The Lighthouse Road(88)
Even as he tried, he could not take his eyes from the postcard. He looked at the faraway cast of her eyes, the lilt of her chin. He couldn't say she appeared sad, though there was an undeniable quality to her expression. Or at least a quality to the look in her eyes. Like she could see from where she lay the full bright moon.
He switched his stare to her breasts and it was then he felt his pulse quickening. Just like that. From a glance. And once his pulse started strumming, his vision went blinky and he had to sit down, which he did in the light from the sconce. His guts stirred and he closed his eyes, rested his head against the wall. Why the beaver? Why was she lying that way at all? Why was there a picture of it? And, most confusing of all, why did he have this feeling? He put the picture back in the box and sat there for some time. By some simple instinct he knew that what he'd seen was beyond his capacity to understand, so rather than trying to make sense of it, he pondered the simpler question of how he could keep it a secret.
And so it happened that Odd— only ten years old— passed from childhood. During the following days, he no longer wanted to spend the rainy days sitting on the davenport reading storybooks with Rebekah. He no longer thought it a lark to help Rebekah mix a batch of cookie dough and while away an afternoon eating the cookies as fast as they came out of the oven. He no longer challenged Hosea to chess matches after supper. And he was no longer willing to abide by the rules of the house. His chores went unfinished. He did not eat what didn't taste good. He no longer trusted the felicity of his young years, no longer trusted much of anything.
In the years to come he would sneak into the closet whenever the chance arose. He went despite his shame. The way a beaten dog will still take scraps from the flogger's hand.
XXV.
(November 1896)
T hose first days and nights of their life together it was hard to tell who was newborn. Odd would nuzzle and fuss and by purest instinct stretch for Thea's breast, where he would give suck until he was exhausted. Then he'd fall into a fitful and unsated sleep because Thea's milk had not come in yet. She would hold him on her belly, swaddled in a blanket, a knit cap on his small and misshapen head, until he'd writhe again, still hungry or hungry again, and she'd put him back to her breast. And despite the new winter seeping through the windows, despite the frost left on the panes each dawn, the child was like a hot stone in her lap. When she was alone, or when Rebekah was there, asleep on the other side of the room, Thea would remove her nightdress and rest her babe's soft face on the sweat-damp flesh in the crook of her neck.
For four dreamlike days and sleepless nights this continued, the child never really at rest, until the fifth day, when she felt first a tingling and then a weightlessness in her breasts and the nursings that had once lasted an hour lasted fifteen minutes, after which Odd fell into an engorged sleep. Her happiness in those hours, with the contented boy in her arms, was her new religion, their communion her new salvation.
Sitting in her bed under the window, looking out over the isthmus that separated the harbor below her and the cove to the north, looking out over the great lake and her shimmering waters, she thought often of who she used to be. It seemed, in those sleep-deprived daydreams, with her boy on her lap, that the travails of the last year were trifles beside her feelings for Odd. He was her reward for the loneliness she'd endured. This thought filled her with peace. She saw the distance between Hammerfest and Gunflint as the way to this peace and so her regrets and misgivings dissolved in the warmth between them.
Though the look back was clear, the one ahead was dark as the devil's lair, and thoughts of the easiness of her love inevitably gave way to worries about what would come in that darkness. She had every cent she'd made at the Burnt Wood Camp saved in her purse. Seventy-five dollars in all, though what it amounted to she had no idea. She'd been told that returning to the camp on the Burnt Wood was not possible. She would have known it without having been told. She knew finding a husband would be nearly impossible now, too. She knew, finally, that she could no sooner return to Hammerfest than resurrect her childhood. It was as though the way back had been swallowed by the wakes of the boats that had brought her.
Hosea's generosity had saved her more than once, but she knew she could not live with him forever. She would not ask for so much. She'd shift her view from the water to the buildings on the Lighthouse Road. Perhaps she could become a shop girl. Or a cook at the Traveler's Hotel. Perhaps she could even work for Hosea, alongside Rebekah. But where would she live? And how could she take care of her boy while she did any of these things? This last was the question furthest from an answer, the one that cast the darkest pall on her days ahead. It was also the question on which she inevitably turned her thoughts.