The Lighthouse Road(81)

Outside the offices of the Gunflint Ax & Beacon Hosea stopped, set down all that he carried, and opened the door, holding it for Thea. There were four men sitting at desks, one of them was Selmer Gunnarson, who did the typesetting. He'd been in Gunflint for eight years, before there was a Lighthouse Road or brick building. He'd emigrated from Bergen eight years before that.



"Selmer," Hosea said, "I need to borrow your old tongue, friend. This here young lady landed at noon, she speaks hardly a word of English."



Selmer rose from his desk, wiped his huge hands on the apron he wore, and came to stand before Thea. He removed his spectacles and addressed her in Norwegian: " Hosea tells me you've just landed. Who were you expecting to meet?"



Feeling a surge of relief, Thea spoke rapidly, "I've come from Hammerfest, my uncle is Rune Evensen, I've come to help on his farm." She paused, withdrew a letter from her purse addressed to Mrs. Rune Evensen She offered it as some kind of proof. "My auntie was to meet me." She paused for a moment, then asked the question she now feared the answer to. "Why wasn't Auntie here to meet me?"



Selmer looked at Hosea, who stood with his hat in his hands. "The lass is here for Rune Evensen. She's his niece. She's come an awfully long way."



Thea looked from Hosea to Selmer and back again. To Selmer she said, "Is Auntie okay?"



Looking at Thea, Selmer addressed Hosea again. "What should I tell her?"



Hosea stood with his finger tapping his pursed lips for a long moment, then said, "Tell the lass the truth. Tell her how her aunt hanged herself from the barn trusses. How old Rune has lost his mind. Tell her she can stay with me until we figure out what to do." He paused. "Tell her about Rebekah, that she'll have a friend."





She spent two days and nights boarding at Grimm's. At the end of her second day he put her on the back of a wagon bound for the lumber camp on the Burnt Wood River.



The previous morning Hosea had asked her if she could cook. He did this with the typesetter translating again. When Thea said yes, of course she could cook, he told her that Trond Erlandson needed help at the camp. He told her that for around a dollar and a half a week she could winter upriver. She could take stock in the spring, after her season in the woods, and decide on her future then. All of this, he said, was provided she did not wish to return to Norway presently.



Thea sat there dumb, trying to see herself in the woods. And because she could not return home, and because it was harder to fathom an alternative than the prospect before her, she agreed to go.





XXIII.





(January 1921)





The weeks after Christmas were drudgery for Odd. The days came and went with little more than the small changes in Rebekah's temper to mark them. It was a temper as bleak as the cast-iron sky.



In the middle of January Rebekah's belly and breasts started to round. She was tired all the time and fell into a pattern of sleeping during the day and staying awake through the night. During those nights, alone in the world but for Odd's snoring in the next room, she felt herself coming apart. As she paced the small apartment it began to seem she was chasing herself, that she had literally become two people: the one pacing— worried and weak and vacant— and the one she used to be, a shadow, trying to keep up. She knew she had to close the distance between herself and the shadow. How to do that, though, was entirely beyond her power of imagination.



Finally she went searching for an abortionist. When she found him in a rank office above a harborside warehouse, her misgivings met the squalor of his surgery and she knew enough to leave. But now she carried a new and cumbersome shame around during her insomniac nights. She'd seen plenty of the women in Gunflint lose their minds. She knew what it looked like. It looked like her. But she had enough wits remaining to want to fend it off.



So she did the unthinkable: She wrote Hosea. In all her life she'd never had reason to write a letter, though she had spent many of her days slotting mail into the townsfolks' boxes behind the apothecary counter. She could see Hosea, standing there in his starched apron, the hat he'd worn every day for twenty-odd years. Was he getting along? Did he think of her? If he did, was it with fondness or that meanness she alone in Gunflint knew?



In the middle of the night she found one of the pencils Odd carried behind his ear. On the back of a brown paper sack, without salutation or date, in her childlike scrawl, Rebekah wrote: I was never who you said I was. But this is not me neither. I am having a baby. A baby. What has happened . . .



She folded the paper sack and hid it beneath the davenport cushion and continued her restless pacing.