by Lamar Herrin
Now I sat looking down on a lake that was a puddle in comparison, a little blue glacial afterthought, around which weekenders and retirees had pitched their camps many years ago and never bothered to renovate or enlarge, when Walter Kidman appeared on the terrace with a breakfast tray, which he set on the glass-topped table between us, sheepishly, it seemed.
He said, I’m afraid I had too much of the Beam brothers last night. Sorry if I got out of hand.
And I said, I’m assuming we remember they’re not Beam brothers. They span two hundred years.
Indeed, in direct descent—except for one nephew, Walter recalled, cheering himself. There you go!
We ate breakfast silently, in the multi-throated warbling of the birds. It was an overcast day, but humid, warm, windless, as if a southern weather front had moved in. Meteorologically, very hard to account for, considering the crisp, cool evening we’d had after I’d taken that swim and we’d gone in to sit before the fire. It was a Monday, the day we were to leave, but Walter had not said a word. I was retired, he wasn’t. I had no idea what awaited him at home, what was on his docket, if that was the term he still used.
He poured us coffee. Strange to be toasting with cups of coffee, but we held ours up between us as if we’d come to our last hour here and a toast was on our minds.
Walter said, with a mix of vehemence and forbearance, and a touch of fondness, too. That goddamned toad!
A toast to the toad? And I replied, What you have to understand is, it really was a paradise up there as long as I was a boy.
Walter made a sighing, sympathizing, growling-with-anger sound.
And I told him about it. About my aunts and their families, and about their husbands as they came off the road. About my cousins, all my junior and all but one willing to assign to me the supremacy I deserved. I tried again to acquaint Walter with Little Howie, but this time up in his element, where the boy became a man, and where even as a boy, once we got past the cabin and the jigsaw puzzles and the card games in the rainy afternoons, and that row of chaise lounges in the glowing evenings, he was our entrée into that world. And I tried to make Walter understand how a world like that one up in the mountains only became truly and fully available in the wake of a war, it took a war to get back what before a war might have meant little more than a pleasant two weeks out of a year. And it took getting down close to the fish, eye to eye with the fish, whose world the lake was and which you fished for in an effort to join them. A crusty father-and-son team, by the name of Coggins, who performed the role of gatekeepers. A woman standing by a cast iron stove with you down below her, waiting to be fed. Isums. What is ’ums, she said I’d said.
Isums? Walter repeated. And what are isums?
The first food I remember putting into my mouth.
So what is thems? What are we talking about?
Pancakes, I said.
Ah! Walter said. Then shook his head. You and Little Black Sambo. Jesus, what a world down there!
Don’t worry, Walter. It’s gone now.
That goddamn toad!
Don’t worry about the toad either.
Once he took it all, he took off?
Something like that.
For a moment we sat before the water, down at the end of this little lake. It felt and sounded like Monday down there, we’d gotten up late and people who’d come for the weekend had gone back to wherever they’d escaped from. I assumed that didn’t include Byron Wainwright, but until five in the afternoon we were free of him. It was so quiet there at our end of the lake, in that humid, windless morning, I felt I could get up and walk out upon the water, that the lake would permit that liberty since we were the only ones around and could be counted on not to say a word. It was that kind of morning.
I could tell you about it, Walter, I said. It won’t be firsthand.
Not even a glimpse or two? Not like at your mother’s funeral?
It will be secondhand but mostly third. Through cousin Harriet, through my sister, and on to me. If you’re willing to settle for that.
You saw him standing back from your mother’s funeral, keeping a stopwatch on his wife. And you heard him driving off, pebble by pebble. And that was it?
Yes, I said without hesitation, that’s the deal.
Ah, and behind that screen door.
I’m not even counting that, Walter.
Because that could have been any toad-shaped man not quite ready to step into the big house.
True, I said. It could.
Hmmm, Walter said, as if weighing the pros and cons, considering the entertainment value on this Monday we were due to go home.
And before he could decide, I said, You could probably tell it yourself. Think of the various ways a man with a chip on his shoulder and a whole lot of weaknesses to feed could waste a fortune, and don’t leave out a single one. Maybe there were a few original touches in there, but they don’t amount to much. Here’s an image. The passengers disembarking from a ship and the rats clambering on board. You want to take it from there?
I’ll pass, Walter said. Then reconsidered: Better said, I’ll take a pass I can use later on.
A big house, I went on, like an ocean liner my aunt had built after her son and husband died. She was determined to keep it all going. Every summer she sailed into port, docked, and invited anyone remotely connected to the family to come spend two weeks with her. It was an extravagant house. She got, I believe, two summers’ worth out of it, maybe a third, I’m not sure and it really doesn’t matter. The summer after she died, Ellie took over. In the name of her mother she summoned the family back to the big house, but she also gave in to her newly wed husband and allowed Leland to invite what he could cram of his family into the original house, that cedar-red one with a line of chaise lounges facing the lake. The same two weeks, Walter, and it’s not hard to see why. My sister and her kids were there, Aunt Ruth came with her two daughters, Harriet, our pipeline, and her sister Beatrice, and their kids. And there were others. My mother, smelling a rat, and Aunt Lily, who always smelled one, stayed away. Leland’s kin filled that lakeside house up with aunts and uncles and cousins all from the same town in the next state over, and his kids too, a couple who had kids of their own, even that sulky son of Leland’s, the one who might have stretched out in Howie’s, Little Howie’s bed after Rosalyn’s funeral—
Where you slept too, Walter reminded me, perhaps just to show me he was staying in touch.
That’s right. Richie, “Little Richie” they called him, so somewhere there must have been a big one.
Jesus! Walter said. It never fails, does it?
You don’t want to take it from here, Walter?
Let me make one guess. The toad had one of those boisterous southern mothers, who could go toe to toe with any man—
Amazing! You’ve got it, Walter! I’m impressed. Married to who?
Some stock car racer gone to seed? I don’t know. Or some no-neck football player, a lineman, a tackle, never took his helmet off, Bronco somebody.
Close, I said. Leland’s mother’s name was Sammie, or that’s what they called her, and her husband was known as Sarge because he’d spent twenty-some-odd years in the army, where he’d been the company cook. He was not Leland’s father. Leland’s father had been run off or run over or run through and good riddance. Every day Sarge would cook up a pot of something, chili or stew or pork and beans, something like that, and from the deck of the new house you could smell it cooking and you could smell it coming, for he always sent a pot up—
A Trojan horse sort of offering?
Walter!
Don’t flatter me, Jim. It’s pretty obvious how you’re setting this up.
You can see it, my sister could, too. And Harriet. Ellie, it’s hard to say about her. She was straddling the distance between those two houses. In one summer Leland’s kin overran the red one. Cars everywhere. Motorcycles gunning up and down the road. Children who never stopped screaming, so their mothers and fathers screamed, too. Music
blasting. Terrified fish. For a year, I think just one year, maybe two, Ellie straddled those two worlds, but nature abhors a vacuum, and as soon as our family stopped going to the lake, Leland’s family, multiplying by the day, moved into the big house Rosalyn had built to keep it all going, and from this point on we’re pretty much in the world of hearsay. Except for Harriet. Harriet, out of loyalty to Ellie, tried to keep going, even though she might leave her children behind. Remember, she was the only member of the family who’d gone to their wedding. She was a quiet sort, not really mysterious, but she kept her own counsel and you knew she knew things. But she’d always been like that. When we were kids, I’d go to her to catch up on what I had missed. She’d tell you, but maybe only the part she wanted you to know, I could never be sure.
Our pipeline, Jim?
She liked a good story, Walter, but if my sister didn’t want to take on the role, we probably couldn’t have a better eye on the Ellie and Leland show than Harriet. And somehow she insinuated herself into Leland’s good graces. It even got to the point where Leland employed her.
So we have our Trojan horse, too.
You wouldn’t want to say that about a lady.
Sorry. I keep forgetting we’re no longer up north. Employed her how?
We’re getting ahead of ourselves, Walter. First there’s the toad on the lake.
It was horrible, inexcusable, what Leland Oldham did in the name of the Whalen family, how somehow he tapped into the goodwill the Whalens had built up over the decades up there until he’d run it dry or until he’d poisoned the well so irremediably that no one who valued his life would drink from it again. He played the fool but played it so aggressively the last laugh caught in your throat. He played the fool with such utter irreverence that the fool became the fiend.
So I told Walter about Leland on the lake where my cousin had taught us about boating and water-skiing and fishing, of course, but fishing as it were from the fish’s-eye view. But Leland Oldham never touched the fishing boat, he went straight to the speedboat, and instead of teaching his nephews or nieces or any stray kids of his how to get up and stay up on water skis, to earn their pleasure in the streaming open air, he found some kind of sub-sized surfboard—a boogie board, he called it—and pulled them up on that. And swung them off. He was drunk. He veered back and forth in the open lake and whipped his family members off that board. Then he swung back by them with that board flying at the level of their heads, and the miracle was that no one was ever hit by it and no one was ever reported drowned. He drank constantly and took his delight in sending nephews and nieces and probably his own surly son through the air. He had another board, which he called his banana board, that he could crowd four Oldhams onto and quadruple his pleasure by whipping all four off. According to Jean, the kids loved it for a while and then began to get scared, and Leland had to browbeat them into coming out onto the lake with him.
In that year of the overlap Jean went out with him once. But this was on the houseboat, along with Harriet and a couple of her kids, and also Sammie and Sarge, who brought a pot of his cooking along, and Jean said that something as pokey as a houseboat Leland ran at open throttle, if nothing else so that he could swing right and left and ride his own waves. He drank like a drunk out to keep a mean streak going, like someone who’d gotten his hands on something and he’d be damned if he’d give an inch or ounce of it up. He didn’t drink straight from the bottle—after all, he was the captain and had his own mug—but he threw his empties overboard and fouled the water. Sammie and her Sarge were one step behind him. Except they were bursting with their own brand of delight. Imagine, Jean said, someone who’d lived her whole life hearing stories of the leisured life of the very wealthy and suddenly found herself living it. And, according to her son, with no end in sight. Why wouldn’t she be giving vent to some kind of howling pleasure? Jean could make a case for the rowdy good-natured mother and her man. Leland, she said, was a more devious sort and had grievances that ran deep.
Everybody’s got grievances, Walter reminded me. Grievances are the cheapest thing going. You’ll never win a case pleading your client is in the grip of his grievances, whatever they are.
Ellie, in one of her sober moments, told Jean that Leland had suffered horribly from his father’s neglect, more than anyone knew, and that he loved Ellie because her father had loved her so much. He loved father love and what it could do.
Which was probably why, Walter surmised, he became a scoutmaster or campground leader or whatever he called himself. He wanted to give other little underloved boys and girls what he hadn’t had himself. Put up that statue of the big man and the little girl and case closed.
They ran that camp for a few years. There actually was a camp back there, Walter. Little Howie’s first cabin became a kind of headquarters, I suppose, there were streams, beautiful trees, I spent time back there before Ellie was even born, it was its own world …
Until?
Until they had to sell it like everything else.
What else did they have to sell, Jim?
Cars.
So Leland, the toad, was a used car salesman on top of everything else.
He liked old cars. Vintage, mint-condition cars from the Roaring Twenties and the thirties. No Rolls or Mercedes or Jaguars, nothing like that. Al Capone cars with running boards and those bulbous headlights and rumble seats. He built an enormous garage for them down beside the red house, ground we’d played on as kids. Six cars in all before he had to sell them off. And he ran them around that lake on roads so narrow you’d have to pull off if you saw him coming. Drunk as a lord, of course, but for a while being married to a Whalen got him a pass. Waving at everybody, my sister said, and for a while people waved back. It was a show. One of the cars was bright yellow, a color no gangster ever painted his. Whether he thought of himself as a gangster or not I don’t know, but he probably did think he was one of the untouchables. There was a tackle and bait shop down the road, a dock a father and son ran, and Leland used to spin in there, scattering gravel and roaring out, just to let them know the lengths to which someone with a lock on the Whalen fortune could go. He spent a nice chunk of that fortune on those cars, Walter, you have no idea what one of them could cost, and then one by one he had to sell them off. His empties he threw out beside the road.
Fantasy land, Walter said. But then it had been a sort of fantasy land for you, too, up there, Jim.
It’s not the same. But you know that already.
I do, indeed.
Leland, your toad, was not uneducated. He’d been schooled. He could do numbers. He looked at that Whalen fortune and really believed he could see no end. He was drunk on it. I’m not sure he even needed the booze. Or you could think of the booze as something like the fortune’s lifeblood, for figure out what a fifth of Lagavulin 16 costs compared to a paltry pint of blood and right away you saw the difference. Of course, he’d have to pay to keep Ellie drunk, too, but that was an operational expense to keep it all in his hands, an expense he could probably write off as a tax deduction, and to keep her defenseless and drunk he’d do her the courtesy of staying drunk himself, too, just a bit more functional and a step ahead to keep the whole enterprise going. But it was self-indulgence of the most reckless sort. They took a trip west, went skiing in the Rockies, down, I suppose, the slope reserved for drunkards, became so charmed with the place that they bought a bed-and-breakfast out there and tried to persuade Harriet to run it, which she did for a while, before they had to sell it off. They took the house that Big Howie and Rosalyn had on the coast, an enormous house that Ellie had some childhood memories of, although nothing like those up on the lake, and upgraded it, sparing no expense. This included building stables for horses it’s hard to imagine them riding. Everything pristine. Ellie was so grateful that she bought up surrounding tracts of land that came up for sale and put them straight into Leland’s name, she was so, so much in love with her man, as Jean reported Ellie had said to her, making a cooing, booze-slurring
sound when she said it to me. Soooo, soooo much in luuuvvv.
I get the idea, Jim.
The idea, Walter, was nothing compared to the lavish fact of the matter. You’ll have to take my word for it.
Which I have up to now.
Well, I drew breath and said, this sort of thing went on, and Leland kept setting his family up, too. Not just his sons. Some cousins he picked out from the goodness of his heart, a favorite aunt. He had a heart, but think about it in military terms and Leland, the toad, was building perimeters of defense, he was surrounding himself with recipients of his largesse who would defend him to the death.
Something like what Big Howie and Rosalyn surrounded themselves with. Don’t take offense. Something like, I say, not the same.
