Day One. Ice: none.
The bow broke the shell ice like plates.
Not one plate. A whole cabinet of them going over, and another cabinet behind it. The sound ran out from the boat across the flat gray of Bittern Lake and hit the pines on the far shore and came back to us late. Smaller. As if somebody over there in the trees was breaking plates too, a beat behind, copying.
I counted the gap. One. Two. Most of three. Then the next crack and the next echo, and I lost count, which I don't like to do.
"Last boat of the year," Gil said. He said it loud, over the motor. "After this she closes. Tonight, maybe. Tomorrow for sure."
He ran a sixteen-foot aluminum boat with a tiller motor. I sat in the middle with my duffel between my boots and the groceries against my shins. He was short and built like a rain barrel, with a white beard gone yellow at the mouth and a hearing aid he'd switched off at the landing, like a man taking off his watch to go swimming.
He talked anyway. He talked to fill whatever the motor left.
"You ever hear a bittern?"
"No."
"Marsh bird. Stands in the cattails with his beak straight up, pretending he's a cattail. Makes a noise like somebody blowing across a jug." He did it, low in his chest. "Boom. That's where the lake gets the name. When she makes ice she booms like a bittern. First time you hear it you'll think the bottom fell out of something. She's just making."
"Making," I said.
"Ice. Making ice."
The shell ice was only along the edges yet. Out in the middle the water was open and black and so still it looked thick. Thirty-one degrees, the sign at the Kwik Trip had said, and the sky was the color of a nickel. Every time the bow found another sheet, it broke in long white lines that ran out ahead of us, faster than we were going, as if the cracks knew where we were headed and wanted to be there first.
The island came up out of the gray. Pines, black. Granite, pinkish where the water had been at it all summer. One house, two stories, gray clapboard, the green trim gone pale as old lettuce. Every window dark.
"Old icehouse," Gil said. "Haldane Ice Company built it. Walls full of sawdust. It talks."
"Talks how?"
"Ticks. Settles. Groans at you. Cold comes, the sawdust shifts. You'll get used to it."
I said I'd lived over a laundromat in Superior and could sleep through a dryer full of sneakers. I didn't say that half of Wade's three thousand six hundred had already gone on back rent and the bus, or that the car was gone. He hadn't asked about the car.
"Insurance wants it lived in all winter," Gil said. "Heated and lived in, or they won't carry it." He looked at the island and not at me. "Wade always meant to get a sitter. Took this to make him do it."
I waited. Four years on a nine-one-one console, you learn to wait. People will fill a silence with the real thing if you give them room.
Gil didn't fill it. He swung us south instead, toward a gap between the island and a low wooded shore. "Narrows," he said. The shell ice was thicker in there and gone milky. The bow rode up on a sheet and stuck, and Gil backed us off and came at it again, and it broke with a sound like a church pew going over.
When we were through he throttled down. He looked at me properly for the first time.
"Nobody told you."
"He said the house was empty and needed somebody in it. He said three weeks. He said keep careful logs."
"Yah, well. That's Wade. Careful." He pointed with his chin at a stretch of ice along the island shore, no different from the rest. "Sixth of November, at dusk. His wife, Nora, and their girl. Hazel. Took Nora's dad's old canoe out, green one, older than me. Found it three days after, right about there. Wedged in the reeds, upside down."
I looked. It was ice, gray, with the dusk coming down on it.
"Girl's hat was tied on the thwart," Gil said. "Red knit thing. Tied on, like somebody wanted it found."
"Tied on," I said.
"Double knot."
The spot went by. I watched it behind us until I couldn't tell it from the rest.
"And them?"
"Divers went down two days. Nothing. Forty feet out there, and thirty-nine degrees on the bottom." He said it flat, like the depth of a well. "Lake keeps what it takes till spring. Sometimes longer."
I put my hand over the side without meaning to. The water was so cold it didn't feel wet. It felt like being bitten by something with no teeth. I pulled my hand back and jammed it in my armpit, and Gil watched me do it and let me.
"Wade was out all that night," he said. "Stove his bow in on a deadhead that night, searching in the dark. Deputies walked the whole shore next morning. Nothing. Tore that pantry wall out after, the day the deputies left." He moved one shoulder. "Grief, I guess. People do things. My brother-in-law painted his garage twice after my sister went. Same color."
He took us up the west side, and the island turned as we went. Its north end ran out in a ridge of pine and quit in a point of bare rock.
"North point," Gil said, louder now, over the motor. "Spring under it. Ice is never right over a spring." He was quiet a while, for him. "Wade's first wife went through off there. Eleven winters back. Lise. December." He looked away from the point. "That's the lake."
Two wives. I didn't say it. On the console you say, Okay, and you type.
We came around the top and down the east side, and the dock showed, gray boards on black water, and beyond it, across six-tenths of a mile of nothing, the landing we'd left.
"So who comes to get me?" I asked.
"Wade. Wade walks the first ice every year. Sunday morning, before light, landing straight out to your dock with his spud bar, staking the road. Out at six, before light, like church. Nobody goes on till Wade's been. Half the landing turns out with a thermos to watch him do it."
"And till then?"
"Till then you're out there." He said it kindly. "His boat's hauled already, up on the trailer in the lot. After I'm back in, the narrows skim over. Too much ice for a boat, not enough to walk. Nothing gets out there till it makes. County's got the rescue airboat, and that's for people in the water."
He reached into his coat and came out with a pair of ice picks on a cord. Yellow plastic handles, the color of a school bus, a steel spike in the end of each.
"You go through, you jam these in and kick like hell and pull yourself out on your belly. Don't stand up till you're well back from the hole." He held them out over the duffel. "Wear 'em. Out here you wear 'em. Everybody does. Lise did."
"I'm not going on it."
"Wear 'em anyway."
I put the cord over my head. The picks hung against the zipper of my brother's old Carhartt, which was too big for me and always had been, and they clicked together once when the boat rocked.
"You'll be safe," Gil said, "long as you stay off it."
I don't say that word about ice. I didn't say anything.
◆
He didn't tie up. He held a cleat with one hand, motor running, and handed my things up piece by piece. Then a key on a red foam float.
"So it floats," he said. "Somebody's idea of a joke. Probably mine."
The sun was down and the light was going out of everything, the water first. Gil was watching the narrows.
He pushed off. "You need anything, you holler. Sound carries."
"How far?"
"Out here?" He grinned in his yellow beard. "Farther than you want."
He swung wide and went. The plates started breaking again, fainter and fainter. His wake ran in and slapped the shell ice along the shore, a long wet clatter down the whole length of the rocks, and then it was done.
Then nothing.
I have heard a lot of nothing. On the console we called it dead air, and you learn to listen into it, because there's always something in there. A TV. A dog. Somebody breathing who doesn't want you to know they're breathing.
This was a whole lake holding still. My own coat was loud. Far off at the landing a truck door shut, and the sound arrived next to me small and perfect, as if it had been set down on the dock.
The motor reached the landing and quit. A yard light came on over there, one. Six-tenths of a mile, Gil had said. It looked like a star somebody had hung too low.
I picked up the boxes and went up to the house.
◆
It was colder inside than out. A house kept at fifty-five, the cold has been in there a while and made itself comfortable. The kitchen smelled of old woodsmoke and lemon dish soap and, under that, something dry and sweet, like a feed store. Sawdust, I figured. The walls.
A big kitchen, low ceiling, a woodstove on its own black pipe out through the back wall. Beside it, in the corner against the chimney, a plank shelf with tin on top. A table with an oilcloth, yellow with red cherries, the kind my grandma had. On the oilcloth, squared to the edge, an envelope.
EDIE, it said. Block capitals.
Inside, one sheet of lined paper, pressed hard enough that the letters stood up off the back like Braille. He spelled his numbers out in words, as people do on a check.
I read it out loud. I read everything out loud. Four years of read-back. You say it back so the other person hears what you heard. There was no other person. I did it anyway.
> HOUSE RULES. THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS. > ONE. THE CELLAR STAYS LOCKED. NOTHING DOWN THERE YOU NEED. TELL ME IF YOU EVER FIND IT OPEN. > TWO. DON'T USE THE BACK STAIRS. THIRD STEP'S ROTTEN. > THREE. KNOCKING IS THE PIPES. OLD HOUSE. TEXT ME THE ROOM AND WHETHER IT'S WALL OR FLOOR AND I'LL KNOW WHICH LINE. > FOUR. ANYTHING THAT LOOKS LIVED IN, PHOTOGRAPH IT WHERE IT IS. DON'T MOVE IT. > FIVE. MEASURE THE ICE OFF THE DOCK EVERY MORNING. TEXT ME THE NUMBER. > SIX. FURNACE STAYS AT FIFTY-FIVE. THE WOODSTOVE IS YOURS. > SEVEN. TEXTS GO FROM THE KITCHEN WINDOW. CALLS ONLY HOLD AT THE END OF THE DOCK. > W.O.
My voice was wrong in there. The room took the last word of each line and didn't give it back.
Thank you for doing this. That part I liked.
The cellar door was off the kitchen, plank, painted cream, a brass padlock through the hasp. I pulled the lock. I said "Locked" to it. Rule one.
The back stairs went up from the corner past the stove, narrow and steep, brown paint worn pale down the middle of each tread. The third step was a shade darker than the rest. I didn't put anything on it. Rule two.
The pantry was on the other side of the chimney. Cans, flour, a box of Saltines, and a back wall that wasn't a wall anymore. Somebody had torn out the old boards and screwed raw plywood over the hole, three sheets, the screw heads still shiny. One sheet had split along the grain near the top where a screw went in too close. The plywood was the newest thing in the house. It smelled sharp and clean over the flour.
Tore that pantry wall out, Gil had said. The day the deputies left.
I turned off the pantry light and shut the door on it.
◆
In the front hall there was one photograph in a frame.
A woman and a little girl on the dock I'd just walked up. Fall, by the yellow birches. The woman was small, short dark hair, a jaw like the end of a shovel, squinting into the sun with her arm around the girl. The girl was smaller than nine looks, in a red knit hat pulled down to her eyebrows, squinting the same squint. Whoever took it stood up the slope, so they were both looking up at him, the woman not quite smiling, the girl smiling enough for both.
The hat had a pompom. I looked at that a while. Then at the girl's mittens, which were on a string through her sleeves, because somebody's mom had thought of it.
I made myself stop. The hall was darker than when I'd started, and somewhere above me the house made a small noise, a tick, like a fingernail on a jar lid. Sawdust. It talks.
I went back to the kitchen, where the light was.
◆
I plugged my phone in on the tin shelf by the stove and wrote a text and it sat there saying sending. Rule seven. I took it to the north window and held it up to the glass like I was showing it the lake.
I read it out as I typed. "Message to Wade. Arrived. Gil says hi. Furnace reads fifty-five."
It went.
He wrote back in under a minute.
Good. Rules are on the table. Furnace stays at fifty-five. I'll come across to relieve you when the ice makes four inches. Probably Sunday.
I read that out too. Then I said, "Four inches." Up here everybody talks in inches.
He'd had the phone in his hand. I'd have done the same, with a stranger alone in my house.
The woodstove was cold and black, and I made it not cold, which was a thing I knew how to do. The stovepipe ticked as it heated, a fast little tick, different from the house's. I ate chicken noodle soup out of the pan, standing up, because there was nobody to see.
Then I went up the front stairs, the ones I was allowed.
◆
Upstairs, a bathroom. A big bedroom at the end, the bed made up tight. One door shut, with a wooden H hung on a nail, horse stickers all over the H. The radiator was on in there, hissing and ticking behind the door. I didn't open it. It wasn't on the list.
That was the daughter's. Mine was the small room at the top of the stairs, east side, and Wade had told me whose it had been: his wife's, back when she was the girl in this house. A slanted ceiling, an iron bed, a quilt with geese on it. On the wall a blue ribbon gone purple, VILAS COUNTY FAIR, JUNIOR DIVISION, and under it in a kid's pencil on the wallpaper, NORA H. The radiator stood under a window seat that looked east. One wall was the chimney wall, boarded over in pine, painted white a long time ago, knotty. When I put my palm flat on it, it was warm. Not warm like a person. Warm like a cup somebody set down an hour ago.
I sat on the window seat with my knees up.
East was the dock, and the lake, and the one yard light at the landing. Nothing between. The lake was too dark to be a color. While I watched, a sound came off it, small and clean, a ping like somebody flicking a wineglass with a fingernail, and then another ping a long way off, answering. Making, Gil would have said. It wasn't the boom. It was something smaller getting ready.
I got out my logbook, spiral, three columns ruled down every page in pen, because I am who I am. Time, place, nature. I wrote down the boat, the rules, the text, the ping. Then I turned off the lamp and got into the iron bed in my long johns and my socks and Teddy's coat on top of the geese, and the picks still on.
I'd meant to take them off. I lay there with them on my chest and didn't.
◆
The house talked. Ticks in the ceiling. Something in the walls that wasn't a sound so much as a settling, sawdust easing down an inch inside the boards, a long dry whisper, like sand in a box someone has tipped. The radiator under the window clanked and hissed and went quiet. Outside, the lake pinged. I lay still and named each thing as it came. That's the job: what is it, where is it, how bad. After a while there was less to name. Then almost nothing. I picked up the phone to see how long I'd been lying there. Eleven forty.
Two soft knocks.
In the wall by the radiator. Low, about knee height. Knuckle on wood. Not a bang, not a clank, nothing like the radiator. Two, close together, the second a little softer than the first, the way you knock on the door of a room where somebody might be sleeping.
I didn't move. I lay on my back with the phone lit in my hand and the picks gone cold on my chest, and I counted. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. The radiator ticked. The lake pinged. My heart was going in my ears, which is the one sound you can never get off a recording.
Rule three. Knocking is the pipes.
It hadn't sounded like a pipe. It had sounded like a hand.
At sixty I was still counting and nothing had happened, and that was worse, because when nothing happens after a thing, the thing is still in the room. On the console, when a line goes quiet, you don't hang up. You say something. You let them know someone is still there. You say, I'm here, I'm still here, I'm not going anywhere.
I don't know why I did it. Half of it was the job. Half of it was that I was scared, and it was funny: a grown woman in her brother's coat in a stranger's bed on an island, being scared of a radiator. I reached out of the quilt in the dark and found the painted pine with my knuckles, low, where the sound had been, and I knocked twice.
Two soft knocks. Mine.
Then silence.
Not the ordinary kind. The house stopped. The ticking stopped and the radiator stopped and the long dry whisper in the walls stopped, all of it, every board, at once, like a room full of people who have just heard their own name. I lay with my hand still on the wall. Out on the lake a mile of black water was turning to glass, pinging as it went. In here, close, in the wall, near enough to touch, there was only the quiet.
It went on a long time.
Then, low in the house, one tick. Another. The sawdust easing down. The house starting up again one board at a time, careful, the way people start talking again after somebody has come into the room.
I kept my hand on the wall. It was warm.