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the old house up on High Street. Hadn’t lived there in what, three years?” His smile vanished. He paused to look Noah in the eyes. “One of my bright shining moments. Enough was enough.”
    “Just like that?” he said.
    “Never a drop since.”
    “I didn’t know people could quit drinking like that.”
    Olaf merely raised his shoulder to his ear and closed his eyes for a moment. “I guess they can,” he finally said. “At least I did.”
    “Do you miss it?”
    “Not the booze, but I’d smoke a hundred cigarettes a day if they weren’t such hell on me.”
    “What’s that?” Noah asked, pointing at an envelope on the table.
    Without a word Olaf slid its contents onto the table. There were two dozen or more photographs sheathed in plastic. Olaf took one of the photos from the pile, set it down on the place mat, and wiped an imaginary layer of dust from it. He looked at Noah from over the top of his glasses—big, black-rimmed bifocals that he’d pulled from the pocket of his flannel shirt. “I guess this is what I wanted to show you.”
    The waitress interrupted them with their soup. Noah thanked her.
    At the same moment, as if they were one man in a mirror, they moved their soup aside. Olaf said, “Anyway.”
    Noah sat dumb as his father took one and then another of the photographs from their plastic wraps. The first, a black-and-white snapshot of five men standing on the main deck of the Ragnarøk and two others suspended over the side, one in a bosun’s chair, the other on a rope ladder, looked like something out of a Life magazine pictorial. Printed on heavy Kodak paper, it had faded to sepia. Of the seven men Noah recognized three: his father, Jan Vat, and Luke Lifthrasir. They all wore scowls on their faces and looked identical in dress, wearing black wool caps, three-quarter-length peacoats unbuttoned to the waist, gray trousers cuffed at the ankle, and thick-soled black boots. The ship’s bowline was attached to a harbor cleat, sagging heavily under the weight of icicles. The ship, as the unmistakable block letters of his father’s handwriting on the back of the photograph said, was wintering up.
    On the deck behind the men, the riveted hatch coamings and covers and the hatch crane were glazed with ice. The two men hangingover the side of the ship chiseled at a layer of ice. The men on deck all wore that expression so fixed in Noah’s memory—they looked caught between humor and tragedy, as though they were thinking, simultaneously, that they were elated to be home but craved leaving again, too.
    In the steely background of the picture, a million shades of gray blended into the harborscape: the cone-shaped piles of taconite and limestone, the enormous cranes and rail tracks, the rail cars steaming with coal heaps. Fences, barbed wire, wooden pallets. The crisscrossing power lines and ten-story-tall grain and cement silos. A squat tug steaming through snow flurries. Ice. And, enveloping all of it, smoke from a thousand stacks and steam whistles.
    Noah looked up from the picture and saw his father staring out the restaurant window. Noah thought of saying something but looked back down at the picture instead. In the background he recognized a big part of his boyhood. Driving into downtown Duluth just two days earlier he’d felt similarly transported in time. In his exhaustion he’d chalked it up to the depressive autumn mood that seemed to have settled on the city like the fog. But now, seeing the same place and thing in a different time and in different hues, he knew that he had mistaken fatigue for the nature of the city, not autumn’s coming on.
    He thought back to his boyhood and the ships, his father’s ship especially—his third, actually, the storied Rag . The Superior Steel Company had a fleet of fourteen ore boats, and though there were many distinctions in their size and capacity, in their age and shape, each of the ships was distinctly superior —as they were known across the