Noah held the bag up. “Knut says hello. Nice guy. There’s not much you couldn’t find in that store of his, either. It’s doubling as the local coffeehouse. Told me to tell you to come down some morning and join him for a cup.”
Olaf lifted the thermos. “I make my own coffee. But he runs a good business, been around since the Voyageurs.” He looked in the bag.
“That going to work?”
“This is fine,” Olaf said.
“Where are you headed anyway? Looks like you’re ready for a polar expedition.”
Olaf suddenly seemed bashful. He slapped his hand against his thigh, turned to look toward the shed, made a tentative step in its direction but stopped and faced Noah. “Come here,” he said.
The padlock on the shed wasn’t locked. Olaf took it from the hasp, hung it on a nail pounded into the siding, and tugged the warped door open. He stepped into the shed and pulled aside the curtain, barely illuminating the heaps of junk everywhere. Car parts and oil cans occupied a whole wall of shelves. There were mildew-stained cardboard boxes, splintered canoe paddles, busted lawn chairs, a step-ladder missing every other rung, a mattress and box spring leaning against the back wall, two pairs of Noah’s childhood skis propped in the corner, vintage life preservers hanging from hooks on the wall to his right, and on the left a table that must have been his father’s workshop, as evidenced by the hacksaw, the stainless-steel tubing, and the mayonnaise jar full of nails and screws atop an oak door that spanned two sawhorses. The place stank like ripe, wet wood.
Where, Noah thought, disgusted, could her ashes possibly be in this mess? “This place is a sty,” he said, stepping over a stack of magazines.
Olaf was clearing his toolbox from an old wooden barrel that sat on the floor beside the makeshift table. He shrugged. “You and your sister used to sleep out here. There’s a nice breeze in the summer.” He pointed the hacksaw at the cracked window. “Comes up off the lake.”
“It could use a breeze now. It smells awful in here.” Noah was trying to figure out how to ask about his mother’s ashes.
Olaf poured a cup of coffee from the thermos. “You recognize this?” He pointed at the barrel.
“This? Yeah, I sure do.”
Olaf pried the lid off, exposing thousands of taconite pellets.
“Your mother hated these things. Thought they were messy. She hated a mess.”
Noah picked a handful from the barrel and rolled them around in the palm of his hand. “They were,” he said. “They still are.” He showed his father the black smudges on his fingertips.
“I used to bring a pocketful of these home for you each run. Like they were goddamned lemon drops.”
“I remember that,” Noah said.
“You loved it. You thought it was the neatest damn thing.”
Noah wanted to smile at the memory but couldn’t. “Where are her ashes?” he said.
Olaf had turned his attention to the chain and didn’t look up when he said, “Somewhere. It’s been a long time since I had them out.” He slung the chain over his shoulders. “I used to keep them in the house but got scared I might use them instead of flour to bread the trout.”
“You’re joking.”
Olaf set the chain on the workbench and said nothing, only smiled.
“And now they’re lost.”
Olaf sat down, took a piece of the stainless-steel tubing, and threaded the chain through it. “They aren’t lost. They’re somewhere here. You can spit from one wall to the other, wouldn’t take long to find them.
“Anyway, forget about the ashes for a minute. I need help getting this down to the lake.” He kicked the barrel at Noah’s feet, finally looked him in the eye. “And there’s something else. All this stuff”—he gestured toward the workbench—“it’s for an anchor. The chain, it’s for an anchor.”
“What anchor?”
“For my burial in the lake.”
Noah looked at him for a hard moment. “Have you gone completely nuts? Your burial?” He raked his hair back and shook his head in disbelief.
“Settle down, would you? I know what’s going on here”—he put his hands to his stomach—“I know what’s happening to me. I’m not a fool.”
“You’re wrong about that. You’re exactly a fool.” Noah stepped toward his father. “First of all, we can take you to the doctor. We can get help for whatever’s happening to you. They cure this stuff nowadays. I mean, you don’t even know what’s wrong. And don’t tell me we covered it already,” Noah insisted, anticipating Olaf’s retort. “Let’s be reasonable instead.” Now he took the chain from his father’s shoulders and let it slink to the floor.
In a firm voice Olaf said, “I’ve lived a long time and deserve this much.” He bent to pick up the chain. “I know you think it’s ignorant or selfish or nuts, I guess, but the simple fact of the matter is that after you’ve lived as long as I have, after you’ve come to terms with everything you’ve wrecked in this world, everything you’ve loved, once it’s all tucked away and measured out, six more months or a year don’t matter anymore.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you anymore.” Now Noah sat down. “Do I understand you? Do you really believe the things you’re telling yourself?” He shook his head in disgust and in sadness. “Listen, there’s no way I’m going to chain you up and drop you out with the fish. You can’t ask for something like that. I’m glad I’m here and can help. But this is out of the question. You can just forget it.” Noah stepped to the door. “Don’t ask me again.”
Inside the house Noah tore through his bag, put on a flannel shirt, took his dirty jeans from the bedpost and a pair of leather gloves from a shelf by the door, and headed back outside, only stopping long enough to fetch the chainsaw and the full gas can from the back of the truck.
He hurried to the fallen oak. When he reached the tree he paused and looked down into the creek bed. He swung into the gulch, tugged on the cord, set the chain against the trunk of the tree, and pulled the trigger.
He worked first with the saw above his head. Balancing against the steep incline of the gulch’s wall, he let the saw rip through the oak as it rained sawdust on him. When the saw slipped through the top side of the trunk he flinched, expecting the tree to shift or fall when the first bole fell. It didn’t.
On the bank of the gulch ropy stalks of bramble grew from the clumps of rusty soil, and he used them to pull himself up. There had to be an easier way of doing this. He stepped onto the trunk. He started the saw again and tiptoed backward out onto the tree. It couldn’t have been much more than eight or ten feet above the ground, but it seemed much higher, especially when he looked toward the lake.
Measuring off a foot and a half, he set the saw onto the tree and hit the trigger. From this angle the saw worked much more easily. In less than half the time it had taken him to make the first pass from the underside, it cleaved the first stump. He made eight or ten more stumps from the trunk, and when he choked the saw off and looked behind him, he saw that he was a solid quarter of the way across and suspended above the nettle as if he were on the bowsprit of a ship.
His body thrummed with the lingering vibrations from the saw. He caught his breath, tightened the gloves on his hands, and brushed the sawdust from his sleeves. Now the hard part, he thought. He dropped back into the gulch, set the saw on the bank, and stacked the stumps into a pile at the base of the incline. Then he began hoisting them out of the creek bed. The first, narrower half of the bunch were light enough that he could toss them up. The second half required a plan. He managed to get the first big stump onto his shoulder. The thick bark bit his face as he crawled up the embankment. His feet churned in the loose soil. Laboring, the stump sliding around his neck — it must have weighed seventy-five pounds — the bark burning his neck, he imagined it crushing his ankle. He strained against the stump, finally rolled it up over the edge.