That night on the road, I didn’t answer Mrs. Abel. I didn’t follow her. I watched her walk away, disappear into the shadows.
I stepped off the road, into the woods, the trees, turning back the way I’d come. I started along paths I’ve known my whole life, and even in that darkness I knew the ground underfoot was the dark brown of dried cedar and around me the velvety leaves of sumac’s new branches, the darkness of their red cones and the prickly bushes crowding the path, bright green in daylight, bright orange when the branches were dead. Here in the darkness I followed the paths of Horse Hideout—the white rocks, speckled with black, glowing against the night, those stones carefully stacked by my mother and her sisters, in their childhood, almost fifty years before.
I didn’t return to the Red Cabin that night. Instead, I crossed the road and started along beneath the bluff, limestone cliffs that stretched over a mile, parallel to the shore—at one time they had been the shore, the lake stretching hundreds of feet higher. All these trees, the cliffs and the caves, all of this was underwater; I pretended I was able to breathe that dark water as I walked along the lake bed, looking for the path that slanted up the cliff so I could eventually surface.
The wide path was not easy to find; finally, I found the opening in the underbrush and headed upward. My mother wrote a poem about this path, about the past, and it hangs in the kitchen of our cabin (never happy with it, she’s always asking me to critique it, then taking the frame apart and inserting new versions, new words):
One hundred years ago Anton Amundsen’s
Cows ambled down the stony path above our road.
Shadowing the side of the cliff,
Tails flyflicking, udders swaying,
They quickened their pace and headed toward the Bay
Stone stepping the beach,
They lowered their heads and drank.
That night I swam up the path through those ghost cows, and near the top saw the yellow light, cast from the screen porch of the Zahn house, right at the edge of the cliff. Old Mr. Zahn was a widower and lived there alone, keeping to himself. He was sitting on his screen porch, twenty feet away as I passed. I knew he must see me; I waved and said hello, so he would know who it was.
He didn’t wave back. His hands were in his lap—one held a knife, the other a piece of wood. His beard was white and suspenders red, his face so wrinkled I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. He had fallen asleep.
I kept on, into an open field. Mr. Zahn had cut back the trees below (not appreciated by the neighbors who owned them) so he’d have a view of the lake, which was calm now, flat and dull in the moonlight. I could also see the tops of the houses below. The closest was Mrs. Abel’s, empty now; she was somewhere else, walking by herself, further and further away from me.
Out in the woods I’d find skeletons of bleached bones. All the bones of an animal—if the deer or raccoon had collapsed, there—all its muscles and sinews gone loose and rotted, eaten away, fur gathered by birds and mice for nests, rolled across the forest floor. More often the bones were spread out (a skull there, a shard of rib, a cracked piece of pelvis) over a wide area, pieces always missing when I tried to reassemble them.
Another kind of skeleton I found beneath the trees were long, curved boards, bleached gray, that were the remains of old boats. People dragged them out into the woods to collapse in on themselves, to be dispersed like the bones of any other animal. And yet some were still boats, in front yards, listing to starboard in the tall golden grass along Town Line Road. The one I knew best, Anne Maria, sat adrift in the trees on Mr. Zahn’s land, its bow just peeking out into the moonlight.
A fishing boat, its blue-and-red paint chipped and faded. Twenty feet long, with its keel stuck in the earth, so heavy that it didn’t shift at all as I pulled myself up, swung a leg over onto the deck. It still smelled faintly of fish, and of diesel, though the engine was gone and so was the steering wheel in the tiny, square pilot house, behind the scratched cloudy windows all covered with registration stickers from the sixties and seventies. Most of that boat was belowdecks—a huge compartment to hold the fish, another for the nets. I lifted the cover of the latter, eased myself down, inside, and pulled the lid over the top of me.
The only sounds in that darkness were the wind in the trees and my own breathing, which helped me imagine that the boat was afloat, cruising through the trees, rising and falling along the backs of great gray swells. My arms wrapped around my knees, sitting there, I felt more than I thought, imagining the fish, still alive and drowning in the air, piled high atop each other just through the wooden partition, gasping, sliding across each other. I sailed in this landlocked boat and imagined Mr. Zahn in it, not long before, perhaps singing a song as he pulled in a net full of fish and the wind buffeted the seagulls overhead, the birds trailing the boat like a broken cloud.
The bushes outside, brushing the boat’s sides, were waves, water. The slap of a leaf was the slap of a hand, just as, later that summer—as we swam among the moored boats off Ephraim, or in Nicolet Bay, or especially in the U-shaped harbor of Horseshoe Island—Mrs. Abel would slap a boat’s hull and a half-asleep owner would emerge, shouting from the deck, trying to shine lights out across the water, shouting Who’s there? as we swam away, into the darkness.