rebeca, I will bring Fenrir to Gunflint even if I have to walk all the way there.
So do not ever come here again. Do not ever touch my shoulder again.
~Silje Lindvik
“You look mad enough to spit, Silje. Did I say something wrong?”
Silje looked at Willa, still rowing, sweat dampening the hair which earlier had hung in gossamer curls around her eyes. “You didn’t say anything wrong. I’m not mad. Not at you.”
“Well, good.” She feathered the oars, removed her own bonnet, used a kerchief to wipe the sweat from her brow. The tender came to rest in the calm waters, just fifty yards offshore. “It’s not supposed to be this hot.”
Silje filled the cup again and handed it to Willa.
“You’re a regular saloonkeeper. Thank you.” She drank the water and rolled her sleeves past her elbows. She put the oars back in the water and steered them for Otter Bay. “Would you tell me something?” Willa ventured.
Silje looked up from beneath her bonnet.
“Why doesn’t your uncle have a wife?”
Now Silje felt her unwilling smile. “Why do you want to know?”
“It’s such an improper and impertinent question. I’m sorry.”
“My mother wondered the same thing. I think he knew he had to take care of us. It was as good as being married, having her for a sister.”
They rowed the rest of the way in easy silence. Willa brought the boat ashore and, after Silje stepped out, hauled it up the gravel beach.
“We should tend to our letters first,” Willa said, shielding the sun with her hand and checking the post office hut on the hillside. “Mr. Holzer keeps scant hours.”
Together they walked across the beach and up onto the quay. Inside, Arnold Holzer sat behind his counter, reading a folded newspaper that sat in a square of sunlight.
“Here’s an unnatural pair of birds,” he said.
“Not so unnatural,” Willa said. “And certainly not birds.”
Without rejoinder, Mr. Holzer reached into the box designated for the lighthouse and removed the letters, which Willa accepted and stashed in her handbag. The slots designated for Silje’s family and her uncle were empty.
“Nothing for you, Miss Lindvik.”
She removed from her pocket the letter she’d scribed. “I need to send this to the apothecary in Gunflint,” she said, laying the folded piece of paper on the counter.
Mr. Holzer opened a drawer beneath the counter and removed an envelope. He dipped his pen in an inkwell and handed it to Silje. “Address here,” he pointed to the center of the envelope, “and return address here,” he pointed to the upper left-hand corner.
Silje carefully addressed the envelope and stuffed the letter inside.
“Two cents to send,” he said.
Silje reached into her pocket, beneath the folded dollar bills, and removed a handful of coins. She pinched two copper pennies onto the counter. “When will the letter arrive?”
“Next boat’s tomorrow,” Mr. Holzer said. To Willa he added, “Anything else, Mrs. Sauer?”
“Not today.”
“Well, then.” He returned to his newspaper and concluded, “Give my regards to your husband.”
* * *
After leaving the post office, they walked up and over the bridge and to Winkler’s Dry Goods. If such a thing were possible, Silje noted that his round belly had grown even from her last visit a month ago. His joviality seemed to have grown with it.
“If it’s not my favorite fisher girl,” he said, stepping from his ladder and reaching into a canister of licorice and handing Silje a string.
She thanked him but remained serious, scanning the store for what she wanted.
Mr. Winkler, picking up on her intentions, turned to Willa and said, winking, “She’s all business today.” He stepped out from behind the counter and wiped his hands on his apron. “What can I help you with today, Mrs. Sauer?”
“Bacon,” she said. “Do you have any?”
“As luck would have it, Swanny—that’s Mr. Mikael Swanstrom, lives up ’round the logging camp—he just butchered a couple of his hogs and set me up with some. I’ve got it in the icebox over here.” He was already moving toward the oak icebox in the back corner of the store. “One pound? Two?” he said.
“Two, I think.”
He unlevered the handle on the icebox and pulled out two packs of bacon, each labeled with a grease pencil. He brought them back to the counter and started a receipt.
“That,” Silje said, her voice barely above the scribble on the paper. She stood just a few paces off, pointing up at the wall of traps and riffles. “And I’ll take a pound of bacon, too.”
Mr. Dreiss paused in his work, stepped around to the counter before Silje, and said, “Now here I thought you were a fisher girl. What in damnation are you going to do with a number 14 wolf trap? Is this for your uncle?”
She chewed on her licorice by way of answering, but somehow Mr. Dreiss understood she wasn’t joking. He removed the trap from the wall and brought it to the counter where he laid it before Silje, who had followed him over. He looked skeptically to Willa, who merely shrugged.
“Do you know how one of these works?” Mr. Dreiss asked.
“Of course I do,” Silje replied.
“What do you need this much trap for, anyway?”
She stared at him deadpan. “A friend.”
“A friend, you say?” He looked again at Willa, as befuddled as if Silje had asked for his hand in marriage. Next Mr. Dreiss placed the trap in a gunnysack for carrying and laid it on the counter. “It’d be a strange creature who’d want to be friends after getting his leg clamped in this.”
“I’ll worry about that, so you don’t have to.”
“Fair enough. But I must say, Miss Lindvik, I don’t feel right putting an item of this extravagance on your uncle’s account. Not without his direct permission.”
Silje removed the dollar bills from her pocket—five of them—and spread them on the counter.
Now he smiled as if an elaborate joke had finally been given its punchline. He rang the till and punched the drawer open and deposited the bills. “I’ll be curious to hear how your hunting goes.”
Silje took the gunnysack off the counter and hefted it over her shoulder, the steel jaws biting into her flesh. “You’ll know when I come back with Fenrir on a leash. Don’t forget the pound of bacon.”
“Fenrir?”
“My soon-to-be friend.”
He could only nod, fetch another pound of bacon from the icebox, and wish them a good day as they left.
* * *
The afternoon had settled beneath a rampart of suffocating clouds, a day evermore like August than mid-May. Silje’s thoughts were up in them for most of the row back to the station.
It wasn’t until they rounded Big Rock again that either of them spoke.
“Did you see the comet last night?” Willa said
Silje lay again on the stern sheets, resting her cheek on the gunwale and staring down into the limpid depths. “It looked like spindrift off a November storm wave. One that rolled for half an hour.”
Willa smiled and nodded agreement. “That’s a beautiful description. They’ve been calling it ‘The Serpent’s Tail.’ ”
“The comet? Who has?”
“The comet’s tail. The newspapers and scientists.”
Silje sat up suddenly. The waters stood calm enough she could see her face in the flat surface, but below it, the Lisbon. “There it is.”
“There’s what?”
“Stop rowing,” Silje demanded. “Look.”
Willa again feathered the oars. She came beside Silje and looked down into the water.
“Do you see it?” Silje asked.
“The ship that sank here five years ago.”
Silje nodded, calling up the draugar of her memory, those men who came ashore the night of the storm five years ago as though descended of the enormous waves.
Willa, as if sharing the girl’s thoughts, said, “It’s hard to believe the same lake as this”—she gestured at the calm waters all around—“sank that.” She nodded at the inverted hull nine fathoms down.
“Is it?” Silje asked.
The Storm
November 28, 1905
Are souls like ships, plying godless seas?
What child ever saw one and didn’t feel the affinity, even if they couldn’t name it?
I’ve never believed in souls or divine seas, but I’ve known plenty who have. Some because they lack imagination, others because they have too much. Some are less a ship on a godless sea than a godless sea unto themselves.
* * *
THEY WERE SHELTERED in the trees on the trail the mail carriers used in winter, but still the storm found them. The wind screamed up their backs. The snow fell crosswise. And if not for the darkness of the lake water coming in and out of view as they marched, delineating the snowscape, they’d have had no compass to mark them. Silje had never seen her father frightened before, but he was now. He carried her like he had when she was a toddler, guiding them through the deep snow, sometimes falling to his knees as the trail dipped and rose.
They’d left the boardinghouse in Otter Bay at first light, her father eager to return to his wife even as the storm intensified. Her mother was no doubt climbing the walls like a spider. But he was concerned for his fish house, too. Not only did it hold his livelihood, but he could find refuge nowhere else. He hadn’t shuttered it. Hadn’t tied his boat to a tree.
That’s what he’d told her, at least, tying a scarf around her neck and hefting the rucksack over his shoulders. “We’ve walked in worse,” he said, though she was certain that wasn’t the case.
“I doubt this is a good idea, Pappa,” she’d said. “My boots.” She lifted her left foot. Showed him the crack in the sole.
He flashed an unconvincing smile and said, “I might have cobbled that a month ago. I’m sorry, sweet girl. But don’t worry, I’ll carry you if I have to.”
And he had, for the second mile. Now they were crossing the small bridge at Black Granite Brook, the one Samuel Riverfish built on the mail route, and he had to set her down. She sank into snow up to her waist.
Two steps she took before he brought her back up onto his shoulders. “You keep me warm, anyway,” he said.
“I’ll do my best, Pappa.”
“You reach back and pull that hood up, eh? Is your scarf still tied?”
She pulled on her hood and tightened the knot in her scarf.
Her whole life she’d remember that haul. More than anything, she’d remember the snow, which fell in such abundance that it enveloped the forest around and above them so that the trees became mere shadows of the storm itself. Became monuments to it. Many moments found them in a blur of whiteness so complete Silje felt as if she were upside down. But then they would come again to a part of the trail overlooking the lake and again the contrast of that black water put them upright.
They trekked all morning and at noon reached the junction on the Wabun River, where he set her down to rest. His toque had disappeared under snow and Silje reached up to knock it clear. He was exhausted, but still he smiled and said, “Almost home, sweet girl. Can you walk from here? I’ll break the trail?”
“My boot,” she reminded him.
“Ah, that’s right. Well, hop back on.”
As she did, the wind lulled and in its absence they heard a brontide in the near distance.
“Pappa?”
He put his finger to his lips and canted his head as though to hear better, but the wind moaned again and for a moment the sound disappeared. But then in another respite the peculiar grating sound returned.
It came from the direction of the lake. Silje thought for a moment it was perhaps a new kind of wind, one cleaving granite from the cliffside. A notion bolstered by the fact that she believed she could feel it through the sole of her broken boot. And though she was terrified of the possibilities, she was also compelled to slide off her father’s back and trudge her own path between the trees on the point.
With each step both the sound and vibration grew. Louder and more unnatural. Despite the hour of the day the quality of dusk held all around, and so it wasn’t until they were practically on the edge of Big Rock Cliff that they saw the orchestra of this cacophony: a ship coming apart on the shoal. Its three masts pointing in different directions. One east, one north, one west. Its hull had split, and the fore and aft ends of the steel boat listed in opposite directions. That sound, they learned standing there watching the wreck, came whenever a wave big enough to toss the ship into the face of the cliff rose out of the lake. When that happened, it felt like the whole shore would collapse, and Silje had to muffle her ears.
