The parade started at noon from the cannery and came up Main Street at the speed of a man walking a dog, which, at the front of it, was what it was.
The man was Nesvik’s oldest living veteran, ninety-three, in a garrison cap, with a small white terrier on a lead, and behind him came the high school band in shorts and the fire truck and then everything in town that had wheels or could be put on them: a gillnetter on a trailer with three children in survival suits waving from the wheelhouse; kids on bicycles with streamers in their spokes.
Thorsen stood on the kerb outside the hardware store with Claire on one side of him and Marj on the other, and the dog sitting on his foot.
Marj could not see the parade. She could hear it. She stood with her hand through Claire’s arm and her face turned up the street, and named things before they reached her. “Second trumpet’s flat. He’s always flat.” The band went by. “Fire truck. They’ve had the siren fixed.” The siren went.
Celia was outside the bank, on their side of the street and three doors down, standing behind her father’s chair with one hand on his shoulder.
Thorsen saw her before she saw him. Ed was in a lawn chair with a cup of coffee, in a clean wool shirt buttoned to the neck, with a little flag stuck in his hatband that somebody, a grandchild of a neighbour, had put there for him. He was not shouting at anybody. He was watching the parade go by with his coffee held in both hands, like a man watching weather, and his daughter stood behind him in a blue summer jacket with the sleeves pulled down to her wrists, and now and then she bent and said something to him, and he nodded.
Then she looked up and saw them.
She said something to her father, and patted his shoulder, and came along the kerb between the people, smiling.
“Daniel. You’re up.” She stopped a metre and a half away, and looked down at the dog, and the dog looked at the fire truck. “I came round yesterday, Marj will have told you. With a pie. I didn’t know she’d have one in the oven.” She smiled at Marj. “Hello, Marj. How’s the hymn book?”
“Same as ever,” said Marj.
“And you must be Claire.” Celia put out her hand, her right. “Marj has told the whole hill about you.”
Claire shook it. “Has she.”
“She has. You’re the welder. From Minnesota.” Celia let go. “You’re very welcome. It’s a long way to come for a man with a sprained ankle.”
“It wasn’t for the ankle,” said Claire.
Celia laughed. Her eyes went to Thorsen and back.
“How is it? The ankle?”
“Better.”
“And the rest of you?”
“Getting there.”
“Good. That’s good.” She was standing very easily, with her weight on one foot and her right hand in her jacket pocket and the left at her side, the sleeve down over the wrist. “So when are you off home? Back to the van? Or does Claire get you?”
“Norway first,” Thorsen said. “In a couple of weeks. To see Ingrid.”
Something happened in her face, and went, so quickly that if he had not been watching for it he would have had nothing to watch.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course you are. Give her my love. Will you? Tell her—” She stopped. “Tell her I think about him.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Thank you.” She looked along the kerb at her father in his chair. “I’d better get back. He’s had a bad week. That newspaper story’s upset him, and he won’t say so. You know what he’s like.” She smiled at Claire. “Good to meet you. Make him rest.”
She went back along the kerb. The band had gone up the hill and the street went quiet between floats, and Thorsen heard them quite clearly.
“You’re cold,” Ed said.
“I’m not cold, Dad.”
“You’ve had that sleeve down all week.”
“It’s my arm, Dad. Drink your coffee.”
She stood behind his chair again and put her hand on his shoulder, and Ed reached up without looking and put his own big hand on top of hers, and left it there.
Claire was quiet for a while. The parade had come to its end, a man on a ride-on lawnmower towing a wagon full of toddlers in life jackets, and the crowd was beginning to come off the kerbs into the street behind it.
“That woman’s frightened of you,” Claire said at last. Not loudly.
He did not answer.
“She talked to me, and she watched you. The whole time.” Claire looked at the street. “Her right hand never came out of her pocket after she shook mine. And she kept her left arm very still.” She was quiet. “I’m not asking.”
“I know.”
“I’m just telling you what I saw. In case you missed it.” She took Marj’s arm again. “You didn’t.”
Rainy found him at the hot-dog stand outside the Sons of Norway hall, with mustard on her thumb.
“Weather’s set,” she said. “Clear to Wrangell this afternoon, and they’re saying high pressure all week. And the Mounties have given us the valley back.” She licked the thumb. “So I’ve got Celia at six-thirty tomorrow, holiday or no holiday. Up to her stations. She called last night and said first thing Monday, Rainy, before it changes its mind.” She looked up at the sky, which was a high, hazy, washed-out blue, the colour of an old pair of jeans. “Everybody else in town’s going to be in bed with a hangover. And me and Celia over the flats at seven with the sun on the ice. Can’t complain.”
“No,” Thorsen said.
“You want to come? I’ve got the back seats.”
“No. Thank you.”
“Suit yourself,” said Rainy. “You’ve seen enough of that valley, I suppose.” And she went off towards the beer garden with her hot dog.
He gave his own hot dog to the dog, who took it from his fingers as gently as a lady taking a cup, and walked to the end of the building where there was nobody, and called Fraser.
“She’s booked Rainy for six-thirty tomorrow morning,” he said. “Alaska time.”
There was a short pause on the line.
“Thank you,” Fraser said. “That’s very helpful.” Another pause. “Where are you?”
“Outside a hall. With a dog. And four hundred people in the street.”
“Good. Stay there.” Fraser seemed to think about something. “Is Mr. Marsh going up this evening?”
“He said he was. If you wanted me.”
“I want you,” said Fraser. “I’ve thought about it. I’d rather have you where I can see you than in a town with her in it, wondering what you’re going to do. And Ellie wants you, and Ruth wants you, and I’m not going to argue with Ruth. And bring the dog. Ellie says he won’t stay with anybody else.”
“All right.”
“You’ll come up with Mr. Marsh, and in the morning you’ll go where I put you, and you’ll stay there.”
“All right,” Thorsen said again.
At four the two little Larkins were setting off a box of fireworks one item at a time on a flat rock below the breakwater, and Hazel stood behind them with a bucket of seawater in one hand and the fire extinguisher off the boat in the other.
“You can’t see them,” Claire said, looking at the smoke drifting off the rock. “It’s too light.”
“It’s always too light,” said Hazel. “They’re not for seeing.” She did not take her eyes off her brother. “They’re for hearing. That one’s a big one. Read the box.”
It went off with a bang that bounced off the breakwater and the cannery and came back from across the harbour, and every gull in Nesvik went up at once, shouting, and the dog, who was not afraid of helicopters, flattened himself against Marj’s legs, and Marj put her hand on his head and said, “There, there. It’s only the Fourth.”
Gordie had his boat at the transient float at five, fuelled, with two jerrycans lashed in the stern and a cooler that his wife had packed and a sleeping bag for Thorsen rolled in a garbage bag under the bow seat. He was in his good float coat with DALGLEISH RIVER JETS on the back, and had his manifest on a clipboard in a plastic sleeve, and he showed it to Thorsen as he came down the ramp, the way a child shows his homework.
Marsh, G. (operator). Thorsen, D. (pass.). Dog (1).
“Reporting at the Landing,” Gordie said. “Like a citizen.”
A harbour officer checking the moorings stopped and looked at the manifest over Gordie’s shoulder and said, “Well, now I’ve seen everything,” and walked on.
Claire had come down the ramp with him. She had carried his bag. Marj had stayed at the top, by the harbour office, holding on to the rail with one hand and the dog’s lead with the other, until Thorsen took the lead from her, and then she had said, “Mind that ankle,” and turned and gone up the hill on Bev’s arm.
Thorsen put the dog in the boat. The dog went to the bow, where he had sat all the way down the river in May, and lay down on the coiled line with his chin on the gunwale, and looked up the channel towards the flats.
Claire stood on the float with her hands in her jacket pockets and looked at him.
“You’re going back up there,” she said.
It was not a question, and it was not an accusation either. It was a thing she was looking at.
“With a lot of police,” Thorsen said. “And I’ll wait where they tell me.”
Claire looked at him a moment longer.
“That’s new,” she said.
She put her hand flat on the middle of his chest, through his jacket, over the place where the sock had been, the way she had in the dark in the sauna on the shore of Stone Bay, as if to check that the thing in there was still going. It was. Then she took the hand away and stepped back on the float, and did not wave, and he watched her not waving until the breakwater took her.