Читать книгу The Lighthouse Road - Peter Geye - Страница 8

VI.

(March 1910)

In mid-March, along the river's frozen waters, two thirteen-year-old boys shattered the glaze on a knee-deep and moon-shaped snow. They wore snowshoes they'd made of bent ash and moose gut. Their hats were beaver fur, trapped and skinned and finally sewn while they sat around the fire in the wigwam.

Odd and Danny Riverfish. They wore bowie knives on their belts and carried shotguns over their shoulders and they dragged a toboggan behind them. They were on their way to Danny's traplines on Thistle Creek and in the beaver ponds above. Their play at being men was grave and full of purpose and hardly premature anymore.

" Maybe there'll be some otter or marten, too," Danny said.

"Otter's good to eat. Pelts will fetch a fair price at the trading post. Maybe at Hosea's," Odd said, trying the woodsman's banter he was just learning that winter.

" Loony Hosea."

Odd smiled. "Yeah."

Danny smiled back.

"How's marten roasted up?" Odd said.

"We don't eat marten."

Odd nodded, committing to memory this new knowledge.

They went into the woods east of the lower falls. The water had cut through the snowpack and fell thunderously, icy mist rising into the clear, hard morning.

"You think Miss Huff will miss us today?" Odd asked.

"Miss Huff could make a forest fire boring. Besides, I don't plan on ever going to that schoolhouse again. I've had enough of her goddamn Bible. Goddamn arithmetic. Arithmetic never got a beaver tail to fry up, did it?"

"Or a pelt to sell," Odd said, then fell silent for a moment before he added, "She tells Hosea I'm truant and I'll get the belt."

"Someday you'll be doing the belting."

"I'll never be able to whomp Hosea."

"Sure, you will. Someday we'll whomp him up together, steal his money."

The mere thought of this made Odd despair. His feelings about Hosea were as complicated as his own true history. The only thing in his life that held any semblance of order was his friendship with Danny. They'd been fast friends since they could crawl. Miss Huff had been their teacher since kindergarten.

"I don't mind her lessons," Odd said. " Those Old Testament stories are about as scary as hell."

"None of it makes the least damn sense. Fire and brimstone and a bunch of things to be scared of. Bunch of impossible rules. And she's ugly as a pile of bear shit."

"That's plain meanness. She can't help how she looks. And her Bible stories ain't that different than those stories your grandpap tells around the fire."

Daniel looked over his shoulder and smiled at his friend. It was his best feature, that smile. It conveyed a minute's speech in a second's time. "Grandpappy never whipped you if you doubted him, though, now, did he?"

Odd tried his turn at a smile.

"Did he?" Daniel persisted.

"No, he did not."

"And besides, you think Miss Huff could tell you a damn thing about these woods? You think there's secret directions in that black book of hers on where to set your traps? Where to tap the maple trees come spring? Where to go ricing?"

"The woods ain't everything, Danny."

Daniel stopped, held his hands palms up. "What else do you see?"

It was true: The wilderness was ubiquitous, in all its guises. From where they stood he could see the cedar swamp east of the lower falls, knew it went from bog to basalt in a few mere steps, the rock rising sharply into bald outcroppings too steep to climb. This late in winter the lichen would have been eaten away by the surefooted caribou, their tracks were all over the place.

The outcropping went on for a mile, and they walked its base in silence until they heard the river falling at the Devil's Maw.

"We'll take a break at the river, eat those biscuits and bacon," Danny said. They each had a pair of sandwiches in the pockets of their wool coats.

"I'm about hungry enough. That gruel Bekah cooks up in the morning is the worst."

"You know, you can come live with us anytime you want."

"I don't think Hosea would like that very much."

"Hosea. Pap says he's two men at once."

"I believe he might be."

They walked through the edge of the woods to the river's shore. Odd said, "It ain't that I wouldn't want to."

"Want to what?"

"Live in the wigwam village."

"It's better than town," Danny said.

"Sure is."

They stood on the shore and unwrapped their sandwiches and drank cold coffee Odd had carried in the deer-hide wineskin.

"You got the land and farm now," Danny said.

"It ain't so bad at Hosea's. Except he makes me go to school."

"Plus you got Bekah."

"Yep."

"Well."

They finished the coffee.

Odd said, "I'm going to apprentice with Arne Johnson in springtime."

"A herring choker? That Hosea's idea, too?"

"Hell, no, it ain't. It's what I want to do."

Daniel Riverfish wore his rascally grin.

"The hell's so funny?" Odd demanded.

"It's just that you're a bit of a chickenshit, is all. I don't see you out on the lake by yourself. Least not when the wind comes on down."

"A chickenshit?"

Still that grin.

"I'm no chickenshit, Danny."

"You mess your britches and run for Bekah when an owl hoots. What's it gonna be like out on Gitche Gumee?"

Odd turned inward, began to think about this, was readying some sharp response. But Daniel spoke again first. "We got a ways to go, let's walk."

So Odd stowed the wineskin in his coat and put his mittens back on and adjusted his hat.

"You make the trail now," Odd said crossly. "I'll drag the sled."

And so they climbed the northern rim of the outcropping in silence, Odd sulking, Daniel cutting trail.

It was true Odd was a fearful boy. He was scared of almost everything, but especially of the fact that he'd never had a mother. At night, up in the third-floor apartment at Grimm's, in the closet-sized room, under the down ticking with the moonlight blaring through the window, in his socks and his union suit, he passed his sleepless hours mulling the life he didn't have. He didn't know it, but he was possessed by an old man's fears. He missed his mother— the mother he'd never known— the way an old widower might miss his wife of fifty years, he'd worked his mother up to those heights. Her ghostly presence colored so many of his thoughts.

And because of the hole she left in his life he was timid, and that timidity might have come across as fear.

Odd looked around the woods, at Daniel's back before him, at the enormous sky pitch blue and getting bluer. He had always taken these woods for granted. But in that quarter mile before Thistle Creek he realized that if there was anything to fear it was this wilderness, not his missing mother. He'd heard it said there were thousands of miles of the same woods to the north, and temperatures colder, and colder longer, the farther you went. He knew about the wolves and bears and moose that roamed these trees. He suddenly felt vulnerable.

"I guess I'm afraid of some things," he said from out of the blue.

Daniel Riverfish stopped, turned to face him. "Some things? You flinch at your shadow, bud." He turned to move ahead but stopped. "All I'm saying is that's hellish work, out on the lake. Much harder than trapping or standing behind a counter selling aspirin. I ain't saying you couldn't do it, but—"

"I never thought I was afraid of these woods, but I am. I think."

"Hell, yes, you are. And you should be. These woods are the world and the world ain't an easy place. That's what Grandpap always says. And he ain't ever wrong. About nothing."

"I know it now," Odd said.

"Good."

Thistle Creek came down the gully off Peregrine Hill and emptied at the oxbow just north of the Devil's Maw. Daniel's first trap was a hundred paces up the creek and marked by a cedar tree grown out over the frozen water. They stopped at the tree and unlashed their shovels from the toboggan and dug through the snow. The trap was empty, as Daniel presumed it would be. He thought they'd be empty clear up to the pond, two miles upstream. But he was dutiful and they spent three hours digging and resetting traps.

By the time they reached the beaver pond Odd's neck and shoulders were burning and taut and he took the firmness for a sign.

" Watch me be brave," Odd said aloud.

"What do you mean?"

"Just watch."

Daniel smiled. "I will."

Whereas the otter traps were baited with fish, the beaver traps were baited with poplar poles two feet under water. The beavers would find the poplar and as they sat back to eat it fall on the trap and drown. Daniel had a dozen traps in the pond and they worked the first ten of them into the late afternoon. It wasn't until the eleventh trap that they found a beaver, a middling male. Odd pulled him out of the pond and tossed him onto the snow, released the trap, and reset it underwater.

Daniel huzzahed from across the pond, where he'd found a second beaver in the last trap. He likewise released the trap and reset it and joined Odd near their toboggan.

"Ma will love this tail," Daniel said. He could already taste it, fried up in bear fat, so hot it would scald the roof of his mouth.

"I'm coming for dinner," Odd said.

Daniel smiled.

They unsheathed their bowie knives and each of them gutted a beaver, tossing the offal aside for the ravens and wolves. If they were making a living they'd have been poor and disheartened, but because they were only boys in the service of becoming men they were thrilled, and they lashed the gutted beavers to the toboggan and turned 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.