Though he’d not intended to sound contrary or at odds with Mayfair, he did. Mayfair seized on him. “Allow me to refresh your memory. You tried to feed one of the horses to the wolves, then you feasted yourself on this helpless young lady. Does that course of events sound familiar?”
Smith ran his hands through his hair. “Sir, there’s some truth in that. Some truth, I admit. But that ain’t the all of it.”
A broad and sarcastic smile came to Mayfair’s face. “By golly,” he said, “he’s a slow learner. Mister Smith, why don’t you tell me the all of it, then? Enlighten us.”
“May I have a cup of water?” Smith said. “I’m parched something fierce.”
“For the love of Christ, get the mutton chop some water.” Mayfair threw his hands up, shook his head. While the constable went for a glass of water, Mayfair packed his pipe and lit it. When the constable returned he set the water before Smith, who scooped it up almost as it was set down. He guzzled the water like there was a fire to put out.
The magistrate took a pull on his pipe and through the smoke he squinted and said, “All right now, Smith, let’s have your side of the story.”
Smith wiped his lips with his sleeve and pulled himself up in his chair. “Well,” he began, picking grime from his fingernails, his eyes intent on the task, “you all were here last winter?” He looked up, from the judge’s face to Grimm’s to Selmer’s. When he got to Thea he looked down, then quickly back to the magistrate. “You all felt that cold?”
Mayfair waited silently, still chewing on the pipe stem. The constable went for another glass of water. He returned and set it before Smith and said, “Drink that. If it don’t loosen your lips, we’ll presume what we’ve heard to be true. You can add another twenty years to the sentence you’ll be getting in Duluth. You’ll never see another day of freedom so long as you live.”
Smith drank the water.
“Listen to the constable,” Mayfair said. “And be aware, my patience is about gone.”
“My brother and I, we bought this outfit selling watches and pocket knives to the lumberjacks. Had a little supply office in Duluth and two horses and two sleighs. He took the Wisconsin and Michigan camps, I took the Minnesota camps. Me and that old mare with the suspect hooves. A goddamn sleigh and a map and that winter enough to freeze a man’s reason right out of his head.” He paused, ventured a look in the judge’s direction. “That’s what I mean, you all felt that cold. Colder than this world was ever meant to be.” Again he paused, as though the mere remembrance of those nights was enough to freeze him up.
Thea was not listening to Selmer translate Smith’s testimony. She understood everything he said through her lessening fear. He was pathetic, and she had the strength of her child swimming in her womb to bolster her. She sat up straighter.
“It’s a long way from one of those camps to the next,” Smith continued. “A long ways and a lot of dark. I’m just a man from Duluth looking for the next logging camp. Selling watches to men who spend all their time chopping down trees.” He shook his head. “You know how far it is from Duluth to Gunflint? You know how much wilderness is between here and there? It’s a long way to go just you and a horse. Well, you and a horse and all the sounds in the woods. The shadows. Caribou jumping out of the trailside woods. Ravens everywhere you go, day and night. Enough snow to suffocate you. And the cold. Christ almighty.” Again he paused. “Why do they need watches? They’re crazy about watches. How about a change of drawers? How about new boots? Watches?”
Mayfair interrupted, “With all due respect to your travails, Mister Smith, what bearing does any of this have on your actions?”
“It has everything to do with it. Maybe you sit in your warm office, you light up your pipe without frostbitten hands, you loosen your shirt collar to cool off, maybe you do all that and you forget about what’s there —” he pointed out the window, up the hill, at the trees and the wilderness they held—"and what it all means. What it means."
“Mister Smith, I’ve lived in this town for twenty years. I built the first house, I named the first street. Lectures on how cold the winter is are lost on me. I’ll offer you a last chance to make your case.” He held his index finger up, wagged it at Smith. “One more chance.”
“I had wolves following me day and night. They were after me. Their tracks were on the trail before and behind me. They’d howl. How they’d howl. You put the wolves after the cold, after the wilderness.” He shook his head.
“There are wolves in these woods just as there’s cold in winter, Smith. It’s true.”
Joshua Smith risked interrupting Mayfair. “They were taunting me. I needed them to stop. That’s why I set the horse in the paddock. To feed them. It was me or the horse.”
“Mister Smith, if it’s true the wolves were taunting you, then all the hounds of hell must have besieged you in Duluth. Why else burn a city block? I think we’ve heard enough about the horse. Tell me, what were your intentions when you went to the mess hall?”
“My intentions? I went to the mess hall,” Smith said, speaking more softly now, “because the cook’s beautiful. There’s no great mystery in it. She was kind to me and she’s beautiful and I was a man caught in that season. I don’t know what I expected. I don’t know.”
“I’m sure we’d all agree Miss Eide is lovely to look at, Mister Smith, but I’d venture to guess we’d none of us do what you did. The cold and the wolves and the trees don’t grant permission of that sort. No one does, nothing does.”
“Permission—” Smith began, but Mayfair interrupted.
“Do you know the girl’s enceinte?”
“Enceinte?”
“The girl’s with child, Joshua Smith. While you’re doing your time in a federal penitentiary, she’ll be raising your misbegotten child.”
Smith’s mouth hung open. He leant forward, tried to look at her belly under the table opposite him.
“There are five people in this room with better things to do with their time than listen to your stories about being cold. I’ll write a decision to send with the Mounties.” Mayfair moved papers around his blotter, took his pen from his shirt pocket, and began to write even as he continued speaking. “This world is dreadful enough. It doesn’t need the help of monsters.” He paused in his writing, looked squarely at Smith. “Mister Smith, you are a monster. I can only hope the sight of this woman and the child growing in her belly tames some small part of you.”
To Thea and Hosea and Selmer, Mayfair said, “You’re all free to leave. I’m sorry for the waste of your time.” Then to Thea he said, “Miss Eide, my wife and I pray for you. We pray for your unborn child. People are unkind, but if you can rise above the unfortunate nature of the conception of that babe, and if you can love it with a pure heart, with an unsullied conscience, then the stain of its paternity will fade. The good people of Gunflint will rise above their ignorance and make the child one of us. I promise you that.”
Selmer finished translating Mayfair’s last words and rose. Hosea followed. Then Thea. They stood for just a moment, long enough for Joshua Smith to get a glimpse of Thea’s belly, of the swell that sealed the rest of his life with a barred fate. He knew that much. He knew, also, that he was right about the cold and the trees and the wolves.
XXI.
Every morning that December Odd woke in the darkness and padded down the hallway of the brownstone they’d rented on East Sixteenth Street. He’d stand over the sink in the bathroom and shave around a lit cigarette dangling from his lips, the wonder of hot running water and the steam it aroused a minor miracle each morning after all those years of hauling buckets of icy water up to the fish house from the lake.