South of Superior (42 page)

From Christmas to the third week of January the construction office was closed. Jim did that every year, laid everybody off and took a couple of weeks himself. Paul had known it was coming Up, but when it happened it threw him. He couldn't stop prowling around the house, looking for things to do. There wasn't much, barely even a lightbulb to be changed.

“You're making me nervous,” his mother told him one morning, a week into his mandatory vacation. His dad had gone to drink coffee at Hardee's with his buddies. He'd invited Paul to come along but Paul didn't want to. “Why don't you relax?”

“I am relaxed,” Paul said, drumming his fingers on the table, then jumping Up to fiddle with the doohickey that controlled the blinds. It seemed sticky to him, maybe he could fix that.

“Paul. Sit down.”

Paul frowned but he did sit because even all these years later he was conditioned to obey when his mother spoke in a certain tone of voice.

“What are your plans?”

“What do you mean?”

“You're welcome here anytime, but—”

“You're not throwing me out, are you?”

She put her hand over his to stop the tapping. “You can't go on like this.”

“Like what?”

“You're just marking time. There's more to life.”

Paul had tried for that brass ring, the elusive “more to life” people talked about, and he'd failed. Marriage, Garceau's, Randi—nothing worked. He never said that, it sounded like whining. But his mother was looking at him with such a serious expression that he decided to tell her the truth. “I don't think there is, though. I really don't.”

His mother was a lanky woman with a strong, angular face, a face that was plain in one light and beautiful in another. Right now her expression was grave. “Listen to me, Paul. I know you think you've failed at things, but you've lived, that's all. You've tried. That's life. It's messy.”

“Mine is anyway.”

“Will you go back Up north in the spring?”

“You know I took this job for the long term.”

She shook her head. “Your heart is not in the back office of Jimmy's company.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn't in pizzas, either.”

“Are you sure?”

Paul wasn't sure. Now that Garceau's had caved in, he wasn't sure he hadn't loved the place. And after six weeks of managing Jim's paperwork, he wasn't sure his own business had been so bad. Maybe he'd paid too much attention to the downside, never gave the positives their due. He'd broken even, eaten well, been warm, had a car
and
a truck. What else had he needed? He shrugged in answer to his mother's question. “I was killing myself trying to do two jobs. The show must go on, that's what I thought. And you know what? The show doesn't have to go on. The place fell down and the world hasn't stopped.”

His mother was giving him the same look she always did when he said he didn't blame himself for the accident. Her silence made him feel defensive.

“I thought you liked having me back.”

She grinned. “Yes and no. It's a little like living with a caged bear.”

He stared at her, speechless at the injustice of this.

She came around the table and gave him a quick hug. “Paul, Paul. What am I going to do with you?” She went into the kitchen and he heard her clanking dishes in the sink. “What about that boy you told me about whose mother's in so much trouble, and the woman who's looking after him?” she asked. “Seems to me like there are some people who need you.”

Paul fiddled with the place mat. It was woven in stripes of bright pink and orange, sky blue and lime. It was cheerful, not garish. His mother had an eye for things like that. “And you don't?”

“We're fine, Paul.”

“I can't go back to the prison,” he said, loud enough to be sure she could hear him over the dishwater. “I can't do that.”

“Of course not. But you have to do something.”

He stared at the place mat. “Do I? I was thinking it's pretty easy just to float.”

“You'll soon get tired of that,” she called back to him cheerfully.

He raised his eyebrows at the place mat, which stared back at him blankly.
Right again, Ma.
The phone rang and his mother picked it Up, and he could hear by her side of the conversation that it was good news, great news. He went in the kitchen and she grabbed him.

“Tom's coming home!” she cried, her face shining.

 

 

In McAllaster,
the winter was like living in a painting. Starting at Christmas the snow poured down, and the wind blew, and the cold got deeper. By the middle of January, icebergs were building Up along the shore. Madeline went to her attic windows every morning to look out over the rooftops of the tiny town huddled beside the immense lake. To the north was water for almost two hundred miles. To the south and west and east, thousands of acres of swamp and forest blanketed in snow in almost Unbroken expanses.

On clear nights, she went out to see the stars, and she really could
see
them, even from her own porch in town. That never happened in Chicago. Sometimes she'd leave Greyson asleep Upstairs and walk the few blocks to the beach to get an even better view. It still amazed her that all of this was safe: leaving him asleep, walking alone in the dark, wandering the beach. She was learning a few constellations: Orion and the Pleiades, Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper, which was really just part of the great bear. Often when she stepped outside she'd hear coyotes howling from a few blocks away, where town ended and the woods began. Their eerie, thrilling voices always made her shiver.

It had been exactly like this when Ada Stone lived on Stone Lake. The photos Gladys gave Madeline for Christmas, two sepiatoned prints taken at the Stone Lake lumber camp in 1933, sat in a place of honor on a bureau in the sitting room. She gazed at them again one morning after getting Greyson off to school.

How had people done it, back then? She was finding it hard going in town, with a phone and radiators and neighbors and stores. How had it been in a lumber camp? In one of the pictures, a woman, two boys, and two men stood outside a building of massive logs that was banked with snow and hung with icicles as long as a man's leg. The cabin at Stone Lake. Ada and her husband—named Emmanuel, Gladys had told her—and Joe and Walter, and another man, the cook's helper posing with a dinner horn.

Ada wore a long striped dress with an apron over it, a knit cap on her head. Her sleeves were shoved Up to her elbows, and sturdy shoes peeped out from Underneath her skirts. She had her arms cocked at her hips and she was grinning, her eyes bright with smartness and cheer. She leaped out of the picture like she was ready to wrestle a bear. Oh, the look of
life
in her, flashing out after all these years. Ada Stone stood out in the snow like she'd never heard the need of a coat. Madeline's great-grandmother. It was a good feeling, a
strong
feeling.

The cook's helper was slight and dark. His mouth curved Up in a mischievous grin beneath a long handlebar mustache. He held the dinner horn in one hand and a great long carving knife in the other. Emmanuel was taller, broader, in a striped Mackinaw jacket belted at the waist. He stood off to the side, smiling shyly, leaning on an ax. The smaller boy sat on a wooden sled with a tin milk can on it, the other, a little older, stood beside him, his hand on the brother's shoulder. Joe and Walter. Both were bundled Up in hats, scarves, thick woolen jackets, boots. Impossible to really see them, Under all the layers. Where had they all gone right after the shutter had flashed? The boys down to the lake to fill the can with water? The cook's helper back inside to chop something Up with that big knife? Ada off to tend the fire, roll biscuits, set places out for the crew?

The other picture was taken inside. The room was filled with benches built of planks and long tables laid with tin plates and mugs. The tables were covered with checkered oilcloths, tan and gray in the photo, but they would've been red and white in life. Madeline closed her eyes to picture the scene full of color. A moment in time when the people living it didn't think of themselves as history, antiquated and done with. They were just about to sit down and eat, that was all.

Ada was a blur, her back to the photographer as she worked at a cookstove. Emmanuel wore a battered felt hat in this picture, a ragged long-john shirt, wide-legged trousers held Up by suspenders. He held a cat Up against his chest, black with white paws, and wore the same shy smile. Madeline thought,
He loves that cat
. She laid a finger on the photo, over the cat's nose. “See Marley, a cat,” she said. Marley looked interestedly at her. She picked him Up and went to the windows.

The skies were so beautiful, some days iron-gray and stolid, others bright, others yet celestial with pinks and lavenders and blues. The clouds were enormous. She loved to watch the weather move in from out over the lake, weather that had come from the Arctic, down through Canada, skimming across Ontario before it reached them. The break between sun and cloud was sharp and exact. She'd tried to paint it a dozen different ways and had yet to find the right one.

Most days the lake pounded in the wind, crashed Up over the icebergs in plumes of freezing spray, clawed at the shore. On rare calm days it would settle to a slushy rocking. She had a map of it pinned on her bedroom wall: 350 miles long, 160 miles wide, a surface area of 31,700 square miles. The largest freshwater lake in the world, ten percent of the whole world's fresh water. Only Lake Baikal in Russia compared to it.

She was entranced by it, this inland ocean. The lake was so deep and cold and large that it created its own weather, and made a kind of weather inside Madeline, as well. A stark, beautiful weather that was Unlike anything else. Intoxicating and grounding both. Just like life.

There was virtually no money coming in and she was already dipping into what she'd slated for the roof. There wasn't much in that fund. The sale of the apartment had paid for the hotel outright, with only a little left over for repairs. And now she was cold all the time and pouring heat through the building at such a rate that she was afraid her wood would run out and she wouldn't be able to pay the gas bill to run the radiators. How quickly she'd come to the same impasse as Gladys. And how swiftly her devotion had grown to match Gladys's too.

She closed the bedroom and bathroom doors to make the attic as small as possible and fed the stove logs and stared at the lake and painted through the hours Greyson was at school. When he got home, he helped refill the woodboxes and shovel paths to the doors at the hotel, and at 26 Bessel and then Mill Street, if Pete hadn't beaten them to it.

The winter seemed infinite. It was possessed of a kind of quiet Madeline had never known before. It was a quiet that gave her time to paint, and to think. Sometimes instead of drawing she'd write in her sketchbook, nothing she'd ever want anyone to see. Sometimes she wrote letters to people who could never read them—Emmy, and Joe Stone, and Jackie. One night she wrote to Paul. She wouldn't send it; it was just a way of setting down her thoughts, hopefully leaving them where they'd bother her less.

Often Greyson drew while she fixed supper in the evenings. Every time he filled Up a sketchbook, she would pick Up a new one for him at the variety store. Sometimes he was so compelled to keep drawing, in between pads, that she had to let him tear pages out of hers. It flattered her that he seemed to have copied this interest from her. Beyond that, she loved that he had this outlet for his thoughts and ideas and feelings. She knew how important that could be.

 

 

Jim stopped by to see
Paul in the middle of January, just before the office was scheduled to reopen. He knocked on the back door and Paul let him into the kitchen and offered him a cup of coffee. Jim said no, and then yes, and bounced on the balls of his feet, and wouldn't sit down, but then did.

Paul eyed him suspiciously. “Spit it out.”

“We lost the school contract.”

“What do you mean, lost it? I thought it was final.”

“They're canceling the job. Budget cuts.”

“Hell. That's bad news.”

“Real bad.” Jim's leg was still jumping Up and down.

“What else?” Paul said, his eyes narrowed.

Jim said that business was not so good. Way down from last year. Not as many houses going Up. He'd been hoping it would turn around, expecting people to plan their new homes in the winter and line Up a builder for spring. It wasn't working out, and without the school job he couldn't keep Paul on.

“You're joking. You just hired me, and now you don't have enough work?”

“It's the economy, I can't change that.”

“Screw the economy. You don't have any better grip on your business than that?”

“It's nothing I have any control over. The school—”

Paul hit the table with his fist. “Screw the school. You shouldn't have brought me all the way down here based on one job. I treated part-time seasonals better than this.” Jim's face turned red, and he seemed about to launch into a defense that Paul knew he couldn't stand to hear. “Forget it,” he said.

“I can give you another two weeks.”

“I don't want another two weeks.”

“Really. That's some attitude.”

“You're going to talk to me about attitude?”

“I thought I was doing you a favor with this job, man. Putting you in the office, giving you a good wage.”

“A
favor
.”

“Well, there was no way you were going to climb around on roofs with that leg of yours, and I always felt bad for you about that. I figured I could give you a better chance than you had anywhere else.”