Water on the Stones

By noon on Saturday the rain had gone through everything Kaisa owned.

It had started before they left the dock, and it had not changed since. It fell straight down, cold and steady, with no wind behind it. The board in the lodge hall said the canoe team was on Hirvi today. The notebook inside her jacket said the north shore of Sumu and the Step Portage, and so that was where they were.

She stood at the top of the Step with water running off the bill of her cap. The portage was only twenty-five rods, a staircase of ledges between two lakes, and every ledge had a stream on it. Tansy stood beside her with her tail down and her ears flat. The dog had tried. She had cast along the landing and up the first two steps, and then she had looked round at Kaisa in plain apology.

“I know,” Kaisa told her. “There’s nothing in the air. That’s the rain, and you’re a good dog.”

Anders came up the last ledge behind them. He had left the canoe at the Sumu end, because there was no sense in carrying it. He stopped beside her and looked where she was looking.

Ukonvesi lay below them, and she could see about a quarter mile of it. After that there was only grey.

“Nine miles,” he said. “It’s two miles wide at the middle, and it has more bays than I’ve got fingers.”

“You’ve got nine and a half.”

“It has more than that.”

She almost smiled, and she was too tired to finish it. She had waded four landings on Sumu’s north shore that morning with her father’s rules in her head, and she had found wet rock at every one. If two young wolves had come over this portage on Wednesday night, they had done it on stone, and three days and this rain had taken the rest.

“Tell me what you’d do,” she said.

He was quiet for a moment. She had never asked him that before.

“I’d go home,” he said. “I’d dry the dog and wait for a morning you can use. I can hold a boat on that lake in this. I can’t make it tell you anything.”

“No. Nobody can.” She wiped her face, which did no good. “Pia’s been out twenty-eight nights. I’ve got twenty-two left before the moon. I just spent one of them standing in the rain.”

“You spent it finding out they aren’t on Sumu’s north shore.”

“That’s a kind way to put nothing.”

“It’s what you’d write on the board, if the board were honest.”

He was right, and it did not help. All the way down Sumu and over the Long Carry she kept seeing the small hollow under the spruce, with the grouse wing beside it. Her hands went numb on the paddle on Hirvi and stayed numb down Vaara. Neither of them talked. It was a different silence from Tuesday’s. On Tuesday she had been unable to look at him. Today she was simply cold, and he knew it and paddled harder.

It was nearly dark when the red canoe touched the dock on the point. He lifted the dog out before she could ask. Then he bent over the glass tube he kept wired to the last post and read it in the last of the light.

“An inch and a half since six this morning.”

“Write it down.”

“I will.”

She walked up to the lodge with the dog, because the lie had to be fed. There were only a few people in the hall. She uncapped the pen and wrote, SAT 3 OCT. Hirvi, west shore and islands. Heavy rain. NOTHING FOUND. It was the nearest she had come to the truth on that board since Thursday. Nobody spoke to her. She went back down the shore road with her boots squelching.

Anders was standing in the path below Cabin 3 with an armful of split birch.

“It’s Saturday,” he said.

“I know what day it is.”

“I fire the sauna on Saturdays. My grandfather built it in 1958, and I doubt it’s missed twenty Saturdays since.” He shifted the wood on his arm. “You’re cold through, and so am I. It’ll be hot in an hour. I’m telling you it’s there. I’m not asking you for anything.”

She looked past him at the low log building on the rock above the water.

“That’s the room,” she said. “Where he did it.”

“It is. He sat me in there dry. The first Saturday after we buried him I went in and threw water on the stones until I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t going to let him keep the building.” He nodded at her door. “Come when the smoke goes thin, or stay by your stove. Either one is all right.”

He went on down to the shore. She stood in the rain a moment longer and then took her dog inside.
***
She fed Tansy, rubbed her down with a towel and left her flat on the rug in front of a good fire. Then she undid her wet clothes with fingers that would barely bend, wrapped herself in the dry towel and her rain jacket, and crossed the forty yards in her unlaced boots.

Over the sauna door somebody had cut A.K. 1958 with a knife. Inside there was a small room with pegs, and his clothes were on one of them. She hung her jacket on another and opened the inner door.

The heat took her whole body at once. It was dark in there. The stove was a black iron box heaped with lake stones, and a line of orange showed round its door. One small window looked at the water, and there was nothing in it but night and rain. She could make out two benches, one above the other, and the shape of him on the lower one with a towel round his hips and his elbows on his knees.

“Top bench is hottest,” he said.

“I remember how a sauna works.”

She climbed past him and sat with her back against the logs. The cedar was hot under her thighs. For a long while she did nothing but let the cold come out of her. It left her hands first and her feet last, and it hurt in the middle.

“Water?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He dipped the ladle and threw it. The stones roared, and the steam rolled up over her like a wave and stung her ears. She breathed it in to the bottom of her lungs. He threw another and sat back, and she heard him let out his own long breath.

She could see the line of his shoulders against the stove’s glow. Water ran down between them. She could not see his face, and he could not see hers. She thought she would never be able to say it in a lighted room.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she said. “Don’t turn round while I do it.”

“I won’t.”

“On Tern Rock you saw me at that hollow, and you didn’t ask how I knew. I’ll tell you now. When I left here I drove west until I ran out of road I wanted. That was a trailhead on the east side of the Swan Range, in Montana, at the end of October. I put my clothes on the seat and the key on the front tire. I meant to run for a night, to get out of my own head.”

The stones ticked.

“I stayed a wolf until April.”

He did not move. She watched his shoulders and went on.

“The old women tell it wrong. They make it sound like drowning. It’s the best you’ve ever felt in your life. Everything that hurt me had words in it, and the words were the first thing to go. What you said at the fire went in about a week. By the first big snow I’d lost my father’s name. By February I couldn’t have told you my mother’s, and I didn’t miss it. I killed snowshoe hares and slept under a cedar root, and I was happy. That’s what I saw under that spruce. Pia isn’t suffering. That’s why it’s so hard to come back from.”

“What brought you back?”

His voice was low and careful. It was a question and nothing else.

“People shouting. It was April, and the snow was going rotten. A skier had gone off a ridge two days earlier. I’d passed him that morning in a creek bottom, alive, with his leg bent wrong. To a wolf he was a thing to walk round. Then I was up on the ridge, and there was a line of people going up the wrong drainage, calling a name. They called it over and over. I stood there, and I knew where he was. I knew the one thing they needed, and I had no hands and no voice to give it to them. I hadn’t wanted a word in five months. I wanted one then so badly that I lay down in the snow and tried.”

“How long did it take?”

“All night. Ten breaths, the law says. It took me from dusk to sunrise, and more than once I thought I’d stick halfway. In the morning I broke into a hunter’s shack for a coat and a pair of boots. I walked down to the road and told a deputy I’d seen a man in the creek from the ridge. They had him out by noon. He lived. He isn’t one of my thirty-eight.”

She pulled her knees up and held them.

“My truck had been towed in November. It cost me four hundred dollars to get it back. The woman I work for thinks I waited tables that winter. I’ve never told anyone at all. That’s why I take one night a month on four legs and never two together. It’s part of why I work with a dog. I told my father she never gets tired of being a dog. I got tired of being a woman once, and I know how easy it is.”

It was out. Her heart was going hard. She waited for him to say he was sorry. She waited for him to turn it into his own fault and make her comfort him for it. Either one would have sent her back to her own stove.

He sat still for a long time.

“Is there anything you want me to do with it?” he said.

“No.”

“Then I won’t do anything with it. I’ll know it. That’s all.”

“You’re not going to tell me it was your doing?”

“What I did is mine, and I’ve said so. That winter is yours. You drove there, you stayed, and you got yourself out, in a night, in the snow, for a stranger. If I took the blame for it I’d be taking the rest too.” He was silent a moment. “I’m glad about the skier. I’m glad somebody was shouting.”

Her eyes stung, and she let them. It was dark, and the steam was a good enough reason.

“More water,” she said.

He threw it. They sat in the roar of it until she could not bear the heat another minute. Then she said, “Lake,” and he said, “After you,” and she went out through the little room and down the wet planks at a run. She dropped the towel at the end of the dock and jumped.

The cold drove every thought out of her. She came up shouting, with the rain on her face. He hit the water beside her and came up with his hair in his eyes, and she heard herself laugh. They were back on the boards in half a minute. Steam rose off both of them. He kept his eyes on her face while she got the towel round her, as he had at the fire on Hirvi.

She was warm to the bone. Her skin felt new all over. She looked at him standing there in the rain, big and quiet and waiting for nothing, and she found that the decision was already made. It had been made somewhere on the top bench, when he asked his one question and then left her story alone.

“Is your stove lit?” she said.

“It is.”

“Then walk me there.”
***
His cabin was one large room with a low loft. A lamp burned on the table. There was a stove with its damper half shut, a wall of books and tools, and a wide cedar bed under the eave. The red-and-black wool shirt hung on a hook by the door. She took it down and put it on over the towel, and did up two buttons.

“I was sorry to give this back,” she said.

He had pulled on trousers in the sauna porch. He stood just inside his own door with rain on his shoulders and did not come any nearer.

“Before anything else, I’m going to say this in words,” she said. “I want to go to bed with you tonight. I’m a woman who’s made up her mind, and I’ve been making it up since Thursday. This isn’t the bond deciding, and it isn’t an answer to anything. There’s no bite. There are no promises. Tomorrow I’m still angry about twenty-two months, and I’m still hired, and I still have a life somewhere else that I haven’t decided about. That’s what I want. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” he said.

“All of it? With no more than that?”

“All of it. No bite and no promises. I’ll take what you’ve said and not go looking for more inside it.” He took one step. “Now I’m asking you, and I’ll wait for it. I don’t mean what you’ll allow. Do you want me, Kaisa? The man who did what I did. Do you want him in that bed?”

He stopped there, an arm’s length off, with his hands open at his sides. He would have stood there until the lamp ran dry.

“Yes,” she said. “I want you. Come here.”

He came. She put her hands on his chest, and his skin was hot from the stones and cold from the lake in patches. His heart was going as hard as hers. He kissed her slowly. It was different from the kiss on the granite, because nobody was holding back his hands now. They came up into her wet hair.

“May I take this down?” he said against her mouth.

“Yes.”

He undid her braid. He was as careful with it as he was with a steamed rib, working the three strands loose with his fingers, and when it was free he spread it over her shoulders and looked at it. Nobody had seen her hair down in years. She undid the two buttons herself. The shirt and the towel went to the floor, and she stood in the lamplight and let him look.

“Seven years,” he said, very low.

“Don’t count. Touch me.”

He touched her. He began at her face, with his thumb along the white line through her eyebrow, and went down the side of her throat to her collarbone. His palms were rough from the plane and the paddle. When he closed his hands over her breasts she heard the sound she made, and she was not embarrassed by it. He bent and put his mouth where his hands had been. His beard was soft against her skin, which she had not expected, and her knees went loose.

She had her own looking to do. She pushed him back to arm’s length and did it. There was the breadth of him, and the dark hair across his chest. A pale scar ran along one forearm. She took his left hand, lifted it and kissed the short finger at its blunt tip. His breath went out as if she had struck him.

“Bed,” she said.

It was cold linen for a moment and then it was warm. He lay beside her and learned her with his hands, her ribs and her waist and the long muscle of her thigh, and he watched her face to see what each touch did. She had thought it would be quick, after so long. He would not let it be. Each time she reached to hurry him he caught her hand and kissed the palm and went on at his own pace, until she was shaking and said his name in a voice she did not know.

“Now,” she said. “Anders. Now.”

“Tell me if anything’s wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong.”

She pulled him over her and took him in. Then for a while there was only his weight and his heat, and his breath breaking against her neck. She was fiercer than she had meant to be. Her nails were in his back and her heel was behind his knee, and he answered it. The bed creaked like a boat. The thing under her breastbone had gone wide and bright, and it pulled at her. But it was her own hips that rose, and her own hands that held his face, and she kept her eyes open so that she would know it.

His mouth came down on the place where her neck met her shoulder. She felt him stop. He lifted his head an inch and moved his lips to her jaw, and his teeth never touched her. She loved him a little for that, and she did not say so.

It took her like the lake, all at once and to the top of her head. He followed her with her name in his mouth.

Afterward he lay on his back and she lay against him with her cheek on his chest. His arm was round her. Neither of them said anything clever. He drew the wool blanket up over her shoulder, and his hand moved slowly through her hair, and the rain went on over the roof. She listened to his heart slow down. She fell asleep between one beat and the next, as easily as an animal.
***
She woke in the dark. The rain had stopped. The stove was down to coals, and the window showed two stars.

She lay still and took stock, as she did on waking in any strange place. She was warm, and nothing hurt, and for the first time in weeks the place under her breastbone was quiet. She could have stayed there until noon. That was exactly why she would not.

She slid out from under his arm and found her towel and her boots by the lamp’s last glow. She put the wool shirt on again.

“Your stove will be out,” he said from the bed. He had not moved.

“I can light a stove.”

“I know you can.”

“I’m not sneaking off. I’ve got a door of my own forty yards from here. I need to walk through it this morning and know it’s still mine.” She did up the buttons. “It isn’t about last night. Last night was what I wanted.”

“Then go and walk through it.” She heard him smile. “Take the shirt.”

“I was going to.”

She stopped at the bed and bent and kissed him once, briefly, on the mouth. He let her go. He did not ask when, or whether, and she noticed.

Outside the air was sharp and smelled of wet pine. She crossed the forty yards under a clearing sky with her hair loose down her back. Tansy met her at the door of Cabin 3, wagging from the shoulders. Kaisa knelt on her own floor and laid kindling on her own cold grate and struck the match.

The fire caught. She sat back on her heels in his shirt and watched it. She had walked back to her own door and nobody had tried to stop her. She already wanted to walk the other way.
***