Duved Cove had been a fishing village in the 1800s and a logging centre in the early 1900s. The mill was still operating, but on a much smaller scale than in its heyday. My father hadn’t liked working with his hands and had broken with tradition by becoming a cop, a profession Grandpa Larson had viewed with a jaundiced eye, but even he had to admit that Dad would have made a poor logger. As it turned out, Dad wasn’t much of a cop either. The year after I’d left for Bemidji State University to work on a chemistry degree, my father was implicated in a coverup of some sort and quietly dismissed from his duties. If he hadn’t had such a good reputation, and if all the higher ups in the chain of command hadn’t liked him so much, they might have made a harsher example of him for the benefit of the younger officers on the force. As it was, rumours of the dismissal were punishment enough in such a tight-knit community. Dad never told us the full story, and we knew not to press him for details. His dismissal was quiet enough that he was able to get a job as a customs officer at the Pigeon River crossing about an hour’s drive from our house. It was a job he’d held until Friday.
My father remained in the house where I’d grown up even after my mother died. He owned a good twenty acres of land that had never been developed—land handed down from my great-grandfather, along with our house on the north-east corner. The house I’d loved as a child, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by woods and rock that led to the rocky shoreline of Superior. The house where my father had found my mother hanging from an attic rafter one cold October morning.
I slowed the car and fought to keep the memory from surfacing. My hands had been clutching the wheel, and I tried to flex my fingers. If I allowed myself to think about the horror of that day, I would never be able to make this journey—one I’d been unable to make when my father had been alive. I’d visited my brother twice, the last time when Gunnar was six, but I’d never made the trip to my parents’ house, even though Jonas believed it would help me to heal.
“I have nothing to heal from,” I’d said angrily, and Jonas had watched me with veiled eyes. I’d tried to appear unaffected. “I just have no reason to go back there. I’m over it.”
The last mile was almost too painful to bear, the big rock where I used to meet my best friend Katherine Lingstrom so we could walk to school together, the crooked tree Jonas and I had climbed, the path into the woods that led down to a sand beach where Billy and I had lain in the shadow of the woods. I took each landmark in with starved eyes. This was the part of me I’d shut away since my mother’s death.
I could see her in my mind’s eye, walking down the road, a cattail in her hand, twirling back to smile at me and tell me to hurry up. If I pretended time had stood still, if I believed hard enough...her hair had been white blonde like mine, and falling almost to her waist. She worn it braided, but the days she’d let it loose had seemed a gift. She had a smile and blue eyes that had warmed me always, even when she was trying to contain me. Back then, I’d been a carefree and careless child, rushing headlong into every situation. My disregard for rules had gotten me into trouble with my father over and over again. I’d rebelled against his harsh, unyielding nature that turned monstrous when he drank. My mother had been powerless to protect me, to protect herself from his anger. I’d loved my shy, tormented mother with my whole being, and when she’d killed herself, she’d killed any part of me that could forgive my father. And yet part of me needed to with childish desperation.
I was surprised to feel my cheeks wet with tears as I started up the long driveway to our house. I lifted my brimming eyes to my old bedroom window on the second storey on the right side of the house. The blind was halfway down, as if it couldn’t make up its mind. The symbolism was not lost on me. I parked the car and stepped outside. I’d come home at last.
I circled around to the backyard. The sun had risen above the treeline, and the snow had taken on a rosy hue to match the sunlight filtering through the trees. I purposefully averted my eyes from the woodpile and scanned the yard. Dad had kept it free of clutter. I could see poles in the ground where he’d planted tomatoes and beans in Mom’s vegetable garden. A concrete birdbath rose above the snow pile with a mound of ice capping its basin. Directly in front of me were a stand of birch trees and two spruce with birdfeeders hanging from the lowest branches. As I watched, a squirrel parachuted onto one of the feeders and scattered the last of the seed into the snow. Like so many properties in Duved Cove, there was no fence to encircle the yard except around the garden to keep out deer. I looked down. The ground had been trampled by a number of boot prints. I could only imagine what must have taken place after they’d found my father’s body.
I turned and walked slowly towards the deck. When I reached the bottom step, I hesitated with my glove on the railing. I forced myself to look. The snow was piled in uneven patches around the spot where my father had fallen. I could see red and pink through the layers, and it was an eerie feeling to know that this was his blood. The place he had met his maker. I moved closer and squatted in the snow. They’d dug around the area, probably looking for clues. As a crime scene went, it would have been a hard one to keep. Even now, the wind was blowing swirls of snow in intermittent gusts. I moved back towards the stairs, careful not to leave more footprints than necessary. I grabbed the handrail and leaned on it heavily as I maneuvered the icy steps. Once I reached the landing, I fumbled in my pocket for my keys. The key to this house was still on my keychain. I didn’t know why I’d kept it after so many years, but I had. I supposed it could be construed as more symbolism, if you were bent that way.
The yellow and black tape across our back door made me pause a second, but it would not stop me now that I’d come this far. I pulled the yellow tape aside and fit my key in the lock. It turned as if I’d used it every day for the past twenty years. The familiarity of the key’s weight in the lock brought back memories hooked onto feelings long forgotten. Once inside, I slammed the door shut and leaned against it with my eyes closed tight. I sucked in air like a drowning swimmer and tried to still my frantic heart.
“Mama,” I whispered.“Your Maja’s come home.”
My father’s kitchen had changed little since the last time I’d been in it. The same green linoleum on the kitchen floor, lifting a bit around the edges; the original tired oak cupboards; the old Frigidaire in the corner. A new rectangular pine kitchen table and matching chairs looked out of place in the otherwise drab room. I circled the space, trailing my fingers along surfaces. The house was still on its programmed heating cycle, and I heard the furnace kick in. I’d hardly noticed how cool it was until that moment. I heard the clock ticking loudly on the wall over the stove, the same clock that my mother had picked out of the Sears catalogue thirty years before. The room smelled stale, the dankness heightened by a mixture of cooking grease, overripe bananas and rotting potatoes, and I suddenly couldn’t wait to leave it. I went quickly down the darkened hallway into the living room. Here Dad had splurged on a new couch and leather recliners that encircled a big screen television. He’d acquired a state of the art sound system too that had place of honor on top of a shelving unit. The ornaments and pictures Mom had collected were gone, but lower down on the shelving unit, my father had placed a framed picture of himself and two buddies dressed in hunting gear and holding rifles. In the photo, Dad was grasping a handful of dead ducks by their feet and grinning into the camera.
I walked over and picked up the frame, staring into Dad’s face and trying to see any part of him that I could latch onto. I had no idea why I thought the essence of him would be captured in a photo when I’d never been able to find it in real life. He looked fit and ruddy-faced, as if time had held off aging him. His blonde hair had turned a soft white, cut in a layered style, and his eyes were still a deep vivid blue. I put his picture back next to framed photos of Gunnar. In the first, he is a baby in Claire’s arms, and in the second he is school age, grinning into the camera with his top front teeth missing.