The old man with the white beard laid the paddle across the chest of my grandfather, and the Lutheran church fell completely silent, so that I heard the radiator knocking in the basement below. It was a cedar paddle, six feet long, the blade burned and darkened by decades of sun, and all over it, on both sides, from the grip to the tip, were names. Tiny ones, burned in with a hot nail, hundreds of them. The old man stood leaning on his cane with his hand flat on the blade. “My name is Walter Halvorsen,” he said, in a deep voice that shook. “I am eighty eight. In 1972, I came to Ely as a boy of thirty six with a failing marriage and a bottle.”
He looked down at my grandfather. “I hired a young guide named Ray Lindgren to take me into the Boundary Waters for a week. I had not planned to come back. I do not mind telling you that.” A shiver ran through the pews. “On the fourth night, on Knife Lake, I took a bottle to the shore, and he sat down beside me and did not say a word. He just built a fire. Then he said, Walt, I have a paddle I have been meaning to give away. He put it in my hands. He said, every person who comes into my canoe, I burn their name in. Tell me yours.”
The old man closed his eyes. “I told him. He burned it. And I wept, because I had not been anybodys name in years.” He opened them again. “I put away the bottle that night. I have not touched it for fifty two years.” He lifted a trembling finger toward the paddle. “That one, near the grip, is mine. There is Frank Becker, whose son was killed in Vietnam. There is a woman called Annie, who came out here to scatter the ashes of her husband. There is a boy with cancer, nine years old, whom Ray took out in a canoe for three days when the doctors had said no.” His voice thinned. “Every name is a person he saved.”
A cedar paddle burned with hundreds of names was laid on a casket by an old man with a cane and gave one grandson the morning to bring his aunt back to the lake.
I had not known that. I had only known him as the man who built canoes and smelled of cedar and woodsmoke, who taught me to swim in Shagawa Lake the summer my father left, who held me under the chin and said, kick, Nate, I have got you. I looked at my aunt Marian on the front pew. Her Escalade keys were in her hand, and she had stopped looking at her watch, and her face had gone the color of a candle. Walter Halvorsen lifted the paddle and held it out. “Two hundred and sixty three names,” he said. “Every one of us who burned a name came to tell him what he did. He always said, you are welcome, and went back to fishing.”
A big man in a Boy Scout leader uniform rose from the back of the church, in the ranks of those standing in the snow. His face was red and wet. “Mr. Halvorsen, I am one of them. Troop 118, Chicago, 1989.” He wiped his cheeks. “We were city kids, twelve years old. One of us was scared of water. Ray stayed up all night with that boy, and in the morning the kid paddled across Moose Lake. That kid is my brother. He is a sergeant in the Marines.” He cleared his throat. “Ray told us never to thank him. He said, thank the lake.”
They simply spoke their names to the casket, one at a time, like a litany, and pressed their hands on the old cedar. My aunt Marian rose from the pew as if sleepwalking. She came down the aisle, tall and rigid, in a fur collar, and she stopped in front of the paddle.
“Daddy,” she said. It was the first time in thirty years I had heard her call him that. “I said you wasted your whole life in a boat.” Her voice was a raw whisper. “I said it to my husband in the car. I said, nobody remembers a fishing guide. I did not know that you were the remembering. I did not know that you were what everybody else was made of.” She put her gloved hand to her mouth. “I was ashamed that you smelled of fish. I would give anything now to smell it.” She sank to her knees on the stone floor, and no one moved to help her, because it was not our place.
I went to her. I knelt beside her, and I put my arm around her fur collar, and for the first time in my life I held my aunt. She was shaking. “Marian,” I said, “he forgave you before you ever asked.” She nodded against my shoulder. “I know,” she whispered. “That is what I cannot bear.” Walter Halvorsen, leaning on his cane, bent slowly down. With a thumbnail he picked at a tiny bare place near the middle of the paddle, and then he took a small wood burner from his pocket and held it out to her. “Child,” he said gently, “there is a spot. It is yours, if you wish.”
We all watched her do it. My aunt took the burner in her gloved fingers. She was the least handy woman I know. She bent over her father, and with great care, with her lips pressed together, she burned in her name, letter by crooked letter. M A-R I-A N. When she finished, she sat back on her heels and looked at it, a small black signature among two hundred and sixty three, and she began to laugh, a high, shaky, helpless laugh, and then she cried, and then she laughed again. Walter Halvorsen patted her shoulder and said, “Welcome.”
We buried him in March, in the frozen cemetery above the lake, and in May, when the ice went out, a hundred canoes put in at the landing at Shagawa. Nobody organized it. They simply came, from three states, and paddled out in a long quiet line, and rafted up on the dark water in a ring. A young man took a cedar paddle from a canoe and held it up. It was the one with the names. He lowered it into the lake and drew one slow stroke through the silver, and the ring of canoes drifted apart, each toward its own shore, as the loons began.