Lodge Green

The rain came at four in the morning. Kaisa heard it begin on the roof of Cabin 3, a few taps and then a steady drumming, and she lay awake and thought of ten feet of black mud on the Long Carry going soft and smooth again.

She had the photographs. She had also told the two mothers last night, on Elsa’s porch, in exactly the words she had promised and no others. Elsa had put her hand over her mouth, and Sanna had sat down on the step.

By eight the rain was falling straight and hard, with no wind in it. A dog could work in rain. A rain like this beat scent into the ground and left the air empty, and she would learn more today with a pencil than with a paddle. She fed Tansy, put the logbook inside her jacket, and crossed the forty yards to the canoe shop.

She had made up her mind somewhere on the paddle home. Yesterday he had held a canoe still in a crosswind for as long as she needed, and he had not asked why she was looking at his keel. He had also taken his hand away the moment she spoke. She was not going to think about that part. The rest was the record of a boatman she could work with, and he knew more about paint than anyone on the lake.

The shop was warm and thick with the smell of wet cedar. A kettle roared on a gas ring at the far end, feeding steam into a long plywood box, and white wisps leaked from its lid. Anders stood at the form with his sleeves rolled above the elbow. He looked up when the door opened.

“I need ten minutes,” she said.

“I’ve got eight ribs in the box. They come out when they’re ready, and after that I can’t stop. Can you talk while I work?”

“I’ll wait.”

She took the stool by the door. Tansy went straight to the pile of shavings under the bench and lay down in it as if it had been put there for her.

The hull on the form was ribbed and planked halfway to the gunwales, except at the two ends, where the form still showed bare for a couple of feet. He saw her looking.

“The end ribs go on last,” he said. “They take the hardest bend. I want the planking holding the others before I pull against them.”

“Whose is it?”

“A man in Minneapolis. Sixteen feet, sixty-eight hundred dollars, and he wants it by ice-out.” He pulled on a pair of leather gloves. “It’s the best order I’ve had this year. I’d like not to crack it in front of you.”

He lifted the lid. Steam rolled up around his arms. He drew out one rib, a thin flat strip of white cedar as long as his leg and limp with heat, and he had perhaps half a minute before it stiffened.

He did not hurry. He laid the middle of the rib on the centre line of the form and set his palms flat on either side. Then he leaned, and the wood went down over the curve under his hands like something giving in. There was one soft creak. He walked his hands outward, pressing all the way, never letting the bend gather in one place, and brought the two ends down to the inwales and clamped them. Two tacks went in at the centre, each with a single tap. He stood back, looked along the line of it against its neighbours, and went to the box for the next.

Kaisa had watched his father do this when she was a child. Tauno had made a show of it, with a great deal of grunting. Anders made no show at all. He never checked to see whether she was watching. His forearms were wet from the steam and corded with the effort. The cedar seemed to do as he wanted because he asked it at the right moment and with the right weight. He set eight ribs, and not one of them cracked.

She was aware of how long she had been looking at his hands. She made herself look at the window, where the rain ran down the glass.

He hung up the gloves and wiped his face on his shoulder. “That’s ten minutes of yours I’ve used.”

“It was worth seeing.” She opened the logbook to Sunday’s page and held it out, flat, with the little bag taped to the paper. “I found this two days ago at the ice-house landing. I didn’t tell you yesterday. I’m telling you now.”

He did not take the book from her. He bent over it where she held it. She noticed that, and noticed that it stung in some small way she had no right to feel.

“May I?”

She peeled the bag off the page and put it on the bench. He carried it to the window and turned it in the grey light.

“Where exactly?”

She showed him the photograph on her phone. “It’s a scrape on the rock shelf, two feet above the water, running straight up the slope. It’s eighteen inches long and about as wide as my thumb, and it’s fresh. That was at the top end of it.”

“So that’s why you were looking at my keel.”

“Your keel’s red.”

“I noticed you noticing.” He turned the bag once more. “This is lodge green. It’s marine enamel, the same one we’ve bought since before I was born. It’s on both towboats from the waterline up. It’s on the dock boxes and on every shed door along the shore. It goes on oars and boat cradles and the trim of the lodge.” He nodded at the floor under his bench. “I’ve got two gallons of it right there. I’ve put it on half the things on this lake myself.”

“A towboat has a keel.”

“A towboat has a motor, too. Somebody would have heard it at the ice house, even on a windy night.” He put the bag down on the bench between them. “I can’t make it mean one boat, Kaisa. A man who leaned an oar on a wet shed door could have carried that flake there on the blade. It points at everyone who’s ever held a brush here, and that includes me.”

“So it points at everyone.”

“Yes.” He rubbed the stub of his short finger with his thumb. “After yesterday I don’t like that any better than you do.”

She taped the bag back onto its page. Under Item 1 she wrote: Lodge marine enamel per A.K. Towboats, dock boxes, shed doors, oars, cradles, trim. Not specific. He watched her write his initials and said nothing.

When she looked up from the book, her eye went past him to the rafters.

Lengths of gunwale stock lay across the beams above the steam box, pale and clean. Among them was something darker and shorter. It was a paddle that had never been finished. She could see the outline sawn out, the shaft roughed round, and a long blade left thick and square at the edges. The dust on it was as grey as a mouse.

Every other thing in this shop was either in use or put away.

“What’s that one?”

He did not look up to see what she meant. “An order,” he said. “Nobody collected it.”

“It’s got a lot of dust on it for an order.”

“They never came for it.”

He said it evenly. He had turned to the bench and was setting his clamps back on their rail, one by one, in order of size. In her chest the thing that kept track of him had gone very tight and quiet, like a held breath.

She had spent seven years learning to tell when a witness had given her an answer that was true and had left something out. She knew she had just been given one. She also knew she had no claim on what a canoe builder kept in his rafters.

“It’s short for you,” she said.

“It wasn’t for me.”

She closed the logbook. “I’ll be at the lodge. I’m putting up a board.”

“Take the roster board in the hall. Wipe it. Nobody’s reading trip rosters this month.” He glanced at the window. “This will blow out overnight. You’ll have your wind back tomorrow.”

“Then I’ll see you at the dock at first light.”

“I’ll be there.”

She whistled up the dog and went out into the rain. Twenty steps along the path she heard the lid of the steam box bang shut, harder than a careful man shuts anything.
***
The lodge hall was a long log room with a stone fireplace at one end and the kitchen door at the other. The roster board hung beside the kitchen door, four feet by eight, where everyone who came for coffee had to pass it. Kaisa wiped off August’s canoe trips and went to work.

She drew the chain of lakes down the left side in black, from Vaara up to the bottom of Ukonvesi. She cut every shoreline into segments and lettered them: V1 to V9 on Vaara, H1 to H6 on Hirvi, S1 to S4 on Sumu. Down the right side she ruled four columns and headed them SEGMENT, WHO, DATE, RESULT. Then she opened Stefan’s four pages and copied every search onto the board in a hand large enough to read from the door.

It took two hours. People came and went behind her. They got their coffee slowly and stood with the cups going cold. Nobody spoke to her, but she could hear them reading.

Under the columns she wrote:

MON 21 SEPT. Long Carry (Hirvi to Sumu). Tracks, both children, travelling together, heading north. Photographed. K. Rautio / A. Korpela.

WED 23 SEPT. Canoe team goes north of the Long Carry at first light. Shore teams: put your names against a segment below.

If you search a segment, write it here the same day. If you walked on a track, tell me. I won’t be angry. I need to know.

She was underlining the last line when the kitchen door swung open and hit the wall.

Britta Tormala stood in it with flour to her elbows.

She was thirty-six now. She was as tall as ever, with the Korpela black hair twisted up under a kerchief and the straight Korpela brows drawn level. She had taught Kaisa to dive from Otter Rock by the simple method of counting to three and pushing. She had been the first person Kaisa told about the bond. That was seven years ago this month, the two of them whispering in this kitchen at midnight over a pan of burned cardamom rolls.

“So it’s true,” Britta said. “You’ve got my brother carrying your boat.”

“He carried his own boat.”

“Don’t be clever with me. I’ve had seven years to think what I’d say to you, and I’m not going to spend it on clever.” She wiped her hands down her apron, hard. “I know what he did. I was standing closer to that fire than you were. I’d have helped you pack. I’d have driven you to Duluth myself and called him names the whole way. But you left me too, Kaisa. Not one postcard.”

“I didn’t know what to write.”

“You write, ‘Britta, I’m alive.’ It fits on a postcard. There’s room left over for the weather.”

“You’re his sister.”

“I was your friend before I was anything to do with him and you. I was your friend when you were six and wouldn’t put your face in the water.” Her voice wobbled, and she scowled it straight. “I had a five-year-old under my feet that winter and I kept thinking, she’ll write at Christmas. Then I thought, she’ll write when the ice goes out. Then I stopped.”

Kaisa put the cap on her pen, because her hands needed something to do. She had written cards to her father all those years, four lines each. She had never once written Britta’s name on an envelope. Every time she tried, the envelope turned into the lodge, and the fire, and his eyes going to the ground.

“I couldn’t write to anything that had this place in it,” she said. “That isn’t a good reason. I’m sorry, Britta. I should have sent the postcard.”

“Yes. You should.” Britta looked at her for a long moment. “I know you’re sorry. I can see it. I’m not ready to have it yet.”

“All right.”

“The coffee in that urn is for searchers. I suppose that’s you.” She turned to go back in, and a boy ducked under her arm from the kitchen and stopped short.

He was twelve, all wrists and shins, with his mother’s hair standing up in a wet crest. He was not looking at Kaisa. He was looking at the yellow dog asleep under the board.

“Is that her? Is that the one who found them?”

“She found their trail,” Kaisa said. “Her name’s Tansy.”

“Can I touch her, or is she working?”

“Her harness is off. That means she’s just a dog. Go ahead.”

He was on his knees before she had finished. Tansy rolled over, presented her stomach, and looked up at him with complete devotion. The boy laughed out loud.

“That’s Mikko,” Britta said from the doorway. Her tone had not warmed, but she had not left. “He’s due on Saturday’s moon. He’s eaten a loaf and a half since breakfast and he can’t sit still.”

“I can sit still,” said Mikko, with his whole arm round the dog. “How does she know which person? If there’s a hundred smells?”

“I show her one thing that person slept in, and I tell her to find it. She keeps that one smell in her head and lets the other ninety-nine go.”

“For how long?”

“Six hours, if I keep her watered.”

He thought about that. “Mr. Zalar said the trails went to the water. Everybody knew that already. So why’d you do them over?”

Kaisa sat down on the bench so that she was level with him. This was the feeling she got in the hay field with her six volunteers, and she had not expected to find it here.

“Because they told me where the children went, and I needed to know how they walked there. A dog on a line shows you that. If the trail wanders and doubles back, that’s one kind of night. If it goes straight, that’s another.”

“Which was it?”

“Straight.”

“Huh.” He scratched Tansy’s chest. “What does rain do?”

“A little rain can wake up an old trail on moss. This much washes bare rock clean. That’s why I took pictures yesterday.”

“When I’ve shifted, will I smell what she smells?”

“You’ll smell more, in some ways. She’ll still beat you at one thing. She never decides she knows the answer before her nose tells her.”

He grinned at that. Then he looked up at the board, and he read it properly. His lips moved on the segment letters. Kaisa waited.

“Nobody’s done the islands,” he said.

“Say that again.”

“There’s no islands on there. It’s all shore.” He pointed. “Is that because wolves walked it, and you can’t walk to an island?”

It had taken her most of Sunday afternoon, with Stefan’s lists and a pencil, to arrive where this boy had got to in two minutes. She stood up, uncapped the pen, and wrote at the bottom of the board in capitals: ISLANDS, ALL LAKES: NOT YET SEARCHED.

“That’s the right question,” she said. “That’s a tracker’s question.”

His ears went red. “Pia could get to one easy. She swims for the team in Ely. She can hold her breath longer than anybody.”

Kaisa thought of the swim ribbons on a bedroom wall. She wrote that in her logbook too.

“Did she talk to you, after her first moon?”

“She wouldn’t shut up for about two days. Then she got weird and wouldn’t tell me stuff. She said I’d find out when I was old enough.” He scowled, and for a moment he was his mother exactly. “She’s only four months older than me.”

“Mikko,” Britta said. “Rutabagas. They won’t peel themselves.”

He got up slowly. He bent and said something into the dog’s ear, and went. Britta held the door for him. Her eyes went over the board from top to bottom, and then to the dog, and last to Kaisa.

“He’ll be on about that animal all night,” she said, and let the door swing shut.
***
The rain was thinning when Kaisa walked back to the point at nine. A light burned in the canoe shop, and she kept her eyes on the path.

There was something on the step of Cabin 3, pushed well back under the eave where the drip could not reach it. It was a plate with a mixing bowl turned upside down over it. Tansy got there first and stood over it with her tail going.

Kaisa lifted the bowl. There were four pasties under it, still warm, each with a braided edge, and a small K was pricked into each crust with a fork. That had always been the mark for no onions. She looked for a note under the plate and in the bowl. There was none.

She ate the first one standing in the open door with the rain blowing against her knees. It was beef and rutabaga and too much pepper, and it tasted exactly as it had when she was sixteen. Her eyes stung, and she blamed the pepper.

Up the shore the lodge windows were dark. People here did kindnesses without signing them. Someone had filled a woodbox before she came, and now someone had left a plate. She had forgotten that about them.

She gave the dog a corner of crust and stood a while longer, looking at the black water. Somebody on this lake had been to the ice-house landing in the dark, a week ago tonight, and had left only a flake of paint behind.
***