Safe from the Sea (4 page)

Lake Forsone was cut from an ancient batholith, the last above-water remnants of which rose in a sharp palisade of iron-streaked granite on the far northern shore. Fifty feet tall and a quarter mile long, the cliff dominated the landscape. On the western edge of the escarpment the Sawtooth Creek emptied into the lake. It was here that the late-season trout would be gathered on what the Torrs had named the first step. The water beneath the palisade descended in four broad steps to a depth of more than a hundred and fifty feet. There were almost a thousand lakes in the county, Forsone was the deepest.

The southern quarter of the lake was much shallower, and the rock outcroppings that dominated the northern shore gave way to a muskeg thick with black spruce and fen. The muskeg drained into Tristhet Creek, a fishless stream that trickled all the way to Lake Superior. Noah watched as a barred owl rose from its hollow tree in the bog land, its wings flapping in slow motion. A breeze rose with the bird.

By the time they reached the shadowy water beneath the palisade, Noah felt well primed. It had taken him nearly half an hour of constant rowing. He reached over the gunwale, cupped his hand, and brought a scoop of water up to splash his face. It was ice cold and clear as glass.

When he turned to his father the old man was already tying a bucktail jig onto Noah’s line. “It’s still enough we won’t drift much,” Olaf said, handing him the rod. “Cast up against the cliff, let it sink, crank her in. The water’s cold enough the lakers are out of the depths. They’re spawning now.”

Noah took the rod, thinking,
You could be dying, but still you’re baiting my line? I know how to bait a line, I remember
. He stared at his father, who cast his own line up the shore. It hissed in the otherwise silent morning and then splashed as the jig hit the water. The old man rubbed his nose and combed his beard with his fingers again, looking past Noah and out over the still black water.

“We’re poachers now. Trout season ended more than a month ago. And you with no license on top of it all,” Olaf said softly, working the jig with quick jerks of his rod. “I hope the DNR is busy with the bow hunters.”

Noah could not take his eyes off him. For the first time since he had arrived that morning he really looked at the old man. The gaze must have made Olaf uncomfortable because he glanced away, hurried his line in, and cast again.

“Well, it won’t be long,” Olaf said.

“What’s that?”

Olaf shifted his weight, picked something from his teeth, and shrugged. “The fish. We’ve got to be quiet if we want to catch fish.” He looked at Noah. “They aren’t stupid. They can hear us.”

Hear us
, Noah thought, suddenly overcome by the significance of being there, by the sickness practically radiating from the old man. He leaned toward his father and whispered, “Who cares about the fish?”

“No fish, no dinner.”

“Dinner is easy enough to come by. I can get in the car and be back in half an hour with dinner.”

“Chrissakes, you want potato chips and bologna sandwiches, why’d you come all the way up here?”

“I came because you’re sick. I came to figure out what we’re going to do. I came to give you a hand.”

“Well, right now the best thing you could do for me would be to shush. I want to catch some of the fish swimming around down there. Maybe spare me your bologna sandwich. What do you say? How about you bring us back in a little closer?”

Okay
, Noah thought,
we can fish today.
He put the oars in the water for two pulls toward the palisade. He cast his jig onto the placid water, ripples widening in perfect circles as he waited for the lure to reach its depth. As he made the first crank on his reel he heard the hiss of his father’s drag. He looked over, saw the old man’s rod arcing from his hand. His face looked serene.

Olaf caught three lake trout—the first was as long as Olaf’s forearm—enough fish for dinner that night and three meals stored in the freezer. Noah didn’t catch a thing.

“That’s just rotten luck,” Olaf said as they rowed back toward the cabin.

Noah pulled harder on the oars and felt the skin on his hands toughen.

A
FTER THEIR FOUR
o’clock dinner of cracker-crusted trout, instant mashed potatoes, and creamed corn, they sat at the table and talked for an hour about the things Noah could help with around the house. Olaf was most concerned about his woodpile, a concern Noah could not comprehend given the bounty of split boles stacked, seemingly, everywhere. Olaf mentioned that the hearth needed some mortar work, that the eaves trough spanning the roofline on the front of
the house required repair, that there were shingles missing on the shed. He also said he wanted to get the dock out of the water this winter. Noah insisted, despite his misgivings and certainty that he would be unable to repair any of it, that anything Olaf needed, he would do.

Noah got up and cleared the table. Standing at the kitchen counter he said, “We’ve got our chores lined up, now what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You said you were sick.”

Plainly, Olaf said, “I’m dying.”

Noah felt the word—
dying
—like a punch in the gut. He returned to the table and sat down. “What? How do you know? What have the doctors told you?”

“I haven’t been to the doctor.”

A guarded hope entered Noah’s mind:
How could his father know he was dying
? “How do you know what’s wrong?”

“I’ve done my research.”

Noah looked at him, puzzled. “Research?”

“At the library. Up in Gunflint.”

“The library? Dad, if you’re sick enough to die, you’ve got to go see someone. You’ve got to get help.”

Olaf put his hands palm down on the table and cleared his throat. “I want you to listen to me,” he said patiently. “I know what I’m doing. I know what I want. I’m not going to the doctor and the reasons are simple: I’m sick, I’m going to die. Whether it’s tomorrow or six months from now hardly seems important. What is important is that I don’t prolong my misery, don’t hold on and end up in a nursing home with a bunch of old ladies reeking of Listerine and playing goddamn bingo. This is going to happen on my terms, understand?”

Noah buried his face in his hands. “Who said anything about a nursing home? All I’m saying is you need to see a doctor. You’re in no position to diagnose yourself, even if you’ve read every book in the library. Is there still a hospital up in Gunflint?”

Olaf stood heavily and looked Noah squarely in the eyes. “I will say it one more time—I am not going to the doctor. It’s final. Now, I’d like nothing better than to have you help me get the place ready for winter, but I will not be lectured.”

He lumbered into his bedroom, closing the door behind him.

Noah’s first impulse was to anger. But as he sat there alone, the seriousness of his father’s health now a certainty, his anger subsided, was replaced instead with an unnatural calm. There was a new light cast on his being there, one that complicated even as it made clearer.

Noah walked to the door and looked out into the yard, now being swallowed by the gloaming. Thinking to call Natalie, he took his cell phone from his pocket. But there was no signal, there hadn’t been since he was twenty minutes north of Duluth.

So now what?
he thought as rain began to fall.

TWO

The next morning Noah woke early and headed toward the lake. The overgrown trees dripped rainwater. The giant bedrock boulders shouldering the path were covered with feathermoss and skirted with bunchberry bushes. Mushrooms and reindeer lichen grew among the duff and deadfall on the trailside.

At the lake Noah turned left and walked along the water’s edge. A hundred feet up the beach he came to the clearing in the woods, a clearing he’d all but forgotten in the many years since he’d last seen it.

When Noah turned five years old his father and grandfather built a ski jump on the top of the hill just east of the house. They cleared a landing hill on the slope that flattened at the beach. Back in Norway Noah’s Grandpa Torr had been a promising young skier. He had even competed at the Holmenkollen. When he immigrated to the States, he became a Duluth ski-club booster and helped build the jump at Chester Bowl, where Olaf himself twice won the junior championship.

Each Christmas Eve morning Noah’s grandpa and father would boot-pack the snow on the landing hill and scaffold before grooming
it with garden rakes. On Christmas morning they would sidestep the landing hill with their own skis and set tracks for Noah. Olaf would stick pine boughs in the landing hill every ten feet after eighty, and by the time Noah turned nine he was jumping beyond the last of them, a hundred twenty or a hundred twenty-five feet.

Looking up at the jump he remembered the cold on his cheeks, his fingers forever numb, his toes, too, the exultation of the speed and flight. And his skis, the navy-blue Klongsbergs, their camber and their yellow bases and the bindings his grandfather mail-ordered from a friend still in Bergen. They were the first skis his father bought for him, the first not handed down. He remembered the way his sweater smelled when wet and the way it made his wrists itch in that inch of flesh between the end of his mittens and the turtleneck he wore underneath it.

But most of all he remembered the camaraderie and the lessons and the pride felt by each of them—son, father, and grandfather—in the knowledge of a lesson well learned. Even after his father had washed up on the rocks the morning after the wreck there had sometimes been a sort of reprieve from Olaf’s drunken vitriol in that isolated week between Christmas and New Year’s. Now the landing hill had grown trees again, and the bramble and deadfall made it almost indistinguishable from the rest of the hillside. Even so, at the top of the hill he could still see the scaffold and the deck standing at the side of the takeoff where his father or grandfather had stood for hours at a time, coaching and encouraging him.

“You remember this thing?” his father asked, out of breath.

Noah turned, startled, “Of course I do.”

“You can hardly see it up there.”

“I can see it.”

They were both looking at the landing hill with their hands in
their pockets. The temperature was dropping, but the sky was clearing. “I used to wonder about you when it came to this thing.” Olaf gestured up at the jump. “You were a pretty good jumper, but that attention span.”

Noah smiled. “I was easily distracted.” He thought,
Whatever happened to those days?

As if intercepting Noah’s thoughts, Olaf said, “Chrissakes those were fine, fine mornings.”

“They sure were.”

“You should have stuck with it.”

“I often think that. Guess I wanted to get away, out of Duluth.”

“Duluth was so bad?”

Noah shrugged.

Olaf nodded. “Maybe it wasn’t Duluth you wanted to get away from.”

“Maybe not.”

Olaf looked at him charily. “Come with me, I want to show you something.”

T
HE TRUCK SMELLED
of cigars, and the inside of the windows dripped with condensation. The plastic upholstery covering the enormous front seat was split and cracked from corner to corner, and mustard-colored foam padding burst through the tear. A speedometer, fuel gauge, and heater control sat derelict on the dashboard, and beneath it, where a radio should have been, three wires dangled, clipped, with copper frizz flowering from each.

Noah felt like he was in an airplane, seated so high, and he marked the contrast his father’s truck cut against his own Toyota back in Boston. His car got fifty miles to the gallon. He’d have bet that the truck
got less than ten. Still, he derived a definite satisfaction from sitting there in the passenger seat. He thought he’d like to drive it.

Olaf put the key in the ignition, pumped the gas pedal four or five times, and turned the key. The truck shook and grumbled but did not start. He tapped the gas pedal a couple more times and tried again. This time it groaned but finally started. He revved the accelerator, and white smoke blossomed from the tailpipe. Inside, the cab filled with the smell of old gasoline.

“Carburetor,” Olaf said, grinning. He reached under the seat and pulled out two cigars wrapped in plastic, gave one to Noah, unwrapped and bit the end off his own, and finally lit it with a kitchen match. Noah rolled his between his thumb and forefinger.

“We can take the rental car,” Noah said.

“Don’t worry about the truck.”

“I can’t believe you still drive it.”

“It’s got almost four hundred thousand miles on it.”

“That’s amazing. I lease a new car every couple years so I never have to worry about repairs. I haven’t had a car in the shop since I started leasing.”

“This thing’s never been in the shop, either.”

Olaf pulled a stiff rag from beneath his seat and wiped the condensation from his side of the windshield. He rolled his window down, too. “Crack your window, would you? Let’s get some air in here.”

Noah cranked his window down. “Where are we headed?”

“Thought it would be nice to get down to the big water.”

Olaf navigated the truck up under the low-hanging trees and onto the county road. Cool air streamed through the open windows.

“It’s getting colder,” Noah said.

“But the pressure’s rising, which means it’ll be clearing up. This wind, though, it’s going to blow the high pressure right through.”

When they reached Highway 61, Olaf turned left, away from town, and drove slowly in the middle of the road. After a few miles the lake unfolded before them. “Look at all that water,” Olaf said.

“Those waves are huge. It looks like the ocean,” Noah said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this. The water was practically still yesterday.”

Olaf stared out at the lake. The deep creases around his eyes and in the slack of his chin and neck seemed flexed all the time. His lips and nose crinkled in a constant grimace, and his mouth parted as he alternated between slow breaths and puffs on his cigar. Noah watched his father’s hands, too, one on the steering wheel with quivering white-haired knuckles, the other sitting on his leg as if helping to keep the accelerator constant. He drove thirty miles per hour.