The Ice Road

Ida Pellonpää had been ninety-four years old and had outlived two husbands, a son, and the Sable Harbor cannery, and on the second Tuesday in February half the town came to Front Street Funeral Home to tell Mara she had looked like herself. It was the best thing anyone could say in that building, and Mara took it at the door with a nod and a handshake for each of them, the way her father and grandfather had taken it before.

Outside it was twenty below and still dropping. The mourners came up the porch steps with their scarves over their mouths and their eyelashes white, and went down them again an hour later bent into the dark, and in between they stood in the warm chapel with their coats open and talked about the cold the way people in other places talked about sports. The thermometer at the bank had said minus twenty-two at five o'clock. The harbor had been frozen out to the breakwall since Christmas. The ice road to Sable Island had opened on the eighteenth of December and the grocery truck was running on it twice a week, and Cal Hendry's crew said the ice at the landing was twenty inches thick and the Gut was behaving itself, for once.

"Stay between the trees," old Toivo Ranta said to Mara at the guest book, as if Mara had announced a plan to drive to the island that night. It was what everybody in Sable Harbor said in February. It meant: be careful, and also, goodbye.

Ida's family had asked for coffee and bars in the side parlor after the prayers, and Mara spent an hour there refilling cups and listening. The talk went where talk went at a Sable Harbor visitation in February: to Ida's lefse, to the price of propane, to the Pellonpää grandson who had come back from Minneapolis with a beard nobody liked, and then, inevitably, to the ice. Arvid Koski had pulled a nine-pound lake trout out of his fish house on Sunday. The Lindahl boy had put his snowmobile through a soft spot in the bay and walked home wet to the waist and lived, and his mother had not yet stopped telling him about it. Somebody had heard the Gut was making noises again. Somebody else said the Gut always made noises and that was the point of the Gut.

Lise Brandt came alone, a tall woman in a long red coat who taught music at the school, and apologized to Ida's daughter for her husband. Theo kept the ferry line's books, and Tuesdays he drove across the ice road to do them at the ferry office on the island, and came home late. "He's married to those ledgers," Lise said, lightly, the way people said things that were not light at all. Mara noticed her afterward because she stood alone with her paper cup by the window for a long while, looking out at nothing, and did not seem to mind being alone.

Toivo shook Mara's hand a second time before he let go. "You did right by Arne Lindqvist," he said gruffly. "People noticed." Several of them, going out, said the same thing in fewer words.

The Cold Lamp business was three months behind them now. Joanie Bright's trial had been set for April in the county court, and people had mostly stopped asking Mara about it at the post office, though they still looked. Mara had been coroner for ninety days and had signed forty-one death certificates in that time, every one of them for somebody old, or sick, or both. The county cell phone lived on the nightstand and had not rung after midnight once since Thanksgiving.

At nine the last car pulled out of the lot. Mara turned down the chapel lamps, carried the guest book to the office, and stood a minute at the front window with her auburn hair still combed for company, looking out at Front Street under the streetlights. The snow on the sidewalks squeaked when anyone walked on it. Far out past the breakwall, where the town ran out and the lake began, the ice boomed, a long rolling sound like furniture being dragged across a floor upstairs, and then was quiet.