Safe from the Sea (15 page)

“Maybe it doesn’t matter to
you
anymore.” Now Noah sat down. “Do I understand you? Do you really believe the things you’re telling yourself ?” He shook his head in disgust and in sadness. “Listen, there’s no way I’m going to chain you up and drop you out with the fish. You can’t ask for something like that. I’m glad I’m here and can help. But this is out of the question. You can just forget it.” Noah stepped to the door. “Don’t ask me again.”

Inside the house Noah tore through his bag, put on a flannel shirt, took his dirty jeans from the bedpost and a pair of leather gloves
from a shelf by the door, and headed back outside, only stopping long enough to fetch the chainsaw and the full gas can from the back of the truck.

He hurried to the fallen oak. When he reached the tree he paused and looked down into the creek bed. He swung into the gulch, tugged on the cord, set the chain against the trunk of the tree, and pulled the trigger.

He worked first with the saw above his head. Balancing against the steep incline of the gulch’s wall, he let the saw rip through the oak as it rained sawdust on him. When the saw slipped through the top side of the trunk he flinched, expecting the tree to shift or fall when the first bole fell. It didn’t.

On the bank of the gulch ropy stalks of bramble grew from the clumps of rusty soil, and he used them to pull himself up. There had to be an easier way of doing this. He stepped onto the trunk. He started the saw again and tiptoed backward out onto the tree. It couldn’t have been much more than eight or ten feet above the ground, but it seemed much higher, especially when he looked toward the lake.

Measuring off a foot and a half, he set the saw onto the tree and hit the trigger. From this angle the saw worked much more easily. In less than half the time it had taken him to make the first pass from the underside, it cleaved the first stump. He made eight or ten more stumps from the trunk, and when he choked the saw off and looked behind him, he saw that he was a solid quarter of the way across and suspended above the nettle as if he were on the bowsprit of a ship.

His body thrummed with the lingering vibrations from the saw. He caught his breath, tightened the gloves on his hands, and brushed the sawdust from his sleeves.
Now the hard part
, he thought. He dropped back into the gulch, set the saw on the bank, and stacked the stumps
into a pile at the base of the incline. Then he began hoisting them out of the creek bed. The first, narrower half of the bunch were light enough that he could toss them up. The second half required a plan. He managed to get the first big stump onto his shoulder. The thick bark bit his face as he crawled up the embankment. His feet churned in the loose soil. Laboring, the stump sliding around his neck—it must have weighed seventy-five pounds—the bark burning his neck, he imagined it crushing his ankle. He strained against the stump, finally rolled it up over the edge.

He collapsed onto the bank, half standing and half sitting, and felt his pulse throbbing in his wrists. Breathing heavily and sweating profusely again, he eyed the remaining half-dozen pieces of oak.
If not right now
, he thought,
I’ll never finish
. Besides, the wind funneling up the gulch felt fine. He took off a glove, felt the back of his neck, and saw blood on his fingertips. He stanched it with the collar of his shirt. After he caught his breath he hefted the other stumps from the gulch. When he rolled the last one over the lip, he crawled out himself.

The wheelbarrow was parked where they’d left it. In its rusty, dented bottom, shallow pools of water had formed. Noah carted it to the edge of the gully and muscled the two biggest pieces of sawn oak into it. The trail, with its tree roots, potholes, and rocks, made steering the barrow difficult. But he managed eight trips. On the last he stopped midway back and looked up at the ski jump. Several times since he’d been back he’d thought of climbing the rickety old thing, but each time the thought crossed his mind he’d been distracted. Now he set down the empty wheelbarrow and kicked his way through the overgrowth to the lopsided steps that led up to the base of the scaffold. There were four telephone poles supporting the top of it and two more midway up the inrun. On the left side of the ramp
thirty steps made of two-by-fours were pounded into the plywood floor under the handrail. He took them two at a time.

When he got to the top he stood for a minute looking down the inrun. The wind—a headwind he fondly recalled—blowing almost violently now, caused the scaffold to sway. Beyond the takeoff, on the left, the coaching deck his father and grandfather used to huddle on had completely sunk in the overgrowth. It was easy to imagine them standing there, their hushed voices carrying up to him as he latched his boots into the cable bindings and lowered his goggles over the rim of his white leather helmet. It was the flattery he overheard on those mornings that gave him his first sense of vanity, though neither could tolerate his lack of concentration.

He had no trouble concentrating now.
It looks so damn big
, he thought. Though the jump was awfully small in contrast to the Olympic-sized jumps he’d competed on as a teenager, the years of forgetting almost entirely about the sport had skewed his perspective. The landing hill was overgrown with new trees and thistle, and the takeoff was buried in the scrub, but he could easily imagine the whole scene packed with snow. Even though the lake frothed in the wind, he could see ski tracks narrowing in the distance.

The brightness of the sun glinting off the snow, the cold toes and windburned cheeks, none of it was lost after all. His skis squeaking against the hard snow at the top of the jump before he pulled himself onto the inrun, the speed gained as he hurtled down the ramp, the serenity and silence of the flight, the camber of both his skis and his body in flight, the exultation of flight. The perfect instinct to land and the explosion of consciousness in landing . . .
none
of it had been forgotten.

He looked back toward the house. Why had he been so quick to condemn the old man’s project in the shed? Why had he been so
quick to deny him this favor? Didn’t the million mornings standing on that coach’s platform in the wicked wind and chill of the Minnesota winter add up to something?

For all his horror at the thought of dropping his old man in the lake, the idea was not altogether unbeautiful. Again he thought about the story his father had told him the night before, this time pausing to reflect on the type of eternity his father had so narrowly avoided. Maybe the will to be buried in the lake was born of the notion that it was his honest fate, not merely some screwball’s version of an interminable penance. None of which meant, Noah thought, that he’d be able to carry out the old man’s wishes.

He wheeled the last load of wood back to the yard, noticed the door of the shed still open. He saw his father working, could see, through the papery curtain and dirty glass, that the old man had somehow managed to lift the barrel of taconite onto his workbench.

The sight of it made his entire morning’s labor seem feigned.

S
PANNING SIX OF
the barrel staves, the words
SUPERIOR STEEL & STEAMSHIP COMPANY
were branded black.
The barrel must be a hundred years old
, Noah thought as he rubbed his thumb through the tarnished grooves of the lettering. He imagined piles of these barrels in the hull of an old turn-of-the-century bark, loaded with iron ore. He remembered this particular barrel hidden behind the furnace in the house on High Street.

One of the pieces of stainless-steel tubing was already attached to the barrel with a dozen finely placed bolts. In a pile on the table another dozen bolts appeared ready for the same purpose, and the second piece of tubing was apparently being shortened by something less than an inch. At least the hacksaw blade halfway through it suggested
as much. Noah wrapped his arms around the barrel and lifted it off the workbench. It took all his strength. Though he could not imagine how the contraption might work, he admired the old man’s vision. No doubt he had a plan, and no doubt that plan would work. Had he not been a sailor, Olaf might have made a fine life as a builder. Noah had often wished for his father’s advice while in agony over how to install a new toilet or hang a chandelier from the dining room ceiling. Any of a hundred household tasks at which he inevitably failed. Long weekend afternoons with hammer-bruised thumbs. He smiled now, well removed from them.

The old man was at his afternoon nap. Later today than the day before.

Noah walked outside and crossed the yard. He began stacking the wood around the splitting stump in the yard. He thought of Nat, on her way now. He thought back through the travails of their childlessness. He remembered how the first couple years of trying had been almost magical in their ability to bring the two of them closer together. There had been such solidarity of purpose, such a marveling at prospects. It wasn’t until after the first pregnancy and miscarriage that things had actually started to seem both urgent and unlikely.

He could remember that morning vividly. He had startled himself awake from a deep sleep and found her side of the bed cold and empty. He could hear the sound of the bathroom faucet and in the grainy light could see Nat’s bare legs beneath the sink. Under the stream and splashing of water, he heard her unappeasable, almost silent, sobbing. When he stumbled into the hallway and stood in the bathroom door, she didn’t even look up. “No, no, no, no,” she muttered above her sobbing. He tried to console her, tried to hug away her quivering, but for the first time in their lives together she rejected him.

The other miscarriages had been worse in their ways—one had been twins, miscarried two days apart—but it was the first that had taken the deepest stab at their hope. The late-night talks about rearing the wonder child disappeared, her explanations of the tests and procedures her doctor was performing to isolate the cause of her infertility also ceased. So did talk of next steps. Over the next two years their inability to have a child had come to seem like an illness. It was mired in an unremitting despondency that might pop up at any time. They’d see a duckling in the pond at the park, and Nat would fall miserable for three days. If they saw a pregnant woman in the grocery store Nat would forget what they were there for. It was her sadness that had come to matter most to him, he realized.
She’s somewhere near
, he thought as he headed for the lake.
She’ll be here before dark
.

Down at the lake steely clouds mixed in the sky. The wind-whipped water curled up in waves that washed on the beach. He stepped onto the dock and bent to untie his boots. He took off his jeans and shirt, his socks and drawers, and stood naked at the end of the dock. Instantly the sweat that only a few minutes earlier had been dripping from him dried—seemed almost to encase him—as the wind curled around him. He stood there, distracted by the cold air, and had only a single moment of clarity, of apprehensive panic, before he jumped feet-first into the lake.

From the instant he went under he could feel the water seizing him. Although he’d been anticipating something like it, he could never have expected the grip of the water. If he hadn’t kicked and pulled for the surface the instant he was submerged he might have ended up sunk.

Crazy though the idea of the bath had been, both his father and grandfather had been inclined to take late-autumn and even early-winter baths. It was a point of pride between the two men. Noah
could remember watching them—their long arms and lean, muscular legs, their hairy chests and long beards—as they dove into the water while the early-winter snow whitened the sky. It was a rite of passage Noah had not grown up fast enough for. As he climbed onto the dock he took a cracked bar of Ivory soap from its wooden nook on the dock, wetted it, and began lathering himself. The air felt warm in contrast with the water, and he washed away the day’s hard work and grime. He scrubbed his underarms, legs, and feet. He wetted the soap again and lathered his hair and face, his neck and arms. He washed his back. And before he could fear it, he dove back into the lake. He experienced the same convulsions, the tightening in his lungs, the stardust behind his closed eyes, but he needed a second to rinse himself, so he messed his hair with his hands and kicked wildly while he watched the soap disperse in the dark water.

Back on the dock he stood in the bracing wind as water puddled at his feet. He dried himself in the gale. Nat would not have known him there. He could not have known himself. He was—if only for a few long minutes—more his father than he had ever been. More than ever he was his son. A sense that ought to have brought with it a feeling of benevolence brought instead a pale choler. Nat would be here soon—was perhaps already up at the cabin—willing herself and Noah into parenthood with her resoluteness alone, stopping literally at nothing to add a branch to the Torr family tree. And here Noah stood, half an orphan for most of his life. He’d learned to live without his father, almost without the memory of him. He’d reinvented himself in a fashion with Nat’s help, had evolved as a man even as his father had receded ghostlike into the Minnesota wilderness. Thoughts that should have been spent on memories of the old man, on anticipating times to come, had been spent on what instead? He toed the soap back into its nook.

Aside from Nat—from their life together—and these few other things, what did he even think about? Of their childlessness, sure, but less and less even of that. Was he not entitled to recompense for the void? Would it have been better if his father had died on that night all those years ago? Whether this last was said or only thought he did not know, but soberer for it having crossed his mind, he forgave the old man all at once. Forgave him everything. He wondered whether his father would forgive him.

In the spirit of being his father’s son, he walked back up to the cabin in his boots alone.

SEVEN

I leave you alone for a few days and this is what I come to find?” Nat stood at the kitchen basin, scrubbing a bunch of radishes, staring at her naked husband. She was trying to make light of things, Noah knew, but the effort felt stilted. She seemed unsure of her own presence. “Hurry and dress. Soup’s on.” In the middle of the great room, before the now tempered woodstove, the card table was prodigiously set. Noah took a piece of cheese, sniffed it, tasted it. “Brown cheese,” he said, then stepped into the bedroom.