The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye Page A

frozen timepiece?"
       "For that you'll want Joshua Smith. He'll be passing through before long."
       The foreman took a deep breath. " Sorry you didn't get your wolf."
       "I'll get one yet."
       "I believe you will."
       Hosea offered his hand. "I'll see you in town."
       "Soon enough."
       As the two men parted ways on the river, an unkindness of ravens decamped from the high boughs of a white pine and flew up the gorge. Their cries were horrible and their moving shadow cast yet another shade on the snow.
       Hosea Grimm turned back to the foreman and shouted across the river, "What did I say about the ravens?"

    T he ice road cut through the tallest stand of white pine along the river. Before the upper falls, the road veered south and plunged into Gunflint. The next morning Trond Erlandson sat his horse on the crest of the road looking onto the morning over the lake. A mile offshore the vaporous open water cemented his doubt. It clouded the sunrise. He looked down the shore for Isle Royale, but it was gone in the sea smoke.
    He had once been a peaceable man— not given to the agitation that
    was so much a part of his daily routine now— and the vista, though it complicated things, reminded him of that quiet part in him. When he had first arrived in these wilds, now thirty years ago, he'd looked on the country— in all its enormity and ungoverned beauty— as if it were his own private opportunity. Though he had worked tirelessly and with unchecked vigor, all he had to show for his labor was his authority. And his responsibility. He took neither lightly. He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the snow and spurred the horse forward.
       In all that cold the leather saddle creaked with the first stride. The horse sidestepped into the soft snow on the edge of the road and began his cautious descent. Some few paces down, the wind paused and when it did the horse paused, too, and the foreman craned his head toward the river. He heard the water coursing under the ice and over the falls and into the Devil's Maw. He cursed it and spit in its direction. Were it not for the falls and that hole in the river he could have rafted the harvest down to the mill instead of hauling it on the treacherous road. The horse stepped again without prodding and in half an hour Trond heard the whine of the mill and saw the mountains of stacked pine in the mill yard.
       Instead of hitching his horse outside Grimm's, he stabled him at the livery to be blanketed and fed. Before leaving the horse he took his Winchester from the saddle scabbard and unloaded it and put it over his shoulder. He asked the livery keeper to water the horse, too, and he patted the Appaloosa's mottled hindquarters and walked to Grimm's.
       By any definition Grimm's store was more than an apothecary— if it was an apothecary at all— though that was what the signboard above the door advertised: grimm's apothecary. The first time Trond Erlandson entered the store had been in the late spring of 1894, a few months after it opened. His piles had become insufferable and he submitted to his embarrassment and sought counsel. Grimm prescribed oakum, to Trond's dismay, but it worked. He'd been a reliable customer since.
       The store was as much a testament to Grimm's eccentricity as it was a place of commerce. When Trond entered that midwinter morning, the whole of his beard was coated with ice stained amber from the snoose dribble. For as often as he frequented Grimm's apothecary, and as fond as he was of its proprietor, Trond did not feel, now more than a year after his first visit, any closer to knowing Hosea Grimm.
       The door closed behind Trond Erlandson, sucking much of the heat with him. He stomped his feet and took off his mittens and hat and nodded at Rebekah, who darned socks in a chair beside the box stove. There was a basket of socks on the floor beneath her. Hosea himself stood behind the counter, his felt derby squarely on his