sickle moons. He worked methodically, choking the fish in one section of net after another, his eyes moving from his task to the water, to the ridges, to the sky—always watching for weather.
A gull squawked and shit white in the boat as he started in on a new net. But something was wrong. The net resisted him. Its pull was skewed, and it wouldn’t come over the gunnel like it should. And sure if that net wasn’t one of his best. Not good. Not good at all. He hadn’t been able to afford new nets for some time. Maybe if he’d worked more of that year’s winter timber. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave, not with Berit so low.
He maneuvered himself further along, watching the net as he pulled it from the water, then the cleared side to make sure it sank back right. Could be that the lake had tossed a timber his way. The bulk of the problem was coming right up. There. A couple fathoms below, and it looked like a huge ball of a mess. Almighty. He couldn’t afford this. The weight of it was starting to strain, turning him so he was taking the swells at an angle. Then he stopped pulling. It lay below him in the water.
A man.
There was a man tangled in his net.
He rose and fell, rose and fell, and the sun shone and sparkled on the water.
A head and shoulders cocooned in the mesh. Black hair, or else some kind of cap. His thoughts raced nowhere and everywhere at once, like the blue sky and water that was all around him.
There was a man in his net. The fish lay in the bottom of the boat and the gulls bobbed on the water, watched with round eyes. He hauled the net closer to the surface. Something shone white. It was a hand. He felt his breakfast in his throat.
A man. A dead man. Wound in his net. He was wearing dark wool. If it was a uniform he’d never seen it. He pulled the straining net higher, and the body rose up and broke the surface along the skiff.
A white ear was sticking through the mesh. Water lapped at a waxy cheek.
He rose and fell with the body, feeling like he was in a dream. Even the fish at his feet looked unfamiliar. If he could wake and start the day over, open his eyes to Berit’s back. But it was no dream, sure as the cold in his fingers. He’d have to get the man into the boat.
The coat’s silver buttons were tangled in the net, and his leads were wound up and through. The man’s leg was bent at an ugly angle, but he couldn’t tell whether it was from his net or sometime before. Cutting him out would be the fastest, but he’d lose the net for certain that way.
He took hold of a cork to get a sense of what was what. The body shifted and the face rolled toward the sky. Black hair growing from a porcelain forehead. A mustache over lips like a bruise. His breakfast surged up again and he turned away. Water drops shed from the ropes, hit the surface in expanding circles.
He couldn’t afford to lose the net. He had no choice but to untangle him. He’d let the steamer know at the end of the week. He tried not to look at the face as he worked, unwinding the leads, tugging the net here and there. How long he’d been down was impossible to know, the way the lake holds things as they are, too cold for bloating gases, too cold to rot wood.
The buttons were impossible, so he cut them off the coat and let them sink out of view. A glint of light flashed as the body rolled. It was his other hand, his finger, a gold wedding band.
A gull paddled close, turned its head side to side.
Berit.
He couldn’t bring a body home to Berit. Already, she worried too much, feared for him in weather and not.
The white face stared up to the sky, unrelenting in its lifelessness. The most gruesome thing he’d ever seen.
He rode the swells.
She’d never forget it. He couldn’t bring the body in.
Would it be so wrong to leave him to the lake? Every man who had ever worked on the water had to come to terms with his own drowning there. There was probably a law, but who was to know. Laws were made for towns, for the problems of people who lived as close as stacked wood. They didn’t really apply to him. God’s laws were a different matter, but he hadn’t killed the man. He was dead when he found him.
He couldn’t bring the body home.
Using his knife as sparingly as he could, he worked steadily to release him, trying to block thoughts of the dead man’s wife, and focusing on his own instead. If it were he who had drowned in the lake, Berit would want to have his body. “Buried, not out there adrift,” she’d say. “Not left with the hope that you’d return.” But Berit knew, she knew. The lake’s a killer. She’d lived her entire life on its shores. She knew the water temperature didn’t bend toward hope.
The dead man’s wife was not his concern. He had a live one with enough sorrow as it was. He would not bring the dead man home. God forgive him. He couldn’t do it.
The sunlight shone innocently on the water, but the gulls, they were watching him closely. The net was damaged, though not beyond fixing. First, he decided, he’d take care of the body, then after come back and finish picking the nets. He’d tie him to the skiff and tow him further out.
When he reached down to get the rope around the man, he half expected his bones to poke through, but he was as solid as a cold side of meat. Gunnar tied the rope under the man’s arms, let out a length, and secured it to the skiff. There was no real reasoning to where he was going, just out deeper, one mile or four, he wasn’t sure when he’d stop.
A black head plying the waves. The body turning, showing the white face. Staring at the man was a danger to himself. He should have been watching the sky and the water, but putting himself in danger felt only right. He vowed to the dead man—or to God, he wasn’t sure—that from that day forward his life would change. He would coax his Mrs., his marriage, back to life.
Gunnar skis on as the sun lifts from the lake and is swallowed into a bank of clouds. He’d made good on his promise; their life has turned around. But still, he thinks of the man he left out there. His grieving wife. Maybe a passel of children. Not a day goes by when he doesn’t come to mind.
When the morning is well established, Gunnar stops to rest. He plants his poles in the snow and slides the pack off his back. He circles his shoulders and pops his neck, looking back toward the ridge he’d helped log, the sheared stumps and the bramble of brush. They’ll come through and burn what’s left.
Gunnar unscrews the cap to his canteen. As he drinks, the sun pokes out for a moment, causing a patch of water to brighten and then dim. He wipes his mouth across his sleeve, feeling small and fragile.
At fourteen, I crossed the ocean. The unpath’d waters. The deep salt sea. My feet solid on the ship’s deck, I imagined beneath the water surface. The fishes. The mammals. The corals. The algae. All the hidden dangers below. My face to the wind, I imagined exotic lands. Tried to grasp the great distances, and the endless horizon.
But the ocean was incomprehensible.
Too vast. Too far. Too deep, my mind said.
I had the luxury of giving up and turning my attention to other things.
As a man I worked the great Gichigami. Lake Superior. The sweet-water sea. I knew its waters touched no exotic lands. That its creatures were few. Dull colored. Benign. Still, like the ocean, its horizon is endless. I grappled as I stood on her shore, as I rode her waves in each morning’s light. But always I was left uncertain.
It is a fact that Superior is easily measured. In length. In width. In hundreds of miles.
Superior should be comprehensible.
It is not.
And that discord is readily felt.
The Great Lake is movement at peripheral vision. It is sound at the limit of audible frequency. It is the illusion of the ability