The Lighthouse Road(13)

"I will," he said.



And he had. She'd baked popovers and set them on the table with a bowl of herring roe and gherkins. Sliced cheese. It all looked delicious, but they never got to eating.



She poured them each a whiskey and water. They sat on the davenport with the windows open, the lake breeze coming across the pink sky at dusk.



After their first cocktail she mixed a second and sat back down. "Do you ever think of that day up at Rune Evensen's farm?"



"We shouldn't talk about that," he said.



"Do you?"



"Of course I do, Bekah."



"I've been thinking about it. I can't stop thinking about it."



He looked out the window. "What have you been thinking?"



"That we've wasted enough time," she said quickly.



"Wasted time?"



And that was when she came across the davenport and kissed him. She kissed him and unbuttoned her blouse while he unbuttoned his shirt. It was as simple as that.



If he stopped to think about it he started feeling dizzy. So he cleared his head of her and stepped back outside. He took the stone path to the barn and heaved the skidding tongs and chain and an ax back to the horse.



"Yup," he said to the horse. "Yup, yup. Let's find a bit o' wood." He shouldered the ax and untied the reins and together they made for the stand of birch under the shadow of white pine up behind the barn.





Though he spent most of his time on the water, Odd loved the woods too. He knew the wilderness— the paths and meadows, the bear dens and beaver lodges, the blueberry bushes and eagle aeries— as he knew his own fears and desires. From the time he was but seven or eight years old he'd been free to roam. So he did, often alone but just as often with Daniel Riverfish. They were days of freedom, hunting or simply beating the summer heat in the shade of the tall pines, but even in the freedom Odd knew something was missing. He'd always known it. It took him years to understand the void, but when he did it was as if the mysteries of the wood were amplified. He saw in the wilderness a reflection of his motherlessness. It was easiness that was missing; the orphan's onus, never seeming whole. It was as if he ran and hiked through the woods without his feet ever hitting the duff, as though his own ankles never felt the brush of the ferns.



But now it was different. Now, with the horse trailing him up the game path and into the woods, the weight of his task as heavy on his mind as the ax over his shoulder, he felt wholly less alien, as though his purpose gave him life and his prospects with Rebekah gave him a future. The thought quickened his step.



When he reached the top of the hill and looked down over the slope of birches, onto the overgrown barnyard and up at the slice of river the vantage held, he felt a new absence. The sun was high and hot, the birds shrill and all around. The hilltop here was narrow and as he stood there, he felt the sensation of someone watching. He shrugged, hoping to shake the feeling. The horse stepped toward him and when he turned to look at her, he realized that the sensation of being watched was only the sun warming his back. A stand of white pine that had once loomed from the western slope of the hill was gone. Just gone.



He stepped to the other side of the hill and looked down at the blown-over white pines. There were a dozen of them, trees that had grown from the hilltop, subject to the prevailing winds and their own heft, and so begun a slow bowing. Together they'd formed a gentle arc fifty years in the making. And now they were all down, the air above the heap redolent of the pitch oozing from the thousand broken boughs. He stared down on the tangle of trunks and limbs for a long time, as though somewhere in that crude geometry lay proof that his errand was not a fool's. And proof took form, there, the tree that lay atop the pile, its boughs most intact and cloaking the others. He studied the curve of trunk, cocked his head, childlike, curious, first mystified and then bothered that he hadn't thought of this on his own.



Convinced he'd found his keel, he plotted his day's work. In his mind he trimmed the boughs and cut it to length and set the skidding tongs and rapped the horse on the ass. He turned to look at the trail heading back down the hill, judged the bend against the length of white pine in his mind, hauled it down the ghost of the ice road and meandered through the trails to his fish house, caught only a couple of times. He wondered how long it would take to bleed the pitch.



And then he saw himself with the whipsaw and planes, the keel materializing in the molds he'd fashion, he saw a whole winter of building the boat up from the keel, saw the beautiful sheer, the transom with her name hand-carved and lacquered and riding across the lake, with only the memories of them watching from the breakwater in Gunflint, waving themselves good-bye.