It took him three days, the way it always had. Colorado, Nebraska, the Cities. Then north, with the farms thinning and the birch and aspen thickening, gone yellow all at once as if somebody had thrown a switch, and signs for bait and gas and taxidermy and Jesus.
The interstate comes into Duluth over the top of a hill.
He had forgotten that. He had forgotten it so completely that when the road crested and the land fell away in front of him he took his foot off the gas without meaning to, and a logging truck behind him leaned on its horn.
The lake.
It filled the whole windscreen. It went out to the edge of the world and over it. There was a city below, a harbour, bridges, ore boats at the docks the length of city blocks, and none of it mattered, because beyond it there was the lake, the colour of slate, with the morning sun lying on it in a single broken line, and no far shore. You could not see the other side. There was no other side. It was a sea that somebody had decided to call a lake.
He was five years old, the first time. His father had pulled over at this same place, on the old road before the interstate, and lifted him up onto the bonnet of the car so he could see. Thorsen remembered the warmth of the metal through his shorts, and his father’s hand on his shoulder, heavy, and his father’s voice.
That’s the lake, Danny. That’s Superior.
Can you swim in it?
You can. Once. His father had not smiled. It’s cold all the way down. It never warms. If you go in, you don’t come up. It doesn’t give anything back.
He had had nightmares about it for a week, and his father had been made to apologise, and had not quite.
He drove down through Duluth and out onto Highway 61, north-east, with the lake on his right hand.
And there were the signs. It was an election year, but the signs at the ends of the driveways were not about the election: blue ones, YES TO THE ARROWHEAD PROJECT — 600 JOBS, and hand-painted ones on plywood and bedsheets, WATER IS LIFE. At one mailbox there was one of each, as though the people inside had decided to let the road settle it.
Nordby came round a headland, the way it always had. A breakwater. A white Lutheran church. A main street three blocks long, with a Legion and a hardware store and a Sons of Norway hall. On the hill above the town, a low brick building with razor wire round the yard at the back. Baptism County Law Enforcement Center.
He drove through without stopping. Two miles on he passed the last house, where a big grey-haired man splitting wood in the yard straightened up with the maul on his shoulder and watched the van go by. Beyond it a gravel lane went off to the right into the trees, and there was a mailbox at the end of it on a post, black, with reflective letters on the side.
THORSEN.
The lane was half a mile long and he remembered every turn of it. There was a steel gate halfway down that had not been there in 1986, standing open, with a chain hanging from the post. Then the trees fell back and there was the Point.
It was smaller. Everything from childhood is smaller; knowing it did not help. A white frame house with a porch on the lake side, on a shelf of black rock that ran out into the water like the prow of a ship. Below it, the fish house, long and low and grey, with a rusted tin roof and a stone chimney at one end. A dock on cribs of piled rock, with a fibreglass boat tied up at the end. Beyond the dock, deep water. Beyond that, the lake, grey and moving, all the way out to where it turned into the sky. Against the trees on the far side of the clearing, a trailer with a blue tarp on the roof. Nils’s, he supposed.
He stopped the van in the yard and turned off the engine. The silence came in through the glass. Wind in the spruce. Water on rock. A gull.
The front door of the house opened and an old man came out onto the porch and stood at the top of the steps.
He was tall still, though not as tall as he had been. He stooped a little at the shoulders, the way big men do when they have spent their lives ducking through low doors and bending over nets. The red beard was white now, and cut short. He wore a checked wool shirt and canvas trousers held up by braces, and rubber boots. His hair was white too, and thick, and stood up in front where he had run his hand through it. His face was brown and creased like an old glove.
But the hands. The hands were the same. They hung at his sides, enormous, the fingers half curled as though they were still holding something.
Thorsen got out of the van.
They stood and looked at each other across the yard. Thorsen found that he did not know what to do with himself. He had known what to do in rooms with men who had killed their children. He did not know what to do with an old man on a porch.
Arne came down the steps.
He came slowly, one hand on the rail, and crossed the yard, and stopped in front of Thorsen, and looked up at him. He had to look up. That was new too.
“Well,” Arne said. “Look at you.”
Then he put out one of the enormous hands, and Thorsen took it. It was dry and hard as wood, and it held on. The knuckles were scabbed, two of them, healing cuts across the backs, the skin around them yellow and blue.
Arne saw him look.
“Net reel,” he said. “Caught it a couple weeks back. Stupid. Seventy-six and I still put my hand where I shouldn’t.” He did not let go. He looked up into Thorsen’s face for a long time, the way you look at a photograph of someone dead. “You’ve got his face,” he said. “Karl’s. Older than I ever saw it. It’s the eyes.”
“He said to say hello,” Thorsen said.
Arne’s grip tightened very slightly, and then let go.
“No, he didn’t,” he said, without any anger at all. “But it’s good of you to say it. Come in. I’ve got coffee.”
The kitchen was the same.
Not the same: there was a new refrigerator, and a calendar from a bait shop with the wrong month showing. But the long scrubbed table was the same, and the black woodstove, and his grandfather’s shotgun on its pegs over the door, and the smell of coffee and woodsmoke and wet wool and, underneath it all, fish. It went in through his nose and took him by the back of the neck and held him.
Arne made the coffee the old way, in a blue enamel pot, with an egg cracked into the grounds, shell and all, and boiled it on the stove and settled it with a cup of cold water. Thorsen had not seen anyone do that since he was a boy.
He watched Arne’s hands do it. They did it without looking.
“Marit died,” Arne said, with his back to him. “Eleven years ago. Cancer. You wouldn’t have known.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’d have liked to see you. She always asked after you.” He brought the pot to the table and poured, and sat down on the bench opposite with a grunt, and looked at his cup. “Karl sent a card when she died. Him and Ana both. A long one. Ana wrote most of it.” He turned the cup a quarter turn. “I never answered it. That’s the only word from him since he went, and I never answered it.”
Thorsen let that lie. He drank the coffee. It was very strong and very clear and tasted exactly as he remembered.
“Tell me about Paul Strand,” he said.
Arne told it better this time. He had had three days to put it in order.
Paul Strand had come to the Point the first time in the second week of September. He had driven up in a little grey Subaru with a Duluth dealer’s frame round the plate, and he had parked at the gate and walked down, which Arne had liked; most people drove in as if they owned it. He was a slight man with glasses and a fleece jacket and a laptop bag over his shoulder, polite, a little nervous. He said he worked for Superior Title & Abstract in Duluth, and that his firm was doing the title work for Laurentian Copper on the purchase of the Point.
“Laurentian’s buying it?”
“Signed in August.” Arne turned his cup round on the table. “Four point one million. For the Point and the shore lots. They want the water. There’s to be an intake out there, off the deep side, and a pipeline up through the woods to the plant. Nothing else. They’ll leave the house. They said I could stay in it till I die.” He shrugged. “It’s a lot of money, Danny. For a fisherman. For Nils, after. There’s no herring left worth catching. I’ve been selling smoked fish to tourists out of a cooler at the end of the lane. Till Labor Day, anyway. I haven’t lit the smoker since.”
Strand had wanted to know about old papers. Family papers. Anything from Arne’s grandfather’s time, Anders, who had come over from Norway and built the place, or from Arne’s father, Halvor. Deeds. Letters. A family Bible. He was very interested in 1924.
“Why 1924?”
“That’s when the deed was. When Anders got the Point.” Arne lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “I told him there wasn’t anything. There isn’t. My mother burned most of Dad’s papers when he died. She was a great one for burning things. There’s a box of photographs in the attic. That’s all.”
Strand had come back the next Saturday and found Nils on the dock instead, and Nils had not liked the questions.
“Nils thought he was looking for something wrong with the title,” Arne said. “To stop the sale. He’d heard there were people in town who’d pay to stop it. The water people. Or some lawyer. He thought this fellow was working for them. He’d got it into his head.” Arne rubbed his face with one hand. “Nils has been — it’s been hard for Nils. He’s forty-nine years old and he lives in a trailer and works on the boats when they’ll have him. That money was going to be the first time in his life anything went right for him. And here comes a man from Duluth in a fleece jacket to take it away.”
“That night, after the Legion, Nils came home,” Arne said. “About half past ten. I heard his truck. I was in bed. I didn’t hear anything else.” He was looking at the table. “I’m a heavy sleeper, Danny. I’ve always been. You could drive a train through this house.”
“Did you know Strand had come back up that night?”
“No.” He looked up. “No. Not till the morning. His car was at the gate. The little Subaru. Nils saw it when he went down to the nets and thought, that bastard’s back snooping, and went to look for him. And found him.”
Thorsen nodded. He did not write anything down.
“The sheriff,” Arne said. “Hollister. He’s a — ” He stopped and chose something else. “He’s sure. He’s very sure. He says Nils went looking for Strand on the Point and they fought and Strand went off the rocks. He says it’s manslaughter if Nils pleads, and murder if he doesn’t. The lawyer says plead.” His voice dropped. “Nils won’t plead. He says he never touched him. Not out there.”
“Do you believe him?”
Arne looked at him for a long moment with his pale eyes.
“He’s my son,” he said simply.
That was not an answer, and they both knew it, and Thorsen let it be.
“There’s something else,” Arne said, after a while. He said it slowly, the way a man sets down a heavy thing he has been carrying and is not sure he is allowed to put down. “There was another truck on the lane that week. More than once. A big black Ford, with a plough mount on the front. I know whose it is. Everybody does. It’s Jarrett Pruitt’s. He works for Hale. Hale Land and Timber. They own the land up behind us, all the way back to the Kettle. They’re the ones selling Laurentian the mine.” He looked at Thorsen. “He was up here, Danny. That week. I saw him turn round at the gate. I told the sheriff. The sheriff said Pruitt had business with me about the sale. I never had any business with him.”
“What night?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know for sure. That week.” Arne turned his cup round. “It might’ve been the Wednesday.”
He went down to the rocks alone. Arne offered to come and Thorsen said no, and Arne nodded as if he had expected it and stood in the kitchen window and watched.
The path went out along the spine of the Point, over bare black rock with lichen on it in orange coins, beside an old iron rail rusted to the colour of dried blood. At the very end the rock rose a little and then dropped away on the lake side, sheer, twelve or fifteen feet down to a shelf of tumbled boulders at the water’s edge, and then deep water.
There was no tape. There was a scrap of yellow plastic caught on the rail where tape had been, snapping in the wind. Nothing else. The lake had been washing the rocks below for ten days.
He stood at the top and looked down.
The boulders at the bottom were the size of cars, black and wet, with the lake sucking in and out between them. A man who went over the edge here, pushed, or falling, or knocked down in a fight, would come down on those rocks from fifteen feet and break whatever hit first. If he went out a little further, with momentum, he would go into the deep water past them, and the deep water here went down a hundred feet in the length of a bus. And then he would not have been found at twenty to seven by a man checking his nets. He might not have been found at all.
Strand had been found on the rocks. Half in the water. With his head broken.
A man who goes fifteen feet off a rock onto boulders, in a fight or out of one, breaks more than one thing. He throws his arms out without thinking. His wrists go, or a shoulder, or his face. Arne had said the head. Only the head, high up at the back; the sheriff had told him so, to explain it. In nineteen years Thorsen had learned that falls hurt people low and all over, and that blows hurt them high and in one place. It proved nothing. A man can fall a hundred ways. But it was not ordinary.
When he turned round Arne was no longer in the kitchen window.
The fish house was not locked. It never had been.
He stood in the doorway and let his eyes come round to the dark. Then he went in.
It was exactly the same.
The net reels along one wall, with the old gill nets still wound on them, stiff with tar. The benches where the fish were dressed, with the knives in a row above them, bright with use, and over the knives, on a nail, a short club of dark wood: the priest, the old fishermen called it, because it gave a fish its last rites. Floats hanging from the rafters. At the landward end, through a low door, the smokehouse, with its racks and its stone firebox, black and cold. And the smell: tar and smoke and fish, and the lake under everything.
And on a cradle of timbers in the middle of the floor, the boat.
She was a herring skiff, twenty feet long, clinker-built of cedar, painted white with a green sheer strake, and she was the most beautiful thing Thorsen had ever seen when he was ten years old. She had been his great-grandfather’s. Her name was painted on her transom in old-fashioned gold letters with black shadows.
SOLVEIG.
He put his hand flat on her side. The paint was smooth and cool. Somebody had kept her up. Somebody had painted her within the last year or two, and varnished her thwarts, and greased her oarlocks. She was not a working boat any more. She was a boat that somebody loved.
He stood there for a long time with his hand on her.
Then he went to the ladder.
It was at the far end, by the lake wall, a plain wooden ladder going up through a square hole into the loft. Beside it, on a nail of its own, hung a long steel torch with a cracked lens. He and Nils had slept up there every summer, on two old army cots, under the roof, with the rain loud on the tin, and lain awake telling each other things in the dark. He went up it now. It took his weight with a groan. He put his head and shoulders through the hole.
Two cots. Still there. No bedding on them now, just the bare canvas, grey with dust. Boxes. A broken outboard motor. A child’s life jacket, faded orange, hanging from a nail.
And at the lake end, in the gable, the window.
It was a small square window with four panes, salt-crusted, and it looked straight down onto the dock and out across the cove to the lake. He had forgotten it. He had forgotten it completely, the way he had forgotten the hill above Duluth. And now he could not stop looking at it.
He climbed the rest of the way up and crossed the loft, stooping under the rafters, and stood at the window.
The dock below. The fibreglass boat rocking at the end of it. The grey water of the cove, and the rocks on the far side, and beyond them the lake going out to the edge of the world.
He had stood here before.
Not in the day. At night. He knew it the way you know a smell. He had stood at this window at night, barefoot, on these boards, with his hands on this sill, and looked down at that dock, and something had been happening down there. There had been a light. There had been —
He did not know what there had been. He reached for it and it was not there. There was only the feeling: cold boards under his feet, his breath on the glass, his heart going very fast. And a sense, absolutely certain and absolutely without content, that he had been somewhere he should not have been and seen something he was not supposed to see.
He stood with his hands on the sill.
“Danny?”
Thorsen turned his head.
Arne was standing at the foot of the ladder, in the dim light of the fish house below, looking up at him through the square hole. He was very still. Thorsen had not heard him come in. He did not know how long he had been there.
They looked at each other.
Then Arne smiled, and the creases of his face rearranged themselves into the face of a big red-bearded man on a dock, forty years ago, with his arms folded and his eyes half closed, letting a boy steer.
“Supper’s on, Danny,” he said.