On the Friday afternoon, while Nils sat in an interview room at the LEC with a lawyer from Duluth, Wally drove across the bridge to Superior a second time and waited by the fence at Cooper Elementary, because the first thing he had told Jenny Strand had not been true. He rang Thorsen at Claire’s that night and told him about it in a few lines. She had sat on the bench with her hands in her cardigan pockets and heard him out, and asked one thing: whether Paul had known what was happening. Wally had told her no. Paul had been looking at the lake. “She said Paul would have bought him a beer,” Wally said. “Then she went back in for her coat.”
The drum started before the priest came in.
It was a big hand drum, the size of a cartwheel, laid flat on a stand at the front of the church below the altar rail, with four men sitting round it on folding chairs in their coats. They struck it together, slow, a heartbeat, and the sound went down through the floorboards and up through the soles of Thorsen’s boots, and the church, which had been full of the small noises of people in winter coats settling into pews, went quiet.
St. Francis Xavier had been built by people who did not have much money and had spent all of it on the windows. The snow was coming down past them, slow and thick, so that the light in the church was white and soft. An oil stove ticked by the door. The pews were full. People stood along the walls.
Thorsen stood at the back, by the stove.
Claire was in the front pew. He could see the back of her head, the braid, grey-streaked, lying straight down her dark wool coat. Tyler sat beside her, very straight, and did not look round. On her other side sat a small, thin woman of seventy-five or so with white hair cut short and a face that was Claire’s face with twenty-five more winters on it, and beside her a tall stooped man with a white beard, holding her hand.
Rose Defoe was in the second pew with her arms folded. In the aisle, in a wheelchair, with an oxygen line he kept pushing away from his face, sat Gene Mahoney, and Wally stood behind him in a corduroy coat. Kayla Novak stood against the side wall in uniform with the new patch on her shoulder.
On the other side of the door from Thorsen, at the back, Gary Erickson stood with his father. Walt was in his Korean War cap. Gary had his hand under the old man’s elbow and was looking at the floor.
Nils was in cell seven.
Thorsen thought of him there now, on the steel bench under the glass blocks, with nothing to do with his hands.
Father Benoit came in from the side in a white chasuble, slowly, because of his knees.
He said the Mass in English, with here and there a few words in Ojibwe that the old women in the front pews answered him in.
There were no coffins. There was the drum, and two tall candles either side of the rail, and between them, on a small table covered with a white cloth, two books lying open: a tall narrow one in black cloth with its spine mended with tape, and a newer one beside it in red.
When it came to the homily Father Benoit did not go up into the pulpit. He came down the two steps and stood beside the table and put his hand on the old book.
“In November 1923,” he said, in his quiet, dry voice with the French somewhere far back in it, “Father Rousseau, who had this parish then, wrote that a Mass was said for the soul of Joseph Lacourse, who was lost on the lake. He wrote what he was told. In August 1986 nobody wrote anything at all. Leonard Lacourse’s wife would not have a Mass said over an empty lake, and Father Dufresne let her be. I came five years later. I have turned past that empty page every November since and never asked her again. I am sorry for that.”
He took his hand off the book.
“Today we are going to write down what is true.”
He nodded to the front pew, and Claire stood up.
She walked to the table and stood beside the priest, small and straight in her dark coat, and looked out over the church.
“Joseph Lacourse,” she said. “My great-grandfather. Who could write his name. He was not lost on the lake. He was killed on it, on the nineteenth of November, 1923, by a man who took him out in a boat to pull nets.”
The snow came down past the windows.
“Leonard Joseph Lacourse. My father. Who built bridges, and whistled. He was not lost on the lake either. He was killed on it, on the fourteenth of August, 1986, by a man who took him out in a boat to talk.”
She looked down at the books.
“And Paul Strand. Who found it out, and rang me twice to say so, and I wiped him off a tape both times.” She did not look up. “He said he’d call me after. Write him down too, Father. He hasn’t got anywhere else.”
She stood a moment looking at the back wall, at the stove; and Thorsen, who was standing beside the stove, did not move.
“That’s all,” she said. “That’s what’s true.”
Father Benoit bent over the table and wrote, slowly, in a careful old-fashioned hand, in three places: once in the margin of the old book beside a line in faded brown ink, once at the foot of the last written page of the new one, and once more on the line below it, a name that had never been in either. Then he blotted them, and the four men round the drum lifted their sticks.
It was an honour song; Claire told him afterwards. He knew only that the men round the drum began to sing, high and hard, a long falling line of sound, and that everybody stood, and that he could feel the drum in his chest where the lake had been.
At the end of it Father Benoit went to the back of the church himself, past Thorsen, on his bad knees, to where a rope came down through a hole in the ceiling by the door. He rang the bell twice. The sound went out over the bay through the snow and came back off the far shore.
Then he stood holding the rope and looked down the church at Claire. She had turned round in the pew. She nodded.
He rang it once more.
Thorsen knew what it was. He had stood at Split Rock in November beside her and heard a bell rung for twenty-nine men, and then once more, for all the others. Across the door, old Walt Erickson had taken his cap off and was holding it against his chest.
Gary stopped beside him on the way out with his father on his arm, and settled the old man’s cap back on his head. “I went in to see Nils this morning. My sister’s boy.” He looked at the snow coming down past the door. “Bank’s had the cabins since November. Becky’s got a room for Dad in Two Harbors.” Then: “I stood at the edge of that yard and didn’t go in. This whole shore’s been not going in for a hundred years.”
He took his father down the steps.
Outside it was snowing harder. The drummers carried the drum out between them, wrapped in a quilt, like a sleeping child.
Mahoney came down the ramp at the side of the church with Wally braking the wheelchair, and stopped beside Thorsen and looked up at him with his bright old eyes.
“Drain plug in,” Mahoney said. “I wrote that down. First time anybody read it.”
“You were the young one,” Claire said.
She had come up behind them.
“Flat calm,” he said. “You were right.”
She bent and kissed him on the forehead, and he let her.
The small white-haired woman came to him herself, across the churchyard, alone, in a long grey coat, and stopped and looked up a long way. She did not seem to mind.
“You’re Karl Thorsen’s son.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Marie Kerrigan. I was Marie Lacourse.” She kept her hands in her pockets. “I don’t suppose Claire’s mentioned me.”
“She has.”
“Then you know I burned his papers.” She said it plainly. “Old Halvor came to my house in September of ’86. He stood on my porch with his hat going round in his hands, and he could not get one word of it out. And I had a ten-year-old girl in the kitchen and I’d decided we were going to live. So I shut the door on him.”
“He wrote it down,” Thorsen said. “The night Leonard came. He gave it to my father to take away. It’s in the court now. He just couldn’t say it.”
“No.” She turned her head and looked across the churchyard at nothing in particular, at the corner of the church where the snow was drifting against the white clapboard.
“That boy carried soup up my steps,” she said. “With his father. Every week, the winter I had pneumonia. He was fourteen. He’d stand behind Arne holding the pot with a dish towel round it, red to the ears, and say Hello, Mrs. Lacourse, like it hurt.” Her voice did not change at all. “I’ve been sick about that soup for a week, and now I’m sick about him. Tell him the soup was a kindness, whatever his father was. Tell him I knew that.”
“I’ll tell him.”
She took one hand out of her pocket, and for a moment he thought she was going to touch his arm. She put it back.
“And you tell your father he can stop now. Whatever it is he’s been doing for forty years. He can stop.”
She went back across the snow to the tall man by the car, and he opened the door for her, and she got in.
Claire found him on the shore.
He had gone down the path below the church and stood on the rocks at the edge of the ice. Stone Bay had frozen in the week since Gull Rock, a white sheet running out under the new snow to where the water was still black and steaming faintly. Across the bay the old tug stood on its pole outside her shop, pointing out at the lake.
She came and stood beside him.
“Rose says the Point’ll come to the Band in the end,” she said. “Some part of it to Joseph’s heirs. Me and Tyler and forty cousins I’ve never met. I don’t want it. I couldn’t stand on that dock.”
“What do you want?”
She thought about it, honestly, the way she thought about a weld.
“A stone. In there, in the churchyard, with his name on it. There’s nothing to put under it. I don’t care.” She looked at the ice. “I’ll cut it myself.”
“You’d do a good job.”
“I’d do a perfect job. That’s what I’m afraid of. I’d never finish it.”
“Nils asked me to say something about the boat,” Thorsen said. “He wants her to go to the Band. Clean, he said.”
“Rose has it on her list. And the skiff, if the Band wants her.” She looked out at the black water past the edge of the ice. “I brought his boat back in. Somebody had to. I didn’t look at her.”
“Every time I look at you I’m going to see that dock,” she said.
“I know.”
“I’m going to look anyway.” She did not turn her head. “I wanted you to know I’d thought about it.”
She leaned, very slightly, so that her shoulder was against his arm.
“You’re going. Monday.”
“I promised. Christmas Eve. And I’m driving my parents.”
“In the van. Your mother’ll love that.”
“She’s going to inspect your heater installation with a stethoscope.”
Something happened at the corner of her mouth, and this time she did not put it away.
“Ice goes out in April,” she said. “Most years. Middle of April there’s a morning you come down and the bay’s open and the whole lake’s moving again, and you can hear it.” She did not look at him. “That’s all. I’m just telling you. It’s a thing that happens up here.”
She took her right hand out of her pocket. There was a key in it.
It was the Ford key, Ray’s key, worn smooth. She had held out her hand for it in the truck outside the LEC yesterday, without explaining, and he had given it to her.
“The tape was mush,” she said. “Since the lake. I took it off and put new on.”
He took it. There was a new strip of masking tape round the head, wound on flat and tight, the way she did everything, and on it in black marker a capital R. It was not Ray’s R. Ray’s had leaned backwards, always. This one stood up straight. She had tried to copy it; he could see where she had tried. And then she had written it her own way instead, because it was her tape now as well.
“It’ll start,” she said. “Ray would want it run.”
He put the key in his shirt pocket, in front of the napkin, and buttoned it. They stood on the rocks a while longer, not saying anything, and then Gus barked once from the truck up by the church, and they went back up the path together.
On the Sunday Wally drove him inland to a lake outside Virginia, Minnesota, and they sat for an hour on a cedar bench in Wally’s sauna on the shore, in the dark heat, with the stove hissing and the sweat running off them and the frozen lake white in the one small window. Wally had said in the car that Thorsen was not allowed in the hole in the ice this year, on medical grounds, and after that neither of them said one word. It was the best hour he spent in the state.
It was minus thirty in Claire’s yard at a quarter to six on Monday morning, and the van started first time.
He sat in it with the engine running and watched the windscreen clear in two half-moons from the bottom. The new window in the back door, which Claire had set into a steel frame she had welded up herself, was clear on the inside without a feather of frost. Beside the two green lights above the bunk, wedged into the edge of the shelf where he would see it from the pillow, was a faded photograph of two boys on a dock.
The kitchen door opened and she came out onto the step in her parka with a mug in her hand, and Gus pushed past her legs and stood in the snow.
She did not come over. They had said what there was to say on the shore. She looked at him through the windscreen, and he looked at her, and then she lifted the mug about an inch.
He put the van in gear.
In the mirror he saw Gus run a little way down the drive after him, and stop, and sit down in the snow.
The interstate goes out of Duluth over the top of a hill.
The road climbed away from the water through the dark, and at the crest, with the sky going grey in the east behind him, he looked in the mirror.
The lake filled it. Slate-coloured, flat, going out to the edge of the world, and all along it the smoke standing up off the water in long white columns, lit pink at the tops where the first of the sun had found them.
Then the road went over the hill and it was gone.
Professor Brekke telephoned at ten, somewhere south of the Cities, with the land gone flat and white on either side and the wind lifting the snow off the fields in long pale snakes across the road.
“You are driving. I can hear it. Do not crash. I will be brief, which is not my nature.” Something rustled. “There is one more letter. It was not in the catalogue, because it was not from Anders. It was to him. Solveig wrote to her brother in the summer of 1925, after his letter about Joseph, and he sent it back to her without opening it. He wrote one word on the front, in pencil, across her writing. Retur. And she kept it, sealed, for the rest of her life.” She cleared her throat. “I opened it on Thursday. I am eighty-four. I have stopped asking permission of the dead.”
“What did she say?”
Her voice changed and became careful, a reader’s voice. “Anders. I have your letter, and I have not burned it, and I will not. You must go to the Indian’s wife. You must go to the sheriff of that place and tell him. If they hang you, they hang you, and God will see what you did at the end, and not only what you did in November. I could not carry it alone. I have told our priest. I am sorry, brother. Now there are two of us, and that is a little lighter.”
The snakes of snow ran across the road in front of him and under the wheels and away.
“He never read it,” Thorsen said.
“No. He lived sixteen more years on that shore and never read it. She was braver than him.” A pause. “Ingrid Thorsen Eiksund, who gave us the letters, is alive. She is eighty, in the house above the harbour at Ulsteinvik, and she asks for news of the American slekt, the kin.”
“I don’t know if she’d want me. After she knows.”
“She knows. I told her. She asked anyway. That is what asking is, Mr. Thorsen.” The dry voice softened, very slightly. “Ulstein in May. The light that never quite goes, and the mountains across the water white down to the sea. There. I have been sentimental. Drive carefully.”
She rang off.
On the Tuesday morning, at half past eight, he stopped for fuel at Ogallala and sat in the van with a coffee and the phone in his hand. It had come back on in the hospital with a small chime, as if nothing had happened. He found the voicemail with the 626 code and listened to it again, all eleven seconds of it.
Then he called the number.
It rang four times. He nearly hung up.
“Hello?”
“Jo. It’s me.”
A silence, with a kitchen in it. A radio, playing something with strings.
“Dan.” Her voice had not changed. “Oh. Hi. Where are you?”
“Nebraska. I’m driving home for Christmas.”
“Good. That’s good.” He heard her sit down. “I’ve been reading the paper. About Minnesota. It said you went into the lake.”
“I’m all right.”
“You always say that.”
“This time it’s true.”
“Jo,” he said. “When you wanted kids. And I kept saying next year.” He stopped. It was harder than the lake. “It wasn’t you. I know what it was now.”
For a while there was nothing on the line but the radio.
“I know it wasn’t me, Dan,” she said at last, quietly. “It took me a long time, and a lot of money on a woman in Pasadena with a box of tissues. But I got there.” She breathed. “Thank you for calling to say it.”
“Do you have them? Kids?”
“A girl. She’s four. Lucy.” He heard her smile. “She plays the piano like a person hitting a wasp.”
“Good.”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “It is. I’m glad you’re all right, Dan. I really am.”
He sat with the phone in his lap a while, and then he started the engine and went out onto the interstate, west, with the sun behind him.
At the top of the Cajon Pass, on the Wednesday night at half past eight, he rolled the window down. It came in soft. Fourteen degrees, smelling of sage and diesel and oranges and, very far off, the sea.
It was ten past ten when he turned up the hill above the harbour in San Pedro. The porch light was on at his parents’ house. It was the only light on in the street.
He parked at the kerb and turned off the engine. The heater ran on for a minute, cooling itself down, the way Claire had shown him, and stopped.
The front door opened before he was out of the van.
His father stood in the doorway in a cardigan over his pyjamas, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and the light behind him. He did not come down the steps. He stood there, eighty years old, in his slippers, the way he must have stood at the window for an hour, watching the road.
“I left it on,” Karl Thorsen said. “The light. In case.”
“I saw it.”
His father looked at the van at the kerb, at the driver’s door that a woman in Minnesota had beaten straight with a rubber mallet, at the new window in its steel frame. Then he looked at his son.
“Come in, Danny. Your mother fell asleep on the couch. She said to wake her. I’m not going to.”
Thorsen came up the steps and stopped on the one below him.
“Dad. Leonard Lacourse’s wife said to tell you something.” He had thought about how to say it for two thousand miles, and there was only the one way. “She said you can stop now.”
His father stood in the doorway with the light behind him and his hand on the frame.
“You told me about Nils on the phone,” he said. “Friday night. I’ve had five days with it.” He did not move from the door. “I rang my brother to give him a night. I thought I knew what he’d do with it.” His hand tightened on the frame. “He sat up writing a lie for his boy. I’d have written the same one for you.” He was quiet for a while. “She’s wrong, Danny. I don’t think I can stop. But I’ll try, if she asked.”
Then he stood aside.
“I’ll make you some eggs,” he said.