By the time they returned to the steerage cabin, Ingeborg had stopped screaming. The surgeon swayed from foot to foot with the ship, the watchman holding a lantern behind him. It cast a nauseating, blurry light on the cabin walls and ceiling.
“Well, now, what’s this business?” the surgeon’s voice boomed.
“Ingeborg, I’ve brought the surgeon. He’s here to help you.” Thea’s voice was only a whisper, but it carried in that haunted cabin as much as the surgeon’s. “Are you all right?”
The surgeon stepped to Ingeborg’s bedside and put his hand on her forehead. “She’s afire,” he said. To the watchman he said, “Fetch my porter, quickly.”
The watchman fixed the lantern to a hook on the wall and nodded and left.
Now the surgeon turned to Thea. “You say she is with child?”
“Yes.”
To Ingeborg he said, again in a very loud voice, “We’ll have a look now.”
Ingeborg would not uncurl, her sorry blanket lay bunched around her.
“Come, now,” the surgeon persisted, reaching for Ingeborg this time and pulling her onto her back.
She was indeed unconscious, though clearly breathing, her chest rising and falling with each labored breath.
“Your kind companion here has informed me you’re with child. Let’s have a look.”
The surgeon removed his stethoscope from his bag and pressed it into the folds of her tunic. He listened closely, checked her forehead again, and stood erect with his hand on his chin regarding her.
“How long has she been unwell?” he asked Thea.
Thea explained how she woke to her wailing.
“Is she family?”
“No,” Thea said. “I’ve only known her since we boarded.”
“Then I’ll have you step outside. For her privacy.”
As he suggested Thea leave, Ingeborg stirred, a sudden and sharp movement that began and ended with her eyes. They were pouched, her eyes, and full of tears. She reached for Thea’s hand and when she did the blanket fell from her lap. The woman’s skirt pooled at her waist. In the folds of her dress her trembling hands held tight the lost child.
The boy was still attached to the umbilical cord, his pallor the color of rotten meat. His visage, in the slewing lantern light, looked restful.
In a voice altogether different than any he’d used so far, a voice far gentler, the surgeon said, “The child is lost, dear. Let’s not lose you in the bargain.”
He did save her, though from what Thea did not know. When the surgeon sliced the umbilical cord and removed the still child from its mother’s lap, Ingeborg’s cry was as sorrowful as a cold moon.
XI.
Odd stared in wonder at the triptych of framed portraits of his mother. In the first photograph she stood outside the mess hall at the old logging camp up on the Burnt Wood River. A beldam and the handsome camp cook stood to either side of her. She wore an ankle-length dress beneath her apron and shawl, a man’s wool hat, mittens. Her expression was clearest in this photograph, alert and flummoxed. Sad. The snow on the ground was glazed and dazzling, and it cast a light as keen from below as above. A pair of wolf pelts hung above the entry door to the mess hall.
In the second picture she sat up in bed, holding Odd himself in full swaddle. Her eyes rested on him, so her expression was less visible, but he could imagine how she felt. He thought it must be something like how he felt then, looking at those pictures. It was the first time he’d seen pictures of his mother, the first time he’d seen pictures of himself as a baby.
The third picture gave him the longest pause. It had been taken upon his mother’s arrival in Gunflint in 1895. She rose in a blur behind the Opportunity’s mizzen shrouds. In the foreground, a sternline stretched taut to a cleat on the Lighthouse Road. In the background, the spanker flapped in the harbor breeze to accentuate the hoariness. Her hands clenched the rail and her face, split by one of the shrouds, appeared to be going in opposite directions. She was bent at the waist, in the act of standing.
He closed his eyes, felt the urge to cry, and couldn’t tell whether those almost-tears were for him or for her. He knew he felt her fear and sadness and loneliness vicariously, could glean her kindness and gentleness from the simple cast of her eyes.
“Was it a mistake? To give these to you?”
Odd looked up at Rebekah, who stood with her hand on the dining table. They were on the third floor of Grimm’s, had just finished Thanksgiving dinner, the capon bones still cluttered a platter, the pot of congealed gravy sat on the middle of the table, the coffee cups were still warm. She had given him the pictures for a birthday gift.
“No,” he said but heard the lack of conviction in his voice even if he didn’t feel it.
“She was such a beautiful girl.” Rebekah put her hand on Odd’s arm, squeezed, then set to clearing the table.
Odd poured another ounce of whiskey into his coffee and took a sip. When Rebekah returned from the kitchen she brought a pecan pie and a bowl of whipped cream.
“I was an ugly runt,” Odd said.
“Let’s see.” Rebekah stood above him, looked down at the picture of Odd and Thea.
“Look at that bunched nose. My head looks like a squash.”
“Mmm,” Rebekah said. She put her hand in Odd’s hair. “Babies aren’t usually born with hair like that. You came out looking like a young man. You were serious as one, too.”
“Guess I foresaw my lot.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.” Rebekah came around the table and sat opposite him.
“These pictures are a hell of a thing to see. I guess I’m feeling a little squirrelly is all.” He folded the picture frame in thirds and smiled at her. “Thank you.”
She smiled and took his hand. “Jesus,” she whispered. She took a deep breath, shuddered.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly. “Let’s have some dessert.” And she started to quarter the pie.
As she served it, Hosea came from the water closet, adjusting his suspenders, whistling, oblivious. Instead of coming back to the dining table, he detoured to the kitchen, where he packed his pipe and lit it with a wooden match. When he returned to the table he finished the dregs of his coffee and poured an ounce of whiskey in its place and lifted the pictures of Thea, of Odd’s mother.
For a long time Hosea looked silently at the pictures, the smoke from his pipe clouding his face. When his pipe was finished he set the pictures down, put his pipe on his saucer, and lifted his cup of whiskey. “I’ve seen a lot of people arrive in this place. Lumberjacks and Lutheran pastors. Millers and petty con men. You name it. Not one of them impressed me the way your mother did, Odd. Not one of them.”
Odd shifted his eyes from Hosea to Rebekah.
“She was impressive, Odd,” Rebekah reiterated. “And such a cook!”
“The bread she pulled from the oven.” Hosea said, almost a whisper, something wistful in his voice. He shifted the pictures in order to see them again. “Your mother, Odd,” he began again, but stopped. Took another sip from his cup. “Your mother departed this world as innocently as she arrived in it. That should tell you everything you need to know about her.”
The tone of Hosea’s voice struck Odd as nostalgic. These holdings-forth were often easy to ignore, inflated as they usually were. But on that evening Odd sensed sincerity more than anything.
Odd said, “She couldn’t have been all innocent. There’s me to account for.”
“Yes, well, if we spent all night accounting for you we’d need another barrel of Canada’s finest to accompany our ciphering,” Hosea said. “Let’s take your place on this earth for granted. What say? Speaking of your place on earth, I have a birthday present for you as well.” He stepped to the sideboard and brought back a large box wrapped in brown paper. He set the box before Odd, who had moved his coffee cup and plate aside. “Now, it’s nothing like what Rebekah put together for you, but I hope you’ll like it all the same.”