The Lighthouse Road

motion made each movement difficult, but she managed to get the basket open and remove the milk, which she offered right away to the woman.

She drank with gusto, finishing half the jar before she realized what she was doing. She capped the jar, and handed it back to Thea, who offered the cheese in turn. The woman took only a small bite.

“Please,” Thea said. “Help yourself to all you want.”

She took another bite.

“What’s your name?” Thea asked.

“Ingeborg Svensrud.”

“Is it very difficult with the child?” Thea gestured at the woman’s belly.

She rested her hand on the unborn babe and took a deep breath. The ship had begun to complain, a sort of whining that accompanied the more violent waves. “This passage would be easier without the pregnancy, but I am blessed. I thank God every minute.”

“I pray for you each night.”

“Thank you.”

“Where are you going?”

“To meet my husband in North Dakota. He left in April. He doesn’t know about the child.”

“He will be very pleased.” The woman smiled. “I hope so,” she said.

Two days the storm. The Thingvalla beating against the sea. Steerage passengers had been ordered to stay in their berths, to keep their cabin doors shut and their belongings lashed. The stewards, instead of coming three times daily with their firkins of tepid water, came only once during the forty-hour blow. They ladled water into teapots and bowls and said they’d return when next the seas allowed. The general clamor had given over to a general moan, one heard even through the closed-up cabins.

Ingeborg Svensrud was at once miserable and rejuvenated, first by the storm and then by the food Thea shared with her. They didn’t speak much, but whenever Thea removed the basket from under her bunk she offered some to her cabinmate.

In the middle of the second night of the storm, after thirty-six hours of the yawing Thingvalla, Ingeborg fell into a hollering fit. Thea asked Ingeborg what was the matter, but the woman only folded at the waist and let out another shriek. Thea somehow knew instinctively what had taken hold of Ingeborg, and she hurried into her cloak and set out down the gangway in search of the ship’s surgeon.

It took Thea ten minutes to find her way up to the main deck and ten minutes more to find a crewman at his midnight watch. She told him her purpose, that her cabinmate was ill. Desperately ill and in need of a doctor. They spoke Norwegian.

“She’s full of sick folk, your boat. Back down to your bunk, now. This deck’s no place at a time like this.” He spoke loudly, over the storm.

“Sir, I beg you. She’s with child. She’s in labor. She needs a doctor.”

He removed his hat and pushed back his wet hair.

“Sir, she’s desperate. She’s alone down there.”

He responded with an about-face, and Thea followed him up a staircase and into a dim, carpeted gangway. They walked nearly the full length of the ship and then climbed another staircase before stopping at a wooden door. The watchman knocked softly and then stepped back, elbowing Thea aside. He stood with his feet spread and his hands behind his back.

It took a full minute before the ship’s surgeon answered the knock. He was dressed in his nightshirt, and as he swung the door open he was busy pinching his glasses on. Thea repeated the story of her desperate cabinmate and the surgeon, still more asleep than awake, reached behind the door for his bag and followed the watchman, Thea trailing the two men.

By the time they returned to the steerage cabin, Ingeborg had stopped screaming. The surgeon swayed from foot to foot with the ship, the watchman holding a lantern behind him. It cast a nauseating, blurry light on the cabin walls and ceiling.

“Well, now, what’s this business?” the surgeon’s voice boomed.

“Ingeborg, I’ve brought the surgeon. He’s here to help you.” Thea’s voice was only a whisper, but it carried in that haunted cabin as much as the surgeon’s. “Are you all right?”

The surgeon stepped to Ingeborg’s bedside and put his hand on her forehead. “She’s afire,” he said. To the watchman he said, “Fetch my porter, quickly.”

The watchman fixed the lantern to a hook on the wall and nodded and left.

Now the surgeon turned to Thea. “You say she is with child?”

“Yes.”

To Ingeborg he said, again in a very loud voice, “We’ll have a look now.”

Ingeborg would not uncurl, her sorry blanket lay bunched around her.

“Come, now,” the surgeon persisted, reaching for Ingeborg this time and pulling her onto her back.

She was indeed unconscious, though clearly breathing, her chest rising and falling with each labored breath.

“Your kind companion here has informed me you’re with child. Let’s have a look.”

The surgeon removed his stethoscope from his bag and pressed it into the folds of her tunic. He listened closely, checked her forehead again, and stood erect with his hand on his chin regarding her.

“How long has she been unwell?” he asked Thea.

Thea explained how she woke to her wailing.

“Is she family?”

“No,” Thea said. “I’ve only known her since we boarded.”

“Then I’ll have you step outside. For her privacy.”

As he suggested Thea leave, Ingeborg stirred, a sudden and sharp movement that began and ended with her eyes. They were pouched, her eyes, and full of tears. She reached for Thea’s hand and when she did the blanket fell from her lap. The woman’s skirt pooled at her waist. In the folds of her dress her trembling hands held tight the lost child.

The boy was still attached to the umbilical cord, his pallor the color of rotten meat. His visage, in the slewing lantern light, looked restful.

In a voice altogether different than any he’d used so far, a voice far gentler, the surgeon said, “The child is lost, dear. Let’s not lose you in the bargain.”

He did save her, though from what Thea did not know. When the surgeon sliced the umbilical cord and removed the still child from its mother’s lap, Ingeborg’s cry was as sorrowful as a cold moon.

XI.

(November 1920)

Odd stared in wonder at the triptych of framed portraits of his mother. In the first photograph she stood outside the mess hall at the old logging camp up on the Burnt Wood River. A beldam and the handsome camp cook stood to either side of her. She wore an ankle-length dress beneath her apron and shawl, a man’s wool hat, mittens. Her expression was clearest in this photograph, alert and flummoxed. Sad. The snow on the ground was glazed and dazzling, and it cast a light as keen from below as above. A pair of wolf pelts hung above the entry door to the mess hall.

In the second picture she sat up in bed, holding Odd himself in full swaddle. Her eyes rested on him, so her expression was less visible, but he could imagine how she felt. He thought it must be something like how he felt then, looking at those pictures. It was the first time he’d seen pictures of his mother, the first time he’d seen pictures of himself as a baby.

The third picture gave him the longest pause. It had been taken upon his mother’s arrival in Gunflint in 1895.