ALL THROUGH THE SPRING Thor spent odd moments working on his new boat. It wasn’t a powerboat, it was nothing at all modern. It was an old-fashioned square-ended skiff such as fishermen in the old Scandinavian countries and fishermen in the new world New England sat in hopefully, peacefully in the middle of a flat body of water, the line and the flat-bottomed boat both moving almost imperceptibly. It was a boat for a man who, for days or weeks or months at a time, could live happily with, or without, people.
Both Chris and Bridie, as the long hard Baranof winter drew to a close and the ecstasy of the long golden days and rosy summer nights began to tingle through the sluggish fibers and nerves and tissues and blood and skin of the winter-weary Alaskans—both these women who loved him developed and followed a plan of campaign.
Chris interrupted his boatbuilding.
“But what are you going to do with it? You’ve got boats as good as that. You’re just wasting your energies.”
“I thought I wouldn’t fish this year—with the tender, I mean, and crew. You’re earning money, I don’t need much myself—just the few dollars for food and tackle and my little jaunts around the Territory.”
“That’s what I mean. You could come with me to California. Or perhaps Honolulu. We’d fly, it only takes a minute.”
“Everything only takes a minute. Now. What’s the hurry? Where’s everybody going in such a rush?”
He talks like an old man, Chris thought. A tired old man. “We wouldn’t have to rush. We could stay away for a month. Until the middle of May. Until the ice goes out. Just sit in the sun on a beach.”
“You’re not a girl for sitting in the sun on a beach.”
“I can try it, can’t I? So can you. I’d like, just once, to stand treat. Darling Grampa Thor, you’ve paid my way all my life, until these last two years. You and Grampa Czar.”
“You run along, dear child. Or take him.”
“You’re already sorry you said that, aren’t you? What are you going to do while I’m gone?”
“I could take this new little skiff, and some grub, and just skirt along the shore, very easy, pretend I’m Steller just discovering Alaska, and looking for new greens and birds and creatures.”
She could not say, But you look too thin and almost feeble, you’re too old for that sort of thing now. Alone.
Bridie, in her new spring tweed topcoat for which the Baranof temperature was still far too low (“Nothing shows up a fur coat like that spring sun after a tough winter’s wear. Ratty.”) came occasionally to argue with Thor as he went about his boatbuilding task there by the waterside so near his one-room cabin. She had peered into the cabin before she came down to join him as he hammered, sawed, sandpapered, calked, painted. Everything inside the cabin was neat, orderly, shining. His saucepan, kettle and frying pan scoured, his floor scrubbed, his bedspread straight, his books ranged on the shelves but stacked too, now, in floor corners, his few clothes hanging behind a faded gingham curtain.
“You’re a regular old maid,” she announced as a charming opening gambit. “I don’t know how you ever got along with the Eskimos, slapdash the way they are.… Oh, there I go again, I always forget. Excuse it, Thor, please.”
“Sometimes I think it’s a great waste of time, being neat in your habits. So many things more worth doing than keeping your shoes in a row, toes all pointed one way. But I was brought up to do that in those days that seem so far away in another world.”
“You’re in this world now, Thor Storm, and I’m here to ask you why you don’t plan a holiday for yourself. With Chris, or with Chris and me, or alone or whatever. You could go to the Old Country where your folks are, man like you a prince or a duke or whatever it was you were then. Imagine their faces when they see you, like the prodigal son in the Bible.”
“They’re probably all dead by now, Bridie.”
“You ain’t, anyway.”
“It’s an idea. As you say, they might be glad to see me.”
“Oh, no use talking to you. You and Czar both. Stiff in the mind as you are in the joints, both of you. Why’n’t you stay elastic like me!” She was off, with a jerk at her new spring hat. Now she turned for a parting question. “What’s in that big tin box in your cabin? You got your money or bonds or whatever laying around on the floor like an old miser, when there’s banks in plenty in Baranof? I tried to open it, but it’s locked.”
He laughed then, throwing back his fine old head in a roar of amusement such as she had not heard from him in years. “Bridie, Bridie, we should have married those years and years ago, I’d have been as successful as Czar and Dave Husack combined, and you’d have been Queen of Alaska.”
“Maybe I am now, there are folks that think … What’s in that box, Thor Storm?”
“It’s my book.”
“Finished! You mean the book you’ve been writing on all these years! Finished!”
“No book is ever really finished, I suppose. If you care enough about what you’re writing—or too much—you keep picking at it and picking at it, trying to write better than you can. But now I think I won’t try any more to make it perfect. I’ve said what I had to say as best I could.”
“You don’t sound any too gay about it. My land! About fifty years writing it, first and last.”
“Yes. There’s a little note of explanation in the front of it. I want Chris to read it someday soon. I want Chris to be the first to read it.”
Regretfully, Christine bade him good-bye and went off for the first Outside trip she had had since her return to Baranof following the abruptly terminated Seattle experience.
“I’ll be away four weeks, but if I don’t like it I’ll just come home.”
“Don’t do that. Finish what you start.”
“Grampa Thor, I wish you’d live in my house while I’m away. You’d be so comfortable. Won’t you? If only to keep the mice away.”
“An old fellow like me wants to stay in his own lair, like the woods’ creatures.… Christine?”
“Yes, Grampa.”
“One thing I wish you’d do. I’ve meant to talk to you about it before now. You never finished your college education. You never got your degree, after that bad time Outside, when you left and came back home. I wish you’d go back to Baranof College for one year and get your degree. Cap and gown, and you standing there with the rolled sheepskin as they call it, in your hand. You began it. Finish it.”
“What a strange idea! I’ve got a job. But I’ll think about it.”
“It’s going to be kind of restful, both you and Bridie gone. Nobody to nag me about food and temper and my howling editorials and my bad behavior.”
“We love you.”
The square-ended skiff was finished. It was a strange-looking craft, in some small details. It had, for instance, a plug in the bottom which could be pulled out by a linked metal chain, almost like a bathtub plug. On a brisk flawless May day he hauled the skiff down to the water’s edge and stood surveying it with the eye of a craftsman and a boatman and a fisherman born. For a full half century and more, from the day he had left his native Norway he had loved the sea, he and his father and his grandfather and generations before them. During the month he and Ross had mixed cement and skillfully laid a new floor for Christine’s garage. He now weighted the boat with some of the residue of this mixture, but not too much. The boat was new and shining. Nobody has ever sat in it before, he thought with satisfaction. He himself, eager and alert, was neat and fresh and clean as the boat into which he now stepped as it lay on the water. Leisurely, with a look of utter anticipation and enjoyment, he rowed out to where he could see the mountains white-topped, the almost heartbreaking blue of the Alaska sky, the pines, the glistening water. It was lovely, it was complete. Now he rested his oars and he lashed himself firmly to the boat, pulling the ropes he had brought with him around his ankles, his knees, his waist. It was his favorite time of day, sunset came late now, later and later, soon the daylight days and the daylight nights would meet and blend. The sun was not streaming in bold brassy shafts, it shone golden and warm like Christine’s hair.
Now was the time. The handy old hand reached out, it pulled the plug with one firm jerk. The concrete-weighted boat sank so that for one brief instant he was standing upright in the water, he saw the mountains the sky the trees the water—the elements and objects he so loved. The water slid over him—ankles—hips—shoulders—head—like a soft silken shroud.
Though she rebelled at first in an agony of tears and self-recrimination, Chris understood after she had read his letter.
Until now, Christine my dear child, I always have had a mild contempt for people who leave Last Notes. They are like those who stand and stand at the door, saying good-bye, long after they should have left and done with it. I always had put it down to vanity—to a final fling of exhibitionism. But now I think I understand them a bit. There is no doubt that we have been exhibitionistic old parties—Czar and Bridie and myself. Characters, I suppose we’d be called, and have been. We’re a little passé. Power people nowadays function more quietly. They’re deadlier than we were, though they make much less fuss. Like the barbaric ritual known as war. The drums and the cannon and the guns and even the planes are old stuff now. Now it’s just one neat quiet package like a big cigar, a puff of thick smoke, and that’s it.
I am maundering a little. I meant only to tell you that I have gone on that journey we spoke of. My increasing thinness (or should that be decreasing?) was, as you suspected, illness. It would have been a long business still, and the pain was becoming too much for me. I thought of you and good Bridie nursing me nursing me through the months. Your money would be spent, and hers, and your precious energies and time. How foolish, how wasteful. This is better and cleaner and more civilized.
My work is done. The book is finished. But my work in my beloved Alaska is not finished. You must carry on with that. Not must. I wish to recall that word. I never have said must to you.
You are the most dear and lovely thing I have had in my life—you and freedom. I leave you all I have to leave. My Book. My love of Freedom. My belief in the Dignity and the Spirit of Man, as long as the Human Race shall persist, and in spite of the power and purpose of the Men of Destruction.