Free The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye

on him, wide and in a frenzy, its murmur grown to a full yell. A desperate yell.
       And there was no way to explain what Odd did next. He reached his hand across the distance between them and touched the sleeping sow's shoulder. She was the source of all the warmth in the world, and that warmth was his now, too. For a moment he left his hand there, leaning closer and closer toward the bears as though drawn by some magnetic force. The yearling's screaming had become everything with the warmth. Everything until the sow woke as though from a warning dream. She rolled over and in a single motion came up at his face with her right forepaw. She swiped the side of his head with such force that he was thrown back into the light of day, a bleeding hole where his left eye had been.
       Daniel was upon him, his shotgun raised to his shoulder while Odd scrambled up, screaming, his unmittened hand plugging the hole in his face. The bears were both screaming now, the earth rumbling. Daniel hurried Odd onto the sled, shouting, "Let's go, let's go, let's go!" as he pulled the lead ropes of the toboggan with one hand even as he kept his shotgun ready. He told Odd to hold on. To hold on tight. And he ran with the sled behind him, ran away from the sound in the earth, his best friend half blind.

VII.

    (August 1920)

    H e had spent a month watching the white pine not dry fast enough, the pitch bleeding like icicles dripping from an eaves trough.
       At the end of the month he rented the horse again and dragged the log up to the mill, where for two dollars he had it kiln dried. He had felt, as he stood in the lumberyard smoking half-a-dozen hand-rolled cigarettes, like a cozener; like having the lumber dried was a desecration of his vision. But he'd also spent enough nights with Rebekah to know that time was more important than principle.
       Since that day at the mill he'd lived as a hermit. He tended his nets and ran the barrels but otherwise spent his time in the fish house: by day working on the keel and, on those lucky and unforeseeable nights, in the company of Rebekah. The rhythm of that season was unlike anything he'd ever known. It was almost as if the long, steady work with his saws and adze continued in the dark with Rebekah, and since he took as much pleasure in one as the other, there were nights his felicity seemed endless. Boundless. And so he mistrusted it even as he gorged himself.
       Now he had the keel on a strongback, leveled with shims on the floor of the fish house. He'd built the temporary ribbands and he could see, as he stood back with a fifth cup of coffee on those hot August nights, the bones of it, could see with his eye what he'd seen in his mind for years. He had a flitch of cedar sitting under a tarpaulin where the keel had sat before, he'd built a steam box of planks sawn from the white pine and fashioned a steamer from an old five-gallon kerosene bucket and hose line ordered from the automobile-parts catalog Hosea received each spring and fall. He'd also ordered two dozen C-clamps and a hundred dollars' worth of tools— rabbet planes, chisels, wooden mallets, nippers, a spokeshave, a sharpening stone, an assortment of ball-peen hammers and bucking irons and wrenches and screwdrivers— from Arneson's Hardware. On the fish counter a dozen well-fingered boat-motor catalogs sat beneath the plans, which were hand-drawn by Odd on huge sheets of onionskin paper. There were pencils and rulers scattered on the counter, and a new lamp shining down on it all.
       He'd spent fifteen hours a day working on the boat since he'd gotten the keel dried, days he'd not eaten more than an apple, a bacon-and-onion sandwich, days that turned into night without a moment's notice or pause. At the end of those days he found himself exhausted but unable to sleep for the anticipation Rebekah might appear. And because her visits were unscheduled and the waiting interminable it was during these hours of night that he'd