There was no music on the rack.
He saw it from the door. Trinity was full on Sunday morning, fuller than it had been at the festival, and he and Claire had come in late, behind a family from the hill, and found two places at the end of the back pew. The organ stood under the window with the light coming down on it, and Marj sat at it in her good navy coat with her back very straight, and the brass rack in front of her where the hymnbook should have been was empty. The pastor stood at the lectern with her glasses on top of her head and did not look at it once.
“She’s taken it off,” Claire said, low.
“Yes.”
“Good,” said Claire, and sat down.
Ed Harker was not there. His place was in the fourth pew on the left, by the pillar, where he had sat every Sunday since his wife died, Marj had said, and before that beside her. Bev Marchand sat in it, very upright, with her handbag on her knee, as if she were keeping it for him.
Celia’s name was not said. Nobody had decided that it would not be. It was simply not said, the way nobody in a fishing town says the name of a boat that has gone down until the season after.
The service went the way services go. Thorsen stood when people stood and sat when they sat, and Claire, who had been brought up Catholic on the north shore of Lake Superior and had views about Lutherans, stood and sat a half-second after everybody else, watching them.
The pastor preached for nine minutes on the parable of the lost sheep, and did not make it about anything, which he thought was very brave of her, in that town, on that Sunday. When she came to the prayers she read the list of the sick and the travelling in her ordinary voice, and then she stopped, and took her glasses down off her head, and put them on.
“And we remember Sindre Eiksund,” she said, “who sat in this church on Thursday nights a year ago May and fell asleep in the back pew. Who was a guest here, and was kind. And his grandmother Ingrid, in Ulsteinvik, who knitted him a sweater. And everybody who loved him and was not told the truth about him for a year.” She looked down the church. “And we pray for the ones who did not tell it. All of them. Because that’s the job.”
Somebody in the middle of the church made a small sound and stopped it.
“Amen,” said the pastor, and took her glasses off again.
The last hymn was the one with the difficult middle.
He knew it in the first two bars. He had sat in the back pew on a Thursday night in June and listened to the altos go flat in it, and he had heard Marj stop in the middle of it and sit with her head on one side, listening for the next note in the next room. That was Sindre’s favourite, Marj had said.
The congregation stood. Marj’s hands came down on the keys, and the organ, which had been given in memory of men lost at sea, filled the church to the roof.
She played it as she had played everything for fifty-six years, without looking down. Her eyes were on the wall above the empty rack. Her feet went on the pedals. The first verse went by, and the second, and Thorsen, who had no ear and could tell nothing about music except when it was going wrong, found that he was not singing, and that Claire beside him was, in a low, flat, tuneless alto that did not care who heard it.
The difficult middle came in the third verse.
He heard her come up to it. He heard the organ go into the place where it changed, under the voices, and he heard it falter: one wrong note, low down, a pedal note in the wrong place, and a half-beat where the bottom went out of it. The whole church heard it. A hundred and forty people in their good clothes heard the organ stumble, and not one of them stopped singing. They went on, louder, if anything, carrying the tune over the gap the way men carry a boat over a bar, and Marj sat at the organ with her head on one side in the hole they had made for her, listening.
Then she found it.
He saw her find it. Her hands moved on the keys, and the bottom came back into the music, and she was in the next bar, and the next, and through, and out the other side into the last verse at full voice with all the stops out, as if there had never been anything there at all.
The pastor, at the lectern, had her eyes shut.
When it was over Marj sat with her hands in her lap. Then she put them back on the keys and played the people out, something Thorsen did not know, quick and bright, the way you play children out of school. People went past him up the aisle into the light, talking. Two or three of them, he saw, put a hand on her shoulder as they passed behind the organ bench, and she did not turn round, and did not stop.
“She got through it,” Claire said, outside, on the steps, in the wind.
“She did.”
“I thought she’d stop.” Claire looked out at the harbour, with her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “I’d have stopped.”
“You’d never have stopped. You’d have welded it.”
She thought about that.
“Probably,” she said.
The pastor came out behind them in her robes with the wind getting into them, shaking hands, and got to the end of the line and stopped beside Thorsen with her glasses on top of her head again.
“She came to the church on Wednesday,” the pastor said, not looking at him, looking at the people going away down the steps. “With the hymnbook. The big one, the one I had enlarged. She put it on my desk and said she wouldn’t be needing it, thank you, and would I please stop turning pages behind her like a performing seal, because the whole choir had known since Easter and it was embarrassing for everybody.” She put her hand up to hold her hair out of her eyes. “I’ve been a pastor for twenty-six years. I have never been so pleased to be told off.”
She went back in to take off her robes, and they heard her laugh go up into the roof inside, at something somebody had said.
He told Marj on her porch that afternoon, with the dog lying across the top step in the sun and the harbour going blue below them, and he did it badly, because he had been rehearsing it since Prince George, and nothing that has been rehearsed since Prince George comes out well.
“I’m going to Norway on Wednesday,” he said. “With my father. To see Ingrid.”
“I know. Claire told me.” Marj was shelling peas into a bowl by feel, with the pods going into a bucket at her feet. “Who’s having the dog?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Then talk.” She split a pod with her thumb. “Don’t stand there working up to it. Frank used to do that. Stand in the doorway working up to it, and I’d know from the doorway, and I’d have to wait for him to get there.”
So he talked. He had spent most of Saturday on Marj’s computer with the screen enlarged until a single word filled it, and the answer was that the dog could go to Norway. A rabies shot at least twenty-one days before he travelled. An EU health certificate from an accredited vet, endorsed by the USDA in its own time. A tapeworm pill no less than one day and no more than five before he landed. And thirty kilos of dog in a crate in the hold of three aeroplanes in July, with a man upstairs who could do nothing about any of it.
“And back again,” Marj said.
“And back again.”
“For a week.”
“Ten days.”
She split another pod, and ran her thumb down it, and the peas went into the bowl.
“That dog has spent a winter at a dump at thirty below,” she said. “And a spring sitting on a gravel bar waiting for a boy who wasn’t coming, and a night on a mountain with you, God help him, and a bear. And you want to put him in a box in the dark under an airplane and fly him to Norway so he can sit in an old lady’s kitchen and not understand a word anybody says.” She put the pod in the bucket. “Leave him here.”
“I was going to ask.”
“You didn’t have to ask. I’m telling you.” She did not look at him. She looked at the dog, a little to the left, the way she looked at everything. “He knows the porch. He knows the road. He knows where the butcher’s is. He’s been coming and going from this house since May. He’ll sit by the door and look at the road for you every day you’re gone, and I’ll take him down the harbour in the morning, and that’ll be two of us that can’t read the boat names.” She found another pod. “We’ll manage. I used to take Frank’s old dog down every morning, before. Twelve years. I’d forgotten how it was, walking down there with something on the end of a rope that’s glad to be going. You don’t walk like an old woman with a dog. You don’t have time.” She split it with her thumb. “We’ll manage.”
The dog lifted his head at the word harbour, which he had learned, and put it down again.
“Thank you, Marj.”
“Don’t thank me. I want him.” She said it quite simply, shelling peas. “I haven’t wanted anything for two years. I’d forgotten what it was like. It’s a nuisance.”
She put the bowl down on the boards beside her chair.
“Come back for him, Daniel,” she said. “Or I’ll know why.”
The sign was on the fence by the gate.
Marj had walked past it twice a day since the Saturday Claire came, and not looked at it. Now she stood up.
She went down the porch steps with one hand on the rail, and the dog got up and went down with her, and she walked along the path to the gate with her eyes on the ground a little to one side. At the fence she put out her hand and found the top of the sign, and took hold of it, and pulled.
It did not come. Claire had put the post a long way into the wet ground. Marj pulled again, harder, with both hands, and her face went red with it, and the sign leaned and stuck.
Claire had come out onto the porch behind him with two mugs of coffee. She put them down on the rail, went down the path, and took hold of the post below Marj’s hands without a word, and the two of them pulled it out together, with a long sucking noise and a clod of earth on the end.
Marj stood holding her end, breathing hard.
“Shed,” she said.
They carried it round the side of the house between them, the small old woman and the tall one, with the dog going ahead to show them the way, and put it in the shed behind the crab pots, face to the wall. Marj shut the door on it.
“I’ll call Wrangell tomorrow,” she said. “They can have their sign back. They can come and get it. I’m not carrying it down that hill.” She brushed her hands together and looked at Claire. “You’ve got a good grip.”
“I’m a welder.”
“So I hear. He never stops talking about it.” She went back round to the porch. “My daughter’s going to have a fit.”
“No apartment in Bellingham,” Thorsen said.
“No apartment in Bellingham,” said Marj, with great satisfaction, and sat down, and picked up the peas.
Claire’s jet left at a quarter past one on Monday, and people sat on their tailgates in the car park to watch it come in. She and Thorsen stood at the fence. She had the duffel and the tool bag, and he thought she had worn everything in the duffel twice and washed it in Marj’s sink, and had not minded.
“Gus has eaten a boot,” she said. “The boy who’s minding him says. One of his own. He says Gus is very sorry.”
“I’ll bet.”
“He’s waiting at the end of the dock. Every morning. The boy says that too.” She looked at the jet, which was opening its door at the top of a set of steps a man had wheeled out to it across the tarmac. “That’s two dogs three time zones apart, sitting at the end of something, waiting. I don’t know what you do to them.”
“I don’t do anything.”
“No. That’s what you do.” She picked up the bags. Then she put them down again. “You’re going to Norway.”
“Wednesday. Karl’s coming. Ma’s sending a list.”
“Then you’re coming back here. For the dog.”
“End of the month. Then the ferry, and the van, and the road.”
“And then where?”
He did not answer at once. Somebody’s grandmother at the fence beside them was waving with both hands at somebody coming down the steps who could not see her yet.
Claire looked at him. She looked at him the way she looked at a weld when she had finished it and taken off her helmet, all the way along, to see whether it would hold.
“September,” Claire said. “The house, not the van.”
She picked up her bags.
“Bring the dog.”