Northern Lights - Tim O’Brien

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that no effort was made to save the place. Rusting machinery, uncut weeds, unpainted buildings, unstopped forest. And in 1919, when Pehr Peri hanged himself from the rafters of Damascus Lutheran, his son was ready to endure, having listened. In a natural succession to the pulpit, Pehr Lindstrom Peri presided at his father’s funeral, buried him in pine in the old cemetery, and the following Sunday preached that Sawmill Landing was a dying town, that there was no sense trying to escape it because the next town may already be dead and the next on the verge of death, that the Ice Age was returning, ice a mile thick, a glacier that would level the forest and fill the lakes, the sun would turn black and the moon red as blood. And as though to demonstrate the flux, Pehr Lindstrom Peri journeyed the next day to Silver Bay, where he changed the family name to Perry and eliminated his middle name, his mother’s name, for he did not need it.

      Perry’s first memory of his father was neither striking nor unusual: a holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas, snow on the ground, his mother only a pleasant shadow beside him as they huddled in the house to wait out a storm, his father nervously watching the snow through the kitchen window. His second memory, unconnected to the first except through later association, was of a long sobbing sound, the snow still blowing, a baby crying and his father wiping bloody hands. His third memory was of great loss. The house was stone cold. His father was holding a child, rocking before the fire, and the sobbing sound ran through the house like the wind.

      The three memories might have been separated by years or seconds.

      Later, as he recognized Harvey as a brother, he remembered other things: his father preaching the apocalypse, the word throbbing in four full-bodied syllables like the chiming of a bronze bell. The cold house. Harvey and the old man going off somewhere in the woods. The feeling of cold. Harvey playing football. The old man watching with blank eyes. Harvey fighting. The old man dying, ringing with a spoon in his spit bucket. Harvey digging a bomb shelter for the dying old man, pouring cement, stringing electric lights so as to work at night. Gaunt nightlong images, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly the town, partly the place, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance. He could not find the start.

      Perry carried the rucksack, Harvey plunged ahead. They passed Pliney’s Pond and continued on. Hornwort and water moss grew along the path, in the shallow-cut parts of the forest. It had finally rained and the forest was soggy. Twice the path appeared to end in a tangle, but Harvey would push away the brush and the path was always there. They walked single file. The bushes leaned in from both sides, parting like water and Harvey pointed out the trees and gave their Latin names. He showed where mushrooms grew and explained how they should be eaten and how a man could survive for years in the woods if he knew what was what. The trail was black dirt. It twisted through alternating growths of birch and pine, slim white trunks with maroon leaves. The earth was springy from decay and rot. Harvey seemed very happy. They crossed a meadow, turned on to an old logging road that followed a creek into the thick forest. Perry walked fast. He’d lost nearly five pounds. It was a fresh day. Sometimes he could hear the creek rushing off to the left, bubbling against the rocks, and Harvey kept talking, explaining things, pushing on. He showed where poison ivy and poison oak and maidenhair grew. He was quite expert. The forest grew high and thick, big enough for harvesting, monster trees with gnarled roots that lay like fossils across the path.

      Eventually the trail ended, facing dead into the woods.

      ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ Harvey said.

      ‘Fine.’

      ‘This is really it. I told you it was nice. What do you think?’

      ‘I like it. Spectacular.’

      ‘I told you.’ Harvey pointed into the brunt of the forest. ‘Out there is the real stuff. That’s the wilderness.’

      ‘Where do we swim?’

      ‘Out there,’ Harvey grinned. ‘These trails we’ve been following are white-man made. Loggers mostly. But this is as far as they come, and out there you won’t find anything. This is where the logging stopped.’ He pointed to where the trail widened. ‘See here? The wagons turned around here and went back. This is as far as they ever came. Isn’t it something?’

      ‘Real history.’

      ‘Right. No kidding.’ He waded into the brush, motioning for Perry to follow. ‘See this?’ He picked up a rotted piece of leather. ‘Dad showed it to me. It’s an old horse brace. See? You can imagine how it fitted over the horse’s neck. The straps went here and were attached to a go-devil. All kinds of junk is lying around here if you can find it.’

      Harvey scrambled about the clearing, picking things up and explaining them. He held up a long pole. ‘See? This thing’s called a peavey. They used it to manipulate the logs. See? The point’s rusted off, but it used to have this sharp point on the end and they’d use it to pry logs.’

      ‘Where do we swim?’

      It was hard going. Perry was sweating. His jeans ripped in the thigh. Harvey plunged ahead. The forest had been cut by glaciers, chunks of silicates and rock ripped up and carried forward by advancing ice, blistered and dried, holes and crevices and long strips of gully bulldozed southward. The good soil was skimmed off, carried south. And when the melting started and the glaciers receded, ice turned to water and the water filled the holes and crevices and strips of gully, becoming lakes and ponds and rivers and tributaries, a circulatory system, the land of ten thousand lakes. Only the tough things grew. Pine, birch, bristled brush, primitive kinds of fish, walleyes and pumpkinseed sunfish, bullheads and crayfish and northerns. Tough mammals, too: wolves and beaver and bear and moose, and the Indians and the Swedes and the Finns, all tough.

      The country began to drop. It was a different kind of forest than he was used to. It was thick and blurred and impenetrable, going out and out.

      Then he heard the water again. Then he was in it, up to his knees.

      He followed Harvey up the creek. It was cold water. On each bank the trees grew like mutants, huge and old, and the water ran faster. He was in it. Harvey was moving fast and Perry lifted his knees high to keep up the pace, sweating, his glasses sliding down his nose. Bugs hovered just over the water. There were dragonflies and bugs Perry did not know.

      Gradually the creek widened and flattened out and the water got deep.

      Harvey stopped in a shaded part of the creek.

      ‘A good spot,’ he said. ‘You like it?’

      ‘It’s fine. Water’s freezing.’

      Harvey smiled. ‘Dad showed it to me. You’ll get used to it. You want me to carry the pack awhile?’

      ‘No. I guess I can handle it. Where the devil are we going?’

      ‘Just a way farther. The creek empties into a small lake. We used to go there to fish. You’ll like it.’

      ‘I’ll bet.’

      ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

      ‘Spectacular. I hope to hell the creek doesn’t get any deeper.’

      ‘Maybe you better let me carry the rucksack.’

      ‘No.’

      ‘All right,’ Harvey grinned. ‘We’ll take her slow.’ He gazed up the stream. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Even better when you get deeper in, but we’ll go slow this time.’

      ‘That’s the ticket.’

      ‘You’ll love it.’

      ‘I’m freezing. Let’s go.’

      Harvey waded up the creek. The water rose to his waist and then stayed even. The stream kept widening. Wishing he’d turned over the pack, Perry worked hard to keep up. He decided to stop smoking. He felt awkward and out of place.

      Hooking in a last long sweep, the stream opened into a lake completely surrounded by pine. A beaver dam spanned the mouth of the creek. It was all quiet.

      Harvey crawled on to the bank, waited for him, then they walked along the

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