Down at the lake steely clouds mixed in the sky. The wind-whipped water curled up in waves that washed on the beach. He stepped onto the dock and bent to untie his boots. He took off his jeans and shirt, his socks and drawers, and stood naked at the end of the dock. Instantly the sweat that only a few minutes earlier had been dripping from him dried — seemed almost to encase him — as the wind curled around him. He stood there, distracted by the cold air, and had only a single moment of clarity, of apprehensive panic, before he jumped feet-first into the lake.
From the instant he went under he could feel the water seizing him. Although he’d been anticipating something like it, he could never have expected the grip of the water. If he hadn’t kicked and pulled for the surface the instant he was submerged he might have ended up sunk.
Crazy though the idea of the bath had been, both his father and grandfather had been inclined to take late-autumn and even early-winter baths. It was a point of pride between the two men. Noah could remember watching them — their long arms and lean, muscular legs, their hairy chests and long beards — as they dove into the water while the early-winter snow whitened the sky. It was a rite of passage Noah had not grown up fast enough for. As he climbed onto the dock he took a cracked bar of Ivory soap from its wooden nook on the dock, wetted it, and began lathering himself. The air felt warm in contrast with the water, and he washed away the day’s hard work and grime. He scrubbed his underarms, legs, and feet. He wetted the soap again and lathered his hair and face, his neck and arms. He washed his back. And before he could fear it, he dove back into the lake. He experienced the same convulsions, the tightening in his lungs, the stardust behind his closed eyes, but he needed a second to rinse himself, so he messed his hair with his hands and kicked wildly while he watched the soap disperse in the dark water.
Back on the dock he stood in the bracing wind as water puddled at his feet. He dried himself in the gale. Nat would not have known him there. He could not have known himself. He was — if only for a few long minutes — more his father than he had ever been. More than ever he was his son. A sense that ought to have brought with it a feeling of benevolence brought instead a pale choler. Nat would be here soon — was perhaps already up at the cabin — willing herself and Noah into parenthood with her resoluteness alone, stopping literally at nothing to add a branch to the Torr family tree. And here Noah stood, half an orphan for most of his life. He’d learned to live without his father, almost without the memory of him. He’d reinvented himself in a fashion with Nat’s help, had evolved as a man even as his father had receded ghostlike into the Minnesota wilderness. Thoughts that should have been spent on memories of the old man, on anticipating times to come, had been spent on what instead? He toed the soap back into its nook.
Aside from Nat — from their life together — and these few other things, what did he even think about? Of their childlessness, sure, but less and less even of that. Was he not entitled to recompense for the void? Would it have been better if his father had died on that night all those years ago? Whether this last was said or only thought he did not know, but soberer for it having crossed his mind, he forgave the old man all at once. Forgave him everything. He wondered whether his father would forgive him.
In the spirit of being his father’s son, he walked back up to the cabin in his boots alone.
SEVEN
I leave you alone for a few days and this is what I come to find?” Nat stood at the kitchen basin, scrubbing a bunch of radishes, staring at her naked husband. She was trying to make light of things, Noah knew, but the effort felt stilted. She seemed unsure of her own presence. “Hurry and dress. Soup’s on.” In the middle of the great room, before the now tempered woodstove, the card table was prodigiously set. Noah took a piece of cheese, sniffed it, tasted it. “Brown cheese,” he said, then stepped into the bedroom.
When he emerged again Nat was helping Olaf to a seat at the table.
Noah said, “When did you get here?”
“About a half hour ago.”
Olaf ladled creamy gruel from a plastic container.
“What’s that?” Noah said.
“This is black pot,” Olaf said. “What your grandmothers would have called sort gryte.” “I’m dying to hear about this,” Noah said, heading for the refrigerator. He added the smoked salmon to the feast.
“There’s not much to hear. I found this place online.” She searched for a paper bag under the cluttered countertop. “It’s called Kafe Forny. ‘Kafe’ with a K. I’m afraid it’s all cold.” She handed Noah the bag and an open bottle of beer. She offered Olaf a bottle, but he declined with a turned-down chin.
The label on the bag had a Duluth address under a Norwegian-flag logo. The beer bottle read, HANSA-BORG’S BORG BOKKøL. Noah tasted the beer. He looked at his father spooning the soupy black pot into his slack mouth, the look on his face giving away a deep satisfaction. “So you left Boston this morning, stopped at a Norwegian deli in Duluth, drove up here, and now you’re serving me a beer and something called black pot.” “And lutefisk, lefse, that cheese, krumkake for dessert.” “And radishes.”
“And radishes,” Nat confirmed. She set a plate of them on the table.
“Chrissakes, this is good eating,” Olaf said.
Natalie sat next to Noah. “Dig in,” she said.
A taste for these flavors had long been lost to Noah, but when he saw Natalie sprinkling sugar onto a buttered sheet of lefse, when he saw her slicing another piece of Gjetost cheese onto her plate, even when he saw her daring a quivering spoonful of lutefisk taken from a pan atop the stove, his appetite became tremendous. He ate everything. Olaf ate everything. Noah drank one and then another bottle of beer. Olaf suggested they turn on the radio, which they did, but when they found no station in the twilight hours they settled on old stories told around the table. Food stories all. Natalie recalled the always overcooked pork and dumplings stewed in cans of storebought soup from her childhood. Neither Noah nor Olaf could imagine it. Noah’s memories settled on Christmas cookies so fine they defied his power of description. And for Olaf it was Thanksgiving turkeys cooked in the cavernous roasting pans of steamship ovens; his own mother’s lefse, made of nearly rotting potatoes for their sweetness; her own antique krumkake irons; and finally her homemade butter on the lutefisk she made every Friday night.
Natalie, despite her labor in setting the table and the still too-warm room, wore her favorite sweater of Norwegian wool. She looked wholly native to this spot in the woods, so far from Boston and their life and her cautionary and conservative upbringing. She looked, Noah thought as he sat back for the last sip of his beer, more like his wife in that instant than in any other moment of their life together. It wouldn’t have been possible for him to say that he loved her any better, but neither could he remember a moment in their history to match the intensity of his conviction that here was the woman whose wisdom in all things made him a finer man, finer for the life with her and finer for the child she would — he was suddenly convinced again — bear to this world and to their lives. With this thought came another: that whenever that child did come, Noah would no longer reign in the boundlessness of her love, that that domain was forfeit to the child.
When Nat unpacked the krumkake and offered to make coffee, both men declined. Instead they nibbled at the cookies with waning enthusiasm, Olaf admitting that his mother’s old recipe had nothing on the cookies from Kafe Forny. Enough food still lay on the table for another such feast, the black pot congealing in its cream, the gelatinous lutefisk in the pan, the lefse stacked like tortillas in a plastic bag.