South of Superior (45 page)

“Won't it be hard without that paycheck, though? I mean, it is for me here—”

“It'll work out. I have to believe things will work out. Not always the way you think, but somehow. Like now I'm glad I have the Fairlane, because it'll just about cover the cost of a new oven.”

“You're selling it?”

“Yep. Don't need it; need the oven.”

Madeline nodded.

“I've been thinking maybe I'd give guitar lessons. It'd be a little extra, and I'd love doing it. Garceau's Pizzeria and Music Studio, how's that sound?”

“A little goofy. But good.”

“So how about you?” he asked, taking her hand and entwining their fingers. “How's it been, your first winter?”

“Good. Pretty good.”

He raised his eyebrows, and she confided the truth in a rush. “I'm scared. There's so much I have no clue about. This hotel is—” She stopped, wooshed out a huge sigh, shook her head. “It might be a pipe dream. Gladys tried to tell me, but I wouldn't listen. And so far it's been great. I mean, really amazing. I've done the work, I'm here, I'm opened Up, I haven't run through all my money yet. It's winter, it's beautiful, all that's true. But at the same time, it's all a crapshoot. What will happen, will I make it?”

Paul was smiling. “Welcome to my world.”

“It's terrifying.”

“But you're really doing something. You're trying anyway.”

“Yes, but—what if I fail?”

“You can't fail.”

“That's not true!”

“You've already not failed,” he said, his eyes very serious behind his glasses. Madeline wanted to kiss him for that.

“But what if I can't do it alone? This place, Greyson, everything.”

“You don't have to.”

 

 

Madeline stood
at her windows watching the water after Paul had gone downstairs to sleep. She thought she'd make silver dollar pancakes for breakfast, with eggs and bacon. Emmy had always made silver dollar pancakes on the weekends, and Madeline would eat as many as she could hold and then one more.

She closed her eyes and was in the kitchen of the apartment in Chicago. Some nameless windy winter day, somewhere around 1984. She had feathered bangs and was wearing leg warmers and hoping against hope that Tina Petry would invite her to her birthday party. Emmy flipped the tiny pancakes and the aroma of them rose Up, and she turned to smile at Madeline—

Madeline drifted in and out of time. The wind howled and the waves chopped at the shore. How she loved the lake, that strength no one could tame. The sky was somber, forbidding. It would take a lifetime to try to paint it.

She wondered if Walter was awake down in Crosscut, listening to the snow on his window. Mary would be sitting by her stove, warm as toast, and Emil would be hunkered on his bunk, drinking whiskey, Sal on her blanket on the floor beside him. Arbutus and Pete were probably asleep by now, like Greyson, or maybe watching the eleven o'clock news on television. And Gladys—she was looking out a window at the storm, like Madeline. How like they were in some ways. Madeline took a long breath in and let it out slowly.
Emmy, Emmy
, she thought, as she so often did. A kind of peacefulness filled her.

 

 

 

 

T
he bay began to freeze over in the end of February, and by the first week of March there were shanties on the ice. Paul looked out the attic windows as he sipped his coffee one morning. “We should go fishing. Tom won't need me today and I don't have any lessons scheduled.”

Madeline carried Marley from where he'd been napping on the rocker. Two shanties sat near shore, one bright blue, the other Unpainted plywood. “Scary. Is it safe?”

Paul drew her close. “As long as you stay in the bay. You want to be careful. But yeah, those guys know what they're doing. There's probably eight, ten inches of ice. That's plenty to hold you.”

Madeline started to feel excited about the idea. There were a few more people staying this year than last, but it was slow enough that she could go.

“Buddy, you want to go fishing with Us? Maybe we could steal you out of school for an afternoon,” Paul said when Greyson came out of his room.

Greyson shook his head. “Mrs. Callihan comes for arts and crafts today. And it's pizza at lunch.”

“Oh well, then.” Paul gave him a skeptical look.

“Mrs. Callihan always brings treats. Last week she brang candy bars.”

“Brought,” Madeline said.

Greyson shrugged. “We're making pot holders. I'll make you one, Madeline. I'm making Mom one too.”

Madeline called Gladys and asked if she could come down and babysit the hotel in case someone wanted to check in or call with a reservation.

“I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Just have to get my coat on.”

“You're sure? I don't want to be a bother.”

“No bother,” she snapped. “I ran that hotel before you were a glimmer in your mother's eye, I guess I can handle it for a few hours, and Greyson too.”

“I only meant—”

“It's nothing.”

“There's no hurry, I can get Grey off to school.”

“That child is absolutely no trouble, we'll be fine. Maybe Butte will come down, too, I'll ask her. Either way, I'll see you in a jiffy.” She slammed down the phone.

Paul was watching. “She can come, I take it?”

“Yep. Glad to. Annoyed I suggested it might be a bother.”

“You've given her a new lease on life.”

“She didn't need one. She
owns
life.”

 

They loaded snowshoes
into the back end of Paul's truck, as well a sled, an ice spud to chisel the hole open with, a bucket stocked with ice-fishing poles and bobbers and sinkers, and a kerosene lantern. They bought minnows and fishing licenses at the hardware, then drove to the marina.

Paul lit the lantern in the shelter of the cab, and they trekked along the shore and out across the ice. He strode along, testing the ice with the spud, and Madeline followed. Looking out toward the open water she thought they could have floated in time, landed anywhere in the last thousand years. Abruptly, Paul stopped. “Here's as good as anywhere, I guess.”

He spudded the first hole in the ice and let her try the second one. It was harder than he'd made it look, but after twenty minutes of pounding she broke through, and the icy water burbled Up. Paul scooped it clear with a sieve on a long handle, then tested the depth of the water with a weight on the line. He baited a hook with a minnow and squeezed a weight on the line with pliers and dropped it down the hole, then attached a bobber. “You do the other one.” Madeline did, balking a little at stabbing the minnow onto the hook.

“Now what?”

“Now we wait.”

The bobbers floated in the holes. Water froze on the lines, which made a tiny scritchling noise as they fluttered in the breeze. Madeline's face got cold, and she turned her back to the wind. Now and then they warmed their hands around the glass globe of the hissing lantern.

“So, how's married life treating you?” he asked at one point.

Madeline grinned. “Not bad. Survived the first year, almost.”

They'd gotten married in April at the courthouse in Crosscut. They had a reception at the hotel and invited everyone: Paul's family, everyone they knew in McAllaster and Crosscut, all their friends from everywhere. Madeline started crying when Dwayne and Estelle and Candice walked in. Dwayne grinned and picked her Up for a hug and told her to stop bawling or they'd turn right back around for Chicago. Ted and Lisa Braith brought Walter, who sat tapping his foot to the music and smiling at everyone all afternoon.

Time had flown by since then. The summer and fall had disappeared in a haze of work, but the winter was theirs.

Paul trained his gaze on the bobbers again. Madeline squatted down and warmed her hands around the lantern.

“Randi's coming Up for a parole review, eh?”

Madeline nodded, but she didn't want to think about it. The trial had happened in June and Randi'd gotten a year in the county jail. Maybe she'd only serve part of that before they let her come home.

“She'll want Grey back when she gets out.”

Madeline squinted off across the lake. The wind made snow dervishes rise in swirls Up off the ice. “I know.”

“She's better with him lately.”

“Yeah. Better.” Randi wrote Greyson letters, made him things in the craft shop. She was allowed to go out in the yard with him—she was Using a walker now—to play games and visit in an open room, and she was more herself again, tickling and hugging him to make him giggle, calling him her little man.

“Maybe she'll let him stay with Us some. Or even, I don't know, a lot. I mean, if that's what you want.”

“You know it is. But it might not be what he wants. I mean, it probably isn't. And that's—” Madeline couldn't bring herself to say,
That's okay.
She loved Greyson. And he loved them, but when Randi was back, he would want to go home. It was inevitable, it was probably—maybe—even right, but the thought broke her heart.

“It'll work out,” he said. Madeline wished she could share his certainty. The fishing lines fluttered in the breeze, the bobbers bobbed. She hunkered down, stared across the horizon. Felt the vast cold world spread out all around her and was reassured by the impersonality of it. This land—wild and serene, huge, ruthless and gentle by turns, was always Unconcerned with her, small Madeline who was a tiny dot on its landscape for a moment in time. It reminded her over and over that there was only now. The future would come, Unfolding itself as it did.

“It will,” he said, giving her a funny little smile. “Things do. Not the way you expect, but still all right.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Paul studied her a moment and then shuffled through his layers of clothes for a pocket, fished around for something, and came Up with a folded piece of paper. He handed it to her. She Unfolded it and frowned, not remembering at first, and then remembering and being baffled. It was a letter.
Dear Paul
, it said.
We miss you. That's all I'm writing to say. We're okay, but—

“Where'd you get this?”

“Greyson sent it to me. Last year before I came back.”

“How did he get it?”

Paul shrugged. “Don't know. But things do work out.”

Madeline decided it would be silly to be embarrassed by this revealing letter now. After all, things had worked out. And Greyson—what nerve. She smiled to herself. She read the letter, studied the little drawings. They were pretty good, she could see from this remove of a little more than a year. They had charm. They gave her an idea for the book she was going to illustrate. It was a self-published thing a woman in town had done, nothing big, but she liked the story and it would pay a little.

An hour passed. Her feet began to get very cold. She wondered when they would eat the sack lunch they'd packed.

“
Hey
,” Paul hissed. “Look.”

The bobber quivered, then dipped down into the water. Paul grabbed the pole from where he propped it in the snow, fed out a little line. The bobber rose and dipped again, faster and deeper. Madeline stared at it, transfixed. The possibility that they might catch their dinner galvanized her. She glanced Up at Paul and saw a look of concentrated glee on his face. She watched in anticipation for what would happen next.

McAllaster is a fictional town, but it's like the one I live in—a small village in an isolated spot along Lake Superior—so I'd first like to thank Grand Marais, just for being itself. Also my thanks to the Gitche Gumee, the Big Water that makes life so special here.

Midway through writing this book, I started doing interviews with some of the elderly people in town and writing their stories for the local newspaper. I want to thank those people for sharing their lives and outlooks with me. This novel became something I was doing for them, in many ways. If I could create a character or two who hinted at their great reserves of strength, acceptance, and humor, I would have done something worthwhile. They inspired me to keep working.

Yale Bailey, b. January 1, 1918, Manistique, Michigan.

Isabella “Bess” Capogrossa, b. June 19, 1911, London, England.

Bruce Erickson, b. January 25, 1932, Grand Marais, Michigan.

Nelmi Hermanson, b. May 25, 1910, Grand Marais, Michigan, d. June 6, 2008.

Bill LaCombe, b. August 7, 1917, Grand Marais, Michigan, d. February 18, 2009.

Aino Schultz, b. October 10, 1913, Grand Marais, Michigan, d. June 20, 2009.

Ted Soldenski, b. December 29, 1912, Grand Marais, Michigan, d. February 22, 2008.

Evelyn “Tudy” Tornovish, b. June 1, 1916, Grand Marais, Michigan, d. March 3, 2010.

Evelyn Wood, b. September 1939, Petersburg, Michigan.

Many people have shared their stories and memories with me over the years (mostly over coffee), and I thank all of them. But also particular thanks to:

Bill Bailey and Al Tornovish, for many memorable phrases, including “Always been broke flatter than piss on a platter.”

Jack and Mary Alice Johnson, for telling me about Sweet White Birch Vitamins and Minerals, and for letting me consult on all things Finnish. Also thanks to Jack for keeping the whole show running by fixing everything from Jeeps to espresso machines.

Also special thanks to: