Odd looked up the Lighthouse Road, over Danny’s shoulder, at the moon now resting on the hilltop. He looked behind him, out over the lake and onto the eastern horizon. The first inkling of light showed clouds. He looked back at Danny.
Danny said, “There’s safe water in Otter Bay. That’s halfway up the shore. Safe water again in Two Harbors.”
“You reckon the weather will hold? I got that feeling in my eye.”
“Get on the water. You’ll find out.”
“Danny, thanks, brother.”
Danny clapped him on the shoulder. “The world’s waiting.”
Odd climbed back aboard his boat. He untied the sternline while Danny untied the bowline and held them to the quay. Odd punched the ignition and the Buda rumbled to life. He was already growing attuned to the sound of it, was already learning the way the vibrations felt in his feet. He was ready to go.
Odd throttled the boat forward and turned her left and headed along the Lighthouse Road out past the breakwater. He turned south and west and got her up to speed and they were on their way.
See the sun coming up?” Odd said. They’d been a half hour in the boat and off the portside bow the sun shone dull, half above the horizon, above the water.
“Hmm,” Rebekah said.
“We’re on our way, Rebekah. The rest of our lives—” he gestured to the wide-open waters before them “— it’s right out there.”
She looked up through the cockpit window but didn’t say anything.
“Are you happy?” he asked.
“I’m here,” she said.
In two hours they motored past the settlement at Misquah, past the mouth of the Birch River and the looming hills through which it ran. There were half-a-dozen fish houses dotting the craggy shoreline, half-a-dozen skiffs upturned for the season. This was as far south as Odd had ever been, and then only once, the summer before, when he had delivered a barrel of whiskey to the Lutheran pastor whose church stood stark white on the hillside.
They were a mile offshore, nosing into a quartering wind, the lake not much agitated by the southwesterly breeze. The boat ran like she was on a rail, and Odd felt capable of anything.
He’d piled some of their bags in the cockpit and Rebekah lay on them, her legs under her like a cat, a blanket tucked around her, sleeping. How could anyone sleep on a day like this, Odd wondered. He looked down at her. So lovely, wisps of hair streaming from under her hat, her eyes impervious to the wind and the dull, throbbing sky. He reached down and pulled the blanket over her shoulder. He tucked her hair behind her ear.
The world through the cockpit window was all lake. Like it was carved from an infinite slab of granite. The feel of his boat beneath him would have been enough at any moment of his life before now, but here she was, sleeping at his leg, with a child in her belly. His child. He could see their life shining back at him, reflected off the water, could see the child coming toward him every bit as real as the next swell. Again he reached down and adjusted the blanket. Until five days ago he’d never once thought of having a child, now the lake wasn’t even big enough to contain the promise of it, the promise of the life he saw taking shape.
At noontime, six hours up the shore, the sky finally broke above them. They were passing the town of Otter Bay when Rebekah woke without a word. She went to the transom and hiked her skirt up and peed over the back of the boat. She came back to the cockpit and still without a word fetched the bag of foodstuffs. She took a sandwich wrapped in wax paper and passed it to Odd, who smiled and took it. She poured two mugs of milk and brought two apples from the bag and arranged it all on the cockpit dash before sitting back down on the pile of bags.
Finally she said, “Where are we?”
“We just passed Otter Bay. We’re halfway gone.”
She took a bite of her own sandwich and settled back against the cockpit wall. She trained her eyes on Odd’s face for a moment and then shifted them to their wake. She ate her sandwich and Odd ate his and when they were both finished he took the apples from the dash and handed one to her.
“Another six hours,” he said. “We’ll be getting there in the dark.”
“That sounds about right.”
Odd looked down at her. He shook his head.
“Six hours up the shore and it looks exactly like Gunflint. It’s all the same place.”
“It ain’t the same place,” Odd said. “I can tell from way out here there’s less bullshit in those woods.” He nodded up at the shore.
She smiled, so he did too.
“And Duluth is a real city, Rebekah. They’ve got more than trees
and fish down there. We can buy a brick house and a Model-T. We’d even have proper roads to drive on.”
She looked at him for a long time, could see in his face all the faces of his childhood. She could see all his goodness, his glass eye, the weather from all his seasons on the water like a mask. She reached up and touched his coat sleeve. “Are you going to marry me?”
“I’ll steer this boat into Two Harbors and marry you this day, if it would please you.”
She smiled again, though the truth was she didn’t want to marry Odd. She didn’t want to have a baby or live in a brick house. She didn’t want anything, nothing she’d left behind, nothing out in front. “Don’t stop in Two Harbors,” she said.
The threat of weather that had hung over the first half of their voyage gave over to an afternoon more akin to an autumn day than a late-November evening. The temperature was near fifty degrees, the clouds had broken, and now a dusk as pale as snow settled in the east. The sky above them trickled into darkness. They sailed on in silence. Odd never more at ease in his life, his girl and his boat and a pocketful of cash money all right there.
They passed Two Harbors and Odd lit the lantern and hung it from the cockpit in lieu of running lights. In the moving shadows of the kerosene light they watched Duluth come closer. Still neither of them spoke. The glow from fifteen miles away became clearer with each passing swell. The light spread for miles to the east, to what he knew to be Wisconsin. He’d never seen so much unnatural light. All it held was promise.
Before long they were passing the east-end mansions, everything coming clear in the night. It was enough even to lift Rebekah from her spot in the cockpit. She stood beside Odd, her hand looped in his arm. The evening hadn’t cooled much. It was still almost muggy. It took a half hour to get from the first houses to the harbor entrance. Danny had told him to go until the lake ended. And that was what it did. Marked by the aerial bridge and the breakwater lights, the city to his right unlike anything Odd could have imagined. He throttled down and passed through the canal at a crawl, the swells rising and falling gently, the boat riding them easily.
He followed the harbor east, hugging the shoreline, staying clear of the shipping lane. It was a thin spit of land between the harbor and the lake, lined with houses, a well-lit road running its length. After a half mile they came to the Duluth Boat Club, a Victorian-style building not unlike Grimm’s apothecary, with several empty slips and a long dock on the harbor.
He turned the boat wide and sidled into one of the slips, resting against the fenders that hung from the pilings, then killed the engine and rounded the cockpit to tie the boat to the dock. He came back and tied a sternline as well.
“Where are we?” Rebekah said.
“The Duluth Boat Club, near as I can tell.”
“What’s a boat club?”
Odd crossed his arms and looked up at the building. “I don’t rightly know, but it’s a place to dock her. It’s lit up. I’m hoping they can at least steer me to where I might pull her out of the water for winter.”
As Odd spoke a dockhand came from the boat club. He was dressed in a blue blazer and khaki trousers. He wore also a blue cap in the style of a naval officer and black boots.
“Good evening,” he said. “Welcome to the Duluth Boat Club. I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
