What the Ice Kept

The dredge at the harbor mouth hooked a car that Monday morning, and the word came up Harbor Street a little after nine, the way word always has in Ephraim Harbor, by way of the post office counter and the coffee shop and a woman with a dog who stopped to tell me on the library steps. Not a boat, she said, and not a snowmobile, which would have been ordinary for April. A car.

I had the keys in my hand and an hour before I had to open. I put the keys back in my coat pocket and walked down.

It was the first morning that spring with open water in the inner harbor. The ice had gone out over the weekend in one long grinding night, and what was left of it lay rafted up against the far shore in gray plates, like the broken lids of canning jars at the bottom of a box. The water inside the breakwater was dark green and very calm. The air off it was colder than the air on the street, and I belted my camel coat tighter at the waist and was glad I had worn the good wool trousers and not a skirt.

Half the town was already out on the breakwater. I knew most of the backs. I had come home to the peninsula only last fall, to be the director of the library and to live in my grandmother's white house on Cedar Street behind it, but I had been born here and gone to St. Olaf's and sung in its senior choir, and a town does not forget the shape of a girl just because she spent thirty-some years in Madison. People turned to see who it was and said, "Britta," and turned back. That is a warm welcome on this peninsula. Anything more would have meant they had been talking about me.

They had been, of course. I was fifty-five, a Wikstrom on my father's side, which is Swedish, and an Aasen on my mother's, which is Norwegian and Moravian and as old as the village, and I had been a widow for two years. Neil had died in our driveway in Madison with the snow shovel in his hand. A woman like that does not move back into her grandmother's house without the town wondering aloud what she means by it.

Gary Nyhus stood at the foot of the breakwater outside the harbormaster's office with a mug in each hand, his harbormaster's cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He held one of the mugs out to me before I could say good morning.

"It's bad," he said. "But it's hot."

It was both. I held it in both hands and looked past him to the end of the breakwater, where the salvage barge sat broadside to the harbor mouth with its crane up and its cable down in the water, taut as a clothesline in February.

"They're deepening the channel," Gary said. He had wanted to explain it to somebody for an hour, and I was somebody. "The new slips will bring bigger boats, and bigger boats want more water under them at the mouth. The lake's down this spring, too, a good foot off where it ought to be. So they're dredging the mouth, and the bucket came up this morning with a door handle in its teeth."

"A door handle."

"Chrome. Hal sent a diver down. Then he sent him down again." Gary drank from his own mug and made a face at it. "That mouth never freezes right. Never has. The current runs out of the harbor underneath the ice, right down into the channel, and it eats the ice from the bottom. You can stand on the breakwater in January and it looks like a parking lot out there, and it's about as thick as a pie crust. My father used to say the harbor mouth was the only place in the county where the ice lied to you."

I knew which way to look, because everyone on the breakwater was looking that way. I walked out along the top of it with the coffee, past people I had known as children and people I had known as their parents, and found a place near the end where the stones were dry.

The man running the crane stood at the controls in the open, in a navy canvas work jacket with the collar turned up. He was very tall, taller than anyone on the breakwater, and heavy-built, broad and thick through the chest and shoulders, and he moved the levers with big hands that had no gloves on them in that wind. His hair was near-black and long enough that the wind kept putting it in his face, and he kept pushing it back without looking away from the cable. He had the lined, windburned face of a man who had spent his life on cold water and had not minded it.

"That's Hal Brecht," Gary said. He had followed me out. "Liesel's brother. He was Coast Guard more than thirty years, retired a lieutenant commander, came home three years ago and bought the barge off the marina. He's fifty-eight and he still won't let anybody else run that crane."

I remembered the Brechts. Everybody did. They were German, from the shore road, and they had sat in the same pew at St. Olaf's since before the war, the grandparents and then the parents and then the children, and the boy had gone off to the Coast Guard when I was still in school. I did not remember him being that size. I did not remember him at all, if I was honest, only the family and the pew.

I watched him work because there was nothing else to watch, and then because he was worth watching. He did not hurry. He took up the cable a little and waited, and took it up a little more, and called something down to the diver's tender at the rail, and waited again.

The crowd on the breakwater had sorted itself the way a church basement sorts itself at a funeral lunch, by family and by long agreement. Gunner Tollefsrud stood a little apart from everyone, short and wiry in a hand-knit sweater with no coat over it, his face red from the wind. He had been the harbormaster when I was a girl. Farther back, near the middle of the breakwater, a man in a quilted vest and a seed cap was talking to three people at once, red-faced and pleased with the cold, the way some men are pleased with weather. That was Wayne Kollath. He had been in business with Russ Heimerl, once, and I had not thought of either name in years.

Near Wayne, but not with him, stood Liesel Brecht. She was tall like her brother and straighter than anyone, with her dark hair cut short and close to her head, and a good black wool coat buttoned to the throat. She had taught me to breathe from the stomach the winter I was eighteen. I did not think she had seen me, and I did not wave.

The cable came up a little more. Then the water at the end of the cable turned brown and bulged, and the roof of a car broke the surface.

It came up slowly, streaming. It was dark, a blue so dark it read as black, and the water poured off the roof and out of the seams and ran down the sides in sheets. Nobody on the breakwater said anything at all. I heard the crane's engine and the gulls and the water falling back into the harbor.

Liesel Brecht turned around and walked away.

She did not hurry either. She walked back along the top of the breakwater toward the shore, past Wayne and past the Lindstrom girl from the supper club and past Gary, with her hands in her coat pockets and her eyes on the stones, and nobody stopped her. On the barge, Hal Brecht took his hand off the lever for a moment and watched her go. Then he put his hand back and went on.

That was when the heat came.

It started in my wrists and ran up my arms under the coat, quick and close, the way the flashes had been coming all winter. I had been putting them down to the change since Christmas. My mother had them for years and said the trick was to stand still and let them think they had won. So I stood still on the breakwater with Gary's bad coffee going cold in my hands, and the heat climbed to my elbows and then to my shoulders, and my palms prickled as if I had held them too near a stove. It did not come up into my face the way the others had. I noticed that, and I put it away to think about later, and I told myself it was one more hot flash in a long line of them.

When it passed, the car was hanging from the crane with the harbor running out of it.

Hal swung it in over the deck of the barge and let it down onto the timbers there, gently, as if it might still be somebody's. It was a Pontiac, an old long one, and from where I stood I could see the back of it plainly. The license plate was still on. The registration sticker in its corner had gone pale, but I have spent most of my working life reading date stamps in the backs of books, and the numbers on a sticker are no harder. It said 1987.

Someone behind me said, "Oh, Lord."

Wayne Kollath had come up the breakwater. He stood with his seed cap in his hand and his bald crown pink in the wind, and he looked at the car on the barge for a long moment. Then he put his cap back on.

"That's Russ's car," he said. "That's Russ Heimerl's Pontiac. I'd know it anywhere."

The breakwater made a sound all at once, the low sound a congregation makes when the pastor reads out a name in the prayers and half the pews knew him.

"Poor damn fool," Wayne said. He said it kindly. "He must have gone out on the ice road drunk, at the end of the season, and gone straight through at the mouth. He always did think that ice would hold him. Thirty-seven years, and all this time he was right out there." He shook his head. "All this time we figured he'd gone off somewhere warm."

It was the story the whole town had told itself for thirty-seven years, that Russ Heimerl had cleaned out his partnership's bank account one week in March and driven off with it. I had heard it at eighteen and believed it, because everyone did. Now it was a different story, and I watched the town take it up between one breath and the next with something that looked very much like relief. People nodded. Someone said that Russ did like his beer. Someone else said that the ice road was always a fool's road at the end of March. A woman I had known in high school touched Wayne's arm and said he had been so good about the money, after, and wasn't it a mercy to know.

I have lived long enough to know that people will trade a bad story they are used to for a sad one that asks nothing of them, and be grateful to whoever offers the trade. I did not hold it against them. I only noticed how fast it went.

"I told him," Gunner Tollefsrud said.

He had not moved from his spot. He did not raise his voice, and he did not look at Wayne.

"I told him that ice would take him," he said. "I told him at the board and I told him on the fuel dock. I told him the mouth was rotten every spring of his life." He looked at the car on the barge a moment longer. Then he turned and walked off down the breakwater with his hands jammed in his sweater, and the people in his way stepped aside for him the way you step aside for a man carrying something hot.

Deputy Rosa Delgado had come down while everyone was watching Wayne. I had met her once, in the fall, about a stolen bicycle. She was broad-shouldered and not tall, with brown skin and her dark hair in a low bun under her deputy's hat, and a small gold cross showed at the open collar of her uniform. She had a notebook in one hand. She did not ask anybody to move. She simply walked out to the end of the breakwater, turned around and stood there, and spoke to each person in turn in a pleasant, level voice, and each of them found they were walking back toward the shore without having decided to.

"Thank you," she said to me, when it was my turn. "I'm going to need the end of this clear for the county. You can watch from the lot if you want to."

"Of course," I said.

"You're the new library director."

"Since the fall."

She wrote something in her notebook, I could not imagine what, and nodded at me, and went on to the next person. By the time I reached the stones at the foot of the breakwater she had a blue tarp handed across from the barge and two of the dredge crew helping her rig it over the driver's side of the car, before anyone on shore could see what was in it. Then she climbed aboard the barge herself and stood with Hal Brecht by the car with the tarp between them and the town, and they talked with their heads close, and she wrote. A van from the county came down Harbor Street a while later and backed out along the marina road, and the people in it did what they had come to do behind the tarp, and drove away again. Nobody on shore said what was in the van. Nobody needed to.

I stayed longer than I should have. The library could open late on one Monday in its life. The heat was gone from my arms and the cold had come back into my hands, deeper than before, so that I could not feel the mug, and I set it down on the wall by the harbormaster's office and put my hands in my coat pockets.

Across the water Hal Brecht came to the rail of the barge. He looked at the shore, at the crowd thinning on the lot, and then, as far as I could tell, at me. He lifted one of those big bare hands, not a wave so much as an acknowledgment, the way a man in a pew lifts a hand to someone he recognizes across the aisle. I had no idea why. I lifted mine back, and he turned and went to the car.

From the foot of the breakwater I could see the whole length of the Pontiac on the deck, the side the tarp did not cover. The windshield was whole. The doors were shut. The passenger window was rolled up tight, gray with silt, the glass unbroken.

The driver's window was rolled all the way down.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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