I thought about my son. He had friends, kids in the neighborhood he played with, but he didn’t have a best friend. He possessed a fine imagination and often played alone, games he invented or adventures he concocted in his mind’s eye. I didn’t worry about him. He seemed pretty comfortable with who he was. I knew he was lonely sometimes. Who wasn’t? But watching him with Meloux’s old dog, I wondered if maybe there wasn’t an essential connection missing in his life, the kind of affection offered by a best friend. Or a lovable old hound.
After a while, they came out from under the picnic table. Walleye followed Stevie to the Quonset hut. A few moments later, my son poked his head into the serving area.
“Can I go fishing?”
“Don’t think much’ll be biting in this heat, buddy, but be my guest.”
I kept fishing gear in the back room. Stevie knew where. In a bit, he walked through afternoon sunlight toward the lake with Walleye padding along patiently at his side. They sat at the end of the dock. Stevie took off his shoes, put his feet in the water, and tossed his line. Walleye lay down, his head on his paws, and they hung out together in the comfortable quiet of two good friends.
At home that night I told Jo, “I’m driving to Thunder Bay in the morning.”
She was sitting up in bed, propped against the headboard, reading a file in a manila folder, something from work, I was sure. She often read in bed at night, her glasses perched on her nose, making small noises in response to the text.
“What about Sam’s Place?” She took off her glasses and laid them at her side.
I slipped into a pair of gym shorts and a clean T-shirt, my usual sleep attire. I turned from the dresser. “Jenny and Annie can handle it. Is Jenny here?”
“She came in a while ago.”
“Did she have a good time driving the North Shore with Sean?”
“She didn’t talk much.”
I sat down on the bed. “Is that good or bad?”
“It’s neither, I’d say. She’s just thinking, I imagine. Weighing everything.”
“Weighing an offer of marriage?”
“I don’t know that there’s been one.”
“If I were Sean and wanted to pop the question, I’d take her to someplace like the North Shore, sit her down with a gorgeous view of Lake Superior.”
“I suppose you would. That’s basically how you proposed to me. On Lake Michigan, a beautiful evening, a dinner cruise. That glorious question. Then you threw up.”
“I hadn’t planned on getting seasick. And you accepted anyway.”
“Jenny’s in a different place than I was, Cork. I think we should trust her.”
“That doesn’t mean we can’t nudge her in the direction we’d like her to go.”
“You think she doesn’t know what we’d prefer?”
“I’d like her to think of it as what’s best rather than just what we prefer.”
“I’m sure you would. What do you hope to accomplish in Thunder Bay?”
“A face-to-face meeting with Henry Wellington.”
“And how do you intend to go about that?”
“As nearly as I can tell, his brother-half brother-Rupert runs the company now, so he’s probably accessible. I’m hoping to use him to get to Wellington.”
“And you’ll get an audience with the brother how?”
“The watch. I’m banking on it opening the door.”
“Four-hour drive up, four-hour drive back. Could be all for nothing.”
“Not for nothing. It’s for Henry. And you have a better idea?”
She put the manila folder on the nightstand, leaned over, and kissed me. “You’ll be leaving early. Get some sleep.”
NINE
I stopped by the hospital on my way out of town. I spoke with Dr. Wrigley, who was pretty familiar by then with my association with Meloux, though he didn’t know anything of what the old man had requested of me. There’d been little change in Meloux’s condition. When I asked what exactly that condition was, Wrigley couldn’t give me an answer.
“There doesn’t seem to be any occlusion. We’ve run all the tests we can run here. I’m thinking of transferring him down to Saint Luke’s, in Duluth. Their heart people might be able to figure this one out.”
Meloux was awake. He smiled weakly when I entered his room. “How you doing, Henry?”
“I don’t sleep so good. I don’t crap so good. Mostly my heart is heavy. Like a bear on my chest.”
“I’m going up to Thunder Bay today, try to talk to the man who may be your son.”
“The watch?”
“I have it.”
I’d put it in a small white jewelry box Jo had given me. I opened the box, took out the watch, and handed it to Meloux. His fingers were brittle-looking things, thin sticks, but they handled that watch gently. He opened it and studied the photograph inside.
“She was beautiful,” I said.
The old Mide looked up. “Her beauty was a knife, Corcoran O’Connor.”
He handed the watch back.
“You will bring me my son,” he said.
I followed Highway 1 southeast and reached the North Shore in an hour. I turned left at Ilgen City and took Highway 61 north along Lake Superior.
It was a beautiful August day. The lake looked hard as blue concrete. Sunlight shattered on its surface into glittering shards. Far to the east, where the pale wall of the sky hit the water, the horizon was a solid line, the meeting of two perfect geometric planes. To the west rose the Sawbill Mountains, covered with second- and third-growth timber. The road often cut along steep cliffs or ran beside a shoreline littered with great slabs of rock broken by the chisel of ice and time and the relentless hammering of waves. I drove through Schroeder, Tofte, Grand Marais, and finally Grand Portage, small towns full of tourists come north for the scenery and to escape the sweltering Midwest heat farther south.
I crossed the border at the Pigeon River, and less than an hour later, I entered the unimpressive outskirts of Thunder Bay.
Thunder Bay is really the modern merging of two rival municipalities, Fort William and Port Arthur. As I understand it, the French fur traders started things rolling with a settlement protected by a rustic fort near the mouth of the Kaministiquia River, which emptied into a bay on Lake Superior the French called Baie de Tonnaire. The British, when they took over the fur-trading business, built a more impressive outpost they named Fort William. A few years later, when the new Canadian government wanted to build a road through the wilderness, a site a few miles north of Fort William was chosen. It was christened Port Arthur, and the two towns began trading verbal potshots, something that went on for the next hundred years or so, until they shook hands, erased the borders, and took to calling the new union Thunder Bay. The truth is, it didn’t end the rivalry. Ask anyone who lives in the city where they’re from and no one says Thunder Bay. Either they’re from Port Arthur or Fort William.
The city’s an old port. Like a lot of towns on the western side of Lake Superior, it’s long past its heyday. But it’s trying.
The bay is created by a long, southerly sweeping peninsula dominated by an impressive geological formation called Sleeping Giant, so named because that’s what the formation resembles. The Ojibwe story is that it’s Nanabozho, the trickster spirit, turned to stone when white men learned the secret of the peninsula, which was that a rich silver mine was hidden there.
From what I’d gathered on the Internet, Henry Wellington lived on a remote island called Manitou, which was just off Thunder Cape, the tip of Sleeping Giant. Manitou is an Ojibwe word that means spirit. That’s exactly what Wellington seemed to be. More spirit than flesh, more spoken about than seen.
I made my way to the Thunder Bay Marina, which was at the eastern edge of the downtown area, just off Water Street. The city’s old railroad station had been remodeled into shops and a little restaurant/bar. There were three main docks. Most of the slips were filled with modest sailboats and large motor launches. I walked to the end of the first dock and stared out across the bay toward Sleeping Giant, dark gray in the distance.