Safe from the Sea (7 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, she ought to know what’s going on.”

“Aaah,” Olaf grumbled. “What does she need to hear about it for?”

“Maybe,” Noah said, setting the wheelbarrow down and turning to face him, “she just deserves to know. Maybe she would want to know because you’re her father, after all, and people tend to worry when their father is sick.”

“Do me a favor and don’t call her again. She doesn’t want to see me like this.”

Noah took a deep breath and rolled his neck over his shoulders. He turned back for the wheelbarrow.

They followed the path slowly for another five minutes before they reached the oak, which had fallen across the whole expanse of an old creek bed so that it formed a kind of bridge between the two
sides. The sinewy roots hung like dead willow branches on the other side of the ravine.

“Must have been some wind,” Noah said.

Olaf agreed. He explained the chainsaw, said it’d be easiest to work on the branches first, that he should approach the job as if he were whittling a stick. He warned Noah about how, when cutting off a particularly large branch—and he pointed out half-a-dozen examples—he had to be careful because the tree’s balance might shift. Finally he pulled the cord and the saw fired up. He handed it to Noah. Olaf sat down with his long legs hanging over the edge of the gulch and pointed at Noah to get going.

The saw whined with the first squeeze of the trigger, pulling Noah toward the tree. He trimmed the first branches, the finer treetop limbs still thick with dried leaves. He ripped through them, moving quickly, the branches falling into the gulch, until he had worked halfway down to the thicker limbs. After fifteen minutes he looked back at the pile of branches lying on the bank of the gulch. The air smelled of sawdust, and his ears rang from the shrill saw.

He kept at it until the only thing left was the spotted trunk spanning the two sides of the creek bed. Olaf sat there, his shoulders draped over his chest, his hands folded on his lap, like a child. Noah flipped the power switch and the saw choked off. The muscles in his arms and back stung and twitched.

“Oh-hohh!” Noah hollered. The air had gone silent when he turned off the saw, but his ears still buzzed. “That’s work!”

Olaf smiled.

“Now what, just start on the trunk?”

“We’ll leave that for tomorrow. It’s getting dark.” Olaf turned his attention to the sky. “The days are so goddamn short this time of year,” he said.

Noah looked back at the tree, wanted to continue but said, “You know best.”

They left the wheelbarrow and started back for the house.

They were almost to the cabin when Noah saw something moving close to the ground in the yard. It had crawled out from under the truck. Noah flinched, dropped the saw on a pathside rock, and froze. “What the hell is that?” he whispered.

“What?” Olaf said, startled himself by the thud of the saw on the stone.

“That,” Noah whispered again, pointing at the bushy shadow. “Is that a wolf?” he asked. He bent down and picked up the saw.
“Is that a goddamn wolf?”
he asked again, this time in a louder whisper, turning his head but not taking his eyes off the shadow in the yard.

“What are you talking about?” Olaf said.

“There. Sitting right there, by the firepit.”

“That’s not a wolf,” Olaf said, elbowing Noah aside. “That’s my dog. That’s Vikar—come here, Vikar.” And he whistled. The dog came bounding around the truck and ran a circle around them.

“Jesus Christ,” Noah said, all of his held breath coming out in one relieved rasp. “Jesus,” he said again, watching the huge dog roll on his back as Olaf scratched its stomach. “Where has he been?”

“Wandering around the woods, I’d guess. Comes home when he wants. Must’ve heard the chainsaw.”

The dog was enormous, a malamute or husky a hundred and fifty pounds or more. It had long, coarse hair and ears and forepaws the size of Noah’s own hands. “He scared the shit out of me,” Noah said. “I thought it was a wolf.”

“That’s what you said.”

Noah let the dog sniff his hand.

“How long have you had him?” They were standing in front of
the house now, the dog jumping and twisting under Olaf’s snapping fingers.

“Couple years.”

Noah sat on the step and the dog came up to him, eye level, ears submissively fallen, to be petted. “Any more surprises?” he asked, scratching the dog behind its ears.

“Surprises?” Olaf replied. He stepped behind Noah, onto the porch, took the top off a tin garbage can, and filled an empty ice-cream bucket with dog food. He put it down beside the steps and the dog set to eating.

“D
O YOU REMEMBER
your mother playing the piano?” They sat in the rusted steel lawn chairs on the grassy beach, an oar’s length from the lapping water, darkness cascading down the sky. Vikar lay at Olaf’s feet, his legs outstretched, a stream of groans muttering from his black lips.

“Of course I do,” Noah said.

“She played beautifully.”

“It used to drive me nuts.”

“Why?” Olaf asked, his chin on his shoulder, his long white beard pointing out toward the lake.

“Because I could never listen to my records.”

She used to play the Acrosonic upright for hours at a time, in summer especially, when her long evenings alone went on endlessly. Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Grieg were always drifting through the house on High Street while Noah and his buddies pitched pennies outside against the garage door. Solveig played, too, in her mother’s style but without any of her elegance.

Olaf was teasing a sprig of brown grass. He sighed, cleared his
throat, and put the grass between his lips. “She always wanted to play at your wedding.”

“My wedding,” Noah said, stiffening at the mere mention of it. “I’m surprised you’d bring it up.”

“That was a long time ago, Noah.”

“Five years now,” Noah said, feeling his anger rising. His father’s worst performance ever had come on the eve of Noah’s wedding. He hated to remember it. And here was talk of his mother again, Noah’s sacred subject.

“You know, I was on my way home when she died,” Olaf said, seemingly oblivious.

“I remember when she died,” Noah said, wondering now if his father really was looking for a fight.

“That’s the only time I’ve ever been on a plane in my life. I had to leave my boat in Toledo, take a bus to Detroit and get the plane. It cost a hundred bucks.”

“A regular hero.”

Olaf turned away, set his chin back on his chest. The sky sparkled with stars, lightening and darkening simultaneously as it got later and the moon rose.

“Your mother wanted you to play the piano,” Olaf said.

Noah sneered incredulously, nearly stood up to leave.

“She did,” Olaf said.

“What difference did it make who played the piano?”

“None,” Olaf said. “I’m just trying to remember.”

“Why are you doing this? You can’t even face it now, can you?”

“Chrissakes, Noah.”

Noah had to clench his teeth to keep from saying more.

When, one night early in their relationship, Natalie had asked Noah how his mother had died—they were eating oysters and drinking
Pimm’s at a place out on Marblehead Beach—Noah had said loosely but with conviction, “Of a broken heart.”

His mother had, in fact, died of heart failure, of a heart attack brought on, Noah always imagined, by an excess of longing.

“They called you on Saturday. You got to port on Sunday morning. You didn’t get back to Duluth until
Thursday.
For four days you knew how sick she was, and still you didn’t get home? And somehow you were a hero for getting on a plane?”

“It’s not that simple,” Olaf said.

“She was
dying
.”

“We didn’t know that then.”

“Are you kidding me?” Noah stood up, walked to the edge of the water, picked up a rock, and threw it out into the lake.

“I didn’t expect her to die, Noah.”

“What did you expect, huh?” He threw another rock into the lake and turned to face his father. “We were fucking kids.”

“Your mother and I, we were hardly speaking to each other by then.”

“You had two kids, too. Did you forget about us?”

“I didn’t forget about anything.”

“You know what?” Noah said, stepping back toward his father. “That only makes it worse. We needed you and you weren’t there. You were never there.”

“The story is a lot more complicated than you remember,” Olaf said.

Noah dropped back into the chair and ran his hands through his hair. “What part of the story am I forgetting, Dad? All we wanted was for you to come home and tell us that the world hadn’t ended, that’s all you would have had to do.”

“The world ended long before that night,” Olaf said.

Noah heard a note of resignation in his voice, a pitiful, sad, thoughtful timbre that he’d never heard before but that he didn’t quite believe. “Don’t you get it? Mom had just died. Whatever tragedy you suffered shouldn’t have mattered. It still doesn’t matter. You had a responsibility, and you blew it.”

“Do you think I’m sitting here ignorant?”

“I think you’ve always believed that what happened to you was more tragic and more meaningful than anything that ever happened to anyone else. And that’s wrong. You just couldn’t shake it, that’s all, you lugged it around like a yoke and nothing else mattered. That’s what I think.”

“You’re dead wrong about all of that. Dead goddamn wrong.”

“Then tell me why you weren’t there. Tell me why you disappeared. Tell me why Mom never had a funeral.”

Olaf looked squarely at Noah, a face full of regret if Noah judged right. “I still have her ashes,” he said.

“What?”

“They’re in the shed. They’re stowed away.”

Noah was dumbstruck.

“I can’t tell you why I wasn’t there, Noah. I can’t tell you why I disappeared or why your mother never had a funeral. I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

“They’re in the shed?”

“I never knew what to do with them. What are you supposed to do with your wife’s ashes?”

Noah had no idea.

They sat quietly for a long time. The night was stunning, cooling, the sky bursting with stars. Noah watched his father doze off, his chin on his chest. Twice Vikar stood and went to the shore to drink, and twice he came back to Olaf’s feet.

Eventually he thought of Natalie. He imagined her at home, curled up on the couch in the den. She was coming here. A fact Noah found hard to imagine. Sometimes, at home, before they fell asleep, they’d lie in bed conjuring up their fantasy child—a baby boy—whose ascendance into the nighttime world of forgiveness and fantasy was like religion for them. The boy would be a prodigy, of course, but a prodigy of ordinariness. This meant a Little League career that included errors and strikeouts galore but also a zest for the game straight from the little guy’s good nature. It meant a seventh grade girlfriend and questions about her. It meant high school and the prom and ski trips up to Sugarloaf with the boy and a couple of his pals. It meant college at Dartmouth, Nat’s insistence, and law school and a job in downtown Boston where the two of them—Noah and his son—could get together for lunch on Fridays. There were no dislocations in this fantasy, no shipwrecks. And certainly no ashes stowed in the shed.

“Winter’s in that wind,” Olaf said, turning the collar of his shirt up.

His voice startled Noah from his reverie. He hadn’t noticed the outright chill in the air but felt it the moment his father mentioned it.

“You fell asleep.”

“It’s awfully damn late for me.”

Noah turned his attention back to the lake and the rippling water. Steadier now, the waves lapped gently against the dock posts and onto the beach. “Two weeks ago that sky would’ve been a circus with northern lights,” Olaf said, pointing upward. “It’s a goddamn sight.

“My first year on the
Loki
I used to sit watch from midnight until four. Ninety percent of the time this meant just staying awake. Sometimes I’d be up in the pilothouse, sometimes down on deck, depending
on the weather and where we were. It was a boring job, boring as hell to tell the truth, but my captain that first year was a German guy named Wolfgang, a hell of a guy, smart as anyone I ever knew. He introduced me to the stars, so to speak.” Olaf nodded up at the sky. “He taught me some things about navigating. Just basic stuff, but I was hooked. He said that a true seaman could sail around the world without anything more than a watch and a sextant and the sky to guide him. I didn’t even know what a sextant was, just figured you knew where to go if you were in charge of one of those boats. I never reckoned there was any science to it. Wolf taught me how to take sun sights, how to chart our course, how to estimate our position using dead reckoning when the sky was cloudy and the shore out of sight.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Now it’s just a bunch of satellites telling you where you are and where to go. Back then it was still something beautiful to steer a ship.”

Olaf stopped talking, looked up at the sky, and pointed to different clusters of stars, marking the air with fingertips. Noah, in all his life, had never heard his father say so much at one time. He’d never heard him say half as much.

“What are you pointing at?”

Olaf looked down. “Nothing,” he said. “There was a lot of down-time on the ship, especially as a kid when I didn’t have any responsibilities outside my watch. On clear nights I used to stand on the stern deck looking out at the wake. There’re a lot of things to see in the night sky, especially on Superior. And there were a lot of reasons to be lonely, especially if you were the new kid onboard. But when you’re aching to get away, which I was, even the worst loneliness doesn’t sound too bad.

“Anyway, I got interested in what the captain was teaching me. I used to watch him take his sights, consult our charts, mark our position,
do the math. After a couple seasons I had a real sense for this stuff. I could keep time in my head. I knew where we were all the time. I got good at it.

“You see there?” he asked Noah, pointing nearly straight up at a cluster of bright stars. “That’s Andromeda, you can tell by the spiraling cloudiness of it. It’ll be lower in the sky in the next month. That’s Cassiopeia to the left there. That’s Auriga there, and that’s Capella, that bright star right on the edge of that cluster. You can’t see Orion or Betelgeuse now because they’re too low on the horizon. Jesus, those stars are a long ways away. I can hardly even think about it now. But I’ll tell you what”—he coughed to clear his throat and nodded affirmatively—“I used to sail by their light—I used to sail by Andromeda’s light—and I got around just fine.”