The Organ Builder's Debt

I'm Maria Barnett, forty-four years old, and I run a canoe livery on the Biesbosch with my dad. Or I did run it with my dad, until his hips gave out and he moved to town to sit by a woodstove and complain about his hips. Now it's mostly me, six canoes, two kayaks, and a lot of reed beds that don't care if I eat.

Well. It's me and Krissy. Krissy Samuelson, thirty-six, organ builder, my girlfriend for about a year now. She lives with me in the little house behind the boathouse and builds pipe organs in an old church ten kilometers away, which is the strangest sentence I get to say about my life and I say it a lot.

The first Monday of January, my youngest, Denis, packed up his Corolla and drove off to university in Utrecht. He's twenty-one and he worked summers for me since he was old enough, hauling canoes, scraping hulls, eating my sandwiches. He hugged me in the gravel lot and said, "I'm gonna text you, boss. Don't let the place fall apart." He always called me boss at the livery, to be funny.

"Get out of here before I put you to work," I told him.

Then his taillights disappeared down the dike road and the whole property went quiet in a way I didn't like. January does that here. The tourists are gone, the water's half-frozen, the reeds are brown and rattling. You can stand in the middle of your own business and feel like it's already closed.

Krissy found me that evening sitting on the boathouse steps with a cup of tea I hadn't drunk.

"You okay?" she asked. She had sawdust on her sleeves. She always has sawdust on her sleeves.

"Just thinking about how quiet it is."

"It's always quiet in January."

"Yeah, well." I shrugged. "Usually there's somebody to be quiet at."

She sat down next to me and put her cold nose against my ear, which is her way of saying she loves me without having to say it. I leaned into her anyway.

The rest of the month I drifted through chores like a ghost. I patched the roof of the rental shed. I counted paddles twice and got a different number each time, which meant I couldn't count. I drained the water lines in the wash station. Krissy would come home from the church workshop smelling like glue and varnish and ask how my day was, and I'd say "fine," and it was fine, and that was somehow the problem.

Then, on the last Friday of January, the furnace at the livery died.

Not the furnace in the house. The house furnace is fine. The one in the boathouse, the old oil-burning monster that keeps the workshop side from freezing so the glue and the epoxy don't ruin, decided at four in the afternoon that it had worked long enough. I heard it clunk, then hiss, then nothing, and I stood in front of it like a doctor who just lost a patient.

"Krissy!" I yelled toward the house. "We got a situation!"

She came out in her boots and her big coat, hair tied back. "What situation?"

"Boathouse furnace is dead. Totally dead."

"Did you try hitting it?"

"I hit it. It's past hitting."

"Okay." She rubbed her hands together. "So we fix it or we freeze the epoxy. How cold is it supposed to get tonight?"

"Minus six."

"Then we should probably start with the fix."

We spent two hours in that cold boathouse with a flashlight and my dad's ancient toolbox, and the answer turned out to be a fuel line that had split like an old rubber boot. I could order the part Monday. That night we had the door open to the house side, both of our space heaters dragged over, and we sat on two upturned canoe crates in our coats, hats still on, sharing a thermos of coffee.

"Real cozy," Krissy said. "Like camping, but bitter."

"You know what's funny? This is the most alive I've felt all month. Something broke and I got to be useful for two hours. Is that sad?"

"It's a little sad."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome." She was smiling though, I could tell even in the dark. "Maria. I've been sitting on something for three weeks and this seems like the moment."

"Oh no!"

"Oh yes." She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and turned it toward me. On the screen was a booking confirmation, a long weekend, mid-February. "I booked us a trip. The Biesbosch, but the wild side of it, frozen canals, little wooden channels, reed beds, the works. We rent a canoe, we paddle between little overnight huts with woodstoves, they bring you food. There's a whole winter version of it and nobody does it."

I stared at the phone. "You booked a canoe trip."

"I booked a canoe trip."

"Krissy. I run a canoe livery."

"I know."

"I fix canoes. I rent canoes to tourists who can't paddle in a straight line. That's my entire life."

"Which is exactly why you're gonna love doing it for nothing, with me, in a marsh that looks like a postcard someone dropped in a bucket of ice." She was grinning now, all her teeth. "Come on. Say something."

"Something. Krissy, the furnace is broken. The epoxy shed needs a new seal. I got a roof patch that's held together with hope. February is when I catch up on everything. I can't just leave."

"The furnace part arrives Monday, you fix it Tuesday, the roof can sit under a tarp for four days, and the roof patch was always going to fail, you told me that yourself in November."

"When did I tell you that?"

"November. You were on the ladder swearing. I remember it fondly."

I drank my coffee. It had gone lukewarm. "It's a lot of money, isn't it. That kind of trip."

"It's paid. It's been paid for three weeks. That's the other thing."

"Krissy."

"Let me finish." She got up off her crate and went to the door of the house side, and I heard her boots on the hall floor, and she came back carrying a box. A real box, with a picture on it. "Also I bought this."

"What is it?"

"A pressure cooker."

"Where?"

"For the trip. Look, the huts have two-burner propane stoves. You can't do a real stew in a normal pot on those, it takes forever and eats all the gas. But a pressure cooker, forty minutes, and you've got the best stew that's ever been eaten on a frozen canal. I did research. A lot of research." She set the box on the canoe crate between us like it was a trophy. "Beef and onion, first night. Second night maybe a chicken thing. I haven't decided the second night."

I looked at the box. I looked at her. Somewhere behind us the broken furnace ticked as it cooled, like it was eavesdropping.

"You remembered," I said. I hadn't meant to say it out loud.

"Remembered what?"

"The flood. Two years ago. When the water came up over the road and you were stuck at the workshop with all that timber you'd just bought and no way to move it, and you walked into my office soaked to the knees and asked to rent a canoe, and I just gave you one. Didn't even make you sign the sheet."

"You did just give me one."

"And you've been trying to pay me back ever since and I keep telling you there's nothing to pay back."

"There isn't." She sat back down next to me, close, her shoulder against mine through two coats. "This isn't paying you back. This is... okay, it's a little paying you back. But mostly it's this. You've been walking around here for a month like the place closed and took you with it. Denis leaving knocked something loose in you and I've watched it and I didn't know what to do, so I did the only thing I know how to do, which is plan things and buy equipment." She nudged the pressure cooker box. "Four days. You and me and a canoe and nobody's flooded and nothing needs fixing. I already asked your dad, he said he'd keep an eye on the tarp."

"You asked my dad before you asked me?"

"He was very supportive. He said, and I quote, 'finally, she'll get her out of January.'"

"That sounds like him."

"So." She turned to face me, still in her coat, cheeks red from the cold. "Long weekend, February. Frozen canals. Stew. Say yes."

I put my hand flat on the pressure cooker box like I was swearing on a Bible.

"The stew better be incredible," I said.

"It's gonna be incredible."

"Then yeah. Okay. Yes."

She made a noise then, a happy one, and threw her arms around my neck, and we sat there on canoe crates in a half-frozen boathouse hugging like idiots, and for the first time in a month January felt like it was going to end.

We put in at the south ramp on a Thursday morning, and the cold hit me like a slap I hadn't asked for.

"Okay, so first thing," Krissy said, handing me the dry bag, "the main channel is open, but the side channels are iced over. Kind of. Thin ice. Which means we portage."

"Portage." I said it like a foreign word. "Krissy, I portage for a living. Tourists ask me what a portage is and I have to explain it slowly."

"I know. That's the point."

"What's the point?"

"That you already know how to do everything, you just forgot you know how to do everything."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I put the dry bag in the canoe and checked the straps twice, because that was something I knew how to do.

The main channel was gray and flat and beautiful, the reeds frozen stiff along both banks like they'd been dipped in glass. Krissy paddled bow, I steered, and for the first ten minutes neither of us said anything, which was its own kind of conversation. A heron stood on the ice at the edge of the reeds looking personally offended by the whole season.

"There," Krissy said, and pointed left. "Side channel. That's ours."

"That's ice."

"Partly ice. There's open water in the middle, I checked the map and the forum posts and a very patient man at the hut company explained it twice."

I steered us toward the mouth of it and looked. She was right, mostly. A ribbon of black water maybe two meters wide wound between white banks, and where the ice reached in from the edges it was thin, the kind you could see through to the reeds underneath. You'd break through it with a paddle blade and it would crackle and give and it didn't matter, because the water under it was knee deep at most.

"This is a scam," I said. "You booked this because you knew I couldn't resist it."

"Is it working?"

"Shut up and paddle."

Breaking thin ice with a canoe has a particular quality. It's not hard. It's loud, and it's slow, and every crack sounds like the boat is dying, and none of it matters because the water is shallow and the boat is tough and you just keep pushing. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing I used to do for fun before I started charging other people to do it.

By the third side channel I was laughing. Out loud, alone in a frozen marsh, pushing a canoe through ice like a nine year old with a sled.

"You sound different," Krissy said, not turning around.

"I sound like an idiot."

"You sound like the person who gave a soaked stranger a free canoe in a flood."

I pushed through another sheet of ice and it broke around the bow in white plates. "Okay. Yes. Fine. This was a good idea. Are you happy?"

"Deliriously."

We reached the first hut around two in the afternoon. It was smaller than I'd pictured, which is saying something, a plank building on stilts over the water with a woodstove pipe sticking out of the roof and a stack of firewood under a tarp on the porch. The food delivery was there like they promised, a box with the day's stew meat and onions and a bag of carrots, plus a note in cheerful Dutch we both pretended to read.

Krissy got the stove going while I brought the gear up. That was the deal we didn't discuss, she handled fire, I handled everything else, and it worked the way things work when you've lived with someone a year.

Then she took the pressure cooker out of the bag like it was a newborn and started cutting onions, and I sat on the bunk with nothing to do with my hands for the first time in weeks, and that's when it came out of me. I hadn't planned it.

"You know what I did Monday?" I said.

"Bought the furnace part."

"Ordered the furnace part. Sat in the office for four hours after because there was nothing else to order. Denis used to handle the bookings in the afternoon. He did it since he was sixteen, he grew up in that office, and now the phone rings and I let it go to voicemail because half the time I forget it's not him calling to say he's running late."

Krissy kept cutting onions. "What do you do instead?"

"Nothing. I check the hulls that don't need checking. I reorganized the epoxy shed twice. I swept a floor that was already clean." I looked at my hands. "My kids are gone, Krissy. All four. Lena went two years ago, the twins last summer, Denis in January. Twenty-two years of that house