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When I think back on our five seasons at the lake, I see my father reading in the big wicker chair that usually stood in the corner under the lamp with the green shade but which he would drag in front of the fire on chilly days. He was a great reader, my father: at ease, engaged, capable of sitting for three hours at a stretch without feeling the need to get up or move about, indeed almost immobile except for now and again a small inward smile or a slight tilt of the head in anticipation of the page’s turning. Sometimes I’d see his arm swing like a crane to the little table at his side. He’d pick up the glass with three fingers, begin to bring it to his lips–all this without once looking up from the page–and stop. And the glass would just hang there, sometimes for a minute or more, and I’d make bets with myself about whether it would complete its journey by the time he got to the bottom of the page or be returned, untouched, to the table.

My mother read too, though differently. For days or weeks she would read nothing at all, or nothing but the newspaper, then suddenly take a book off the shelf, pull a chair next to my father’s, and disappear. She read with an all-absorbing intensity, her stockinged feet drawn up underneath her, that I understood completely and yet still found slightly unnerving. Hunched over the book–which she would hold at her stomach, forcing her to look straight down–she looked as though she were protecting the thing, or in pain. No smile, no cup of tea, no leg thrown easily over the other–this was less a dance than a battle of some kind, though what was being fought for, and by whom, I could hardly guess. Two days after it had begun–during which time my mother would often drag a chair out to the shore after breakfast, or retire to one of the hammocks my father had strung about the place, in which she would lie, straight-legged, smoking cigarette after cigarette, holding the book above her head–it would be over. I would find her lying in the hammock, staring up into the trees, the book tossed on the grass beside her.

 

It was in our second season on the lake that my father shot the dog with Mr. Colby’s gun and Mrs. Kessler fell in love with the man who lived in the cabin on the other side of the lake. He was much younger than she was, which was very important, and everyone talked about it those two weeks whenever they thought I couldn’t hear, changing the subject to food or interrupting themselves to ask me whether I had seen the heron by the dam as soon as I came closer. She had made a spectacle of herself, which made me think of glasses even though I knew what it meant, anti really it was a bit much, this carrying on in plain view. Everyone seemed angry about it, and though my parents and the Mostovskys and some of the others didn’t have much to say, I could always tell when people were talking about it by the way they would look slightly off to the side, shaking their heads, or the way their shoulders shrugged, as though they didn’t care, or the way some would lean forward while others, giving their opinion, would lean back luxuriously in their Adirondack chairs.

I knew it was probably wrong and shameful for a married lady to fall in love with someone, and particularly someone younger, but the truth was that I liked Mrs. Kessler. She had come across me once while I was working on one of my many forts in the woods and kept my secret, and sometimes when Harold Mostovsky and I spent the long, hot afternoons feeling around in the water with our toes, trying to walk the pasture walls that had disappeared when the lake was made, we would look up and see her sitting on the shore watching us, her arms around her legs, and when she saw we had seen her, she would give a hesitant little wave, raising her hand a bit, then a bit more, as though unsure of how high she should bring it, and we would go back to what we were doing. It never bothered us having her there, and then at some point we’d look up and she’d be gone.

Though I never saw it myself, I was told Mrs. Kessler lost her head so completely that at night she would walk down to the lake just an hour or two after dusk and get into the rowboat and row across to the other man’s cabin while Mr. Kessler sat reading by the green lamp in their cabin. (I wonder what Kessler’s reading, I heard Mr. Cerný say. Must be good.) That she would sometimes stay for hours and hours, not caring what anyone thought, and that Mrs. Eugenia Bartlett had sworn she’d heard the creak of her oarlocks as she rowed back through the mist early one morning just before dawn.

My mother, I remember, seemed almost lighthearted that second week in June, waking early, surprising me with special meals like apricot dumplings and kašička with drops of jam, asking my father about things in the newspaper. She threw out the stacks of magazines and junk that had collected under the sink and swept out the cobwebs and the bottle caps and the mouse droppings that looked like fat caraway seeds and the bits of mattress stuffing and lint from the previous winter’s nests. One fresh morning after a night of rain she came home with the trunk of the DeSoto crammed with planting trays and seeds and bags of soil and fertilizer and sixteen hanging flowerpots and a paper bag with sixteen hooks to hang them on. In the back seat of the car were four carton bottoms filled with flowers. Except for the marigolds, I didn’t know their names. Some were purple and white, like pinwheels, others a dark velvety red, still others the color of the sky just before it gets dark. They seemed to soak in the spotted light that came through the windows, trembling with life. She was going to garden, my mother said.

I saw my father looking at my mother as she first pointed out to us all the things she had bought, then started to drag one of the cartons out of the car. Here, let me get that, he said.

We carried the cartons down to the bit of shady, tangled grass by the water that served as our yard, placing them side by side so they made a long, lovely rectangle, then returned for the bags of soil and the tools. It was mid-morning. The air was warming quickly. A number of people had gathered out on the float in the middle of the lake, and we could hear them laughing. My father carried out the card table my mother said she wanted to work on, and for the next few hours, while my father drilled holes into the south wall of the cabin and screwed the hooks into them, my mother and I transplanted the flowers into the hanging pots, filled the seed flats with soil, and sprinkled the tiny seeds from the packets into furrows we made in the dirt with the eraser end of a pencil. When my father was finished he asked if there was anything else my mother wanted him to do, but she said no, that he had done a wonderful job with the hooks and that we could do the rest on our own, couldn’t we, and I agreed.

My mother talked more that morning than I could remember her talking in a long time. She asked me about school and told me how happy she was that we had a cabin on a lake and how she hadn’t liked it at first because it reminded her too much of home but that she had come to see things differently and now loved it as much, no, in some ways even more than the countryside she had known as a little girl. And she told me a little bit about the war and what that had been like, and about a certain square in Prague with benches and flower beds and giant twisted oaks and how she still remembered that square as well as a certain churchyard a few minutes away, and when a particular burst of laughter carried over the water she looked at me and said, “People can be silly, can’t they, complicating their lives for no reason, don’t ever complicate your life, promise me that,” and though I didn’t know exactly what she meant, I said I wouldn’t. Later, as we were planting the pinwheel flowers in the new pots, pressing down the soil with our fingers so the roots would take, she told me she had made some mistakes in her life but that it was never too late to understand things and that she understood things now and that she had never been happier than she was at that moment. She suggested we take a break for lunch, but later, when I found her in the hammock, smoking, she said she was a little tired, and it wasn’t until the next day that we finished and by that time some of the flowers in the cartons, which we had forgotten to water, had wilted badly.

I was reading in my room that evening after dinner when I heard my mother get up from the wicker chair and go into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and close, then the quick clink of glass against glass. I heard the water in the sink, then the creak of the wicker again. “What time is it?” she asked my father.

It took a second for my father to move his book to his left hand and, holding his place with a finger, push up the sleeve of his sweater. “Half past nine,” he said.

“Almost time for him to go to bed,” my mother said. There was no answer. A few minutes later she was up once more.

“You think she’ll do it again?” she said from somewhere by the window.

“I think she might,” my father said in his I’m reading voice.

“What could she be thinking?” said my mother.

“Pretty much what you’d expect, I imagine.”

“I don’t think it’s just that.”

“I never said it was,”

“Time for bed,” my mother called. I pretended I couldn’t hear. “What’s he doing in there?” said my mother, and walking over, she knocked on the wood plank door to my room. “Bedtime,” she said. They were quiet for a few moments.

“She’s a fool,” said my mother. “I thought she had more sense, throwing everything away like this.”

They were quiet for a long rime.

“I don’t know that you want to stand by the window like that,” my father said.

“I’m not the one who has to worry about being seen. And him,” she said, after a moment. “Him I can’t understand.”

“What would you have him do?”

“Something. Anything.” Again they were quiet. I heard a page turn.

“And for what?” she went on after a while. “Nothing.”

“I don’t imagine she sees it that way,” said my father.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“How does she see it then?”

“Differently.”

“So you’re saying there’s nothing wrong with him sitting there reading like an idiot while his wife …”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Christ, you’re understanding.”

“Am I?”

“You go to hell.”

I heard my father get out of the wicker chair, then whisper something I couldn’t make out: “I’ve never asked … little enough … to blame … fault.” And then I heard my mother crying and my father saying, “All right, there, come now, everything’s all right.”

The next morning my mother woke me while everything was still cool and fresh. She had made a big plate of palačinky so light and thin you could see the bruise of the jam through the sides of the crepes. She’d set our two deck chairs in the middle of the old garden plot, she said. We would eat breakfast outside–a special treat. She put the palačinky on a tray with two cups of sweetened tea and together we walked up the steps away from the lake to the garden, where we sat under light blankets with the weeds and the thistles growing up all around us and ate with our fingers, draping the floppy crepes between our thumbs and pinkies so the preserves wouldn’t come out and feeding them into our mouths. We laughed about stupid things and pretended to signal to a waiter who stood in the old strawberry patch and to be frustrated when we couldn’t catch his eye.

“What do you think he’s doing?” my mother said.

“He’s not paying attention to us,” I said. I waved my arms wildly, as if signaling a boat far offshore.

“Careful,” my mother said.

I put my cup of tea on its saucer down on the ground, making a space between the long grasses. I waved my arms again. “Can I get some more jam,” I called out. “And some hot chocolate, please.”

My mother was looking at the overgrown strawberry patch as though a man actually stood there in the weeds. “What do you suppose he’s thinking about?” she said, as if to herself.

I didn’t know what to say.

“I think he’s thinking about a girl,” my mother said. She was looking at the strawberry patch. A small breeze moved the patches of shade and sun on the ground, then returned them to where they had been. She laughed strangely. “I don’t think we can get his attention.”

“Why don’t I throw something at him,” I said, and leaning over, I picked up a short, thick piece of branch and sent it flying through the air above the strawberry patch, It fell in the weeds at the far end of the garden. “Missed,” I said. I reached over for another stick. “This time I’ll …”

“He’s smoking,” said my mother. “Look at the way he brings it to his mouth. The way he stands with his elbows back on the bar.”

I looked at her, wanting w follow her, to play on this new field she was making.

“I bet he gets in trouble,” I said. She nodded slowly, agreeing with something I hadn’t said. “I don’t think he’s the kind of man who would care very much. I don’t think he’ll care at all.” She looked around the dead garden, then shook her head and smiled, as if remembering an old joke. “So here we are. Nothing to do but call for the check.” My mother worked on her flowers all that afternoon, sitting at the wooden table in the shade, a cup of coffee and a cigarette on the table next to her, cupping big handfuls of black soil with her hands from the small mountain she’d spilled on the table next to her, packing the pots, then making a space for the root ball by pushing the dirt to the side with her fingers the way a potter shapes the sides of a vase. I went off to play for a while, then returned to find her sitting with her elbows on the table. She was holding the cigarette and the cup of coffee in her right hand as though just about to pick them up, and her head was tilted slightly to the side. She was looking at a spot on the grass a short distance away.

I didn’t want to disturb her so I sat down quietly on the wooden steps to wait until she started working again. Everything was still. Far across the water a group of kids I didn’t know were jumping from the children’s dock into the water. Their little screams sounded strangely distant, as though I were hearing them from inside a closed room.

My father spoke from the open bedroom window. “Can I get you something?” His voice was very close, but though I knew he was right there, I couldn’t see him: the angle made the screen opaque as a wall.

“No,” my mother said. She didn’t look up.

“Something to eat? A cup of tea?” In the other room, the children screamed happily. I could see them run down the hill and onto the slightly lopsided dock, then spear into the water. They looked like little white sticks.

“No,” my mother said again. And then, after a long while: “Thank you.”

It was not long afterward–three days, perhaps a week–that my father shot the dog. Harold Mostovsky and I heard it first while we were exploring along the brook one quiet, cloudy morning–a furious, concentrated thrashing in the underbrush. There was no other sound, I remember–no growling or snarling. When we came closer we thought at first that what we were seeing was two dogs, then a shepherd with something around its neck. Only when it sank its teeth in its own tail and bayed in pain, then bit its own hind leg did we realize something was wrong, and terrified of this thing trying to kill itself, we began to run.

I never thought to ask him how he knew. Whether someone had called him, or whether he’d been walking in the area, or whether he’d somehow simply sensed it, the way parents sometimes will. All I know for certain is that he and old Ashby, who lived in a shack a mile away and who always wore overalls and a sleeveless T-shirt, were suddenly there and my father was yelling “Whose? Where?” then running for the old white Colby house, which stood on a little rise a hundred yards away. As Harold and I ran up behind them I heard my father ask do you know where he keeps the shells? then saw him tap the bottom right pane with his elbow and reach in and open the door. A moment later he was walking out with the shotgun. He brought it up to his face, studying it quickly, then broke it and chambered a red shell he took from his pocket. “Stay here,” he told us.

The shepherd was still there. It was trying to get at its stomach. It had bitten off its own tail; the stub ended in a small, pink circle. It seemed to be trying to stand on its right shoulder. It had shit all over itself and the smell was terrible. My father walked right over to it, extended the gun and shot it in the head. At the sound of the two-part crash of the gun the dog flopped to the ground like a dropped rubber toy; I caught a glimpse of what had been its head–a grinning jaw of teeth, a mat of fur, something pink like a thumb–and then my father’s body blocked the view and he was turning us gently around. “Go home,” he said. “This is not for you. Go on.” And then to Ashby: “Get the shovel. I would like to take care of this quickly.”

And that was all, really. My father didn’t talk about it much, except to ask if I was all right and to explain that the dog had gotten into some poison some idiot had Left out and that the thing had had to be done. He seemed strangely happy that week, unburdened. It started to rain that same afternoon, and when the water began to spill over the sides of the leaf-clogged gutter in long wavering sheets that tore open to show the trees and the hill, then sewed themselves up again, he took off his shirt and shoes and walked hatless into the downpour and unclogged the pipe and dug at the mats of blackened leaves gathered against the back of the cabin with his hands and carried them against his soaking chest into the woods.

It rained for three days. Soon after it stopped, Mr. and Mrs. Kessler left the lake because Mrs. Kessler was in love with the man who lived in the cove and wouldn’t Listen to reason. I never saw them again. The man stayed on for a while–we could see him row out to the dock and swim by himself in the evenings just before dark–as though he didn’t want to go or thought she might come back, but then he left too. My mother kept gardening, and for a time the south side of the cabin burst into color: waterfalls of blossoms cascaded against the wood and bouquets filled with air moved sluggishly in the afternoon heat, but by late August something had gone wrong and they began to die and my mother lost interest. My father made a half-hearted effort to keep them up but they died anyway, and one day he took the pots off the wall and dumped the soil out of them in a corner of the old garden, then came back down and unscrewed the hooks out of the cabin wall and got a small brush and painted the white insides of the holes with dark stain so they couldn’t be seen. The sixteen pots of soil looked like cake molds, white with roots, and they lay there until my father broke them up with a spade and spread them out into the weeds.

By: Slouka, Mark, Harper’s Magazine, Aug2006