6
Where lies the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more?
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
April had almost changed her mind about flying with Max when he showed her the P-38 he intended to use. Although designed as a single-seat fighter, the Lightning could accommodate a second seat behind the pilot. Many of the aircraft purchased by collectors after the war had been modified in this way. White Lightning was among these.
Now, on the return trip, she was too excited even to think about the plane, and she climbed in without a murmur. Max taxied out onto the runway, talking to Jake Thoraldson, who was Fort Moxie’s airport manager and air traffic controller. Jake worked out of his office.
“Max?” she said.
He turned the plane into the wind. “Yes, April?”
“I’d like to take a look at something. Can we go back over the Lasker farm?”
“Sure.” Max checked with Jake. No flights were in the area. “What did you want to see?”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
When they were in the air, he leveled off at three thousand feet and headed west. The day was beginning to turn gray. He had a strong headwind, and the weather report called for more rain or possibly sleet by late afternoon. Probably rain along the border and snow in the south, if the usual patterns held.
The fields were bleak and withered. They had been given up to the winter, and their owners had retired either to vacation homes in more hospitable latitudes or to whatever other occupations entertained them during the off-season.
It was impossible to know precisely where the Lasker property began. “Everything north of the highway for several miles belongs to him,” Max explained. Usually houses were set more or less in the middle of these vast tracts of land. But when Lasker’s father had rebuilt, he’d opted for a site at the southwestern edge of the property, near the highway, and in the shadow of the ridge in which Tom had found the yacht. The idea had been to gain a degree of protection from the icy winds that roared across the prairie.
Beyond the ridge the land flattened again for several miles and then rose abruptly to form the Pembina Escarpment.
The escarpment consisted of a spine of hills and promontories and peaks. Unlike the surrounding plain, they were only very lightly cultivated. Their tops were dusted with snow, and they ran together to form a single, irregular wall. There were occasional houses along the crests and narrow dirt roads that tied the houses to one another and to Route 32, which paralleled the chain along its eastern foot.
“Ten thousand years ago,” April said, “we’d have been flying over water. Lake Agassiz.”
At her direction, Max banked and followed the chain south. She was looking alternately at the crumpled land and at the valley, which was flat all the way to the horizon.
“Where was the other side?” asked Max. “The eastern shore?”
“Out toward Lake of the Woods,” she said. “A long way.”
Max tried to imagine what the world had been like then. A place of liquid silence, mostly. And Canada geese.
“It only lasted about a thousand years,” she continued, “scarcely an eyeblink as such things go. But it was here. That’s all lake bottom below us. It’s why Tom can raise the best wheat in the world.”
“What happened to it?” asked Max.
“The glaciers that formed it were retreating. They finally reached a point where they unblocked the northern end.” She shrugged. “The water drained away.”
They were beginning to run into a light drizzle.
“Some of it is still here,” she continued. “Lake of the Woods is a remnant. And lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba. And a lot of the Minnesota lakes.”
Max’s imagination filled the prairie with water, submerging Fort Moxie and Noyes in the north, Hallock over on Route 75, and Grand Forks and Thief River Falls and Fargo to the south.
“You can find all kinds of evidence in the soil if you look. Remains of shellfish, plankton, whatever.” Her eyes were far away. “I suppose it might come back, for that matter. During the next ice age.”
It suddenly occurred to Max where this was leading. “You think the boat is connected with the lake, don’t you?”
She was silent.
April arrived at Colson Laboratories toward the end of the afternoon, in a downpour. She was met at the front doors by a swarm of employees headed out. “Let’s go,” Jack Smith told her, taking her arm and turning her around. “You need a ride?”
Ride where? It took her a few moments to recall: retirement party for Harvey Keck.
She liked Harvey, but she didn’t want to go. Her samples were all she cared about at the moment. She could claim she had a rush assignment. Had got behind. Wasn’t feeling well. But she owed a lot to Harvey.
Damn.
She locked her samples in the safe, told herself it would be just as well to tackle it in the morning when she was fresh, and went back downstairs to her car. Forty minutes later she pulled into the parking lot at the Goblet.
Celebrations were encouraged at Colson. When a big contract came in, when someone won a major award, when somebody found a better way to do things, they celebrated. The Goblet was more or less traditional for these kinds of affairs. It was a midpriced family restaurant with a good bar. They called it Colson West, and for each event they hung corporate logos and banners around its Delta Room. On this occasion, a blowup of Keck’s management philosophy, which advocated taking care of the help as well as the customers, was mounted behind the lectern. Also adorning the front of the room were his potted rubber tree and a hat rack on which hung the battered Stetson he’d worn during most of the last three decades.
Most of the employees were there when April arrived, and a substantial number were already well into the mood.
She picked up a rum and Coke and sat down with several of her friends. But the routine conversations, detailing struggles with kids, complaints about one or another of the bosses, problems with reports coming back from various subcontractors, seemed extraordinarily dull on this night. She had a major mystery on her hands, and she was anxious to get working on it.
Everyone liked Harvey. It looked as if the entire work force had turned out for his farewell. He was stepping down as associate director, a post that April had set her sights on. She wasn’t in position yet. The new AD would be a temporary appointment, Bert Coda, who was himself close to retirement. As things now stood, April would have the inside track when Coda retired. The position, if she got it, would mean a salary increase of $25,000; and she would still be young enough to aspire to the top job. Not bad for a kid who had started out washing dishes.
But tonight she just didn’t care. Compared to what she had in her safe, the directorship was trivial. It was all she could do not to seize the lectern and announce what she had found. Hey, listen up. We’ve been visited. And I’ve got proof!
When she’d first come to the Dakotas, as an undergraduate at the University of North Dakota, April had attempted a weekend automobile tour that was to include the Black Hills. But western states tend to be a lot bigger than eastern states, and she’d run out of patience with the endless highways. She’d circled back and encountered the Sioux reservation along the south shore of Devil’s Lake. (The north shore was occupied by a prosperous prairie town named for the lake.)
Subsequently she became interested in the tribe, made some friends, and in time acquired what she liked to think of as a Sioux perspective: I would live where the sky is open, where fences are not, and where the Spirit walks the earth.
One of the friends was Andrea Hawk, a Devil’s Lake talk show host, who captured for April the sense of a people bypassed by history. April was saddened by the poverty she saw on the reservation and by Andrea’s frustration. “We live too much on the largesse of the whites,” Andrea had told her. “We have forgotten how to make do for ourselves.” Andrea pointed out that Native-American males die so young, from drugs and disease and violence, that the most prosperous establishment on many reservations is the funeral home.
April’s own life was hedged in by fences. A marriage had gone sour. She wanted both family and career but had been unable to balance the needs of a husband with the long hours her job required. She was in her mid-thirties now, and she had no sense of satisfaction from all the activity. Accomplishments, yes. But if she died tonight, her life would not have counted for anything. She would leave nothing behind.
At least, that was how she had felt until running the test on Max Collingwood’s piece of cloth. Curiously, she had been only vaguely aware of her dissatisfaction until the test results came in and she realized what she had in her hand.
The tributes for Harvey were moving. Several people described how much they had enjoyed working for him, how he had inspired them, why he was a good boss. Two former employees of Colson who had gone on to greater things attributed their success to his inspiration. The first principle of his credo, said one, had carried her through dark days: Do the right thing, regardless of consequences. That was Mary Embry, who had become an operations chief with Dow. “It’s not always a path to promotion,” she said. “But it made me realize that I had to be able to respect myself before others would.” She smiled warmly at Harvey, who looked embarrassed.
The director added his own praise. “Forty years is a long time,” he said. “Harvey always said what he thought. Sometimes I didn’t want to hear it.” Laughter. “Sometimes I really didn’t want to hear it.” Louder laughter. “But you never ducked, Harv. And I’m grateful for that.” Applause.
“I’ll add this for everyone in the room who wants to be a manager: Look for someone like Harvey on your staff, to tell you what you need to hear. Treat him well. Make him your conscience.”
They cheered, Harvey stood, and April actually saw tears around her. He beamed in the rush of affection. When things subsided, he symbolically dragged the lectern to one side. (His refusal to use a lectern was part of the body of corporate myth.) He thanked his coworkers for their kindness and, as he always did, spoke to them about themselves. “In some ways,” he said, “this is the finest moment of my life. I’d like to think that Colson Laboratories has a more solid foundation than it had before I came, and that its employees and customers are better off. If that’s true, and if I can claim some credit for that, I’d feel that my years here have been successful.”
April suspected she had never seen him this happy. Not during her twelve years with Colson Labs. And she thought how very sad that was.
The associate director had devoted his life to the success of the company and its employees. He had refused to settle for anything less than excellence. And now, addressing his colleagues on this final night, he was saying it again. “Never confuse perfection with production. People who don’t make mistakes aren’t doing anything.”
His subordinates loved him.
She watched him now as he thanked the rank and file. He was walking into the dark. At the end of this celebration he would go back to his office for the rest of the week, and then it would be over.
In some ways, this is the finest moment of my life.
My God, was that all it had come to? A few dozen people at a dinner party, teary-eyed for the moment, but who would disperse soon enough to their own lives and leave Harvey Keck to find his way as best he could?
Surreptitiously she wiped her eyes.
Nothing like this was going to happen to her. She would make sure her life counted for something more than being a nice person down at the office. And Tom Lasker’s enigmatic yacht was going to be her passport.