Sundays were Rebekah’s day to tend the store. It was open short hours — from ten, when the service was finished at the Lutheran church, until two — and though it was seldom busy, folks did stop in. Hosea used his Sundays to sleep off Saturday nights. He rarely woke before ten or eleven o’clock, when he’d fix a plate of scrambled eggs and buttered toast and drink a pot of coffee.
That morning, though, he woke early and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He couldn’t say why, but as he stood over the sink, his hands trembling, he felt a kind of emptiness in the flat. It seemed colder and darker and in a way hollow on the third floor. He chalked it up at first to the great queasiness rolling around his gut, but as he drank another glass of water, and as the light of dawn began filling the room, he felt the emptiness stronger still. He finished the second glass of water and went to Rebekah’s bedroom door and knocked. When she did not answer, he pushed it open a crack. Her bed was empty, the room dark but clearly disheveled. The bureau and armoire were picked through, more than half of her dresses were missing, her jewelry box, her hats and beaver-skin coat. He hurried downstairs, checked the offices on the second floor and the shop on the first, and when he saw no trace of her hurried back upstairs to dress.
When he came out of the woods and into Odd’s yard he saw the skiff upturned on the western wall of the fish house, saw a teepee of a dozen or more cedar logs in front of the house, an odd-as-hell way to cure wood, an even odder place to do it, but he thought nothing more of it. His truck was parked at the end of the road. Smoke rose from the chimney.
He knocked on the door and stepped back, his hands joined behind his back to hide their shaking. When no answer came he knocked again and cupped his hands around his eyes and looked through the window beside the door. When after another minute there was still no answer, Hosea turned to face the lake. The sky was low, the wind from the north. The season shifting.
He was about to leave when Daniel Riverfish opened the door.
“Danny?” Hosea said. He leaned forward and peered into the fish house. He squinted, couldn’t see much. So he stepped back and cocked his head, looked queerly at Riverfish. “Is Odd here?”
“Nope.”
“Where is he?”
“Couldn’t say.”
Hosea looked over Danny’s shoulder again. “His boat’s not in there.” He turned his head over his shoulder and looked at the cove. “Where’s his boat?”
“He launched her this weekend.”
“Launched her?”
Danny nodded.
Hosea stood in confused silence for a moment before he said, “Can I come in for a minute, Danny?”
Danny stepped aside and followed Hosea into the fish house, closing the door behind them.
“Can we light a lantern?” Hosea said.
Without a word, Danny went to the bench and put match to mantle and adjusted the kerosene.
Hosea walked slowly around the empty space where the boat had been for the last six months. It still smelled of the homemade varnish, and the fumes were making Hosea’s lightheadedness worse.
“You look like hell, Mister Grimm.”
Hosea sat on the three-legged stool. He put his elbows on his knees and started wringing his hands. In a raspy voice, he said, “Why would he put his boat in the water now?”
Danny hopped up onto the counter and lit a cigarette.
Hosea looked across the room at him. “What are you doing here, Danny?”
“Odd asked me to watch the place for him.”
“Watch the place?”
“While he’s gone.” Danny would not look away. They stared at each other for a long moment.
Hosea shook his head. “You’re a straight-faced son of a gun, Danny.”
Danny answered by taking a long drag off his cigarette. He held the smoke deep in his lungs until Hosea began to speak again, then blew it all out in a steady stream.
“I see,” Hosea said. He turned his hands palms up. The lie that was his life and that had been lived for so long had come back to get him. The truth was no longer a thing to even imagine.
Hosea stood, looked again at Danny. “Rebekah is gone, too,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper now.
Danny didn’t respond.
Again Hosea shook his head. He looked around the fish house as though he’d never seen it before. “It’s been nearly twenty-five years now that I’ve taken care of her. I raised Odd. Even you can’t deny it. It’s because of me he’s got this fish house and the farm up on the Burnt Wood.” He stood up straight. “He was an orphan. Orphan. I gave him a home.” He looked again around the fish house. Tears welled in his eyes, a thing he’d not felt since he couldn’t remember when. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Christ almighty,” he whispered. “How did I miss it?” This he asked himself, but the wonder of it turned him to Danny, and he repeated the question. “How did I miss it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mister Grimm.”
“Did they leave together?”
“All I know is Odd wanted to get his boat in the water. He wanted to put a few miles on the engine. He told me he was going down to Port Arthur. To see about a job for the winter. He asked me to watch the fish house for him. I haven’t seen Rebekah for weeks, maybe months, but I watched Odd motor out of the cove alone on his boat just this morning.”
Hosea listened intently, but he knew a lie when he heard one and what he’d just heard was a steaming pile of moose guts.
“I guess you and Odd are thick as thieves, aren’t you? I could probably get a straighter answer out of a winding river than out of you.”
“I thought you knew every damn thing, Mister Grimm.”
“Is that what you thought?”
Hosea looked a last time around the fish house and headed for the door. At the threshold he stopped. The consequences of all he’d discovered since he’d woken would take days to parse, but the one thing he knew as he walked out to his truck and started it up was that more than anything else he felt abandoned. However peculiar their coming together had been, however twisted and convoluted, he thought of Rebekah and Odd honestly and lovingly as his children. And now they were gone, without the courtesy of a single word, and he was left to wonder at the world without them. All he saw were the unborn days ahead, their emptiness, and his place among the countless hours. In the instant of that realization, it was as though he aged all the hours yet allotted to him. He put the truck into gear and drove slowly away from the fish house.
Despite his sadness and the sting of abandonment, Hosea was geared for deception. Before he was back at the apothecary he had already shaped another ruse: an imaginary sister, deathly ill in Chicago, in need of Rebekah’s ministrations. By the time he parked the truck he’d already started believing she existed.
When the first customer came in at ten Hosea was scrubbed and dressed properly and sitting behind his counter, reading a day-old newspaper while his pipe smoldered in an ashtray at his elbow.
Winter arrived with its vengeance and with it Hosea took ill. He spent the week before Christmas nursing himself in his apartment, the apothecary closed for the first time in its twenty-five-year history. When he reopened the day after Christmas, the flood of customers could hardly believe the change in Hosea. He had aged, to be sure, but he also had about him the aspect of a man pulled from the ashes of a great fire. And it was this — ruin more than age — that caused the townsfolk their greatest concern.