The Lighthouse Road

“Let’s walk around the point today. Get some of that sunrise on our ugly mugs,” Odd said.

“Let’s go, Pops.”

How many times had Rebekah stood at the window as she did that day, her forehead and fingertips resting on the glass? She was watching them walk into the rising wind, out from the point, a sled trailing the boy. They’d been at it often enough since the ice had come to stay in January, and she always watched them go. On some days she stood at the window the whole while they were gone. Others she went to her needlepoint and tried to put them out of her mind.

That morning she would lose hours to the sadness left in their wake. Though she literally could no longer cry, she felt the phantom welling in her eyes. She wondered, Has the boy ever known? Does Odd ever think of me now?

Out on the ice Harry said, “You don’t feel it?”

“I don’t,” Odd said. “You sure it ain’t the breeze is all?”

“The breeze coming up through my feet? I don’t think so.”

“Your tongue ain’t getting any duller, is it?” Odd asked. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and smiled to himself. The smile lasted only a moment.

These mornings ice fishing? The summer mornings when they were at their nets before dawn, the only herring chokers still making a go of it out of Gunflint? Or, back across the isthmus, those mornings in their workshop, building boats side by side? Thousands of mornings if you added them up, all begun with the memory of her looming above him.

If Harry knew of the grief that attended his papa, if he saw it in Odd’s bowed head, he at least had the wisdom to witness it in silence instead of badgering his father about it. Odd took pride in his son’s stoic silence. The whole world, it seemed to Odd, was garrulous. But not Harry.

Out past the breakwater Odd said, “That is a strange wind.”

“And cold.”

“Did you ever know a February wind to be otherwise?”

“I’m just saying.”

“I know it.”

They walked another fifty rods before they stopped. Odd turned to the shore to take measure of where they were. He turned to the lake to do the same. “What do you think?” he asked Harry.

The boy answered by lifting the auger from the sled. He set the blade on the ice and started to drill. He was a long-armed, well-built kid and it wasn’t ten minutes before the auger broke through to water. It came splashing up through the hole.

Odd and Harry looked at each other. “Maybe we should go a little closer to shore,” Harry said.

Odd inspected the horizon over the lake, the sky above them. He pulled the sleeve of his coat up, took off his mitten, and knelt. He stuck his hand into the hole in the ice to measure its thickness. He stood up. “I think we’re all right.”

Harry started another hole ten paces from the first. He’d inherited his father’s habits of calm and diligence, and he went about the work of making a fishing hole with an old man’s patience. When the second hole was augered he brought his papa’s stool to it. He brought the small ice-fishing rod and the box of jigs.

“You rig it,” Odd said.

“I know.”

Odd’s hands were worthless in winter. He could hardly tie his boots anymore, let alone jigs onto fishline. So Harry baited his papa’s line and handed him the rod. He tied a jig to his own line and in no time at all they were both fishing for steelheads. They’d eaten nothing but trout dinners for two weeks, and still they had a freezer full of fish. Times were better on the ice than in the open water, something Odd brought up every day.

“You give any thought to Veilleux’s offer?” Odd asked over his shoulder.

“I give it some thought, sure.”

Already Odd had a strike and he set the hook and started reeling. He loosened his drag and then, as though nothing were happening, he said, “It’d be a good move. He’s a good man with a good business. His family has been here from day one.”

Harry was peering into his own hole on the ice, more intent on hooking a fish than on his papa’s pitch. Even still he responded, “You know how much I like fishing and boatbuilding.”

“And I can’t say I blame you, Harry. But there ain’t much of a living to be made any longer. Neither enterprise pays for itself nowadays. Not small operations like ours. You apprentice with Veilleux and you can make money all year long. You could still fish some. Obviously we’d keep filling boat orders. Canoe orders. You’d just have another wagon to hitch your load to.”

Odd pulled the fish from the hole, unhooked it, and threw it on the ice a few feet away. He took his knife from this belt and knelt before the fish, thumping it on the head with the hilt before he sliced the guts from it. He threw the offal as far as he could, with the wind. He did this in twenty seconds and in twenty seconds more had his jig back in the water. A colony of gulls descended from the clearing sky and went to work on the fish guts.

“Besides,” Odd continued, “you keep telling me how you want to build something out at Evensen’s farm.”

“I could build it without apprenticing. I ain’t talking about a castle.”

Odd looked up into the sky, took a gulp of the cold wind, noted the snow squall on the eastern horizon. “You’re sure and steady with a hammer and nails, there’s no denying that. But there’s more to building a house than a hammer and nails. And it ain’t like building a skiff. Trust me on this one, buddy.”

Harry felt a hit on his line but he failed to set the hook. “Shit,” he said.

“I don’t know how many times I got to tell you don’t horse it.”

“I know.”

“You know.”

They sat for a spell jigging in silence. Finally Odd said, “I’m telling you it’s a good move.”

“I’ll go see Veilleux this afternoon. See what he has to say.”

Odd said, “You got some saying to do yourself, don’t forget that. Sure, he knows you and he’s the one offering, but you stand to gain here. Don’t go over there acting like you deserve it.”

“I wouldn’t.”

As he spoke Harry hooked a fish. A big one. The short rod arced.

“See? You listen to your old man and good things happen.”

Harry was too pleased to say anything back.

But it was moments like this when Odd saw most clearly what his hardheartedness all those years ago had wrought, when their joviality felt most suspect. Good Christ, Odd thought. What have I taken from this boy?

Just as Odd had foreseen, Rebekah had left Duluth back in the summer of ’21. On a Sunday morning after she’d fed the four-week-old Harry, while Odd still slept on the Murphy bed, she went. Odd woke hours later to the boy’s hungry lamentation — it couldn’t have been called a cry — and knew as soon as he stepped out of bed that Harry was his alone.

When the questions started three or four years later, when Harry wondered about his mother, Odd told him what he’d told the townsfolk the autumn they’d returned, that he’d met a sweet gal up in Port Arthur, Ontario, married her, then lost her nine months later when she’d given birth to Harry. That lie and the others it spawned came easily to Odd and he realized that his deceit was different from Hosea’s only by degree. He was not proud of this, but neither did he ever tell the truth. Not to his son. And not to anyone else.

If the townsfolk had ever wondered about Harry, if they tried to make sense of the rift between Odd and the Grimms, they did so in the privacy of their own homes. Hardly a suspicious glance had ever come Odd’s way along the Lighthouse Road. He’d never heard so much as a snigger.

Maybe this was because of the visit he’d paid Rebekah and Hosea the day he’d returned to Gunflint with Harry. Odd had come down from Duluth, turned into the harbor with his boat bell tolling, tied up on the Lighthouse Road, and marched up to Grimm’s. He found them sitting at the kitchen table — the same kitchen table where he’d taken almost all his childhood meals — and held the boy before them.