His mother fed him sarma for breakfast.
He had eaten eleven of the cabbage rolls the night before. She had counted. She put four more in front of him at six o’clock with a look that dared him.
“You’re thin,” Ana Thorsen said.
“I’m two hundred and twenty pounds, Ma.”
“On you that’s thin. Karl, tell him he’s thin.”
“He’s thin,” said his father, from behind the Lancet.
The kitchen had not changed. A blue oilcloth on the table, and medical journals in drifts at one end held down by a fruit bowl. On the wall by the door, the clock from her parents’ house down by the fish harbour, with Saint Nicholas painted on its face, holding a little boat and looking at it with mild concern, as if it were leaking. By the door, on the floor, where it had always been, his father’s bag.
His mother did not ask him about Minnesota. She had been a fisherman’s daughter before she was a doctor, and she knew when to leave a net alone.
His father turned a page. He was thinner. Karl Thorsen had been broad all his life, and the hands were still the hands, but the rest of him had drawn in round them. His neck stood clear of his collar. He was reading with his face close to the page, the way he had once told Thorsen never to.
He lowered the journal and looked over it. The eyes had not changed. Grey and steady and kind.
“Walk with me,” he said. “Before it gets warm.”
They went down the hill at his father’s pace. Twice in four blocks somebody leaned out of a car to say Dr. Thorsen, and his father asked after a knee, a daughter, by name. Down to the water at Cabrillo Beach, and out along the breakwater.
It was a wall of granite blocks running two miles out into the sea, and at the end of it, small in the haze, the lighthouse at Angels Gate. His father had walked him the whole way out on Sunday mornings when he was a boy. They went a quarter of a mile now, with the stick ringing on the stone and his father’s hand on his arm at the gaps, and stopped where the wall bent.
It was twenty-one degrees. A sea lion lay on a block below them, enormous and indifferent, and pelicans went past in a line just above the water.
He told his father all of it, like a report, from the deed book to the ash in his uncle’s smoker, because if he told it any other way he would not get to the end. At the April 1924 letter his father closed his eyes for a moment. At the gas station in Duluth, and the man who dropped the nozzle, he nodded.
“I did drop it,” his father said. “The owner came out and picked it up for me. A big man with a Legion pin. He asked if I was all right, and I told him I was a doctor. I’ve never known why.”
Then he told him what Arne had said at the kitchen table in November.
His father had stopped walking. He stood quite still on the granite, and the sea lion lifted its head and looked at them and put it down again.
“Did he tell you I sewed him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you I heard the man whistling, and sat there?”
“No.”
His father looked out at the sea for a long moment.
“Then he was kinder to me than I’ve been to him,” he said. It came out flat and quiet, like something laid on a table. “When you rang and asked if Dad was asleep, I knew you’d worked out where I was sitting.” He put his hand back on Thorsen’s arm. It was trembling, very slightly. “Not here. Your mother should hear this. She should have heard it the night it happened. Take me home, Danny. Slowly. I’m old.”
His mother was at the sink peeling potatoes when they came in. She looked at her husband’s face and put down the peeler.
“Sit down, Ana,” his father said. “Please.”
She dried her hands and sat at the end of the table with her back very straight, the way she sat at the bedside of a child whose parents were about to be told something.
“Forty years,” she said. “Is it that?”
“It’s that.”
“Good,” Ana Thorsen said. “Then tell it. I’m not getting any younger, and neither are you.”
His father put his hands flat on the oilcloth and told it to them.
“Dad wrote to me that spring,” he said. “He’d never written to me in his life. When you come this summer, Karl, bring the stethoscope. I want you to listen to my heart and tell me how long. So I listened. Congestive failure, angina, nitroglycerin in his shirt pocket that he took like peppermints. I told him a year. He nodded. He said, That’s enough.
“On the fourteenth he asked me to play cribbage after supper. Mother went up at nine. She took her hearing aid out at night and put it in a saucer, you could have fired a cannon. Arne went up at ten. You were asleep, Ana. The boys were in the loft.”
“You came up at ten and kissed me and said you’d be late,” his mother said. “You smelled of his pipe.”
“At eleven he told me. His hands were shaking so much he couldn’t peg. He said a man was coming at midnight, by boat. Leonard Lacourse. I’m going to tell him what my father did, Karl. I’ve written it down. He touched his shirt pocket. There was an envelope in it, with the nitro. I’ve carried it since I was eight years old, and I’m going to put it down before I die, and you’re going to sit here and see me do it.” His father’s voice did not change. “He told me some of it then. Enough. And we went on pegging. Fifteen-two, fifteen-four. I was forty, with a boy of my own asleep in the loft, and I’d never known anything about my family at all.”
Saint Nicholas ticked on the wall.
“He went to sleep about half past eleven, after his pill. In Mother’s rocking chair by the stove, waiting for midnight. He’d been so frightened all day, and his heart was so bad, that he just went. I took his pulse. A hundred and ten and all over the place. I thought, if I wake him and he goes down that path in the dark and does this thing, he’ll die on the dock. So I let him sleep. I thought Lacourse would come up to the house, and I’d wake him then, and they could do it at the kitchen table with me there and the nitro.”
He breathed in.
“At half past twelve I heard an outboard. Small, coming in slow. Then it stopped. And somebody down there started whistling. Like a boy waiting for a bus. There was a light on the dock, I saw it on the glass. I sat with my back to it and his wrist in my hand and listened, and I didn’t go to the window, and I didn’t go down. I thought, he’ll come up the path in a minute, and I’ll wake Dad then.” He looked at his hands. “I didn’t go down. I’ve told myself ever since it was because I had a patient. That’s true. It’s also true that I didn’t want to go down. I wanted it to be morning, and to drive home.”
“Karl,” his mother said.
“Let me finish. If I stop I won’t.” He did not look at her. “I must have slept too. When I woke it was a little before two and the stove had gone down and there was a light in the fish house. The bulb over the bench. And I went down.”
His hands had closed. He opened them again a finger at a time, the way he would have told a patient to.
“Arne was in the slip, where the ways go down, in the lake up to his waist. He’d got the Solveig half up on the rollers and he was standing beside her with a bucket, sluicing her out. There was blood all down the left side of his face from a cut through his eyebrow, to the bone, and he kept wiping it out of his eye with his wrist and going on with the bucket. And the water he was throwing out of her was dark. I could see it in the light from the bench. It ran down the ways into the lake.
“I said his name. He wasn’t surprised. He said, It’s done, Karl. Very calm. Like a man telling you he’d finished the nets. It’s done. It was for the Point. For all of us. For Dad.”
The clock ticked.
“And I didn’t ask him what,” his father said. “That’s the whole of it. I knew a man was meant to be on that dock at midnight. I’d heard his outboard. I’d heard him whistling. I could see what was coming out of the bilge. I’d been a doctor fifteen years, I knew how much an eyebrow bleeds, and it isn’t that much. And I said, Come out of the water before you get hypothermia. Let me look at that.”
His mother’s hand went across the oilcloth and took his. He did not seem to notice.
“I had the bag. I sat him on the bench under the bulb and put in lidocaine and closed it. Five-oh nylon, five interrupted sutures. You line the edges up by the hairs. I lined them up by the hairs.” His voice did not rise. It went lower. “I closed the wound of the man who had just — and I made a good job of it, Danny. Mahoney was right. I was proud of those stitches while I tied them off.”
Thorsen found that his own hands were flat on the table too. He did not remember putting them there.
“And when I was cutting the last suture,” his father said, “I looked up. And you were there.”
The hatch.
His mind offered him the window first, the way it always had: the dock, the lantern, the boats going out. He put it aside. Not the window. The window looked out at the lake. The hatch looked down, into the fish house.
It came up through him whole then, the way a net comes up when the first float breaks the surface and the rest follows in one long pull. The cold boards under his knees. Nils breathing in his cot behind him. The square hole in the floor of the loft, and below it, in the yellow circle of the bulb, his uncle sitting with his head tipped back and one side of his face black, and the lake running off him onto the floor, and his father bending over him with something small and bright in his fingers, drawing a thread through his uncle’s face, again and again, like a man mending a net.
And his father looking up.
Their eyes had met, across fifteen feet of fish house, under the floats hanging from the rafters. He had seen his father’s face change, and go still, and become a face he did not know. He had pulled his head back and crept on his hands and knees to his cot and pulled the blanket over his head and lain there with his heart going so hard he thought it would wake Nils.
“You came up the ladder,” Thorsen said. His voice sounded to him as if it were coming from the next room. “An hour later. You put your hand on my shoulder and said, Wake up, Danny, we’re going home. And I pretended to wake up.”
“Yes.”
“You knew I was pretending.”
“Yes,” his father said. “And you knew I knew. And neither of us said anything. And we never have.” He looked up at last, and his eyes were wet and quite steady. “I didn’t know how long you’d been there. I didn’t know what you’d seen from that window before I came down. I never asked you. Not in the car, not in Nebraska, not once since. I couldn’t bear to. If I asked, I’d have to know. And if I knew, I’d have to do something about my brother.”
His mother was crying without any sound, holding his hand in both of hers.
“So I packed the car. I woke you, Ana, and said we’re going, now, and don’t ask me. You cried in the yard.”
“I thought you’d had a fight with your father,” his mother said. “About the land. Half my life I’ve been telling people my husband fell out with his family over a will.” She wiped her face with the back of her free hand, furiously. “Bože moj, Karl. A will.”
“I let you think it.”
“Yes. You did.” She held his hand harder. “Finish.”
“Dad came out onto the porch while I was loading the car,” his father said. “In his nightshirt, barefoot. Lacourse had never come up to the house, and I was carrying suitcases. He didn’t ask me anything. He looked at my shirt, which had Arne’s blood on it. And he looked at the fish house, where the light was still on. I watched him find out what his son was. It took about as long as it takes to say it.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He took the envelope out of his shirt pocket and put it in my hand and closed my fingers on it. He said, Take it away from here, Karl. Don’t let it stay in this house.” His father stood up, with one hand on the table. “I’ll get it.”
They heard him in the bedroom, the drawer of the bedside table, the old bed creaking. His mother reached across the table and took Thorsen’s face in her hand the way she had on the doorstep, and held it.
His father came back with a Bible.
Thorsen had seen it all his life on the bedside table on his father’s side, and had never once wondered about it. His father opened it somewhere in the minor prophets, and there it was, pressed so long that the pages round it had taken its shape.
A long cheap envelope, gone the colour of old ivory. Sealed. On the front, in pencil, in a cramped upright hand like a schoolboy’s:
Leonard Lacourse.
“I never opened it,” his father said. “It wasn’t mine. It was his, and he was dead, and I couldn’t give it to anybody else without saying where I’d got it, and why I’d run. Every night since, I’ve put my glasses down on top of it and turned out the light.”
“Dad.”
“If I’d taken it to Mrs. Lacourse that autumn. If I’d driven back up and given it to that deputy who was kind to the little girl.” His voice was very quiet. “Paul Strand would never have had to go and look. He’d be alive. Wouldn’t he, Danny.”
Thorsen did not answer. There was no answer that was both true and kind, and his father had never in his life wanted the second without the first.
He did it properly, because it was all he could do for any of them.
His mother had a box of examination gloves in the drawer by the stove. He photographed the envelope on the open Bible with the 7-Eleven phone, front and back. Brooks would have his hide for opening it at all. He slit it along the top with the thin knife his mother used for the cabbage, and photographed that, and drew out two sheets of lined paper folded in three. Pencil, pressed hard.
They read it together, his mother with her glasses on and her hand over her mouth.
Thorsen Point, August 14 1986
To Leonard Lacourse, and to whoever else reads this.
My name is Halvor Thorsen. I am seventy one years old and my son Karl who is a doctor says my heart has a year in it. I want to put this down while I can.
On the 19th of November 1923 I was eight years old. I was on our dock when my father Anders Thorsen went out in the skiff Solveig with Joseph Lacourse to lift the nets that were set off Gull Rock. Joseph gave me a piece of maple sugar from his pocket before they went. I was on the dock when my father came back in the dark. He came back alone. He told my mother the lake had taken Joseph. He did not look at me.
In 1941 when my father was dying he told me the rest. He said he hit Joseph from behind with the fish priest, the little ironwood one that hangs over the knives, and put him over the side by Gull Rock, because Josiah Hale said that if Joseph’s land changed hands the shore at the Kettle would be his and the debt for the tug forgot. In March Mr. Pike who was Hale’s clerk brought him a paper with an X on it for Joseph’s name and my father signed under it as the witness. He told me Joseph could write his name better than he could.
I have lived on this land all my life and raised my sons on it. It was never ours. I want it given back to Joseph’s people, the shore and the pine both, and I want it known that I said so. I have told my son Arne where it was done and never why. He loves this place more than I ever did and I am afraid of what it will do to him. I will tell him the rest after.
I am sorry, Leonard. I should have said this when your father was alive. I have been a coward for sixty three years.
Halvor Thorsen
Under the name he had ruled a line and written beneath it, very small, Witness. There was nothing on the line. Nobody had signed it.
Down the hill a ship’s horn sounded in the harbour, two long notes, and a gull answered it.
He went to his old room in the afternoon, because there was nowhere else in the house to go.
It had been tidied every week for thirty-odd years and never changed. Fernando Valenzuela mid-windup on the wall, eyes on heaven. He lay on the bed with his boots on, which he would have been shouted at for at fourteen, and looked at the ceiling.
There had been nothing behind the door that he had not seen. A boy at a hatch. A man at a bench. A face looking up. And then the two of them agreeing in one look, without a word, never to open it, and keeping that agreement every day of their lives with great tenderness. He had taken it into the academy, and into eleven years of interview rooms, and into his marriage. Joanna had asked him why not, Dan, just tell me why not, and he had said I don’t know, and it had not been a lie.
He lay there until the light in the window went gold, and then grey.
When he came out his mother had gone to choir, because it was Wednesday, and she had said at the door, with her eyes red, that God could listen to her murder the Rutter whatever had happened in her kitchen. His father was standing at the front window with the lamp off, looking down at the harbour.
A tug was going out past the end of the breakwater with its running lights on, red and green, towards the black of the open sea.
Thorsen went and stood beside him.
“You said on the phone you’d known since Flagstaff.”
“Since you said Nils, and a man under the Point with his head broken.” His father did not turn round. “I’d known since I was forty what my brother could do. I told you not to go. That was all the courage I had.”
“You let me sleep in his yard.”
“Yes.” Below them the tug drew level with the end of the breakwater. “Every night since, I’ve thought about it.” He took his glasses off and folded them. “That’s what frightened me on the phone in October, Danny. That he’d asked you. Arne never asked anybody for anything in his life.” He put the glasses in his pocket. “I’m eighty. I’m tired of carrying my brother. I’ll tell your policeman. Tomorrow.”
“Brooks.”
“Brooks. Good.” He looked down at the harbour. “Will they arrest him?”
“Yes.”
His father nodded slowly. The tug went on out past the light at Angels Gate until it was only its two lights, and then only one.
“I was four when he was born,” Karl Thorsen said. “Dad was on the lake from April to November, and Mother had the fish to sell and the house to keep. I carried him round on my hip. I sat up with him when he had croup.” He put his hand on the cold glass. “I taught him to row, Danny.”