The Lighthouse Road

“No,” she said, as though he had proposed three hours ago and she’d had all that time to consider.

He didn’t move.

She stood up, took the hat from her head, and dropped it to the floor. She reached behind her and unbuttoned the dress and let it fall and pool around her ankles. She reached behind her back and unlaced her corset, she slid her hands beneath the waist of her panties and slid her panties from her hips. They too fell in the mess of clothes on the floor.

“No,” she said again. “I don’t want to get married. I can’t be happy and you can’t be happy with me.”

Odd was stunned, both by her nakedness and what she was saying.

She lay back on the davenport. “Stand up,” she said. “Put that ring away.”

As though Odd were hypnotized, he did as she said.

“Now, come here,” she said.

When Odd stepped to her, she reached up and unbuttoned his trousers. She tugged them down and lay back again on the davenport.

“Come to me,” she said.

She left him alone in the parlor when they were finished.

He lay there for a long time before he thought to get up and pour himself that drink he’d first craved an hour earlier. On the way back to the sitting room he stopped and found a new pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket. He also found Sargent’s gift. He took both to the window and lit a cigarette and took a sip of his whiskey. He looked at the pack age. He looked at Rebekah’s dress and hat and undergarments still piled on the floor.

He felt aged, like ten years had passed since he’d got home from work, like in all that time the world had changed without his knowing. He drank and smoked and looked out on the Christmas Eve. There was the snow.

He looked over his shoulder, thought of her sleeping — how could she sleep?—back on their bed.

Almost as though he were surprised, he felt Sargent’s gift in his hand. And because he could think of nothing else to do, he tore off the paper. It was a Bible. There was a note, too, written in Sargent’s impeccable script: turn to luke. bless you. h. sargent

 Odd opened the book and scanned the names — he might have been reading roll for the old men in Gunflint: Joshua, Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Hosea — until he found Luke and turned to the corresponding page. At first he was put off by the high style of the King James version. It reminded him of those Greek poets he’d been made to read in school what seemed like a hundred years ago. But as he settled into it he found himself in a kind of communion with the gospel.

And so he read the story of the life of Christ. He read for hours, until the first light of Christmas morning was showing on the edge of the dark sky. When finally he put the book down and laid his head back, he realized that his own sorrow and suffering were nothing next to the world’s. If Rebekah would renounce him, if she would renounce her child, he would be father enough when the time came to raise his baby.

He set the Bible on the floor, stood up and gathered Rebekah’s new dress and undergarments from the floor, folded them neatly, and put everything in the department-store box.

XXII.

(October 1895)

In an examination room on Ellis Island, an immigration official asked Thea her final destination.

“Gunflint, Minnesota,” she said.

The Norwegian-speaking immigration officer checked one of a dozen ledgers on his desk. “Gunflint, you say?” He checked another of the ledgers. “There doesn’t seem to be a place with that name.”

Thea was of course confused. She told him her aunt and uncle lived there. She gave him their names as though that might prove its place on a map, its place in a ledger.

“How will you be getting from here to there?” he said.

She told him she would be taking a train from Hoboken to Chicago. From Chicago she’d take a steamer to Duluth. From Duluth another steamer up Lake Superior to Gunflint. She told him her uncle raised cattle.

The immigration officer consulted an atlas of Midwestern states. He summoned another official and, after a brief consultation, they settled on Duluth, Minnesota, for Thea’s final official destination.

Five hours later she was on a barge bound for Hoboken. She would not remember these days, or would remember them only as a blur, as though she had passed through the train station in Hoboken in a dream. The locomotive was another dream, and the two days it spent on its way to Chicago were still other dreamlike days.

In Chicago, at Union Station, she stepped from the train into the strangest world yet, a building so grand and in such contrast to anything she had ever imagined that it frightened her. All that noise and motion and clamor like a taut string about to snap.

And outside Union Station was another kind of tension, another kind of dream. The buildings above her were shrouded in fog, a kind of rain fell and drenched the penny map she held before her. On Michigan Avenue she walked north to the river and found the docks of the Chicago, Soo & Duluth Line. In the ticket office she bought a third-class berth on the Sault for seven dollars. She had only four hours to wait for her three-day cruise to Duluth.

The Sault passed through the locks onto Lake Superior in the middle of the night. It rode out of Whitefish Bay, the moon on the horizon its lodestar. It was cold and even as the boat sailed ahead, a breeze came up the stern, hitting Thea’s face and bringing tears to her eyes. The Sault docked in Marquette at midday. For half an hour stevedores unloaded and loaded cargo, a dozen passengers debarked, another dozen boarded. In the dark of night they docked again, this time in Ashland. The same exchange of passengers and goods. Another half hour spent in harbor.

The following morning Thea stood on the stern deck again. Again she watched the sunrise behind them. Still the stiff breeze trailing. It was fully day when the Sault landed at the Chicago, Soo & Duluth Line docks in Duluth harbor. She thought the fledgling city rising before the tall hills looked something like Tromso. Even the air had an arctic quality, chill and damp.

The offices of the North Shore Ferry Service were located right on the harbor, behind the livery and the enormous Board of Trade building. Thea entered and waited while a man behind a barred window sold billets to two families in line ahead of her. When finally it was her turn, she approached the window. She had clutched in her hands the phrasebook she’d been given for just such purposes.

In a halting whisper she said, “Gunflint, Minnesota. Please.”

“Speak up,” the man said.

Thea collected herself and repeated her request.

“Opportunity sails tomorrow at seven a.m. Passage is two dollars twenty cents.” He spoke in a loud voice, avoiding her pleading eyes. “Will you take a ticket? There are others awaiting my services here.” He gestured to the queue behind her.

Thea reached for her purse, pulled some crumpled dollar bills from it, and put them on the tray under the bars. The ticket vendor looked at her finally, exhausted. He took a deep breath.

He shifted his visor and said, “Do you understand the boat leaves tomorrow?”

She answered with an unconvincing nod.

He took another deep breath and shifted his visor still again. “Wait a moment.” He stepped into an office behind him and returned in a moment with his own phrasebook. He made his best effort to put the same question to her in Norwegian.

In English she said, “Yes. Tomorrow.”