Page 16 of God’s Country

“Taking turns staying awake, just to be on the safe side.”

“Gets my vote,” Mal said.

I was standing by the fire, satphone still in hand, when the boys came back. They were clowning around, shoving one another in a playful way. As they reached us, Waaboo gave Luke a particularly hard push. Luke stumbled over a big rock, and for a moment, it looked as if he was going to fall into the fire. I dropped the satphone, reached out, and caught him. Mal was also up in an instant, reaching across the fire to help catch his son. Immediately after that adrenaline rush moment and the confusion that came with it passed, I realized that although Luke hadn’t fallen into the fire, the satphone now rested among the dancing flames and glowing embers. I grabbed for it, but the fire was too intense. Daniel snatched two sticks from the wood we’d gathered and used them to lift the phone free. He dropped it on the dirt at the fire’s edge, where it lay smoking.

“I’m sorry,” Waaboo said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay,” I said. But I was pretty sure the satphone was fried. I waited a couple of minutes for it to cool down, then tried to make a call.

“Dead,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Baa-baa,” Waaboo said. “Really sorry.”

“Accidents happen,” I told him and tried not to sound as upset as I was feeling.

“I brought my cell phone,” Mal offered. “We can still call if we need to.” He’d put the phone in a sealed plastic bag that he kept in a pocket of his cargo pants. He pulled it out, checked it, and came up with the result I already knew he would. “No service here.”

“Maybe it’s time we turned in,” Daniel suggested.

It had been a long day and sleep quickly took the two boys. Their fathers joined Stephen and me by the fire, where we sat talking in quiet voices.

“When I thought about coming into the Boundary Waters, I knew it would be challenging,” Mal said. “I didn’t know it might be dangerous as well.”

“It’s God’s country,” I said. “But sometimes things happen here that make me wonder what the Creator is thinking. You wore a priest’s collar for a long time, Mal. Got an insight you’d like to offer?”

There was a good breeze across the lake that made the flames of the fire lean to the east. The breeze also kept the mosquitoes from being much of a bother. Above the point, the sky was a richness of stars. How many of those suns had birthed planets like ours? I’d often wondered. And were those worlds any less complicated than our own?

“I’ve heard you refer to our maker as the Great Mystery,” Mal said after some reflection. “I think that says it pretty well. We’ve been given plenty of guidance in the way to peace. Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius.” Mal grinned and eyed me and said, “Henry Meloux. And I’ve heard Henry on many occasions ask why you refuse to take his advice.”

“I don’t refuse. It’s just that sometimes I don’t understand.”

“I think God’s like that. But maybe the biggest complication is that we’ve been given the freedom to choose, and we don’t always choose wisely.” Mal picked up a stick and stirred the fire. “When I listened to confessions, what I often heard were people wanting to do the right thing, knowing exactly what that right thing was, but losing the battle with themselves because the wrong thing was so much more compelling. Sex, money, power, anger, hate—they’re powerful forces, and so often our resolve yields in the face of temptation.”

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” Stephen said.

“In a nutshell.”

Daniel said very quietly to be sure the boys could not hear, “The Kennedy brothers who tortured and killed Wollersheim down in Duluth, how do you explain that, Mal? What kind of temptation could they possibly have yielded to?”

“I think the choices we make are shaped long before we make them, mostly in childhood. My own guess is that those two brothers were shaped, or rather misshaped, by things that happened to them when they were young. That doesn’t explain all destructive behavior, but my own experience has been that it explains a lot.”

“What about concentration camps? A whole population refused to see the incredible cruelty,” Daniel said. “How do you explain that? Where was God when the six million Jews were being gassed? Or here on this continent, when my ancestors were being killed or rounded up and put on reservations to die from disease or starvation?”

“My own belief is that God was with them, both as they abandoned their bodies and as they found the strength to endure and survive and, in the end, forgive.”

Stephen shook his head. “The Great Mystery.”

“Exactly,” Mal said. “It’s folly to try to understand the Divine. In my case, I simply try to embrace all the blessings I’ve received.” He looked at me again. “Rose and Luke foremost among them. And rather than pray for understanding, I pray for forgiveness because that’s a prayer I know absolutely will be answered. And I pray for the strength to forgive. But that one rests on my shoulders.”

“You’re a better man than I am,” I said. “Right now, if I could get my hands on those guys Cordell guided in, forgiveness would be the last thing on my mind.”

CHAPTER 10

We divided the night, each man taking a two-hour watch. Stephen offered to take the first. After Mal and Daniel had climbed into their tents, I sat with my son, tending the fire.

“You need to get some sleep, Dad,” he said.

“Pretty sure that’s not going to happen for a while.”