EVEN NOW, almost four decades since your last jump, you’re ecstatic in flight. The memory is as indelible in your mind as it is in your old and softening body, which still, all these years later, will tremor you from sleep and dreams and go taut as though into the cold winter air above some steep, snow-covered landing hill. There in bed, under the soft down, you cock your ankles and lift your chin and rudder your hands as you close your eyes and pull back into the dream. And though of course there’s no rush of air, no danger, the thrill remains. So does the peace.
And it’s into that peace you alight. Most mornings you’ll coax a minute or two in the air. First, you find the hollowing sensation that comes with the leap itself. It was then, as it remains now, the surest sign of a good jump. You’re lighter. You’re empty of inhibitions. And it compels you forward, your hips following the emptiness and grace. A twitch of one shoulder, then the other, as you accelerate, as the world simplifies. Just you and the air and the landing hill below. There’s no concentrating now. Only divination. Only weightlessness and yearning, and, for as fast as it always happened, timelessness. The stall, your Pops called it. That moment when you reached the perfect position, when control and calmness met and the speed vanished and you were no longer flying but only suspended there. Almost inanimate. Like a bird on a gyre. The moment of reckoning. If the air was friendly, if you’d executed your jump properly, if you’d aligned yourself well, then you pulled and pressed and cajoled. Not consciously, but by reflex and instinct.
If you were lucky, the second act of flight was exultant. It was easiness, even as you accelerated, shredding the atmosphere and racing back to consciousness and the Earth. It was your reward. Then your wings unfolded slowly, and slowly you breathed again. Your Pops always said that landing was like shattering glass, but for all you learned from him, for all you believed in him, this was not your experience. Landing, for you, was an insult. And even now, in your warm bed forty miles and forty years from any ski jump, it remains so. You open your eyes to the dark. You reach behind to touch your wife’s hand. Ingrid’s hand. But she’s not there and you roll over and not only is the sweetness of the memory gone but so is she. The house is alive. She’s beaten you awake. She’s in the kitchen.
You swing your legs out from under the covers. You put them on the ground. You have landed on another day. Dream, memory, the thing itself? What’s the difference? You had your dose of rapture, and now it’s time to be him again. Me again.
My eyes are gaining on the dark. I hear Ingrid running water to fill the coffee maker. I hear the cabinet door creak and the rattle of a spoon being lifted from the cutlery drawer. The clock on the bedside table tells me it’s five minutes after five o’clock.
I walk out into the hallway and follow the path of light to the kitchen sink and put my arms around Ingrid and settle into her backside, looking at us in the reflection of the window. She doesn’t say anything. She appears about to cry.
“You’re up too early, sweetheart,” I say.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
I nod, and kiss her cheek and close my eyes and decide on another short detour from waking all the way. I hold her. We warm.
“How many mornings have I hugged you like this?” I say.
She doesn’t answer, but I can feel her loosening. As quick as I can, I do the math.
“Ten thousand, it must be. More even. Fifteen?”
“And each one as sweet as the first,” she says, the look of sadness blanching her face in the window again.
I turn her around in my arms. “We’ve plenty of these mornings left.”
Now she nods, and kisses my cheek, then feigns one of her sweet smiles. These gestures we echo? They’re the work of a thirty-five-year marriage.
“Let me finish the coffee,” I say.
“Nonsense. I haven’t made the coffee in I can’t even remember how long. Here,” and she takes my elbow and urges me toward the kitchen table. She turns on the lamp hanging above the fruit bowl. She even pulls out a chair, as though I were feeble.
“What else do you want for breakfast?” She’s already back at the counter and spooning the grounds into the filter. “Oatmeal, toast?”
“Just coffee, love.”
“You’ve got to eat something.”
“I will. But not yet.”
She presses the button to brew the coffee and returns to the table, but before she sits down she raises a finger and hurries into the mudroom off the kitchen and is back before she’s even left. She has a bag from the bookstore in her hand and she gives it to me and says, “I stopped at Zenith yesterday while you were resting.” She nods at the bag.
Inside are three of the notebooks I favor.
“Oh, Ingrid—”
“You stop that. You heard what Doctor Zheng said yesterday.”
“That I should take up a foreign language.”
“She suggested that merely as one option,” she says.
I resist the impulse to admit that I’m already sometimes unable to conjure words or phrases in my own language, and instead take out one of the notebooks and peel the cellophane wrapper off.
“You should be working, Jon. Now there will be more than one benefit. You’ll be tolerable and you’ll be taking care of yourself.” She lifts my hand and kisses it, then holds it for a long moment. When she sets it down, she rises and goes to the counter and pours two cups full, adds a dram of cream to each, stirs them, and brings them back to the table.
“Is it still okay to tease you?” she asks, sitting back down.
“I’d never take that away from you.”
“Thank goodness,” she says, and takes a sip of her coffee. “And you still want to go up to see Clara this weekend?”
“Of course.”
“She’s looking forward to the company.”
Our younger daughter and her wife live in Gunflint now. They’re artists—Clara a potter and Delia a painter—and they bought a small house just off the Burnt Wood Trail. In winter, the lake view through the bare aspen and birch surrounding them settles below in black and white layers, depending on the ice and snow. They both work multiple jobs. Clara at Hivernants Brewing, where she tends bar on weekends, and at the ski area in Misquah, where she’s on the sales and marketing team. Delia works for the arts colony and at the Burnt Wood Tavern. They’re happy and young and Clara describes their five-year plan as one long working honeymoon in the most beautiful place on earth.
“Clara has a surprise for you.”
“Is that right?”
“Yep.” She takes my hand and kisses it again. “What time should we leave?”
I look at my watch. Habit more than necessity. I can tell what time it is the way I imagine owls can. And anyway, it doesn’t matter what time it is. “I had a thought to call Noah and see if we can stop by the lake.” Noah Torr is my best and oldest friend.
“Wouldn’t that be nice? Are you wanting to talk to him about yesterday?”
I rearrange the notebooks one, two, three across the kitchen table. “I don’t know, but I’ve been waking up in those ski jumping dreams again. He tells me he has a trove of memorabilia I ought to see.”
“Memorabilia?”
“Ski jumping stuff. Photographs and what not.”
She gives me another sad smile. “Another woman might be jealous. You go to bed thinking about it. You dream about it. You wake up thinking about it.”
“It’s in there deep. But you know that.” I do more math. “I reckon it’s the only other thing I’ve done as often as kissing you good morning.”
Now she smiles more simply. “Or kissing me good night.” She takes a long drink of her coffee and sets the cup down. “If you and Noah are going to spend all morning talking about the good old days, I’ll bring a book to read.” She stands up and kisses the top of my head. “I’m going to shower. And I’ll make us something for breakfast when I’m done.” She steps over to the junk drawer and fishes a pen out of the mess and sets it down in front of me. She tilts my chin up to meet her face. “I’ll take another, please.”
I kiss her again, and watch her walk down the hallway. I listen to her in the bathroom, turning on the water, revving her electric toothbrush, her wedding band tumbling onto the pottery ring holder. All the sounds of my mornings.
Ingrid, with all her sweet knowing and patience, is the one who’s really going to suffer. My first thoughts sitting in Doctor Zheng’s office yesterday went to sparing my wife. Don’t get me wrong, she’s up for the challenge. I’m certain of that. Our devotion to each other, I’ve always believed, is as sure as the morning coffee. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been so happy together. And frankly it’s the reason we have this diagnosis now. At Christmastime, she noticed I was ill-tempered and forgetful of our traditions. We’ve never made krumkake, I’d said. We’ve never hung mistletoe. These things I know we have done required reminding from her. And we bickered about it. Like she was unreasonable for wanting Christmas the way it’s been done for the past three and a half decades. There were other signs, too. She’d send me to the grocery store for pancetta and eggs and I’d come home with a box of cereal and a bunch of bananas. I’d walk around the house wondering where my satchel was while it was slung over my shoulder. These are just a few of the examples—and in truth, for the better part of twenty years I’ve been forgetful and absentminded. I teased myself about being old before my time, jokes she never found amusing. It was when I stopped them, though, that she finally said we should go see someone.
So we did. And after two months of tests and examinations, Doctor Zheng told us what we had already come to expect: younger-onset Alzheimer’s. The litany of information and instruction that followed was overwhelming. The road ahead would be hard to predict; it was a disease that took many different routes; likely I could still work for a year or two; make a financial plan; talk to your employer; tell your friends and family; do everything you can to keep your mind active. To Ingrid, Doctor Zheng advised patience. To me, a whole gamut of stimulating activities. And if, after suggesting writing as one of those activities and meeting Ingrid’s rebuke that I was a writer, and a fine and notable one at that, the good doctor was embarrassed or surprised, she didn’t let on. Instead, she walked us through the next steps and answered Ingrid’s many questions.
Me? Well, I guess my thoughts took a pretty frantic tour of my life and loved ones. I thought of my kids, naturally. Annika and Clara and Ben. They’re all grown and making their own way. Annika lives in Minneapolis with her husband. Ben out in Boston where he goes to grad school. Clara, as I’ve mentioned, up in Gunflint. They’re all three smart and healthy and well loved. And though I’m very close with each of them, and though they’ll no doubt be worried for me and sad for themselves and Ingrid, they’ll also be fine.
I thought of work, too. I teach English at the liberal arts college here on the hillside and had been planning to retire soon anyway. Teaching has been a satisfying part of my life, but after thirty years of it I’ve stopped being useful to my students. I don’t know them anymore, and they certainly don’t know the likes of me. Which is not a complaint. Over the years we’ve had a lot to teach each other, and as careers go it was a good one. But there’s also the question of my other work, these books I write. Or, anyway, have written. Not least the one Ingrid thinks I should get working on with these new notebooks.
It was too much to think of her in Doctor Zheng’s office, so as we drove home I practiced thinking of nothing. We held hands over the console and listened to public radio and I wanted to ask her to take me away, as she so often has. But she just wound up the city hillside, and when we got home said she had a few errands to run. I took our dog for a walk around campus. Only then did I think of my brother and my father and our long estrangement. It rules a part of my life as if I’m merely a character in some Norse saga, not a mortal man from north Minneapolis living now on the shore of Lake Superior. I love my brother ferociously, but I’m not sure he’d say the same about me. It’s been five years since we reconciled, since I saw his daughter, since we had dinner with Bett, since I saw his life, since our father died. We’ve seen each other often during the intervening years. He’s come up here, Ingrid and I go down to Minneapolis. I should tell him about the diagnosis. Despite our checkered past and all the complicated feelings, I think he’d want to know.
Ingrid comes back into the kitchen, dressed now in a sweater and wool skirt, brushing her still-blonde hair, the sweet smell of her shampoo filling the room.
“You haven’t moved,” she says, taking my coffee cup and filling it again. “Do you know what day it is, Jon?”
I shake my head.
“February twenty-eighth.”
“So?”
“So it’s five years to the day since your father died.”
“Is it really?”
“Well, he passed on the twenty-eighth, in 2014, right?”
She knows I’m terrible with dates, and the answer to her question would elude me in the best of circumstances. Still, I say, “That’s right.”
She points at the calendar. “And today’s the twenty-eighth.” She tops her own cup of coffee and joins me at the table. She gathers my hands in hers and sighs. “Have you forgiven him yet?”
“Forgiven who, Pops?”
She looks at me, patiently, and says, “Now would be a good time if you haven’t.”
“Of course I have. A long time ago, I did.” I take a sip of coffee and feel stumped. I’ve always been stumped on the matter of him. “Who the hell am I to have forgiven him? I’m the one needed forgiveness.”
This is well-trod ground for Ingrid and me. When Annika was born, I spent as much time laboring over what sort of father I wanted to be as I did simply relishing my baby girl. Ingrid of course knew that my relationship with my family was difficult. But she didn’t know—couldn’t possibly have known—the depth of our breach.
After a couple months of watching me with Annika, our firstborn, she finally said, “You need to call your Mom and Dad. And your brother. Everyone is fine now, it’s time for you to be, too.”
And I did call. I can still remember Pops answering the phone and acting like we’d talked the day before—not ten years since. I remember how I fell in love with him all over again—and like a little boy—in the span of an hour’s conversation. It was the first of hundreds we’d then have over the years.
My mother I didn’t talk to. And Anton didn’t return my call. Not back then.
“Are you hungry yet?” Ingrid asks.
“Sweetheart, I won’t forget to eat. And I can still make my own coffee. You don’t have to get up to take care of me.”
“That’s not—”
“You’ll know when we get there. But don’t let me be a burden already.”
“You’re no burden, Johannes. I’m only talking about breakfast. I like making you breakfast. Just like you like making me breakfast. And if you don’t want it, I guess I’ll go to the grocery store. What else is there to do at this unholy hour?”
She kisses me on top of my head, runs her hand through what’s left of my hair. I’m still sitting at the kitchen table when her headlights shine through the window. The darkness they leave behind serves as a cruel reminder that in a year or two Ingrid won’t be able to drive off alone. Even for something so simple as a trip to the grocery store.
Unholy. It’s not how I think of these hours before dawn. In fact, they’re the closest my life has come to religion since I was a boy and had my ski jumps to play on. For twenty years I’ve been getting up this early to commune with my better selves, these lives more righteous and curious than mine. I’ve loved and worshipped my characters in much the same way I’ve loved and worshipped my own children and wife, and I count their companionship as one of fate’s great kindnesses.
Not only does Ingrid know all this, she as much as taught me to observe it. Each morning, as I awake and sit up, as I put on my watch and rub the sleep from my eyes, she reaches over and scratches the small of my back. It’s love, simply, and I know that. But it’s also, I think, a kind of encouragement. And hardly a day goes by without it. This is just one of the reasons my fumbling mind this past year has been so hard. I’ve been unable to write the final book I thought I had in me. A story I’ve been calling The Ski Jumpers. These notebooks on the kitchen table, what are they for? The answer, it’s plain to me, is a story I can’t write. One that Ingrid has gently been pushing me toward. If I haven’t admitted that until now, it’s because the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do was impress her. In this respect, at least, I know I can’t, and the recognition of this truth is in its own way as brutal as yesterday’s diagnosis.
Last night, after dinner and a nip, while Ingrid sat on the couch reading the newspaper, I went into my office and pulled from the back of the file cabinet those pages that have bedeviled me for five years. I meant to write a thinly veiled story about my mother and father and brother, about the unlikeliness of us all, of the crimes and wrongdoing, and of the years that drove us away from each other. And it would be about ski jumping, the only thing that held us together. During the past half-decade the story has found its way to the page. Hundreds of pages, actually.
As I sat there last night, marveling at the mess of them, I tried—for the umpteenth time—to understand why I’ve never been able to submit to this one. Part of the failure, no doubt, has to do with a fear of confronting what went so wrong in our lives. The time Pops spent in prison. The way his incarceration poleaxed my mother. Her time in the state hospital, which coincided with Pops’s time in the clink. The way Anton was left with only his teenaged brother to take care of him—well, a teenaged kid and Magnus Skjebne, or Sheb, Pops’s cousin and the root cause of so much of our grief. And of course it’s meant confronting my own remorse and culpability—indeed, my guilt—which is the provenance of all the wreckage. I remain as fearful of it now as I did my lifetime ago. Who would relish the thought of dredging that past to life? Not me, apparently.
But there’s at least one other reason this novel has always ended up back in the drawer, and it came clear to me only last night: the story of our unraveling is bound in so many ways to our ski jumping together. And those memories—outside of the ones I have with my own wife and children—are the best I’ve got. No wonder I’ve never been able to reconcile the two threads, or been able to see this book through.
Nothing’s changed this morning except that I’m perhaps more dubious. A superstitious man might blame his diagnosis on the virulence of his memories. Might see his own life as the root of the sickness. But I’m not superstitious, and for every moment of misfortune from my childhood, I’ve been, in the years since, ten times charmed. Which only makes my prospects crueler, and the fact that the story in this particular redrope will never be finished as bleak as the dimming years I have to look forward to.
Our lives. My mother and father and brother and me. Or, more often, just the three of us: Pops and Anton and me. When my brother and I were kids, we used to sit around our kitchen table, and while Pops stirred up a batch of his cream of cod and corn soup or made us grilled cheese sandwiches with slices of government cheese, he’d regale us with stories of his own ski jumping past. He was not braggadocious, Pops, though he had rights to be, given his accomplishments. I think he was trying to steward in his boys the kind of confidence a religious man finds when faced with a doubting crowd. He told us there were all sorts of families in America—rich and poor, lucky and unlucky, self-made and silver-spooned—and that we were like the Rockefellers of ski jumping. He meant Anton and me. He meant that we were of the self-made and lucky class, and that it was our job to believe in the righteousness of our endeavor. He used to say that we had to believe in it like others believed in God: with reverence and solemnity and the conviction that it alone might save us. I spent my childhood imagining it could, and the rest of my life since trying to understand why it didn’t.
It also occurs to me that those evenings around the table were in some ways a stay against our poverty, which is not a word I use frivolously. Because Pops was like a preacher on the subject of ski jumping, and since Anton and I were such devout young believers, and since we couldn’t afford other entertainments, those dinners were as much our trips to the movies as they were our time for prayer and contemplation. Even now I see how those nights shaped us in ways as profound as our mornings on the jumping hills did.
I certainly miss Pops and Anton and how we used to be, but what I miss more than anything are the stories we told each other. I’ve never thought of it like that until now. Even when Pops was sent to the Stillwater penitentiary, I missed the retelling of our lives as much as I missed him. Is such a thing possible? Or am I already falling victim to my nostalgia?
The surest cure for my nostalgia has always been Magnus Skjebne. Sheb, as everyone called him, and the root, as I’ve already suggested, of our undoing. He became, for part of one fateful year, our guardian, a responsibility so unlikely and corrupt as to seem unimaginable now. Yet it happened as surely as any of this. It was a year marked not only by the devastation of the absence of our parents but also by the splintering of the love between my brother and me. I don’t know that I’ve ever articulated this to myself quite so simply, but for a long time—decades—Anton chose Sheb and his way of life over me and ours.
You’d know him if you saw him, old Magnus Skjebne, all six-foot-five and two hundred fifty pounds of him. Handsome and sly and quick-eyed even as a gaffer. The last time I saw him was the night of Pops’s wake. This is five years ago now, down in Minneapolis. I was sitting in the visitation room at the funeral parlor and watched him walk in. He wore a fine worsted suit and a pinpoint shirt and Italian leather brogues covered with black rubbers. He looked, I thought, like he could have been anything. A farmer or pastor, a banker or private eye, a hit man or a pimp.
He had aged, of course, in the years since I’d seen him, but still had a youthful extravagance. He didn’t carry a paunch like so many men his age; his eyes were wide and bright and as menacing as ever. But he also looked more kindly than he had remained in my memory. I wondered how many among those gathered knew that beneath his handsome suit he was tattooed and scarred. The words VARMT and KALD were stamped on either collarbone, and an elaborate ouroboros wound around his body in blue and black ink parallel to a scar as old as his time in Chicago.
In the funeral parlor, he moved from person to person, shaking hands and squeezing shoulders, leaning down to whisper in ears or kiss cheeks. I’d been there for half an hour before Sheb arrived, and I hadn’t yet said a word to anyone. After five minutes, he’d greeted everyone, saving me for last.
“Do my eyes deceive me? Is that you, Johannes?” he said, offering his enormous hand.
We shook. “Hey, Sheb.”
He smiled then, his teeth flashing, and put his hand on my shoulder. Even at arm’s length I could smell the anise on his breath. I knew it could be either the licorice candies he sucked or the aquavit he drank like water. Without looking back, he gestured at the assembled guests. “A bunch of old ski jumpers here tonight, aren’t there?”
“I guess there are.”
“Where’s your brother?”
“You’d know better than I.”
“Probably he’s tipping a few.”
“Probably he is.”
He let go of my shoulder and motioned to the casket at the front of the room. “Have you been to see Pops?”
I looked up there. All I could see was his forehead and the wisps of gray hair that couldn’t be tamed even in death. “Trying to work up the courage,” I said.
Sheb nodded. “The reaper does make cowards of us all.”
“And fools,” I said.
“And fools.” He smiled again, this time close-lipped, and nodded his head. “When your brother gets here, tell him I need a word?”
It was my turn to nod.
“Good to see you, Jon.”
I nodded again.
In truth, it was not good to see Sheb, and not merely because of the occasion. The years between our meetings were coldly and exactly planned by me, and as I watched him join a circle of mourners, I felt the tightening in my gut that any encounter with him brought. It occurred to me that I should have stayed away. That I should not have come home even for Pops’s funeral.
I took a mint from the candy dish on the table behind me, unwrapped it, and looked again toward my father in his casket. My mind went wandering and I couldn’t tell you how long it was before Anton walked in, but I had about half a dozen candy wrappers in my fist when he did.
He stood in the entryway, his knit hat dusted with snow, and he stomped his boots before searching me out. We locked eyes and I raised my chin and he ambled over. We looked at each other for a moment before he spread his arms. We hugged a long time. When finally we separated, he said, “Big brother,” and peeled off the black leather gloves he was wearing.
“Hey, Anton.”
A drop of snowmelt fell from his hat onto his hand. He looked at it, then back up at me. “That should be our tears,” he said.
“There’s still time for all that,” I said. “It’s good to see you. You’re fit. You look good.”
“You’re not. You don’t.” He smacked my gut with the back of his hand and laughed. “Someone’s feeding you well.” I could see he was trying to summon Ingrid’s name.
“Ingrid,” I reminded him.
“That’s right. How’s Ingrid.”
“Very good.”
“And the kids?”
“They’re all moved away. I miss them.”
“Ben?” he said.
“And Annika and Clara.”
He nodded, and scanned the room, hardly interested that his brother was standing in front of him. We might as well have been classmates at a thirty-year reunion.
He wasn’t embarrassed, nor should he have been. I’d distanced myself a long time ago, not just from Minneapolis but from Anton and Bett and Pops, too. I met Ingrid at college in Duluth, where she was born and raised, and we settled down just a few blocks from her childhood home. On that night in Minneapolis, I hadn’t seen Anton in years.
“This room is rotten with jumpers.”
“Ski jumpers and Sheb. He’s looking for you.”
“He always is.”
I didn’t know what he meant, though I had my suspicions. In order to change the subject, I said, “I imagine Bett is, too.”
He looked at me, mean in the old way, and then stole another glance around the room, looking for Bett. “There’s Ma, sitting up by Pops.” He ducked his chin under his shoulder, took a flask from his coat pocket, uncapped it, and took a swill. I guess it steadied him, because when he lifted his face, his expression and tone had changed. “You been up to see him yet?”
“I can’t.”
“I’m gonna. Before Sheb tracks me down.” He stole another drink. “You better fucking say hi to Ma.”
“I will. I’m bringing her home after this. I talked to her this morning.”
Now he looked at me in the hurt way, and we were five and ten years old again. He took a few seconds and then put his hand on my shoulder. “Well, then, we’ll all be there together. It’ll be just like old times, eh? Dinner at the kitchen table.” With that, he slunk into the crowd, and I was left alone with the bowl of mints.
Standing under that wall sconce in the funeral parlor, watching so many ghosts move around, the newcomers covered in snow from the blizzard outside, I might have died from remembering. But it was a funeral, after all, and a gathering of old ski jumpers, too, which meant no end to the flickers of recognition and the old folks coming up to say hi to me—one of the Bargaard boys. My own Bargaard cousins, Tim and Ted, paused for a moment to offer their condolences. After a while, Noah arrived and for the rest of the service stood guard beside me. Otherwise it was a parade of vaguely familiar faces.
A dozen times some wizened man I should have known would stop and say, “You’re one of Jake’s boys.”
“I’m Jon.”
“The older or younger one?”
“I’m the older.”
“The one who left town?”
“That one,” I’d admit.
These men, they were all jowly and slim and had still piercing eyes, eyes that had spent some fair amount of time up in the sky, flying. We had that in common. They’d say things like, “I knew your old man from way back,” and then look into the light of the sconce as though they could get back there, or as if they could see themselves still in the air, their skis neat beneath them. After a moment of fond remembrance, they’d look back at me. “I jumped with him down at Norge.” Or, “We skied together at Wirth.” They’d get lost in some story, sometimes for a split second, sometimes for a full minute. Then: “You were both jumpers. You and your brother. One of you was good.”
“Anton was.”
“Anton. That’s right. I remember watching him.”
“So do I,” I’d say, surprised to feel the pride that always crept in.
Most of those old men would stare off for another moment, on their way back from the memory of my brother in flight. Some, when they returned, would give me a knowing nod. Others, the ones with better memories or more of the story, would take half a step closer and ask, “Did he turn out all right? Anton?”
I’d look across the room at my brother. He lingered near Pops’s casket but hadn’t yet stood next to it. Instead he spoke with people in that easy way of his. “Ask him yourself,” I’d say, and point at him. He always seemed to be smiling back.
Eventually, Anton did move over to Pops. He stood right above him. I imagined he was holding Pops’s hand, looking down on his closed eyes. Anton’s own face turned, in the short distance of those few steps, back to the innocent boy he used to be. He appeared, for a minute or two, very much as he had the first time Pops went away. Like he’d had his voice ripped out. Like he was going to have to subsist on the memory of something he didn’t know the whole truth about. I thought, just then, about the nights we used to sit around the kitchen table and how Anton held on to Pops’s words as if they were the only thing in the world that made sense.
Of course, there were lots of those stories that night. The first person to speak at the service was Pops’s best friend, a man named Selmer Dahlson. He was a ski jumper himself, and surely the oldest person in the parlor. Next up was Sheb, who commanded that room as if he were the mayor of the northside, and who spoke of my father as if he were a saint.
Last to the lectern was Anton, who took a long pause before he began. He thanked Pops’s friends—more than two hundred of them had filtered through over the course of the wake. He thanked the folks at the funeral parlor. He thanked Selmer, not only for his kind words about Pops but for giving so many of us our start at ski jumping over on the golf course at Wirth Park. When it came time to talk to Bett, Anton’s tone changed, and he went from garrulous and almost backslappy to earnest, if not downright melancholy. He told her how much Pops loved her and what their life together had meant to him. He told her what a fine mother she was. He told her that he loved her, which I know was true. And then, before he commemorated Pops, he looked around the room until he found my face at the back. He paused again and collected himself and then he said, “Ma worked a lot of overnight shifts at the hospital, which left Pops in charge of us. He was a good dad. He did the best he could. My brother, Jon? He was a good son. And a good brother. One of us turned out all right.” He smiled at me—or maybe it was a smirk—and then told a few stories about our beloved father.
Even now, five years since, I can still hear the crack in his voice. He was replaying abridged versions of some of the classics. I closed my eyes to listen, and to quell my tears, and when I opened them a few minutes later Sheb was standing beside me in the amber light of the wall sconce. He winked at me, and I turned away. That old bastard had been there from the beginning, when he and Pops and Mom and her sister Lena escaped Chicago in 1954. It was our family origin story. The flames from which we rose.