On Wednesday afternoon he came into Northfield, a river town forty miles south of the Cities with two colleges on two hills facing each other across the valley like rival churches. St. Olaf was the one to the west: buildings of yellow-grey stone with steep slate roofs and pointed windows, very Norwegian and very serious, as though somebody had tried to build a fjord out of limestone.
Heikkinen’s grey Ford was parked outside the library with the engine running and the window down. He was eating a sandwich.
“Use of force training,” he said, through the window. “Four hours of PowerPoint. A man from Mankato showed us a slide with a picture of a fist on it.” He finished the sandwich and folded the paper very small and put it in the ashtray. “How was Kansas City?”
Thorsen told him, standing beside the car in the cold with his hands in his pockets, in order, the way he would have told it to a lieutenant.
When he had finished Heikkinen sat in the car for a while, looking at the steering wheel.
“Walt Erickson,” he said at last. “The old man in the gym.”
“Yes.”
He turned off the engine. “Well, he’s ninety-one and he’s not going anywhere. He’ll keep.” He got out of the car, slowly, as though his knees had opinions about it, and stood and looked up at the library. “Let’s go and see what a title examiner wanted in Northfield.”
The archives of the Norwegian-American Historical Association were in the basement, behind a door with a brass plate on it and a bell that you rang. A young woman with a nose ring and a St. Olaf sweatshirt opened it, and looked at Thorsen, and at Heikkinen, and at Heikkinen’s badge, and said, “Oh. You’re here for Professor Brekke,” in a voice that suggested Professor Brekke had told her something about it, and that she did not altogether approve.
Professor Brekke was sitting at a long oak table in a room lined with grey archive boxes. She was eighty-four years old and very small and very upright, with white hair cut short as a boy’s and a pair of enormous black-framed glasses, and she did not get up. She looked at the two of them over the top of the glasses as they came in, the way she might have looked at two students who were late.
“You are Thorsen,” she said to Thorsen. Her accent was faint, and Norwegian, and sixty years in Minnesota had not quite flattened it. “Sit down. You are too tall to stand in my archive. And you are the policeman.” To Heikkinen. “Sit down also.”
They sat.
She looked at Thorsen without any embarrassment at all.
“Yes,” she said. “You have his hands.”
“Whose?”
“Anders Thorsen’s. There is a photograph in the collection. Only one. I will show you.” She rested one small hand on a grey box on the table in front of her. “Mr. Strand came to me in September. He found this collection in our catalogue, under the name. Thorsen, Anders, 1870–1941. Letters to his sister, 1890–1940. Gift of Ingrid Thorsen Eiksund, Ulstein, Sunnmøre, 1978. He could not read them, of course. They are in Norwegian, and in old handwriting, which is worse. He came to the Norwegian department and asked if anybody could help him, and the young people sent him to me, because I am retired and have nothing to do but be helpful. I said I would translate the ones he was interested in. He was a nice man. Very polite. He wrote everything down in a notebook. He said it was important, and I believed him, because he did not look like a man who used that word very often.” She paused. “Then he did not come back. I read in the newspaper why.”
“Did you finish?”
“I went on.” She took off the big glasses and polished them on the end of the scarf. “I am eighty-four. I do not know how many more things I will finish. I thought I would finish this one.” She put the glasses back on. “There are a hundred and twelve letters. Fifty years of a life. Most of it is very ordinary. Weather. Fish. Money. Children. A man telling his sister at home about his life, because she is the only person who knew him before.” She opened the box. “And one of them is not ordinary.”
She took them through it the way she would have taught it, in order, and Thorsen found that he did not want her to hurry.
A young man of twenty, writing from a boarding house in Duluth on the night he arrived, to his sister Solveig, who was sixteen and had walked down to the steamer with him at Ulsteinvik, on the island of Hareidlandet south of Ålesund, and cried. The lake is like the sea at home, but it is sweet. There is no salt in it at all. I put my hand in and tasted it to be sure. They say it is so cold that a drowned man never comes up again, because the cold keeps him down.
A wife by then, Kari, from Hareid across the island, and a herring cove of his own, and the skiff built in Duluth by a man called Olsen from Herøy, clinker cedar on oak frames, the way their father had built them in the boatshed at Ulsteinvik. He named her after his sister. So now there are two Solveigs who scold me, one at home and one under my feet.
The storm. Professor Brekke read that one aloud in English, slowly, in her small dry voice. A November gale, three days of it, the worst anybody on the shore remembered. Anders had been out with the tug, the bigger boat, named Kari for his wife, when it came, and had got her into the lee of an island and anchored and ridden it out for two nights, and on the third night the anchor dragged and she went onto the rocks. He got ashore. Two of his crew did not. The tug was gone, and all the nets, three thousand dollars of nets, more money than he would see in five years. Only little Solveig was saved, because she was ashore on the rollers. So I have one boat, and a debt to Mr. Hale that I cannot pay, and two widows on my conscience, and a wife who does not sleep.
“Hale,” Heikkinen said.
“Josiah Hale bought his fish. He lent him the money for the tug, in 1919. When the tug was lost, the debt was not.” Professor Brekke turned a page. “There are three letters in 1923 about the debt. He is very frightened. Hale is patient, he says, and polite, and that frightens him more. And then, in the autumn of 1923, a letter about an Indian.”
She read it. Hale had a proposal. There was a man on the Kettle River, an Indian, Joseph, who had the finest stand of pine left on the shore on his allotment, and the shore beside it, and he would not sell. Hale says that the law does not let the Indians sell their land without permission from Washington, and that Joseph is a stubborn man who would not sell even if the law allowed it. Hale says that a time will come when that land changes hands, one way or another, and that when it does, a man who had helped him might find himself owning the shore at the mouth of the Kettle, and his debt forgotten. I asked him what kind of help he meant. He only smiled and said that the lake is very dangerous in November.
Professor Brekke turned to the next letter. It was a single sheet, folded twice, the paper gone the colour of weak tea. The handwriting was different. Still Anders’s, but smaller, cramped, the lines running downhill.
“April 1924,” she said. “This is the one.”
She did not read it in English first. She read it in Norwegian, aloud, in her small clear voice, and Thorsen found that he understood more of it than he could have explained: the shape of the words, the rhythm of them, the sound of his grandfather saying gutten on the porch at the Point, of his father talking in his sleep. Then she read it again, in English.
Dear Solveig,
I must write this to somebody or I will go mad, and you are the only one who is far enough away.
On the nineteenth of November I took the Indian Joseph out with me to the nets off the Kettle, in the little boat that has your name. I told him I would share the catch with him. He was a quiet man. He talked about his children. When we were far out I did what Hale wanted. I will not write how. I came home alone and told them the lake had taken him, and they believed me, because the lake takes many men in November and nobody asks the lake anything.
In March Hale’s clerk brought me a paper to sign, with an X on it for Joseph’s name, and my name under it as a witness. I signed. Now Hale has the pine and I have the shore at the Kettle, and my debt is paid, and Kari has a house, and Halvor will have a place in this country that nobody can take from him.
Kari does not know. Nobody will ever know. Do not write to me about this. Burn this letter.
The land is paid for with blood, Solveig. With another man’s blood. I will live on it for the rest of my life, and so will my son.
Your brother, Anders
Professor Brekke laid the letter down on the grey box, very gently, and took off her glasses, and pressed the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb.
“She did not burn it,” she said. “His sister. She kept every letter he ever sent her, and this one also, in the same bundle, in order, with a blue ribbon round them. And when she died her daughter kept them. And when her daughter died, her granddaughter, Ingrid, found them in a chest in the attic in Ulstein, and thought, how wonderful, letters from America, and gave them to us. In 1978.” She put her glasses back on. “I do not think anybody read them. They went into a box with a catalogue number, and there they sat. Forty-eight years, in my basement. Until a polite man from Duluth came looking.”
Thorsen was looking at the letter.
Landet er betalt med blod, Solveig. Med en annen manns blod.
His own name was on the folder in the catalogue. His own build was on the dock in the photograph in Bryce Hale’s lodge. He had been proud of it, a little: the shore, the bowline, the loft. A man from nowhere, who came from somewhere.
He had come from a boat going out on a cold lake with two men in it, and coming back with one.
In the little boat that has your name.
The Solveig. Up on her cradle in the fish house at the Point, white with a green sheer strake, her name in gold on her transom. Painted within the last year or two. Varnished. Her oarlocks greased. A boat that somebody loved.
“Mr. Thorsen,” Professor Brekke said.
He looked up.
She had taken something else out of the box. A small photograph, mounted on card, brown and faded. A man in a fisherman’s sweater, standing on a dock, alone, looking at the camera without smiling. Enormous. Fair-bearded. His hands hanging at his sides, half curled, as though they were still holding something.
“There,” she said quietly. “You see. The hands.”
Heikkinen asked for copies of everything, and was given them, after a short negotiation in Norwegian-accented English that he lost. Outside it was nearly dark.
The two of them stood beside the cars.
“I can’t do anything with that,” Heikkinen said. “You know that. It’s a hundred and two years old. Everybody in it is dead. There’s no crime there anybody can try.” He looked at the folder under his arm. “But it’s a motive. It’s a hell of a motive. If that letter gets out, and somebody puts it next to an Indian Affairs file and a deed with an X on it, then the Kettle River tract was never legally sold, and neither was your uncle’s point. And there’s a copper mine sitting on top of it. That’s not a hundred-year-old crime. That’s a billion dollars, today.”
“Hale knew Strand was looking for something.”
“Hale knew. Hale’s lawyers knew.” Heikkinen shifted the folder. “And your grandfather knew. In 1986. And told a man he’d tell him the truth. And the man drowned on a calm night, and the sheriff closed it in four days.”
“Yes.”
“And your family left. That summer.”
Heikkinen looked at him in the lamplight for a long moment.
“Is your father alive?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Then at some point,” Heikkinen said, quite gently, for him, “somebody’s going to have to ask him what he saw.” He opened his car door. “I’d rather it was you than me. I’ve met fathers.”
He did not drive north that night. He drove ten miles out of Northfield into the farmland and pulled off onto a gravel turnout beside a field of corn stubble, and turned off the engine and turned on the heater, and sat in the dark with the pump ticking under the passenger seat and the photograph of Anders Thorsen’s hands in front of his eyes.
At nine o’clock, which was seven in San Pedro, he took out the phone and called his father.
It rang once.
“Danny.” The warmth in the voice, like a stove door opening. “Your mother’s at choir. Are you all right? You sound tired.”
“I’m all right.”
“Where are you?”
“Minnesota.”
A silence. Not the silence of the first call, in Flagstaff. A different one. Softer. Sadder. The silence of a man who had known what the answer would be before he asked.
“You went, then,” his father said.
“I went.”
He had meant to ask. He had driven ten miles into the dark to sit in a field and ask. What happened, Dad. What did you see. Why did we go. He had the words ready. He had asked harder questions of harder men in smaller rooms, and he sat in the van with the phone against his ear and found that he could not make his mouth do it, any more than he could have at eleven, in a car, in Nebraska.
“How is it?” his father said at last. “The shore.”
“Cold. Beautiful.”
“Yes.” A breath. “It always was.” Another silence, and then, as if it had been pulled up out of him from a long way down: “Is the boat still there, Danny? The skiff. The Solveig.”
Thorsen sat very still.
“Yes,” he said. “Arne keeps her up. He’s painted her. She’s on her cradle in the fish house.”
His father did not say anything at all. Thorsen could hear the kitchen clock with the painted saint on its face, ticking, two thousand miles away. He could hear the radio, very low. He could hear his father breathing.
“Good night, son,” Karl Thorsen said. “Drive carefully.”