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By Root 297 0

and about his son, who had been badly injured in a motorcycling accident and since then had grown too fond of beer and not enough of work. Tom went back to Minnesota each winter, where he took care of his son and visited his mother, a ninety-two-year-old woman who was deposited once a week at the local library to read aloud to children. Some people back home still lived the Indian way, Tom told me. He described the annual wild rice harvests as he sipped from a can of Pabst in a stained pink recliner. In late summer in northern Minnesota, people took canoes onto shallow lakes where the rice plants grew thickly in the water. They pulled the tops of the stalks over the boat and knocked the kernels into the bottom of the canoe.

Sometimes Tom shared meals with me—stir-fry he’d cooked with a seasoning packet from the store which turned the whole thing into a salty, brown goo. I knew I should be wary; the hygiene situation was sloppy. But I ate his cooking anyway, and didn’t refuse beer when he offered, which he always did. When Tom went back to Minnesota for two months in the winter to take care of his son, I collected his mail and checked on his place. I forwarded envelopes that looked important. Tom wasn’t the friend I’d been looking for, but he needed the help and appreciated the company of a young woman willing to listen.

HOMER HAD BEEN Tom’s retirement plan. He had spent his working life as a machinist and he deserved a rest. Instead, he’d gotten himself hired at one of the fish processing factories where he stood at a stainless steel counter cleaning and filleting fish all summer. Sometimes he steaked them out with a band saw. He liked the work. Tom had befriended the owners and he was able to come and go about as much as he pleased.

The summer before John and I moved to town, the big commercial seafood plant—called Icicle Seafoods—had blown up, sending a cloud of ammonia up the bay. It had been a mythic event, talked about for years afterward. Luckily, no one was killed. Much of Homer’s economy had revolved around Icicle. Everyone we knew had done a stint there or had a friend who had. Tom talked fondly of Billy Pendleton, the man who, with his wife, owned the seafood plant where Tom worked. It was a relatively young business that packaged mainly the fish tourists caught on charter boats; it would freeze the fish and send it back home for them. They had recently expanded their place and dressed up the outside to be cute. They were doing a tidy business, hiring dozens of fish cutters every season who wore orange bib overalls and rubber boots and cleaned, filleted, and packed fish all day at the back of the place. The more photogenic counter crew worked up front where long freezer cases offered vacuum-sealed seafood to tourists at prices no local would pay.

Tom and Billy Pendleton drank together some days, and Tom worried that Billy drank too much. This could be serious, I thought. I rarely left Tom’s place without having emptied three cans of beer myself, and Tom had often been drinking when I’d arrived and was still drinking when I left. Tom admired Billy, and told me how Billy had promised to gather a crew of guys to put an addition onto Tom’s cabin at the end of the season. He said that Billy would have his guys put a new roof on the place too. Tom would use the extra room as his bedroom when he was too old to climb the steep stairs up to the loft. It was insurance against Tom’s old age.

When Billy died suddenly from a heart attack the summer after John and I arrived, word spread quickly around town. I knew it would hit Tom hard. For a few days, I tried calling him, but no answer. A couple weeks later, I stopped by and Tom’s eyes grew wet as he talked about his friend. Who would make sure the extra room was built? I wondered. Who would take care of Tom?

“You make your own family up here,” a woman who had moved from Wisconsin once told me. Helping Tom out—taking in his mail when he left town, checking up on him every so often—was a way for me to feel useful, to grow roots in a community that sometimes didn’t feel