Chapter 30: Two Women

On Monday morning the pack came down the hill into Gull Harbor on foot.

We'd left the trucks at the top of Main Street, by the water tower.

I walked in front, because Vidar had asked me to.

He walked beside me.

Behind us came his mother and Tove and the council.

Behind them came the rest of Greywater, two hundred people in church clothes and work clothes.

The kids held hands in pairs.

The gray pup ran loose between everybody's legs, and nobody caught it.

Gull Harbor came out to look.

The woman who ran the bakery stood in her doorway with flour on her arms.

Two old men stepped out of the bait shop and took their caps off without seeming to know why.

A fisherman I'd known all my life was standing outside the bank.

He had a letter in his hand.

He looked at the letter, then at me, and he didn't say anything.

He just nodded, once, and folded it into his coat.

The old cemetery sat on the slope above the harbor, behind the Lutheran church.

The back fence ran along a row of cedars so old their branches touched the ground.

The flatbed from the stonecutter in Duluth was already parked on the grass.

Six men from the pack had the stone off it by the time we got there.

It was lake granite, gray with a red vein through it, as tall as my shoulder.

They set it under the cedars, in the spot Vidar's mother had walked out to on Saturday and stood in for a long time.

There were two names cut into it, deep and square.

Two sets of dates.

The first woman had been nineteen.

The second had been twenty.

Under the names, the cutter had put the four words Arne had written on a napkin at my kitchen table.

Daughters of this harbor.

Half of Gull Harbor had followed us up the hill.

They stood along the church side of the fence in their coats, and the pack stood along the cedar side, and nobody crossed.

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