she says, nudging the cat from her leg.
“Yah, it sure came down quick.” He flexes his fingers and then cracks them loudly, which doesn’t get the usual rise out of her. “Something smells good in here.”
Berit hands him the warm bundle, which he makes a ceremony out of opening. “Now, this is surely a piece of heaven.” He holds the bread under his nose, then smiles as if she’d given him spring’s first strawberries. He takes a bite and sets the bread on his workbench. “Heaven. But I smell earthly paradise nearby.” He grabs hold of her coat and still chewing, slowly draws her near.
Berit jerks her coat away. “I’m sure you’ll make do with your bit of heaven.”
She scoffs as she opens the door, but Gunnar can see that her eyes are shining. The warm rye nearly dissolves in his mouth. What a figure she cuts as she heads down the path, dangling buckets in the fading light. He raps on the windowpane with a lead, just to get her to turn around.
Berit’s cheeks are flushed, but not from the wind. She hears the tap tapping beneath the blowing, but she’s not going to look back. Thoughts of their morning give her stabs of pleasure. The things between them these days, she just doesn’t know. She’d never imagined this new hunger that has taken hold, that rises like heat and falls like good rain. To experience this now after all they’d been through, all the sorrow, disappointment, and anger, just all of it. Betrayed by her body, that’s how the loss felt. And then that sad year of distance.
Now those times seem long ago, though it was only last autumn when everything changed. She still puzzles about the suddenness, and how it seems to point to the day when Gunnar was so late from picking his nets. She recalls the strange pauses in his work rhythm, and the way he kept glancing back out to the water. She can still see clearly the look in his eyes as he took the fish shovel from her hands, so full, and brimming with such a grave gentleness. “It’s time,” he’d said. “We have each other. That’s blessing in plenty.” Those were his words, and then he’d kissed her.
Since then he’d been a man determined, wooing her back slowly and sweetly. Now there are whole other worlds they share, places they go that are almost like dreaming. She just isn’t certain what’s proper sometimes. Good Lord, when she thinks of Nellie and Hans down the shore, or in the other direction the Torgeson brood. Well, she just can’t picture it.
The little light that’s left is fading fast, but the wind has yet to die down, making the snowfall nearly invisible, though she feels it like tiny needles against her skin. Berit steps onto the ice. Covered with wavering lines of old snow, it looks like a floor of grey marble. She’s smiling at how Gunnar had tugged on her coat when a gust of wind catches her buckets and she slips, banging her knee on the ice.
With a foot in one bucket to keep it from rolling, she lowers the other into the water hole, paying attention to her task now. In the dim light, the water hole is black and foreboding. It sets her insides against themselves, causing her to feel strangely cautious, as if she might pull the bucket from the lake and find it filled not with water, but with some horror instead. She hauls the rope up, and there it is, a pail of water with a small piece of ice, but its harmlessness doesn’t ease her feeling, so she works with haste and turns back toward land and the light from Gunnar’s window, lying yellow across the snow.
From below, the surf churns grey and white. It billows like the bottoms of clouds, creates a sound like rolling barrels, or the distant muffled stampede of hooves.
What prickling sensation at the precipitous drops—one hundred feet, two hundred feet, and more—where the slow-growing fish feed. The herring and the whitefish I once sought. The rising siscowet and the trout. Suspended overhead like long dark shoes. Like deeds left undone. The shape of regret.
On the lake bed the sediment rests in layers. Grey matter from the north. Red from the south. One era’s story deposited over the next.
And my own story, to which I cling.
Yet all this, too, is somehow mine.
I see the relic surfaces bearing the scour marks of ice. The fine, flowing patterns etched in the rock are as my own fingerprints.
Dimpled silt. The solitary burbot swims.
Ringed vibrations surge and rebound.
And rivers of mud waves lie in long troughs. Each red clay canyon has its own dark sounding. Each cave, a pulsating entrance.
The roaming currents carry the whisper of words. Bimitigweyaa. Bon voyage. I try to understand.
2000
The long blue door of Nora’s Buick creaks. Creaks when she opens it and creaks when she shuts it. She tightens the scarf around her neck. Even though she’d started the car earlier, the darned heater is still blowing cold air. The streets are icy and driving is slow with the grey sky pressing down on the buildings, making everything look so squat and dingy that in comparison, the traffic light is dazzling. Bright red, it hangs over the intersection, shining like a perfect maraschino cherry.
The Schooner’s pretty quiet, just a few second-shifters, though it won’t be long until business picks up. The locks are open again, and the ice cutters are out. Once the ships can pass, the railroad, everything, will start swinging into gear. Still, winter is hardly over.
Nora shoves the door to the bar open, causing the green shamrocks she’d hung from the netting to twirl and glint in the low light. Willard waves from the kitchen at the end of the bar, where he’s dropping a basket into the fryer.
“It’s freezing.” Nora hangs her coat.
“No lie. Listen, do you mind if I split? Cheryl is sick, so with the kids getting home. . . . I haven’t restocked the longboy yet.”
Nora lights her first cigarette of the shift. “How was the day?”
Willard shrugs.
“I hope she doesn’t have that stomach flu. Len had it, he said it was killer.”
“Yeah, but short. She’s just wiped out.”
“Did Finn come by about the stove? He was supposed to show up around ten.”
“Nope.” Willard slides his arm into his jacket.
“Did he call?”
“Nope. I’ll see you tomorrow. You’re the best. Hey,” he says, turning from the door, “the fries are for the guy shooting pool.”
Nora raises the metal basket and shakes off the hot grease, then dumps the fries into a hotel pan lined with paper towels. She puts out ketchup and a napkin dispenser. “Fries,” she calls toward the back of the bar.
She’ll have to try and reach Finn again. Jesus. That’s twice he hasn’t showed. It’s bad enough not to come when you say you will, but it’s plain disrespectful to not even call.
A tall boy straddles a stool and leans his pool cue against the bar. “Did you know the table is crooked back there?” He shakes salt and then pepper over the basket.
“There’s nothing wrong with my table, it’s the floor that’s crooked.” How’s she supposed to handle a rush on burgers when half the grill won’t heat?
“They’re adjustable, you know. All you have to do is screw them up or down from the legs.”
Seriously, she’s not in the mood. He looks like a college kid, with pale hair that falls in an I could care less sort of way. “You can? My God, you’re a regular genius.” She leans in with a tone of voice honed glass-sharp over the years. “I can’t imagine how I ever got by before you set yourself on that stool.”
“Schooner.” Nora clamps the phone between her ear and shoulder. “He’s not here, Bev. I know, hon, try