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—”
Odd 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.
He 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.
He’d spent fifteen hours a day working on the boat since he’d gotten the keel dried, days he’d not eaten more than an apple, a bacon-and-onion sandwich, days that turned into night without a moment’s notice or pause. At the end of those days he found himself exhausted but unable to sleep for the anticipation Rebekah might appear. And because her visits were unscheduled and the waiting interminable it was during these hours of night that he’d stop the physical work and resort to culling the catalogs, to his drawings and plans. He’d redraw the lines, up the sheer, recalculate the amount of lumber he was going to need, the barrels of oakum; double-check the weight of the motor he was considering against the strength of the motor box he had planned. All of these things raised in him an apprehension that was redoubled by the uncertainty of seeing her.
The waiting gave him a feeling deep inside. It was not heartache or longing but rather a definite pain, a throbbing in his bones. Some mornings he’d wake from his few fitful hours of sleep hardly able to walk. He’d brew a pot of coffee and stand at the counter scratching his beard, considering the boat. Considering his achy bones. He knew these first strips of wood were the most important, and the thought of his own life at the mercy of his workmanship filled him with doubt. On one such morning, after three nights without Rebekah, he decided to visit Hosea to see what he could learn about bones.
As a boy he’d been forbidden to enter certain rooms at the apothecary. Hosea’s bedroom on the third floor was off limits, as were his offices on the second floor. There were doors with padlocks on them in the basement, rooms he knew now as the storage cellars for the hooch. Even Rebekah — so wont to disobey Hosea, so quick to conspire with Odd — was firm on the banishment.
But even as he’d been forbidden entrance, Odd had been a young boy left often to his own devices and full of a child’s inquisitiveness. He’d made his romps through the apothecary governed by his curiosity, reveling in his cunning more than the discoveries made. The room Odd thought of now was Grimm’s medical office. He wanted to see the skeleton that stood in the corner.
