"You willing to wait a few hours while I cut, old girl? Get up in the shade," he told the horse.
Then he put the ax over his shoulder and descended the hill to the heap of blown-over trees.
It was past suppertime by the time he'd finished, the task unfolded just as he'd imagined. The white pine ran the length of the fish house now, outside against the western wall so that it might take the afternoon sun. The horse had been returned to the livery; a bowl of venison stew had for dinner at the saloon in the Traveler's Hotel; and now Odd sat on the stoop outside the fish house with a teakettle of whiskey and lake water to rout his thirst.
He sat there all of twilight, watching the gloaming fall, realizing in the deepest part of himself— the least part of himself— that he was watching something holy, this turn of day to night. He finished his drink and packed and puffed his pipe. When he finished smoking he tapped the ash out and got to it.
He covered the barrels in the bed of the pickup with a canvas tarp and covered the tarp with stacks of empty fish boxes. The trail up from the fish house was rutted and overhung with tamaracks, but he managed to get onto the gravel road and into town.
The truck was Hosea's, but Hosea didn't often drive. Aside from the six or eight streets in town and the gravel trail that led three miles up the hill to the Shivering Timber, the roads in and out of Gunflint were mere sleigh roads, fit for dog teams or horse-drawn wagons but not rubber-wheeled flatbeds. Grimm's latest initiative, brought before county commissioners and the state legislature, was to transform the North Shore Trail into a highway built from Two Harbors clear to the Canadian border, insisting that people would come in droves given the chance. He had the big lodges in Misquah and Portage to bolster his argument on the grand scale, and the myriad hunting camps scattered all over the forest on the smaller scale. The ferries that ran all summer from Duluth, the pleasure craft that docked in Gunflint harbor from June through September, the anglers who were willing to hike from Gunflint up to any of a hundred lakes in the bush, all of this had convinced Hosea that given the highway, the area would become a tourist draw.
Odd had already delivered a pair of whiskey barrels at the Traveler's Hotel and now parked the pickup behind the apothecary. He opened the cellar doors. Walked down the stone steps and found the lantern hanging in its spot and lit it and checked there was room in the false floor for the whiskey. Then he went back to the truck and from beneath the tarp removed two more barrels and walked them one at a time down the stone steps and into their hiding spot. He extinguished the lantern and replaced it on the hook. Before he fetched Hosea, Odd packed another pipe and smoked it while he rearranged the tarp and fish boxes.
Grimm stepped out the back door. "There's our boy!" he said.
" Hooch is in the floor."
"Very good."
"Already dropped it at the Traveler's, too."
"Then we're up to the Timber."
"I guess you're all dressed up," Odd said. Hosea wore a seersucker suit with periwinkle-blue pinstripes. He wore white patent-leather brogues and a sharp white hat. His tie was mint green and pinched under his gaunt chin in a collar the color of the pinstripes. "You think those girls'll like you better if you dress like a clown?"
"A clown, you say?"
"Some damn thing."
"Odd, lad, the reason you spend all your time whittling and run
ning whiskey is because you don't take care in your appearance. You've been wearing the same shirt all week. And it's been hot. Maybe if you bathed and put on a hat and a pair of proper trousers, you could get one of the little ladies in town to whittle for you." He winked.
"The little ladies," Odd said, his secret blowing through him like a cool breeze. " Guess I'll worry about that, and about wearing a proper pair of trousers."
"You're my charge is all. I promised your mother I'd raise you right."
Odd stepped to the truck and opened the door. "I'm a grown man. I'll dress how I please."
"Suit yourself," Hosea said, joining him in the truck. He withdrew a pocket flask and unscrewed the cap and sucked a long drink. He offered it to Odd, who took a draft himself.
"Now," Hosea said, "let's get to the strumpets."
The Shivering Timber was an unabashed brothel and whiskey parlor that had evaded the reach of the pious Gunflinters and constables by catering to their weird and secret proclivities. It housed a dozen or so prostitutes and was guarded by two woodsmen brothers from Wisconsin on Grimm's payroll. They were mild-mannered behemoths who abstained from the whiskey and the whores and buried their considerable fortune in coffee cans and burlap all over their ten-acre parcel.