The gale had taken the end off Arne’s dock.
The waves had lifted the decking off the last crib in a single piece, like the lid off a tin, and set it down thirty feet away on the boulders at the foot of the Point, upside down, with its spikes in the air. On Thursday morning it was still there, glazed in an inch of ice, and Arne wanted it back.
“Dad put that down in ’62,” he said. “You don’t throw away good wood because the lake moved it.”
So they went out on the rocks with a chain and a come-along. Thorsen moved like a man who had been beaten, because he more or less had. There was a bruise across his ribs where the edge of Claire’s bow ramp had caught him, the colour of a plum going bad.
“In that tin box of hers,” Arne had said, on Wednesday night, when he read about it in the News Tribune. “In that sea.” And he had put his hand on the back of Thorsen’s neck, briefly, and gone to put the coffee on.
Arne worked the come-along, and the frame came up off the boulders a foot at a time. Halfway up, the hook slipped with a crack like a breaking oar, and the frame dropped and swung, and Arne lunged for it and his boots went from under him on the glazed rock.
Thorsen got him by the coat. He had not thought about it. He took a fistful of wool at the shoulder and held on, braced against the boulder with the lake sucking at the rocks a yard below, and for a moment the whole weight of the old man came onto his arm.
It was not an old man’s weight. It was the weight of a big man who had hauled nets every day of his life, and it went through Thorsen’s shoulder and into the bruise on his ribs like a nail.
Then Arne had a hand on the ring bolt, and his feet under him, and he was up, and laughing.
“Christ, Danny. That’s twice in ten days somebody in this family’s been fished out. You went white.”
“Ribs.”
Arne bent and took up the slack on the come-along again, and his hands were perfectly steady. “Come on. Let’s get her up before the lake changes its mind.”
He spent the afternoon in the van.
Since the night of the snow there were two alarms above the bunk instead of one, two small green lights, like the eyes of something patient. He sat with the heater ticking and the folder open on his knees and took two sheets out of it: Leonard’s letter, and a photocopy of a page from Gene Mahoney’s notebook.
He knew how to do it. You put the paper down. You said nothing. You watched what their hands did, and the silence did the work. He had been good at it, and had not much liked himself afterwards.
He had never done it to anybody who had taught him to tie a bowline.
At five o’clock the kitchen light came on in the house, and he smelled woodsmoke and then onions. He put the sheets back in the folder and went in.
They ate first. Thorsen would not do it to a man over his supper.
It was fish chowder, and Arne talked about the dock. He was going to bolt it down this time instead of spiking it. He would need Nils for the heavy end. He said the name and stopped and looked at his bowl, and then went on talking about bolts.
When the bowls were empty Thorsen washed them and put them on the shelf, and Arne watched him. Then Thorsen sat down again across the long table and took the two sheets out of the folder and laid them side by side on the scrubbed wood under the lamp, facing his uncle.
He did not say anything.
Arne looked at him. Then he looked down at the paper.
He took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket, from behind the round tin of snuff, and put them on. Thorsen watched his hands.
They lay on the table on either side of the paper. The scabs on the knuckles had healed into thin pink lines. For the time it took to read the letter they did not move at all. Then the right hand came up and touched the edge of the second sheet, the photocopy of Mahoney’s notebook, and drew it a little closer, and Arne read that too.
His face had gone a colour Thorsen had seen before, on men in hospital corridors, waiting.
The kitchen clock ticked. Down on the rocks the lake went in and out between the boulders, still not over the storm.
Arne took his glasses off and folded them and put them down on top of the letter, along the edge of the paper, and put both his hands flat on the table, and looked at them.
“Where did you get Gene Mahoney’s notebook?” he said at last. His voice was quite steady.
“He’s in a home in Two Harbors. He kept it.”
“Gene was always a great one for writing things down.” Arne was still looking at his hands. “And this. Leonard Lacourse’s letter. That’s what you went to Kansas City for.”
“Yes.”
“And you asked me. Three weeks ago, at this table. You asked me if Leonard Lacourse came to the Point that night. And I said, not that I ever heard.”
“Yes.”
“I know what I said, Danny.” Arne lifted his head and looked at him across the table, and his pale eyes were wet. “I’ve been saying it for forty years. I said it so long I nearly got to believing it.”
He put his hand up to his face and touched the left eyebrow with two fingers. There was a scar there, a white seam through the grey hair of the brow, the kind of scar every fisherman on the shore had somewhere. Thorsen had seen it every day for a month. He had not looked at it.
“Five stitches,” Arne said. “Gene counted them. I remember him counting them. Standing on the porch, looking at my face, and his lips moving.” His mouth twisted. “I said I’d done it myself. In the mirror. With a needle and thread out of the kitchen drawer. He didn’t believe me. I could see him not believing me.” He took his fingers away from the scar. “It wasn’t me sewed it. You’ve worked that out. That’s why you’ve got that face on.”
Thorsen kept his hands where they were.
“It was Karl sewed it,” Arne said. “And it wasn’t a net reel. And it was me, Danny. Not Dad. Me.”
“Dad was going to give it back,” Arne said. “That’s what you need to know first. Grandfather told him what he’d done when he was dying, in ’41, and Dad carried it forty-five years, and that spring, with his heart going and Leonard at the courthouse with the deed, he made up his mind. He sent word to Stone Bay with Walt Erickson. He was going to tell Leonard all of it, and Leonard could take it to the Bureau, and the Point with it. He never told me. I heard.”
“How?”
“Marit and me had the room over the kitchen then. The stovepipe comes up through the floor. You can hear a spoon on a saucer.” He looked up at the black pipe. “Karl and Dad were at the cribbage board, there, the way they did when Karl was a boy. I’d gone up at ten. I put my hand on Dad’s shoulder going past. About eleven Dad said to Karl, Leonard’s coming. At midnight. That was all he said. Karl never said much.”
“And you lay there.”
“I lay there. Marit asleep beside me. And I thought about the Point. Not money. There wasn’t any money then. The dock and the boat and the nets. Nils, nine years old, asleep out in that loft with you. I thought, he’s going to give my boy’s place away to say sorry for a thing he never did.” He stopped. “That’s how I put it to myself. I want you to know I put it like that. So it would sound like a reason.”
The lamp hissed.
“Dad fell asleep in his chair after his pill. I could hear him through the pipe, the way he breathed with his heart. Karl sat on with him down there. I heard him put a log in the stove, and then nothing. And at half past twelve I heard a little outboard out on the cove, and then it stopped, and then a boat touching the dock.” Arne’s voice had gone very quiet. “I went down the back stairs in my socks, so Karl wouldn’t hear me, and out the back door, and put my boots on in the yard. I went through the fish house. I took Grandfather’s priest off its nail over the knives.” He looked at Thorsen. “I’d like to tell you I don’t know why I took it.
“He was on the dock under Dad’s lantern. Dad had hung it on the post for him at dark. A tall man in a clean shirt. He’d shaved. He put his hand out to me.” The big hands on the table closed slowly. “He was glad, Danny. He was glad to see me. And I said, Dad’s gone out ahead to the rock, to show you where. He doesn’t want the house to hear. I’ll row you.”
“Show him where.”
“Where Grandfather put Joseph over. Dad had told me once, when I was grown, and never again. Off Gull Rock.” He breathed. “And Leonard said, that’s good of you. He said that.”
He told the rest of it to the table, the way a man walks a road he has walked every night since in his sleep. Where his voice went he waited for it to come back.
They took the Solveig. She had the old Johnson on her that summer, but he said the house was asleep and sound carried on the water, and Leonard understood that, and Arne rowed. They towed the Lund behind on a line. It was flat calm, with the moon going down behind the hills and the stars coming out in the water, and you could hear the drips coming off the oar blades between strokes. It took the best part of half an hour to make the mile.
“Out there he turned round in the stern and looked back at the house,” Arne said. “All dark. Just Dad’s lantern on the post. And he said, Your father’s going to give me my land back. He told me like I’d be glad. Like it was good news he’d come all that way to bring me.”
“And you hit him.”
“I’d shipped the oars. I had the priest under my coat on the thwart.” He said it without any change in his voice at all. “I hit him once. He came up off the seat and got hold of an oar, the loom of it, and caught me across the eye with it. Here. To the bone. I couldn’t see out of that side for the blood.” Two fingers on the scar again. “Then he went over the side. And I sat in the boat and didn’t put out my hand.
“I took his oars out of his Lund, and his anchor, because a man would’ve used them, and I put them over. Then I stood on her gunwale and turned her over. It took me a long time.” He shook his head slowly. “I left the plug in. I never thought about the motor. Gene Mahoney thought about the motor.”
He had rowed home with one eye, harder than he had ever rowed in his life. He put the Solveig in the slip and got down into the water to his waist and sluiced her out with the fish bucket, because there was blood in her, his and the other.
“And Karl came down. In his shirtsleeves, the way he’d sat at the board, with his hair flat on one side from sleeping in the chair. He stood on the ways and looked at me in the water.” Arne’s voice cracked, straight across, and he waited, and it came back. “And I said, It’s done, Karl. It was for the Point. For all of us. For Dad.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. He went up to the house for his bag.” Arne looked at the table. “He sat me on the bench under that bulb and put five stitches in me, and his hands were steady as a rock, and he never asked me one thing. Not one question. He’s never asked me anything in his life.” There were tears in the white beard, and he did not wipe them. “At half past three the car went up the lane. I stood in the fish-house door with my face sewn up and watched the lights go up through the trees. That’s the last I saw of my brother.”
“And your father.”
“Dad came out in the yard at three, barefoot, and looked at me, and never said a word to me about it. Not that night, not in eight years. Gene came the next afternoon and Dad sat on the porch and told him, He never came. I waited. He said that for me. The only lie I ever heard him tell.”
He got up then, slowly, like a man much older, and felt about in the top drawer of the dresser among the string and the candles, and came back and put something down on the table between them.
It was a small brown glass bottle with a white screw cap and a typed label gone brown. HALVOR THORSEN. NITROGLYCERIN 0.4 MG. ONE UNDER TONGUE AS NEEDED FOR CHEST PAIN. Two Harbors Drug. 6/3/86. There were three tiny white pills left in the bottom of it.
“That was in his coat when he died,” Arne said. “In ’94, in his chair on the porch. He’d carried that one bottle eight years. There were new ones in the cupboard. I don’t know why he carried that one.” He sat down again. “I kept it because he died with it in his mouth, and I’d stopped him saying it.”
Thorsen looked at the bottle. Then he looked at the black pipe going up through the ceiling.
“Where’s the priest?” he said.
“On its nail. Over the knives. Where it’s always been.” Arne did not look away. “I see it every morning.”
On a nail since Reagan, over a bench where a hundred thousand fish had been killed with it. Whatever had been on it in 1986 was in the lake.
“Paul Strand,” he said.
“No.” Arne said it at once, and then again, slower, both hands on the table. “No. Before God, no. He came twice in September and I told him nothing. I never saw him that night. I swear it on Marit.”
Thorsen had heard men swear on their wives before. Some of them had meant it.
“But he’s dead for me, Danny.” Arne leaned across the table, and his voice went low and hard. “Don’t you see it? He went digging in what Grandfather did, and what I did, and that’s a billion dollars to Bryce Hale. That fellow Pruitt on my lane. They killed that boy for what’s under this house. And it was me put it there.”
He sat back. “I’d made up my mind to tell it. All of it. I had, Danny. And then that fellow was dead on my rocks and they had Nils in a cell, and there was no telling it.” He breathed. “I’ll tell your Finn all of it. Every word. When Nils is home. Not before. You know what Curt Hollister’ll say if I go in there now? He’ll say the boy killed that man to keep his father out of Stillwater. That’s what he’ll say, Danny, and twelve people in Two Harbors will believe him, because it’s a Thorsen story.”
“I’m not going to keep this for you.”
“I know. Give me till he’s home.”
Thorsen said nothing.
The worst of it was that Arne was right.
He could hear a county attorney say it. The father killed for this land in 1986, and the man from Duluth had found it out. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s not a motive. That’s two. It would hang Nils higher than anything Hollister had now, and Thorsen would have carried the rope up the hill himself.
And he knew what he had been given, because he had taken a hundred of them. A statement to a nephew at a kitchen table: no caution, no lawyer, no tape. A drowning closed as an accident before the Berlin Wall came down. No body, no boat, a weapon that had killed a hundred thousand fish since, and one other witness, eighty years old in San Pedro, who had never said a word and was Thorsen’s father. On Wally’s desk tonight it would be worth nothing against Arne, who could say in the morning that his nephew had misheard an old man’s grief, and a great deal against Nils. A confession you could use was one a man walked in with and signed. This one was only something Thorsen knew.
So if he gave the old man anything, it was a bet: that a man who had just put a thing like that down on the table would rather walk it in himself than have it carried for him. He had won that bet in interview rooms by leaving the door open. He had lost it, too.
There was nothing left on the Point for the old man to get rid of, and he would not run. He had never lived anywhere but here, and his son was in a cell on the hill in Nordby. The only thing that could go missing in a week was Arne himself, in his chair, the way his father had gone, with the truth still in his mouth. Thorsen did not like that, and could not make it come out any other way.
On the other side of the table was a man who had been at the bottom of the lake off Gull Rock since the summer Thorsen was eleven, and a girl of ten on a porch watching for a running light. And his father, under a bulb in the fish house, cutting a thread and driving to California, and saying nothing for the rest of his life.
That was what the men in this family did. They sat in this kitchen and knew, and waited. He was sitting in it.
“Don’t tell Nils,” Arne said.
He said it quietly, looking at the bottle.
“He loved his granddad. He loves me.” He turned the bottle with one finger, a quarter turn, the way he turned his coffee cup. “Let him have one of us.”
“I won’t tell him.”
“Thank you.” Arne pushed himself up from the table with both hands and went to the stairs door and opened it, and had his hand on the rail, and one foot on the bottom step.
“A week,” Thorsen said.
Arne stopped.
“Not till he’s home. He may not come home, Arne. Hollister’s seen to that. A week from tonight. Then I tell Wally Heikkinen everything you’ve told me, with you or without you. Come in with me. It’ll go better for you, and better for Nils.”
Arne did not turn round. He nodded, slowly, twice, the way a man agrees a price for fish he would rather not have sold.
“A week.”
“And the priest stays on its nail.”
“It’s been on that nail since before you were born, Danny,” Arne said. “Where would I take it?”
He went up. Thorsen heard him on the stairs, and the boards overhead, and the creak of the bed, and the black pipe carried every sound of it down to the table: a man lying down in the dark.
He went down to the fish house without a torch. He knew the way now.
Inside the door he found the switch by feel, and the bulb over the bench came on, on its twisted flex, and lit the bench and the knives and nothing much else. His father had sat here with the bag open beside him.
Over the knives, on its nail, the priest. A short club of dark wood, the handle worn pale by three generations of hands. He did not touch it.
Then he went along the wall where the net reels stood, running his hand over the old tarred nets the way he had as a boy. They were stiff and cold, the twine gone grey and furred with age.
On the third reel his hand stopped.
At the height of his hand, on the outermost turn, one strand of the net was cut clean through. Not frayed, like the rest. Cut, with a knife, and the tar at the end of it bright and black and new, the way the inside of a thing looks when it has only lately been opened to the air.
He stood with his fingers on it.
He thought of a twist of tarred twine in Wally’s evidence envelope. He thought of Arne at the kitchen window all that morning with his hands in his pockets, watching Claire under the van, not coming down. Park it up by the house. Where I can see it from the window.
He had told himself at the table that there was nothing on the Point for the old man to get rid of. He had not thought to count himself.
He took out the phone and photographed the reel, twice, the cut end bright against the grey. Then he went back to the bench and put the bulb out.
The dark came down, and he found the cradle by walking into it, and climbed in over the Solveig‘s gunwale and sat down on her middle thwart, and let himself do the thing he had not let himself do in a month, or since he was eleven.
He went up the ladder.
Not in his body. In the other way. He went up through the square hole into the loft, and across the boards under the rafters, barefoot, the boards cold, and Nils breathing in a heap on the other cot, and he put his hands on the sill of the gable window and his face to the salt-crusted glass.
The dock below. A light on it. A lantern, hung on the post at the end, swinging a little, making the shadows go back and forth.
A boat. Going out. The shape of a man in it, rowing, his back to the lake and his face to the dock, the oars going in and coming out without a splash, the way you row when you have done it all your life. A big man. Big in the shoulders. Filling the boat.
He could not see the face. There was a cap, pulled down, and under the peak of it nothing but shadow.
That was all. He reached for more and there was only glass and cold and his own heart going very fast.
He opened his eyes in the dark of the fish house.
He knew what a child’s memory was worth after somebody had told the child the story. An hour ago it had been a shape. Now it had a name, and he could not tell any more which had come first.
But he remembered the porch. He remembered a stooped thin old man with a blanket on his knees and a paper bag of peppermints, who held the rail with a shaking hand when he went down the steps to the dock, and could not have rowed a boat across the cove.
His grandfather had not been big that summer. His uncle had.