Purgatory Ridge

They approached a long ridge that stretched east, a dark wall rising in front of them. The ridge was crowned with evergreen and aspen, but its sides were bare rock, striated basalt cliffs that, at the eastern terminus, plunged more than two hundred feet, before touching the surface of the lake. It was Purgatory Ridge, the deep ancient lava flow in whose shadow John LePere had been born and raised. The highway cut under the ridge in a long tunnel, lit by bright lights. As LePere drove through, the tires of his old truck seemed to be singing one long note that echoed off the tunnel walls. When the highway broke into sunlight again, LePere immediately slowed the truck and turned onto a narrow lane of dirt and gravel. The lane wound a quarter mile through a thick stand of poplars until it came to a small house on a protected cove named for the ridge that towered above it. Purgatory.

The cove had a beach composed entirely of small stones rounded smooth by waves. LePere’s was the only house. The only other artificial structures were a sturdy little fish house and a long dock where a reconditioned 36-foot Grand Banks trawler christened Anne Marie was moored. LePere parked the truck near the fish house and got out. He fumbled the key into the padlock on the door.

Bridger got out, too, and stretched. With a nod toward the little house, he asked, “How come you never go in the old place?”

“I go in.”

“Just not when I’m with you.”

“I don’t like things disturbed.”

“What is it? Like some kind of shrine?”

“Get your tanks,” LePere said, and threw open the fish house door.

In LePere’s youth, the fish house had been where his father cleaned the day’s catch-ciscoes, herring, whitefish-he sold to the markets and smokehouses along the North Shore between Grand Marais and Two Harbors. Jean Charles LePere had come back from World War II and four years in the navy with a love of big, open water. With the money he might otherwise have used for college, he bought the land on Purgatory Cove from an old Norwegian named Bugge. Along with it came the dwelling, the fish house, a leaky fishing boat, and yards and yards of tangled nets. He spent nearly a year repairing the buildings, making the vessel seaworthy, mending the nets. In the winter of the repairs, he met and fell in love with a beautiful young Indian woman named Anne Marie Sebanc who worked as a waitress in a little place in Knife River. During his second year of laying nets, he married her. Although the house was small and rustic, it became their home, and within a year, they had a son. John Sailor LePere.

For a long time, John LePere’s life was wonderful. He remembered spending long days collecting agates on the shore of the cove and accompanying his father to the north shore towns where he sold the stones to souvenir shops while his father was selling fish. He remembered picnics atop Purgatory Ridge with the Sawtooth Mountains to the northwest, and to the east Lake Superior stretching flat and blue all the way to the end of the world. He remembered his father pointing out to him from that height where, under the silver surface, the fish ran and where was a good place to set a net. His father had loved fishing and loved the big lake. Yet it had been these very things that had killed him, that had plunged his wife into a dark confusion from which she never fully emerged and that had forced his sons to grow up too quickly and too hard. For much of his life, LePere had struggled to crack the truth at the heart of this mystery. What he’d finally come to accept was that the lake called Kitchigami was so vast and ancient and part of something so huge in its ultimate purpose that one human life-or two or three-mattered not at all. In that way, he’d come to think it was like God, who gave and took and offered not the slightest explanation for either.

Bridger pulled his equipment from the back of the pickup. He brought his tanks into the shed, where LePere filled them, and his own, from a compressor. They loaded everything onto the boat. Bridger loosed the moorings and LePere backed the Anne Marie away from the dock. The entrance to the cove was protected on either side by great slabs of igneous rock sliced from Purgatory Ridge by eons of weathering. Even in the harshest storm, the power of the waves was broken before reaching the cove. LePere headed the boat away from the cabin and out onto the great lake, slicing through water deceptively calm, water that had taken from him his father, his mother, his brother, everything that he’d ever loved, water so cold it could punch the heart right out of your chest and so unforgiving it absolutely refused to yield up its dead.

9

NEAR FOUR A.M. he’d become aware of Jo moving in the room.

“You okay?” he’d asked.

She paused in a slash of moonlight that made her feet glow but left the rest of her in darkness. She took a long time to answer. “Just going for some Tylenol.” And she’d slipped out the door.