Harry was peering into his own hole on the ice, more intent on hooking a fish than on his papa's pitch. Even still he responded, "You know how much I like fishing and boatbuilding."
"And I can't say I blame you, Harry. But there ain't much of a living to be made any longer. Neither enterprise pays for itself nowadays. Not small operations like ours. You apprentice with Veilleux and you can make money all year long. You could still fish some. Obviously we'd keep filling boat orders. Canoe orders. You'd just have another wagon to hitch your load to."
Odd pulled the fish from the hole, unhooked it, and threw it on the ice a few feet away. He took his knife from this belt and knelt before the fish, thumping it on the head with the hilt before he sliced the guts from it. He threw the offal as far as he could, with the wind. He did this in twenty seconds and in twenty seconds more had his jig back in the water. A colony of gulls descended from the clearing sky and went to work on the fish guts.
"Besides," Odd continued, "you keep telling me how you want to build something out at Evensen's farm."
"I could build it without apprenticing. I ain't talking about a castle."
Odd looked up into the sky, took a gulp of the cold wind, noted the snow squall on the eastern horizon. "You're sure and steady with a hammer and nails, there's no denying that. But there's more to building a house than a hammer and nails. And it ain't like building a skiff. Trust me on this one, buddy."
Harry felt a hit on his line but he failed to set the hook. "Shit," he said.
"I don't know how many times I got to tell you don't horse it."
"I know."
"You know."
They sat for a spell jigging in silence. Finally Odd said, "I'm telling you it's a good move."
"I'll go see Veilleux this afternoon. See what he has to say."
Odd said, "You got some saying to do yourself, don't forget that. Sure, he knows you and he's the one offering, but you stand to gain here. Don't go over there acting like you deserve it."
"I wouldn't."
As he spoke Harry hooked a fish. A big one. The short rod arced.
"See? You listen to your old man and good things happen."
Harry was too pleased to say anything back.
But it was moments like this when Odd saw most clearly what his hardheartedness all those years ago had wrought, when their joviality felt most suspect. Good Christ, Odd thought. What have I taken from this boy?
Just as Odd had foreseen, Rebekah had left Duluth back in the summer of '21. On a Sunday morning after she'd fed the four-week-old Harry, while Odd still slept on the Murphy bed, she went. Odd woke hours later to the boy's hungry lamentation— it couldn't have been called a cry— and knew as soon as he stepped out of bed that Harry was his alone.
When the questions started three or four years later, when Harry wondered about his mother, Odd told him what he'd told the townsfolk the autumn they'd returned, that he'd met a sweet gal up in Port Arthur, Ontario, married her, then lost her nine months later when she'd given birth to Harry. That lie and the others it spawned came easily to Odd and he realized that his deceit was different from Hosea's only by degree. He was not proud of this, but neither did he ever tell the truth. Not to his son. And not to anyone else.
If the townsfolk had ever wondered about Harry, if they tried to make sense of the rift between Odd and the Grimms, they did so in the privacy of their own homes. Hardly a suspicious glance had ever come Odd's way along the Lighthouse Road. He'd never heard so much as a snigger.
Maybe this was because of the visit he'd paid Rebekah and Hosea the day he'd returned to Gunflint with Harry. Odd had come down from Duluth, turned into the harbor with his boat bell tolling, tied up on the Lighthouse Road, and marched up to Grimm's. He found them sitting at the kitchen table — the same kitchen table where he'd taken almost all his childhood meals— and held the boy before them.
"Look at you two," Odd said, feeling as sad as he did angry. "Couple of quacks." He shook his head fiercely. "I want you to take a gander at my boy here." When neither of them looked up, Odd said, "All right. You mind your own business. That's good. We'll all mind our own business. From this day forward, don't utter his name. Don't even look at him. If you pass us on the Lighthouse Road, walk on by. If anyone asks about him, about me and Rebekah, you shrug your shoulders and don't know a damn thing. Understand? You never breathe a word about this."
He'd not waited for them to respond, those loonies sitting there holding hands above the linen tablecloth, only cradled the boy and turned and went about his life. And so Harry became, like his father a quarter century before him, Gunflint's motherless son, the heir of their blind-eyed sympathy.