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 Elias she had looked like herself. It was the best thing anyone could say in that building, and Elias took it at the door with a nod and a handshake for each of them, the way his 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 Elias at the guest book, as if Elias 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 Elias 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. Elias 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 Elias'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 Elias about it at the post office, though they still looked. Elias 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. Elias turned down the chapel lamps, carried the guest book to the office, and stood a minute at the front window with his black 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.

The breakwall ran a quarter mile out from the foot of Front Street, a long hump of piled granite blocks with a path worn along its top and a squat steel light at the end that the Coast Guard still kept burning. In summer the kids jumped off it into the harbor on dares. In February nobody went out there but people who needed to think.

Elias went out with his parka zipped to the nose and his mittens tucked into his armpits, and the cold came through everything anyway, a clean hard ache in the knees and the forehead. The sky had cleared. There was no moon, but the stars were so thick and sharp that the snow on the harbor ice gave back a faint gray light of its own, and Elias could see a long way.

To the left, the harbor was a white field, scattered with the dark boxes of fish houses, each with a stovepipe, one or two with a glow in the window where someone was sitting up over a hole in the ice with a line down. To the right, beyond the breakwall, the open lake had frozen too, all the way across to the island, a flat gray plain two miles wide with the black hump of Sable Island at the far side and three or four yellow lights on it.

And across that plain, starting at the ferry landing a mile down the shore and running toward the island, was a dotted line of small dark shapes, evenly spaced, fading into the distance: the Christmas trees. Two rows of them, a road's width apart, every one of them somebody's tree from last December, dragged out onto the ice after the holidays and set up again to show the way across.

Elias stood at the end of the breakwall under the steel light and looked at the dotted line for a long time. It was beautiful, in a plain way, the way a row of fence posts in snow was beautiful. It was also, Elias thought, a strange thing to trust your life to: a line of old trees on a lake.

Somewhere out on the ice, the lake boomed again, and the sound went right through the granite under Elias's boots. Elias turned and walked back to Front Street with his hazel eyes watering from the cold, and went to bed.

The county phone rang at ten minutes past six in the morning.

It was still full dark. The window over the bed was furred with frost from the inside, and when Elias reached for the phone on the nightstand the air of the room bit his bare arm like water. The screen said R. ANSEL.

"You awake?" said Ruth.

"I am now."

"Good. I need you, and I need you to be as annoying as you were in November." Her voice was dry, and under it there was something that was almost trust.

Behind her, over the phone, Elias could hear wind, and an engine idling, and a man talking fast and high in the background, the way people talked when they had seen something they could not stop seeing.

"Where are you?"

"On the ice road. About a mile and a half out. At the Gut." Ruth breathed out, and the sound crackled in the phone. "Arvid Koski was driving out to his fish house at six and found open water in the lane. There's a car down there, Elias. I can see a tail light under the ice. It's still on."

Elias sat up in the cold dark.

"Whose car?"

"Silver Buick. I ran the plate from what I could see." Ruth's voice didn't change, but it slowed down. "It's Theo Brandt's. He does the ferry-line books on the island Tuesdays. He'd have been driving home last night." A pause. "Nobody reported him missing. Not till an hour ago. Lise just called dispatch."

"I'm coming."

"Dress for it," said Ruth. "It's twenty-six below out here with the wind. And bring the good thermos." And then, just before she hung up, more quietly, as if she didn't quite mean Elias to hear it: "Everybody's going to say it's bad ice."