South of Superior (35 page)

The hotel was heated with radiators and potbelly woodstoves scattered here and there, one in the lobby, one at the end of the second- and third-floor halls, and one in the corner of the attic. Madeline was pleased by this, and imagined she wouldn't mind the chore of hauling wood Up the stairs if she could sit close by the stove on a cold winter night, absorbing that bone-deep heat. Emil was working on getting wood around, and Madeline was excited at the thought of buying an ax. She'd checked them out at the hardware. The one she wanted had a hickory handle and a serious-looking blade.

Gladys and Arbutus took an interest in everything. They came every day to inspect her progress. Arbutus couldn't climb the steps so stayed in the lobby—looking happiest when Pete was nearby tinkering—but Gladys liked to come Upstairs. Madeline wondered if she had happy memories of her early married days with Frank here. Even with things less fraught between them, it couldn't be Madeline's company she was after. No, she was excited about the hotel, that was all.

She'd tell stories while Madeline scrubbed away at walls and floors and furniture. “Are you writing some of this down?” Madeline asked now and then. She'd picked Up a journal for Gladys while she was in Chicago, one with hard black covers and creamy pages and a spiral binding that made it easy to flip open on itself, buying it with the five-dollar bills Gladys had sent over the years. She'd meant it as a sort of peace offering and because she really did think Gladys should write her stories down, but it had gone over like a lead balloon.

“Who'd want to read anything I put down?” Gladys always said.

The sisters' friends began to stop in, the spryest ones climbing the stairs and drinking cup after cup of the coffee Madeline kept brewed in an electric drip pot she bought at the hardware, eating Gladys's cardamom rolls, or Finn buns as all of them called them. Madeline had splurged in Chicago on coffee beans that she ground fresh for every pot. The ladies—and once in a while a husband—liked this. “Good coffee,” they'd say, nodding their approval, and Madeline would feel a splash of pride, as if she'd really done something. She added coffee beans to her mental list of things she might sell in the shop she was imagining downstairs.

Gladys mentioned one day while Madeline was cleaning the floors that Mabel had been a lumber camp cook over by Gallion. Mabel sat in the sewing chair, knitting.

“Oh, pshaw, Glad, that was a million years ago.”

“You were a good cook, everybody said so.”

“Only because I replaced Toivo Ylimaki. That man couldn't parboil shit for a tramp.”

“Frank claimed Toivo put mice in the stew to stretch it. Why, they ran him right out of camp one spring. Chased him out and threw his pots and pans after him.”

“Wouldn't surprise me if he did put mice in. There were enough of them.”

“Frank's sandwiches Used to freeze solid before he got to them on the cold days.”

“Yes, I remember. They'd build a fire at lunchtime to thaw them out.”

Madeline Unbent from her hands-and-knees stance down on the floor to listen. “How many did you cook for?”

“Oh, twenty or thirty, most times, it was a small outfit.”

“Was it hard?”

Mabel didn't look Up from her knitting. “It was what it was, it was work. I didn't think anything of it. I got Up at four a.m. and was in bed by ten at night if I was lucky. I did it all. Split the wood, hauled the water, fixed the food, cleaned Up after.”

“That's amazing!”

“Times were different. Life was plain.”

Madeline knew that Mabel did not consider it extraordinary that at ninety she still lived in her own house and walked a mile or two every day and organized all the church potlucks. It seemed not to faze her to have lived so long that she had cooked for thirty lumberjacks on a wood-fired stove and also had driven to the Soo and bought a computer and learned to surf the Internet and sell things on eBay. Her expression said Madeline was peculiar and naïve but harmless. At least she made decent coffee.

“The
food
was plain,” Gladys said. “That's a big difference.”

Mabel grinned. “Potatoes and meat one night, milk potatoes the next. All kinds of variety.”

“Potatoes, bread, venison, fish, milk. That's what I remember.”

“Oatmeal,” Mabel said.

Gladys nodded, a nod that said oatmeal was a given. “Remember Fred Ooman?”

Mabel snorted. “Who could forget him? When he was drinking—”

“
Always
—”

“He almost froze to death out back of our place one night. He fell down in the alley going home from the bar and would've lain there all night and froze if Tom hadn't gone out back for more stove wood. I was always nagging him to keep the woodbox filled and he never did. Fred was just about a goner when Tom found him.”

“He was a sweet man when he was sober.”

“Remember that elixir he Used to make and peddle around to the taverns—”

“Sweet White Birch Vitamins and Minerals!”

“Yes. Lord. I wonder what was in it.”

“Birch ashes, I know that. I don't know what else. He Used to go around and get the empty wine bottles to put it in, big green bottles with the raised design—”

“They'd never let you do that today.”

“He wouldn't let it freeze, remember?”

“Yes! He had that old Chevy, put a little stove in the backseat where he carried the stuff, ran a stovepipe out the window.”

“I can see it now, that stovepipe puffing smoke out the car window and Fred inside the tavern, drunker than a skunk.”

“He had a good time.”

“I guess he was happy.”

“I don't know how Celia put Up with him.”

“She was a saint—”

Madeline let their stories wash over her as she worked. And then Mabel said, “Well, your great-grandma was a camp cook too, didn't you tell her, Gladys?”

There was an awkward silence. Gladys cleared her throat. “I guess I never did.”

“Mary told me,” Madeline said.

Mabel nodded, intent on finding a stitch she'd dropped. She seemed oblivious to the tension in the room.

“Did you know her?” Madeline asked. “Did you know Ada?”

“Not really. She kept to herself pretty much back there on Stone Lake, and when they left there, they went to Crosscut. I never had much cause to know her.”

Madeline nodded.

“I didn't know her, either,” Gladys said abruptly. “If I had, I'd tell you. Joe never talked about her much. Well, Joe. He just plain never talked about
anything
much. What he had to say, he said it with the fiddle.”

Madeline and Gladys gazed at each other. “I would tell you,” Gladys said softly.

After a moment Madeline said, “I believe you.”

 

 

In the wink
of an eye it was the middle of October. Gladys still had her Rolodex filled with the phone numbers of customers who Used to stay, and she was calling. Madeline had better be ready by the middle of November like she'd planned because Gladys had already lined Up three deer hunters who were delighted to hear the old place was reopening.

Gladys leafed through the Rolodex again to see if she'd missed anyone. She lingered at the card with the number of the antiques man over in the Soo. She wondered how much he'd want for Grandmother's kicksled. It went against her grain to even think of such a thing, it showed a lack of backbone. But she wanted it back. And now, more or less, she could afford it. Maybe best to let sleeping dogs lie, however. She sighed and flipped to the next card.

She knew Madeline felt a great sense of Urgency to have things perfect even though Gladys had told her the hunters wouldn't mind a little clutter. But Madeline worked every possible minute. She could hardly be bothered to quit for dinner; only Greyson tempered her burning fire to work, work, work every moment.

Gladys hoped she would not burn herself out. As angry—or perhaps not angry, but cautious and hurt—as she still was, she did hope that. And she hoped Madeline wouldn't get her heart broken over Greyson, either, because the lay of
that
land was treacherous, looking after another woman's child. She admired Madeline for having the guts to do it. She couldn't say it to Madeline, but she did feel it. She could want the best for her without quite being able to forgive her, couldn't she?

 

 

Madeline kept taking
Greyson to see Randi three times a week, somewhat against her judgment. Randi'd grown morose. Her braids had been cut in the hospital and she dwelt on this endlessly. It wasn't fair, nobody'd asked her, she hated her hair this way, she was going to make a complaint, it was an infringement of her rights. In the meantime she resisted having it washed. She also refused to do her exercises. “I hate trying to work with patients like her,” the physical therapist—the same one who had helped Arbutus—confided to Madeline one day on her way out the door. “They won't do anything for themselves. Not like Arbutus. She is such a trouper.”

Maybe Randi was feeling just well enough to realize how bad things were. Her injuries were slow to heal and the doctor said she'd be lame for the rest of her life. Her court date had been postponed, which prolonged the agony of waiting, and it was very likely things would not turn out well when it did happen. Sometimes her mood was so bad that Madeline thought it would be better not to take Greyson to see her so often, but the visits seemed crucial to him.

“Mom, look what I did in school,” he told her one day, a big sheet of green construction paper cradled in both hands. He had carried it on his lap in the car, declining Madeline's offer to set it on the backseat because if they had to stop fast it might slide and get bumped. “I love you MOM,” was spelled out, the “MOM” done in elbow macaroni. Thick gobs of glue had oozed from beneath the crooked pasta pieces, drying in translucent bumps on the fuzzy paper, and a red crayon heart encircled all of it. In one corner Purple Man brandished his sword. Greyson said the teacher had helped them to write whatever they wanted on their papers, but he'd done everything else himself. Madeline had told him truthfully that it was beautiful.

Now he struggled to clamber Up into Randi's lap without crumpling the paper. She was sitting in a wheelchair in the front room facing the enormous television.

“You're hurting, Grey, get down.” She didn't take her eyes from the TV.

Greyson's face crumpled.

“Randi,” Madeline said. After a few stubborn moments Randi raised her eyes and they glared at each other. “Greyson, go and find my Uncle Walter.”

“No, I don't want to, we just got here, I want to show my mom what I made her.”

“You can show her in a few minutes. Go find Walter. He likes to see you.”

Greyson trudged away.

Randi was staring at the television again. Madeline went and switched it off, to the disgust of an old man parked in a recliner who shouted, “Hey!”

“Sorry.” She switched it back on. Randi looked pleased and Madeline grabbed the handles of her chair and pushed her out onto the porch.

“It's cold out here, take me back in.”

“I'll take you back after you listen. You have royally screwed Up, Randi, you're going to jail Unless some miracle happens. Did you ever stop and think how that's going to be for Greyson?”

“He's fine. He's got you.”

“He's not fine. He does have me—and Paul and Gladys and Arbutus and a dozen other people—but the one he wants is you. Don't make it worse than it is. Get yourself together. Pay attention to him.”

“You have no idea what this is like.”

“I don't care what this is like. You created the problem, you fix it. Greyson looks forward to seeing you like crazy, and you act like he doesn't even exist anymore.”

“I'll just screw Up his life anyway, he's better off without me. Everybody is.”

“That's a cop-out. People care about you.”

“Like who?”

Madeline stared at Randi in disbelief. “Half the town's pitched in to help.”

“People just do that here, they'd do it for anybody, they have to. They don't care about
me
.”

“Nobody
has
to do anything. And what about Gladys and Arbutus? And Paul? And me?”

Randi bit her lip, shaking her head, and stared into the distance.

“Look. The worst thing you can do to Greyson is to just disappear.”

“I'm right here,” she said dully.

Despite herself Madeline felt a flash of sympathy. How hopeless it must all look from the vantage point of this chair. But Randi couldn't give in to that. “Ignoring him is like disappearing. You're not yourself anymore.”

“No shit.”

“Things will get better,” Madeline said, thinking that they would. Better, and worse, and better again, that constant ebb and flow that life was.

“Nothing's ever gonna be the same,” Randi said, and for the first time her tone was devoid of attitude. “I can't even walk.”

“I know.”

“I didn't do anything different than anyone else.” The whining note was back in her voice. “I just can't handle Greyson right now.”

“You have to. He thinks all this is his fault somehow, you can't do that to him.”

“He's better off without me, I'm just a fuckup, it's all I ever have been.”

Madeline flinched. It was less gratifying than she might have imagined, hearing her own old opinions voiced by Randi. “Everybody screws Up. The important thing is what you do after, maybe.”