Safe from the Sea (6 page)

“Four or five ships from our fleet wintered up there every year. In ’66 and ’67 the
Rag
got her new engine, a diesel. They did it at Fraser.”

“You guys all look the same.”

“We were.”

They sat in the dining room of the Manitou Lodge for a couple hours, talking about each photograph as if it were a wonder. The
pictures dated as far back as the spring of 1938, Olaf’s first year on the lakes, when he had shipped as a deckhand on the two-hundred-fifty-three-foot
Harold Loki
, a ship named for the original chief executive of Superior Steel. Olaf was a baby-faced kid in one of the pictures, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, a cigarette dangling from his lips while a buddy’s hand stuck him with a fake jab to the ribs. Along both sides of the main deck of the ship in the background, a procession of fresh-air vents loomed like a marching band of tuba players, and the smokestack in the stern coughed up its coal smoke in pitch-black plumes.

Olaf couldn’t remember the other deckhand’s name, but he told Noah about a whole crew’s worth of sixteen-and eighteen-year-old kids shipping out in order to avoid abusive fathers or college. Some of the boys, he said, were just cut from the lonely cloth and wanted to get lost. He told him about Tony Ragu, a kid from Muskegon who worked on the
Loki
for the first three months of the shipping season that year before being picked up by the Duluth Lumberjacks, a minor league baseball team that wanted his ninety-five-mile-per-hour fast-ball. He remembered Cliff Gornick, a Chicago guy who put himself through Northwestern Law School by working Superior Steel boats in the summer and who eventually became a famous Chicago newscaster. Russ Jackson was the first black guy he saw on the boats, second cook on the
Loki
. A potbellied, middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a wife and seven kids in Detroit, he cooked the best beef brisket north of New Orleans. Olaf smiled when he talked about the Cejka brothers—one of whose sons was later a watchman on the
Rag
—thick-shouldered shovelers who worked in the engine room of the
Loki
moving coal. If not for the whites of their eyes and their ungloved white hands, Noah might not have known there were any people in the picture at all.

There were pictures of the aerial bridge at the entrance to Duluth harbor, cloaked in fog, a cat’s cradle of steel; of the
Loki
, the
Valkyrie
—his father’s second ship—and the
Rag
all scuttling through the locks at Sault Sainte Marie; of the Mackinac bridge spanning the straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan; of the loading and unloading complexes in Gary and Conneaut; of crewmates, some anonymous or forgotten, others so well remembered it seemed as if Olaf expected them to walk into the dining room any minute and join them; and of Olaf, standing in front of the offices of Superior Steel in the LaCroix Building on East Second Street in downtown Duluth, an ear-to-ear grin on his twenty-eight-year-old face the afternoon he passed his Coast Guard exam to become an officer, and standing behind the wheel in the pilothouse of the
Valkyrie
.

Noah looked up and down between the pictures and his father, and what struck him was how much he himself resembled the man in the photographs and how little the man sitting across from him now did. Three days ago he might have overlooked his father in a crowd, now he felt like he was him. Noah wondered, as his father reconstructed more than thirty years of his life with the help of the photographs, how it had felt to
be
him then, in the spring of 1938, and how it felt to be him now, with the burden of all that had happened and all that he’d suffered, suffering who knew what illness. More than anything Noah wondered what it would be like to sit across the table from a son, imagined a whole lifetime of moments like this: spooning baby food, helping with homework, explaining the birds and the bees, sharing a beer over a cribbage board.

By the time the waitress announced that the dining room was closing for the afternoon, they’d finished with the photographs and had been sitting in a reverential silence. “Listen, Dad,” Noah said,
“why don’t you pack these up? I have to call Nat before we head back to the house.”

Olaf said, “Sure, sure.” And with the care of a surgeon, he placed each of the photographs back into their sheaths and then into the manila envelope.

“W
E’LL BE OUT
of your hair in a minute,” he assured the waitress behind the cash register at the Manitou Lodge. She nodded and turned her attention back to painting her nails as Noah dialed the pay phone.

“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t think I’d catch you.” The phone at Natalie’s office had rung five times before she’d picked up.

“I was starting to think you’d forgotten me. I left messages on your cell.”

“I don’t have cell reception up here. Sorry. I was going to call last night.”

“It doesn’t matter. I worked late last night anyway. New clients.” She was a management consultant and never discussed clients by name. The late nights were a job hazard. “How’s your father? How’s everything going?”

Noah looked out the window at the galloping lake, he glanced at his father. “It’s hard to say. We went fishing yesterday,” he said as though it were the strangest thing. He paused. “What about you?”

Her voice turned grave. “Now that you’re in the middle of the woods, I’m finally going to ovulate again. Of course.”

He could hear her crying and felt an impulse to hang up the phone, not because he didn’t want to hear what she said but because he knew that whatever he replied would be monumentally wrong.

“Okay,” he began cautiously. “I know the timing is terrible, I know it stinks, and I wish I were there—”

“But you’re not,” she interrupted. “I thought this would be the month. I wish you were here.”

“I know, me, too. But we might have to wait until next time.”

“What if there isn’t a next time?”

A next time. Since their most recent failure, an ectopic pregnancy that had taken Natalie months to recover from, she had come to suspect that the reason things weren’t working—the reason their efforts had yielded nothing but endless fretting, thousands of dollars in fertility-clinic bills, and a terminal attitude—was that they hadn’t been doing everything together. “You go to the clinic at eight in the morning to drop off your sperm, and I go at noon to be inseminated between a tuna-fish sandwich and a conference call—I mean, how
could
we expect anything? It’s just unnatural,” she had said, ignoring the fact that their course of action couldn’t be anything but unnatural. So they’d decided they would make their clinic visits together, sure that the
next time
things would be different. The next time was now.

He tried again. “I know this hasn’t been easy.”

“Hasn’t been easy? Noah, they had an easier time putting a man on the moon than they’ve had getting me pregnant. Keeping me pregnant anyway.” She blew her nose. “Maybe you could overnight it.”

He could practically see her, sitting behind her desk at work, looking out the fourteenth-story window. The tears, he’d not often seen them for any other reason.

“There’s an OB/GYN at St. Mary’s hospital in Duluth. You’d have to go down there, but I bet we could make arrangements. They could still inseminate me tomorrow.”

Inseminate
, the sort of word that had become stock in the parlance of their infertility. All the words—
prescription
,
ovulation
,
suppository
,
uterus
,
fallopian
,
cervix
,
endometriosis
,
laparoscopy
,
motility
—made the whole thing feel like a science project.

“I’m sure I could make an appointment.”

“So we could overnight it? Nat, honest to God.”

“What?”

“Let’s be reasonable.”

“Injecting myself with a syringe full of fertility drugs every night
is
reasonable?”

“Is it the end of the world if we have to wait another month?”

“What if you’re there for three months, what happens then?”

This startled him, and he looked across the dining room at his father, whose chin was on his chest. He must have been sleeping. “I’m not going to be here for three months. Listen, I just got here. I can’t very well leave tomorrow. My father needs me right now. He’s not well, remember?” Across the dining room Olaf twitched, his head bobbed up, and he looked around the restaurant, confused. “He can hardly get his feet off the ground.”

“What’s wrong with him? Where is he now?”

“He’s sitting across the dinning room here at the lodge.”

“You’re out to lunch? You went fishing?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“I’ve made a list,” she continued, the tone of her voice suddenly businesslike, “trips to the doctor’s office for fertility-or pregnancy-related visits: fifty-two. Number of prescriptions filled for fertility-or pregnancy-related drugs: no fewer than thirty. Number of injections: roughly two hundred. Cumulative full days missed at work: fifteen. Number of times you’ve had to jack off over some dirty magazine in the doctor’s office: eight. Number of miscarriages: three.
Number of ectopic pregnancies: one. Number of dead fetusus: five.” She paused. “Number of hours spent in paralysis, bawling my pathetic eyes out: a million. Do you get the idea, Noah? I need you to come home. If it doesn’t work this time, I can’t go through it again. This is it.”

Noah looked at his father. He squeezed his eyes shut and pictured the old man laboring up the hill from the lake.

“Are you listening to me, Noah? I have a scar on my arm from where they’ve drawn blood the last three years. I have permanent bruises on my thighs from the injections.”

“My father is dying. He lives alone in the woods. He has to drive eight miles just to use the nearest pay phone.”

“He’s dying?”

“That’s what he says.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“He won’t go to the doctor.”

“But he can go fishing?”

“I know. I said it’s hard to explain.”

“Would leaving for one day matter?” she persisted, though clearly she was less emphatic.

The truth was, he
did
think one day was going to matter. He thought an hour mattered now. But he didn’t say anything.

“Then I’ll come there,” she said after a moment.

“You’ll what?”

“I’ll get a flight on Friday. I’m in meetings the rest of today. I have to go.”

“You’re coming here?”

“On Friday.”

“It’s not an easy place to find,” he said.

“I’ll MapQuest it.” And before he could protest she hung up.

He stood there in stark amazement, the idea of her coming to Misquah sinking in slowly. This sort of impulsiveness was not one of her character traits—though conviction of this magnitude was—and he realized again how single-minded she had become. He tried to imagine her sitting in his father’s cabin but could not see it.

Before he went back to the table, he called his sister. When she did not answer, he hung up, realizing any news of his being at their father’s house would alarm Solveig.

A
S THEY MADE
the slow drive back to the house Olaf looked at Noah and said, “You always did wear it around on your sleeve.”

Noah had been studying the roadside. “What’s that?”

“Whatever’s troubling you.”

Noah turned to his father. “I hope you don’t mind more company.”

“What do you mean?”

“Natalie’s coming.”

“She is?”

Noah turned his attention back to the woods. “It’s hard to explain. It’s ridiculous, really. And embarrassing.”

“Out with it already.”

“Well, she’s ovulating.”

“Ovulating?”

“Like now’s the time she could get pregnant.”

Olaf slowed the truck, pulled over, and stopped. “She’s coming here to get pregnant.” A smile spread across his slack mouth. “You’re a lucky man.”

“We’ve been trying for years.”

“That’s one of the best parts of marriage,” Olaf said, persisting with his sailor’s wit.

Noah thought to turn the conversation but realized his father was trying to make things easier for him. It was a gesture of simple kindness. Now a smile spread across Noah’s face. “I guess you’re right about that.”

THREE

The blunt head of the splitting maul, stuck in the oak stump, looked like clay. Noah had his hand on the smooth ash handle. “I’m falling behind,” Olaf said, sweeping the back of his hand lazily toward a pile of sawn oak.

“How much more do you need?” Noah asked, looking around at what seemed an unending supply of wood.

“It needs time to cure. That pile there”—Olaf pointed at a four-foot-tall by eight-foot-deep pile of split wood as long as Noah’s rental car sitting beside the shed—“it won’t be ready until next year.”

“It won’t burn?”

“Of course it’ll burn, just not very well.”

Noah jerked the maul free of the stump. He swung it up onto his shoulder.

“There are a couple of trees down in the gulch. They blew over this spring. One’s an oak, the last on the lot, I think. I’d like to get them up here before it snows.”

“We can do that.”

Noah measured the distance between the log on the block and
the head of the maul in his extended arms, swung the handle over his right shoulder, and let the steel head fall square on the balanced log. The wood split with a clap, and the two pieces landed four feet away on either side of the stump.

“We’ll get the city boy out of you yet,” Olaf said.

“That felt good,” Noah said, still feeling the reverberations in his shoulders.

“Let’s get at that oak,” Olaf said.

“All right.”

They emptied the wheelbarrow in the yard, and Olaf fetched a chainsaw, a gas can, and two pairs of gloves from the shed. They started toward the gulch, Noah in front and pushing the wheelbarrow.

“I called Solveig,” Noah said over his shoulder. The wheelbarrow bounced over the roots and pine saplings that had overrun the path. “I left her a message.”