Eleanor’s Lake

It’s wrong to call it a lake, but my father did anyway. It’s more of a pond, nestled between the wooded greenbelt surrounding the Cedar River and corn fields, when they aren’t flooded. My father took me fishing there when I was a girl. It wasn’t far from our house; the walk felt like forever the first time we went. We walked down the hill, across Sargent Road, a dangerous road my brother and I were never allowed to cross on our own. The cicadas and frogs orchestrated the summer afternoon as we followed a dusty gravel road then slipped through the woods.

The lake was a mirror, still and round. It reflected the afternoon sky, not quite turning to indigo, but threatening too. The north half is wooded, tall walnut trees and cottonwoods, with a squat, plump willow drooping branches over the water. The south is fringed with tall prairie grass. Swifts flitted in and out of it, chasing each other through their miniature forest.

I was too young to appreciate it that first time. I wasn’t antsy like my brother Floyd, but I was still a child prone to boredom. Luckily for my father I’d learned to read that year. Nothing could keep me from books. We brought books with us, an odd sort of fishing tackle. My father baited hooks, set sinkers and bobbers, cast my line into the water. I wasn’t frightened of the worms he carried in a little white take-out container, but the hooks were sharp.

“Feel the line, with your finger,” he demonstrated, holding it lightly. “If it twitches there’s a fish.”

He sprayed me with mosquito repellent as we settled in. I pulled out my book. It was about Bert and Ernie, and Super Grover, my favorite. Dad cast his line and turned out a dogeared paperback. A frog plopped in the water across the pond, sending ripples along its surface. The reflected sky bumped up and down lazily in the mid-afternoon.

“Where did the lake come from?” I asked.

“Well.” He switched to full Dad mode. His voice changed, growing distant and heightened; my father the scholar. “A long time ago, great big sheets of ice, hundreds of meters tall, covered all of Iowa. They dug divots in the land. When the ice melted, the divots remained and filled up with the water. When this divot filled in it made your lake, Eleanor’s Lake.”

As I grew older, my father’s predilection for describing measures as ‘meters’ and ‘kilos’ grew more unusual to my Iowa-raised ears. Dad grew up in Brighton, all the way across the ocean, in England. He met my mother in college; university, he’d say. When she came back to Iowa, he came with her.

“Ice sheets? Like blankets?” I asked.

“Kind of,” he said. “What are you reading?”

“Bert and Ernie.”

“Read it to me.” He put his own book away. I regaled him with stories of Ernie’s bathroom music concert, held as Bert took a bath. All sorts of people came and sang as Bert bathed. They sang songs about mountains of spaghetti, all covered with cheese.

Dad and I fished a lot when I was young. Well, we kept the pretense of fishing. We caught a few perch and sunfish, but mostly we read. Looking back I see it was a way to make space for our family, packed into our tiny house in sticky summers not blessed with the convenience of air conditioning.

When I was thirteen, I fell into the world of To Kill A Mockingbird. Mom thought I was too young to read it. I had no business reading ‘that court book,’ as she called it. Dad knew me better, realized that I didn’t read it for the court or what happened to Mayella Ewell. I read it for Scout and Jem and Miss Maudie, but mostly for Atticus. I read it cover to cover, and cover to cover again, and cover to cover again. I wanted to live in Macomb, wanted to run off on adventures with Dill.

“Read it to me,” Dad said on a warm August evening, after the hooks had been baited and bobbers bobbed.

I recounted the tale of Atticus and the rabid dog, when he had to shoot the dog in the street.

“Did you ever have to shoot something like that?” I asked.

“I have not. And I bless my fortune.” He said.

“Would you?”

“You mean, if I put on Atticus’s shoes and walked around in them a bit?” His voice twinkled. “I suppose I would, if there were something that was threatening you or Floyd, even a quiet, rabid dog.”

“Did Uncle Jason do that?” I asked. My mother’s brother only bounced through our life, between adventures in Colorado and Arkansas and Montana. Uncle Jason was a hunter. He told Floyd stories of elk and antelope and one time — in Canada — a moose hunt. Floyd loved Uncle Jason’s stories. He gobbled them up, over and over, much like my own escapes to Monroe county in Harper Lee’s book.

“Yes,” my father said after a long pause. “His hunting stories are exaggerated by half, and hunting isn’t at all like what Atticus did.” A whippoorwill cooed in the distance, adding its voice to the frogs and cicadas.

“But,” he said with another pause, “He’s walked in those shoes; before you were born.” Uncle Jason had been in Vietnam. It wasn’t something we talked about, not when I was young. Dad didn’t like Jason’s stories, or how hungry Floyd was for them. Dad wasn’t a confrontational man. Jason only visited every few years. Words that could have been ugly went unsaid.

Dad died in the spring when I was fifteen. It was sudden, a blood vessel in his brain while he was teaching. I still went to Eleanor’s Lake, usually after arguments with Mom. Doors slammed, feet stomped, screams of not understanding echoed in our tiny house. She understood. She never stopped me from running off to the lake. She knew that’s where I’d go. Sometimes I think she was glad to have me out of her hair for a few hours.

I fished; baited the hooks, set the bobbers, cast the line, but it was different. I took books, the most important tackle. I didn’t read them; not that summer.

When I was in high school, I took boys to the lake. It was a diabolical test. We’d walk down to the lake and cast lines into the water. When all was set I’d ask them to read to me. Most looked at me strange, nattered on about sports, or had to be brushed off. Not Steven. I met Steven in theater class. He brought his own book, carried it with him everywhere.

“Read it to me,” I asked under that great old lump of a willow tree, the summer chorus murmuring around us. He opened his book, recounted the story of the Heart of Gold, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Trillian. He performed the voices, each with there own timbre. And Marvin, oh how he exuded pathos when he read Marvin. He was the first boy I knew that loved books like I did. He was the first boy I loved, right there under that willow, stinking of sunscreen and mosquito repellent and worms.

The summer before college, after Steven had gone away to Wisconsin, I came to fish again. Somehow it felt more relaxed, quieter. Whoever conducted the chorus of cicadas and frogs directed them diminuendo. It seemed ridiculous to still use the little fishing pole my father had given me when I was seven, but I did anyway. The sky was clear, save for feathery wisps of high clouds, two contrails that disappeared into the west.

I pulled out a copy of Steinbeck I needed to read for class. I started to read aloud, but my heart wasn’t in it.

“I miss you Dad.”

I came back each summer, when I could. College was busy. I didn’t argue with mom anymore. Well, not as much. I still made time to go fishing.

“It’s not very ladylike,” my mother half-heartedly chided.

“Nope,” I responded and tromped off for Eleanor’s Lake. I still read. I tried to bring new things, things that excited me, things that moved me; things Dad hadn’t heard. Sophomore year, it was Neil Gaiman, a mythic story about Shadow and Mr. Wednesday. As a senior I brought Sherman Alexie to meet Dad. I told him stories of Victor and Thomas Builds-The-Fire. It felt right, reading about Spokane Indians there under the willow, under the sky, with Dad.

The summer I graduated, I returned to Eleanor’s Lake. I didn’t bring any poles or tackle. I didn’t even bring books.

“I’m going to school in England, Dad,” I told him. I imagined he’d be excited. Manchester wasn’t Brighton, but it was England. “I won’t get back as much.” It would be difficult to be away, so far away. I’d miss this lake, this fishing. It was exciting, but…

Nothing said it was okay. No shift of wind, no sudden whippoorwill cooing. But I knew. I knew Dad understood, even encouraged me. It’d been a decade since he left, since the closest I felt to him was this lake-that-wasn’t-a-lake and this silly ritual that gave my mother a break from the children. It was more than that now.