by Peter Rock
The girls could not stand, the water too deep, so they contrived a game under the pier. They held on to the metal posts and she and I swam back and forth under the water while they tried to touch us with their feet. I gasped, I went under—my shoulder brushed against Mrs. Abel’s leg—and surfaced again. The girls’ laughter was so loud, echoing, carrying across the water, that my parents must have heard it, all the way up the shoreline.
At last I climbed out, wrapped myself in a towel. I sat on one of the chairs, its woven plastic straps frayed, faded orange. Beneath me, the game went on; the girls splashed my feet through the slats of the pier.
After a moment, Mrs. Abel came up the ladder. The tips of her braids were wet, sharp.
The girls shouted from beside the pier, holding on to the ladder: “You’re not allowed to get out! That’s not part of the game!”
She turned to face them, pointed to the shallows. “Bring me a black stone,” she said. “The smoothest one you can find.” Wrapping a towel around herself, she sat down next to me, both of us facing the lake.
“Where did you go?” I said, after a moment. “I mean, after that summer.”
“So many places,” she said. “So many misadventures—it seems like a long time ago, that summer. Who even was I? I got married, and I could see how my life would turn out, where it would go, but then none of that happened.”
The color of her hair, the tautness of her skin had changed, but her voice sounded exactly the same as it had that summer, so familiar in my ears.
“When I got the story you sent,” I said, “I thought it was some kind of sign. I came out here, last winter, to find you, but you weren’t here.”
“Oh, I was here,” she said. “I just wasn’t staying in the cabin. Too cold.”
Behind us in the shallows, the girls began to squabble, then found some compromise. Sunlight glinted sharply off the water; I leaned forward, found my dark glasses in the canvas bag, put them on.
“Why did you do that?” I said. “I mean, why send me the story, but also the way you hid it, the first part.”
“What? When?”
“In Mr. Zahn’s house.”
“Oh, that!” Mrs. Abel laughed. “I wish I could tell you. It’s just so long ago—I must have planned to give you the second part, but then you didn’t stay in the house, and I forgot all about it. Right after that, my father became ill, then my mother. So I was tied up with that, until they passed away.” She raised her arms from their armrests, then slowly set them down again.
“But why?” I said.
“Why the story?”
“Yes. And why tear it in two?”
“I think I just wanted to surprise you, to leave something happy behind.”
“To entertain me?”
“You could think about it that way,” she said, “but it was for me, as well.”
Turning, she looked back at the girls, who were running up the pier, toward us, each carrying a black stone. She took one in each hand, exclaiming at their beauty, refusing to compare them, then set them both down beneath her chair.
“We’re hungry!”
“We’re starving!”
“And freezing!”
I wrapped the girls in their towels, distributed the snacks; they stretched out, swaddled at our feet, and began dropping pretzels and goldfish crackers between the planks of the pier. They squinted through, claiming that fish were eating the snacks, then rolled over, looking up at us.
“That’s your house?” my older daughter said, pointing.
“Yes.”
“Can we go inside?”
“It’s pretty empty,” Mrs. Abel said. “It’s been empty for a long time. Raccoons got into it and lived inside, all winter.”
“In your house?”
“Yes.”
“Are they still there?”
“No. A man put traps in my house and caught them.”
“Where do they live now?”
“The raccoons? I don’t know,” she said, “but they sure made a mess. It’s taking a lot of work to turn it back into a house for people.”
“Can we see?”
The girls were already standing, unwinding their towels.
“No,” I said.
“Go ahead,” Mrs. Abel said. “There’s really nothing much there.”
They ran from us, shouting, their bare feet slapping the pier. A silence settled, their voices fading behind us. I stretched my legs out straight, kicking an empty cracker box so it almost fell off the pier. The Reeves’ motorboat plowed along, dragging an inner tube of shrieking children; seagulls rose from the raft at the boat’s approach, settled again.
“Out on the shoal,” I said. “I’ve been wondering about that night, what happened.”
“Yes,” she said. “You wrote about that, in your letters.”
“Or maybe that was just a story, too,” I said. “To entertain me.”
“Would you be happy,” she said, after a moment, “if I said it was?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No, probably not.”
“I’ve wondered about that night, too,” she said. “It can’t be explained so easily. One time”—she paused, squinting across the lake—“I actually went out, again, to where we were that night, where I thought we were.”
“You swam there?”
“No; I had a boat.” She pointed out toward the middle of the lake; on the horizon, against the blue sky, a colored parachute dragged behind the parasail boat; out by the island, white sails. “With a map,” she said, “and a depth detector, but I didn’t find anything, if I was even in the right place. If that kind of thing even stays in one place.”
“You were gone for days,” I said.
“Once I was under there, in those dark rooms, I guess time didn’t seem the same. It was like being half-asleep, and so wonderful, drifting in those shadows.”
“I never told anyone.”
“What could you tell them?”
“Back then, I mean, when you were gone. I didn’t tell anyone you were missing.”
“It didn’t matter,” she said. “And it was so wonderful, where I was. More like a feeling than a place. Nothing like that ever happened to me, before or since. When I searched for it, in the boat, I realized that I was actually glad not to find it, relieved that it couldn’t be located so easily.”
“You said you could breathe,” I said, “and that there were other people.”
“I felt that way,” she said. “It’s hard to describe the feelings. It wasn’t like something in this world. Sometimes I think it was a mistake to return, and I wish I could have stayed there.”
The sound of the wind in the trees behind us, the gentle waves slapping at the beach.
“Should we be worried about the girls?” she said, then.
I stood; I felt a sharp premonition. How long had they been gone?
I called their names. There was no answer.
Standing, I ran halfway up the pier, shielding my eyes, and then I saw their pale faces—suddenly framed there next to each other in the window of the cabin. I waved; I gestured for them to return to the beach. Their mouths moved, talking to each other, and then their faces suddenly dropped away, hidden again.
I turned and walked back to the end of the pier, sat down next to Mrs. Abel. I kept expecting to hear the girls’ voices, the slap of their bare feet behind us.
“What are they doing?” I said, checking over my shoulder.
Mrs. Abel smiled; she kept looking out across the lake. “Something we can’t know,” she said.
When the girls finally returned, they were shouting.
“We climbed your ladder!”
“We saw your bed!”
“What were you doing in there?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“We’
re hungry. We’re starving!”
They began rummaging through the empty cracker boxes.
“Lunch,” I said. “We’ll have to go back for lunch.”
“Swim, first,” they said.
We all leapt back in, resumed our game; a shorter session, but just as loud.
Once we were out, I packed our things. Mrs. Abel walked us back along the pier to the shore.
“We should swim,” I said. “Some night.”
“Like before?” she said, smiling. “My shoulders aren’t the same, but I guess we could see how far we could go.”
“I’ve been trying to remember,” I said, “to really remember the way it felt.”
“You’re still so earnest!” She reached out, touched my shoulder, laughing at me.
I followed my daughters, back along the white stones of the beach. Halfway to our cabin, I turned and looked back; Mrs. Abel still stood on her pier, watching us go. She waved to me, and I waved back.
That afternoon, my mother drove my girls to an art camp in Fish Creek. I helped my father clear some brush. Mostly what this meant was I chain-sawed branches loose from fallen trees and he stood to one side and pointed at what could be cut next, and talked.
I was wearing a hardhat and visor, thick ear protection, so even while the chainsaw wasn’t running it was difficult to hear what he was talking about. One story was about how he worked on a railroad, how he fell through the open hatch of a freight car and cut his chest on a block of ice. Now wearing his broad-brimmed hat against the sun—holding off the melanomas—and a red bandana around his neck, he told me of how his own father was a master at felling trees, how he could lay them down anyplace he wanted. He told me about how his father always wanted my father and his brother to work with him, but actually he did all the work and they just stood to the side and watched, and listened. This reminded me of my father, and my brother and me, the different axes and hatchets that we used to carry through the woods. Now I was doing the work, and my father, after almost a whole life, had returned to standing to one side, watching.
We attempted to dismember an upended tree trunk, down on the shore, tried to knock all the stones held tight in its roots. We didn’t make much progress, and to my mind it was not a task that actually needed to be accomplished, but it was a pleasure to work on it with him, to curse and marvel at the impossibility of success.
- 50 -
My wife arrived, around dinnertime, and we were all together again; we began to catch up with each other, to become familiar, to find and fall into a rhythm.
Later, she went to put the girls to bed, to read to them, and I walked out into the darkness, down to the shore, out onto our pier. The lake was calm; I stripped out of my clothes and waded out into the cold, black water.
I sprinted at first, trying to warm up, out past the raft, pausing to look up, into the stars, before easing south, keeping my strokes steady. When I reached Peterson’s Point, I stood for a moment in the shallows far from shore and, catching my breath, looked down at the lights of Ephraim. The churches on the hill, the boats in the harbor.
Then I turned and swam back up our shoreline, past the lighted windows of the Glenns’ and my Aunt Dee’s, past Harbor House and the Reeves’ and our own cabin, where my wife was likely finishing the bedtime routine and was about to descend to the living room, to answer a variety of medical questions from my parents.
I swam on, past the Davises’, past the Wests’—now owned by someone else—and over the dark, deeper water of the Zimdars’ channel. When I was a boy, I swam this stretch so many times during the day, and I’d see lost fishing lures, snagged and broken off, glittering beneath the stones, silver or gold, still bright or tarnished, and I’d dive down and free them, hold them in my hand or hook them into the fabric of my suit as I swam along. I passed over car engines and train wheels used as anchors, for moorings. Over cribs—frames of timber, filled with stone, meant to attract fish—and across the black channels leading through shallows to docks and harbors, to the boats belonging to the rich houses. I knew that topography, the bed of that lake, so that even at night I knew what was beneath me.
Had it changed? Were those things still beneath me? I swam, that night. I didn’t stop until I reached Mrs. Abel’s cabin, where the windows were dark. On her pier, however, were the two folding chairs we’d sat in, along with a white towel, left behind as if she had dropped it there and would return for it. The gritty, slick stones beneath me felt exactly the same as they always had, standing up to my neck in the cold water at the end of her pier. I remembered how she looked, shining naked for a moment as she stood there, after she climbed the ladder. I remembered exactly how it sounded, the snap as she pulled off her swimming cap, how it collapsed away, a black shadow in her hand.
The night was so silent. I turned a slow circle, still up to my neck in the water, and could see no dark shape breaking the lake’s surface. Far away, on the horizon, the green light of a motorboat slid along, too distant to hear.
I swam back and forth in front of Mrs. Abel’s pier. Fifty strokes, turning, fifty strokes again. I hoped to intercept her, and as I swam I felt the same as I did in the summer of 1994—anticipation and confusion, some snarled portent, the exhilaration of being in on something truly mysterious and beyond me. It was, in that black water, as if those twenty-odd years had not passed, or as if their passage didn’t matter.
In the end, that night, I did not intercept her. I swam and swam, trying to maintain the possibility, the feeling, but finally I grew too tired, and too cold. Slowly, I made my way back to our own pier, where my clothes lay waiting.
- 51 -
From my grandfather’s Hollow Tree: John Reeve built a wooden horse in his grove for his granddaughters. He found a good piece of wood in his woodpile for the body, but couldn’t find a proper one for the head. Finally, he found one in the roadside ditch, but it apparently belonged to a farmer who came to the fencerow to observe him. Embarrassed, John said he wanted it for a cutting block. The farmer began to negotiate. Finally John confessed his true purpose. At that, the farmer said quickly, “You should have told me. Take anything you want.”
My younger daughter has blonde hair and my older one is dark, like her mother. They almost never stop talking, and the next morning as they fished they were discussing the farm they would run, the correct ratio of dogs to goats and sheep.
“Keep the poles out straight,” I said. “The tip down closer to the water. Like that.”
They clutched aging Zebco rod and reel combinations, trailing lures—Mepps silver spinners, size #2—behind us, fluttering eight or ten feet deep. It was late morning, the sun growing brighter, the lake calm, the breeze still cool.
“A little further out,” I said to my wife. “It gets shallow, through here.”
As a girl, she attended a camp in West Virginia where she shot rifles, swam in a river, and learned the J-stroke, among other techniques. When I paddle a canoe, I switch from side to side, to keep the boat straight; her J-stroke allows her to continually paddle on one side, not to switch and drip water on our daughters sitting in the middle, in the bottom of the canoe, which is why she sits in the back and paddles when the four of us go fishing. I sit in the front, seated backward, so I can see them all, so I can help the girls with their rods.
“I got a bite,” my older daughter said.
“It’s just the bottom,” I said. “Here, let’s turn around, head back the other way. I never caught a fish, along this stretch.”
Far away, the dark bump of Horseshoe Island, the white limestone bluffs with the black hole of the cave and Eagle Tower faint against the sky.
“But you caught a lot, Daddy?”
“More than anyone,” I said.
“More than Grambee, when she was a little girl?”
“Way more.”
As we passed the houses, I told stories about the people who used to liv
e in them. How Mrs. West had once asked for the heads of the fish we caught, how she made some kind of soup from their eyes. She had cocktail parties for the adults and sent us children to the beach with raw bacon on strings, to collect crayfish for her to boil; the crayfish would not let go of that bacon, even as we lifted them high out of the water.
“That’s the house, Mama,” my older daughter said. “Where the raccoons lived in there. That’s where the lady lives that we swam with, that we told you about.”
“Is she home?” my younger daughter said.
The windows were dark, empty, but that was how they always looked during the daytime. The orange chairs still sat at the end of Mrs. Abel’s pier, and the white towel, too, where it had been the night before.
“Doesn’t look like it,” I said.
And then my older daughter did hook a fish, and the girls’ voices rose, and I tried not to capsize the canoe, to help and yet to let her do the work, to work the reel. The fish leapt and splashed, ten feet from the canoe, then dove deep again; finally, we got it close enough, it tired itself out, and it was lifted into the air and swung to me, so I could unhook the lure from its mouth.
“A big one,” I said. “I never caught one this big.”
“Really. Is she a girl?”
“Is that hurting her?”
I showed the girls the dark stripes along the bass’s cheeks; I let them touch the spiky dorsal fin, fold it down with their fingers. I held the fish in the water beside the boat, to be certain that she was all right, and then she was loose again, sliding into the murky depths where we could no longer see her.
“We don’t want to eat her?”
“Not this time.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Can we go to the Bead Bucket later?”
We turned and circled back, past our cabin again, past the Reeves’ cabin that is easiest to see from far offshore, even from Eagle Tower, because of its wide green lawn. On one side of the lawn, the Grove, with its swings, hammock, the wooden horse with the real saddle, just visible in the shadows.
