Authors: Peter Geye

The Lighthouse Road (21 page)

BOOK: The Lighthouse Road

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Thea looked down.

He smiled his dead-tooth smile. He said, "You've got a thing for quiet, eh? Where are you from, darling?" He cocked his head as if to take stock. " Those cheeks and blond locks, I suppose you ain't from Africa." He laughed at his joke. "Norway," he ventured, "Norge?"

Her eyes widened and she replied in Norwegian, "I am from Norway." And then, recalling her English lesson upon leaving Hammerfest, she continued in English, "I am new in America."

To her surprise and relief he responded in Norwegian, introducing himself as the watch salesman Joshua Smith, down from Duluth. He informed her that Trond expected him and repeated his request for a bowl of stew. She moved slowly to the pot on the stove and fetched the stew, deciding as she crossed the hall that despite his dead tooth, Smith was handsome in a way none of the jacks was. His handlebar mustache exaggerated a rakish smile and those eyes of his were wide and devilish enough to cast spells.

He ate standing, loosening the buttons on his shirt. She was used to the jacks and their absence of manners and Smith cut a marked contrast. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief after each bite, there was no slurping, no licking the bowl once the meat and vegetables were eaten. He did not belch when he set the bowl on the tabletop. Without asking, he took a tin cup and went to the cistern and dipped a cup of water. When he finished drinking he used the ladle hanging from the lip and dipped himself another. With every movement he became more at ease in the room.

When he said, "The cold will be coming right back," again in Norwegian, Thea could not help herself and asked, "How do you know?"

Smith replied, "The winds are already bringing it."

A
fter dinner he set out his wares: watches and knives and small canisters of curatives and powders. He offered cigars, advertised as finer than the rolled-up dogshit they were peddling in the wanigan, and pipe tobacco imported from Zanzibar. He laid out boxes of chocolates and horehounds. When the jacks leaned in and whispered about hooch, he pulled his coat aside to show pockets with hidden half pints. He passed the bottles with a magician's sleight of hand, recouping quarters and dollars with equal cleverness. Standing behind a table in the mess hall, a green felt cloth covering the pine boards, sporting a suit of worsted wool and having traded his beaver-skin hat for a black stovepipe, his mustache styled with bear-fat pomade, his pince-nez magnifying his huge brown eyes, he looked like he could have sold a whip to an ox.

Clearly the jacks were in a buying mood, and Smith did a steady business. Even as he haggled in four different languages, even as he extolled the virtues of his fine Spanish blades and Swiss timepieces and pocketed the loggers' earnings, Smith managed to keep an eye on Thea. In her own way Thea made a sly study of Smith, too.

After Trond bought the last pocket watch, after Smith loaded his unsold goods back into his haversacks, after the jacks adjourned to the bunkhouse, Smith and the foreman and the bull cook and a pair of company men up for the weekend dealt their first game of seven-card stud. They uncorked a bottle of Canadian rye and passed it around the table

A
bigail Sterle's croup had worsened, so after supper the Meltmen brothers brought her to Hosea Grimm's for care. Thea worked all through the evening hours, doing the job of four herself.

Thea's hands were wet to the wrist in beaten eggs when she drenched the last of a hundred pork chops in the wash and rolled them in cornmeal. She could hear the Saturday-night accordion and merrymaking from the bunkhouse. The poker game was winding down. Smith's back was to her, but every other hand he'd turn and leer. A second bottle was being passed around, and a cloud of cigar smoke hung over the table.

Thea wedged the last pair of pork chops onto the baking sheet— the sixth sheet, each of them loaded— and wiped her hands on her apron. As she did, the card game concluded and the players donned their coats and hats. Smith, his mustache losing its shape, gave her a last drunken grin as the men filed out. She stored the pork chops and stood alone in the mess hall. Exhausted, she thought about retiring for the night but then thought better of it and decided to make the next day's pies. So she boiled water for tea and kept working.

She had already spread the dough and lined the pie tins and mixed the apples and brown sugar and cinnamon when she stepped outside for a breath of fresh air an hour later. The snow had stopped and a full, bright moon hung on the edge of the sky. The bunkhouse had grown quiet but for a few last revelers skylarking outside the door. Smith was right, that hell of cold had blown back in. She hugged herself and turned to go in for the night when she saw a strange sight.

One of the draft horses was being led into the middle of the paddock, snorting plumes of cloudy breath into the night. The handler was nearly invisible in the shadow of the horse, but it was not the barn boss, she knew, for the man pulling the bridle stood at the horse's shoulder and the barn boss was no more than five and a half feet tall. When the man and horse reached the trough, the handler turned to leave, but only after hobbling the horse. Satisfied, the man loped back to the barn.

Thea noted what she had seen but thought little more of it until an hour later, when the horse began to scream.

N
o longer filtered by the cold and dark, the wolves' howls came over the ridge, near and frightening, as though each element of that night— the coldness and darkness and stillness, the moon's bright luster— had its own voice in the discordant choir of the pack. In camp, the jacks stirred. Some came outside for a smoke or to stare up at the sound as though it could be seen. Thea had been readying herself for bed but lit another lantern in the kitchen when she heard the wolves.

They wailed for what seemed an hour. The jacks returned to their bunks and a silence spilled over the night, eerier in its way than the close song of the pack. It was in that interval of calm that the wolves emerged from the ridgetop pines. The dog, Lodden, greeted the pack even as he retreated to the horse hobbled in the paddock, his hackles and slaver evidence of an outrage a thousand years in the breeding. Lodden moved silently, though, even as the draft horse screamed and snorted and finally collapsed onto the trampled snow.

Though terrified, Thea could not help but be drawn to the commotion. Against her instincts and better judgment, she hurried to the door of the mess hall with a lantern. As she shouldered the door open, the watch salesman Smith met her. In Norwegian he said, "The wolves have come."

He still smelled of hooch even in all that cold and in that first moment of recognition she was actually happy to see him. She felt her spirits rise. But then he took the lantern from her hand and made a great show of extinguishing the light. He set the lantern on the floor and approached her as if inviting her to dance, took her hard by the wrist and ushered her into the kitchen. He pushed her onto the kitchen table, piecrusts scattering, the horrible screaming horse and growling dogs in the paddock a befitting accompaniment to his meanness.

She tried to kick him as he came toward her, but he grabbed her boot and twisted it off. She opened her eyes and saw his limp face and fierce eyes and that dead tooth. Then she closed her eyes and felt Smith's hot breath on her neck.

Now there were men yelling in the bunkhouse and barn. The barn boss had set free the bitch and the Ovcharkas circled the horse as eight wolves whirled about the paddock. They moved to their own ancient choreography, their red eyes in the darkness, their thick pelts shimmering like tinsel under the moon. They were silent, but the dogs understood their intentions. Lodden charged a closing wolf, swatted it with his massive forepaw, and bit with two-inch fangs and the wolf wheeled and growled and circled back into the ranks. In the barn, rifles were loaded with shivering hands.

And in the mess hall Thea could not breathe under the drunkard, who held her neck with one hand while he pulled up her skirts with the other. She wanted to cry out but could not, neither for his hand around her neck nor her great confusion. He pressed his hips against her and removed his hand from her neck. As if she had just come up from underwater, she took a gulping breath. But then he ripped her stockings off and she was drowning again.

A desperate yelp came from the night. Lodden chased one of the wolves to the edge of the paddock and broke its hind leg as it attempted to jump the fence. The other wolves continued to circle. At the fence, Lodden set his jaws into the ruff of the injured wolf and sawed into its veins until the blood poured onto the snow. The dog lifted the dead wolf as if it were a pup of his own and carried it across the paddock and tossed it at a trio of its packmates. A warning and boast both. The next wolf Lodden had in his fangs merely rolled over. The dog eviscerated the wolf 's pink belly in a single chomp.

Then the horse was up and bucking, the hobble kicked free. And

the jacks came out of the bunkhouse and barn and started firing at the pack, who would not retreat but seemed unwilling to blitz again despite their hunger.

Thea thought she might faint but was astonished to feel Smith's wet lips on her ear, to feel the gale of his breath. He clutched her breasts violently, and in that same moment she felt a world of fire in her belly. He grunted with each thrust of his hips, and with each thrust she felt a part of her body leaving her. Like the steam that had earlier that season risen from the jacks in the mess.

In the paddock the wolves were suddenly wise. As another shot rang from the direction of the barn, they turned and ran for the trees on the ridge. Lodden and Freya chased, and before the pack reached the trees the dogs tackled the last straggling wolf and sank their fangs into his throat.

Smith's end came with a sobering shudder and he looked at Thea for the first time since meeting her at the door. For a moment he seemed confused, as though he did not know where he was, but then he pushed himself up off his elbows and buttoned his trousers. Three more rifle shots hollered through the night.

As he ran out the door, Thea fell from the table onto her knees. She opened her eyes and saw only the darkness of that unholy night.

XV.

(November 1920)