He went back to the Stone Bay road the next morning with one word in his head. Paul Strand had asked Nils whether he had ever heard of a man called Lacourse, and a woman called Lacourse had told him to freeze.
The roll-up doors were open. The dog was lying in the middle one again. This time it got up when the van pulled in, and came out across the frozen gravel stiff-legged, with its head low, and stood ten feet from the driver’s door and looked at him.
He got out slowly and let it look. In the end it came and smelled his hand, and the van’s front tyre, and then lifted its leg on the tyre, holding his eye while it did it, and went back to the doorway and lay down.
“He doesn’t like you,” Claire Lacourse said from inside.
“He’s made that clear.”
She came out into the light. She was in the welding jacket again, and a wool cap, and she was holding a mug of coffee in both hands. She did not offer him one. She stood in the doorway beside the dog and looked at him with no expression whatever.
“I said go to Duluth.”
“I went to Duluth.”
“And you came back.”
“I came back.”
She looked past him then, at the van, and stopped. She came out of the doorway and across the frozen gravel with the mug still in her hand and walked down the driver’s side, slowly, looking at the long dent in the door and the black smear across it and the mirror he had taped back on with duct tape, and then she crouched at the front tyre and put her thumb on the gouge in the sidewall.
“That’s not a deer,” she said.
“No.”
“Where?”
“On the cliffs above the Gooseberry. Last night. A pickup with a plough mount leaned on me on the curve.” He said it flatly. “He wanted me over the rail.”
She stood up. She looked at the door, and at him, for longer than she needed to.
“Huh,” she said. Then, to the dog: “Gus. If he does anything stupid, bite him.” And she turned and went back inside, and left the door open, which Thorsen decided to take as an invitation, since it was the only one he was going to get.
The shop was warm. There was a woodstove going in the corner, made out of an old boiler, with a kettle on it. Along the back wall there was a long workbench with every tool hung on a board above it, and Thorsen saw that each tool had its outline drawn round it in black marker, and for a moment he could not breathe.
She saw him looking.
“What?”
“Nothing. A friend of mine kept his tools like that.”
“Then your friend had sense.” She went to the stove and poured coffee from the kettle into a second mug, black, and held it out to him without looking at him. He took it. “You’ve got ten minutes. I’ve got a plough truck coming in at ten with a cracked frame, and a man who wants to argue with me about it.”
He told her about Duluth, some of it: the title work, the 1924 deed Paul Strand had thought was wrong, a man in the chain who was dead before he signed. She listened with her eyes on the stove and her mug held against her chest, and she did not move at all until he said allotment, and then her mouth tightened, very slightly, as if something had touched a tooth.
“He called me,” she said, when he had finished.
“Strand?”
“In September. The middle of the month. He left a message on the shop phone.” She nodded at an old answering machine on the bench by the door, the kind with a little cassette, buried under invoices. “A polite man. Nervous. A title examiner from Duluth, researching some land on the shore that he believed might concern my great-grandfather, and would I be willing to talk to him at my convenience.” She drank some coffee. “I wiped it.”
“Why?”
She looked at him then.
“Because I’ve spent my whole life not talking about my great-grandfather’s land,” she said. “That’s why.”
She told him. She did not sit down to do it. She stood with her back to the stove and her mug in both hands, and the dog came and lay across her boots, and she told it in a flat, even voice, as if it were a job sheet she was reading out to a customer: what was broken, what it would cost.
“Joseph Lacourse. Stone Bay Band. When they cut up the reservation he got a hundred and sixty acres at the mouth of the Kettle. Shore, and white pine behind it, the best left on the shore. Held in trust. You couldn’t sell it without Washington’s say-so.” She drank. “He drowned. That’s the story. November 1923. Went out to pull nets and never came back. The lake doesn’t give them back, they said. They always say that, like it’s a law of nature. And the next spring it turned out he’d sold the land. The pine went to the Hales, and the shore went to — ”
She stopped.
“To my great-grandfather,” Thorsen said.
“To Anders Thorsen. Yes.” She did not look away. “My great-grandmother took her kids to her sister’s in Stone Bay, and they were poor, and then they were poorer, and my grandfather went to the boarding school at Pipestone and came home not speaking the language. Every family on this shore’s got a story like it. You get on with your life.”
November, and then the spring. He had given her Paul Strand’s words ten minutes ago, a man in this chain who was dead before he signed, and only now heard them himself. From the way she held her mug, she had heard them the first time.
“But your father didn’t.”
She looked down at the dog.
“My father,” she said, “was an ironworker. He built bridges. He walked on beams four hundred feet up in Chicago and Minneapolis and came home every spring with money and stories. He was the strongest man I ever knew, and the funniest, and he could whistle like any bird you named. And in the spring of 1986, when I was ten, somebody up at the Band office was clearing out an old filing cabinet and found a copy of that deed. And my father read it. And he said, That’s not his mark.”
“Not his mark?”
“My great-grandfather could write. He went to the mission school. He wrote his name in the front of his Bible. My grandmother had it. He wrote it in the church register when he got married. Joseph Lacourse, in a good round hand. And here’s this deed, with an X on it. His mark.” She said the words with great contempt. “Why would a man who could write his name put an X?”
“So my father started,” she said. “He wrote to the Bureau, and the congressman, and the paper in Duluth. He filed a claim on the government’s forms. People laughed at him, some of our own people too. Somebody put a dead dog on our porch. He didn’t care. He was like a man with a fever. He said, They stole it, Claire. They stole it and they wrote it down in a book and they called it law.”
She bent and pulled the dog’s ear, and he groaned and let her.
“And then in August he said he was going to the Point,” she said. “To see old Halvor Thorsen. Your grandfather. He said the old man had sent word. He had something to tell him. He wouldn’t say what.” She looked at the stove. “He was so happy that evening. He shaved. He put on a clean shirt. He went down to our dock in his own boat, an old Lund with a ten-horse Evinrude, and he waved to me, and he went off up the shore late, after dark, and the lake was like glass. I sat on our porch and watched for his running light coming back. My mother tried to make me come in. I wouldn’t. She sat out there with me in the end. And in the morning a man from the Coast Guard came to the door with his hat in his hand.”
“They found the boat.”
“Upside down. Off Gull Rock, a mile out from your uncle’s dock, off the mouth of the Kettle. No motor running, no gas left in the tank, the plug in. No sign of him. The sheriff said a squall must have come through. There was no squall. I watched the lake all night. It was flat calm till dawn. I told the deputy that, a young one, he wrote it down, he was kind to me. The sheriff said I was ten years old and I’d fallen asleep.” Her voice did not change at all. “Four days later they closed it. Accidental drowning.”
Thorsen stood very still with the coffee going cold in his hand.
The fourteenth of August, nineteen eighty-six. She had said it on the first day, by the van, with her order pad in her hand. He had not let himself put it next to the other thing. Now it sat beside it whether he liked it or not: a car running in the lane with its lights off, his mother’s hands steering him through the dark, his father’s face. We’re not going back, Danny.
The same summer. He did not know if it was the same night. He did not want to know, and he knew that he was going to have to.
“My mother and I let the claim go,” Claire said. “It had eaten him. We weren’t going to let it eat us too. She married again, a fisheries biologist, a good man, and I came back at twenty-five and took over this shop from the man who’d taught my father to weld. I’ve never been in the Band office about that land. I’ve never read that deed. I’ve never said Joseph Lacourse’s name to my son.” She put the mug down on the bench, square. “And now a man from Duluth leaves me a message saying he thinks it might concern my family, and I wipe it. And two weeks later he’s dead at the bottom of your uncle’s point.”
She looked at him.
“So you tell me, Thorsen,” she said. “What exactly did you come here for?”
He told her the truth. She was not a woman you told anything else to.
“I came because my uncle asked me to,” he said. “My cousin’s in jail for a killing I don’t think he did. I think Paul Strand found something in that deed, and somebody didn’t want him to say it out loud. I don’t know if any of that has anything to do with your father.” He put his mug down beside hers. “I didn’t know any of this until this week. I was eleven. My family drove away from the Point one night that summer and never went back, and nobody ever told me why.”
She looked at him.
“I remember you,” she said.
“You said.”
“No. I didn’t say. You said.” She folded her arms. “You were a skinny blond kid with sunburnt ears and a California voice, and you couldn’t skip a stone to save your life. You followed your uncle around like a dog. And one day he came down to the dock with a smoked cisco, and you gave it to me. You held it out in both hands like it was a present. And your face went red to your ears.” Something happened at the corner of her mouth, and was put away again. “I ate it on the way home. I didn’t give my father any. It was the best thing I ever ate.”
He found, unexpectedly, that he did not know what to say.
“Your uncle smoked that fish,” she said. “He was kind to me. Everybody on this shore says Arne Thorsen’s a good man. He brought soup to my mother when she was sick, years after. And my father went out from that dock one night and never came back, and your family drove away the same summer and never came back either. And I’ve lived eight miles down the road from that most of my life, and said good morning to Arne Thorsen in the post office, and not thought about it, because if I thought about it I would have to do something, and there’s nothing to do.”
Out in the yard the plough truck was coming down the gravel, orange, with a man in the cab already pointing at something.
Claire looked at the truck. Then she looked at the van, with frost still on its roof.
“How cold was it at the Point last night?”
“I don’t know. Cold.”
“It got down to fifteen at my place. It’s colder out on the Point, the wind comes straight off the water.” She picked up her gloves from the rail by the stove. “That’s an empty steel box with the heat going straight out through the walls. You’ll be dead by Christmas, and they’ll find you in the spring when somebody notices the smell. Bring it round the side. Bay three. I can start on the walls while I wait on the heater. You’ll have to help. I’m not lifting panels for a man your size.”
He looked at her.
“Why?”
“Because somebody already tried to put you in the lake once this week,” Claire Lacourse said, “and I’d rather you didn’t die in my county.” She pulled on her gloves. “And I’ll pull that dent out while I’m at it. It offends me.” And she went out to the plough truck to argue with the man in the cab.
He helped.
It took most of two days. They stripped the back of the van to the steel, and he laid Ray’s bins out on a tarpaulin in rows, because that was what Ray would have done. Claire looked at the rows, and at him, and went back to cutting foam board and wool batting. In between she took the driver’s door off and beat the dent out of it from the inside. They did not talk much, and when they did it was about the work.
On the second evening she sat on an upturned bucket in the open rear doors with a mug of coffee and looked at the slit foam mattress leaning against the shop wall.
“Whose van is it really? It’s not yours. There’s a tyre gauge in those bins that’s older than me, and it’s been calibrated. Nobody calibrates a tyre gauge.”
He sat down on the new plywood with his legs out of the open doors and told her about Ray Okafor. Not all of it. Eleven years at two desks pushed together, a pegboard with every tool outlined in black marker, a widow who put a key in his hand. She had seen the news; she did not need the rest.
“He kept it well,” she said finally. “You can tell a lot about a man by his engine.” She drank the last of her coffee. “Mine never would’ve let a battery terminal go green like the one on my truck.” She meant her father. He could hear it.
The dog came out of the shop and lay down across the open doorway of the van with its back against Thorsen’s boots, and sighed, and went to sleep.
Claire looked at it.
“Traitor,” she said.
He drove back to the Point on the Thursday night with the van smelling of glue and new wool.
At the last house before the lane there was fire in the yard. A burn barrel, flaring orange behind the woodpile, throwing sparks up into the spruce, and Gary Erickson standing over it in the cabins jacket with a sheaf of envelopes in one hand, feeding them in one at a time and watching each one go before he gave it the next. He turned his head as the headlights came along the road, and stood with an envelope in his fingers and watched the van go by, as he had watched it on the Sunday with the maul on his shoulder.
Half the shore burned its rubbish in a barrel. Thorsen knew that. He thought anyway about a notebook that twenty people had seen in the Legion and nobody had found since, and he watched the fire in his mirror until the trees took it.
The house at the Point was dark. There was no light in the kitchen and none upstairs. But across the clearing there was a light in Nils’s trailer, a low yellow one, behind a curtain that did not quite meet in the middle.
He turned off the engine and got out, and did not shut the door, and walked across the frozen grass until he could see through the gap.
Arne was sitting in his son’s armchair, a big brown recliner patched with tape, facing a television that was off. He had his boots on and his coat on, and he was holding a can of Nils’s beer in one of the enormous hands, unopened, resting it on his knee. He was not drinking it. He was not looking at the television, or at anything in the trailer. He was looking at nothing, at a place in the air a little way in front of him, the way Thorsen had seen men look at the wall of a hospital corridor.
Thorsen stood in the dark and watched him. Arne did not move. Once his thumb went over the ring-pull of the can and stopped there and did not pull it.
Thorsen went back to the van and closed the door very quietly and climbed into the back. It was still cold. The heater was still on a truck somewhere. But lying on the mattress in the new dark, with the wool round him on three sides and the foam over his head, it was a different kind of cold. A held cold. The cold of a room, not of the night.
He lay awake and thought about a man in a clean shirt going out across flat water in a boat with a ten-horse Evinrude, waving to his daughter on a porch. And about an old man in his son’s chair, holding a can he did not open.
The light in the trailer was still on when he slept.