by Ilie Ruby
This morning, Grant’s statues stand on the keys of the antique organ, on the mantel of the old cobblestone fireplace, and under the railing of the side porch that slants at almost 40 degrees. A few balance precariously on the arms of the rattan furniture, and on the fence posts of the abandoned garden that will soon be filled with his late mother’s wild orange tiger lilies.
He knows that fighting emotion only creates dangerous pockets in the mind. Things can be brewing deep inside, unknown, until one day, the body is filled with wrenching uncontrollable sobs. Or a person can find himself racing along the highway at midnight in his sky blue Fleetwood for no apparent reason, the gas pedal pressed to the ground, hitting a patch of black ice and flipping the car before it explodes into fire, just as he had done one night when he told Susanna he was going out for a newspaper and instead totaled the car. And yet, he had escaped with only a few scratches. But the sight of the burning car left him with the distinct impression that it was better to sit in one place until he had a better handle on himself. The three children were losses for him, too.
There is nowhere else he could have gone but to the lake. Canandaigua is the place where he feels God in the trees, a place the Seneca call the Chosen Spot, where the Seneca say the earth split its seams and the ancestors emerged, a people for whom nature dwarfed all else. The willows here grow to enduring heights of one hundred feet, their narrow leaves and long branches bent toward the ground, never forgetting their home. During his boyhood summers, Grant would press his cheek against the thick, fissured bark and listen to the life rattling inside, just as it had in the years since the seedlings first tumbled down Bare Hill to settle at the shore, where their roots would one day climb over the stones to hold the shoreline in place. For years, folks in Canandaigua have called the oldest and biggest willows the Diamond Trees. They have been growing on the Shongos’ property near the foot of Bare Hill for more than a century, their girth wide, the bark thick and craggy to protect from water and ice. At night the wind spun their flickering leaves, making it look like diamonds shimmering over the water. All lit up in the moonlight, folks said you could see them from every part of the lake, that they were a beacon for nighttime swimmers, sailors, and lost spirits.
It was here that Grant first tasted the thrill of diving into the cold water and discovering the large white stones, and the small spherical rocks, which contained crystals that tossed strange shapes of light after he’d break them open. He liked to pretend they had come from another world, that his Seneca ancestors had scattered the treasures of their loved ones across the water, hoping one day, they’d be found by a boy just like him.
Grant knew about the white stones, the ones geologists called septaria. Folks said these smooth white stones were the skulls of the Seneca people, expelled from the mouth of a snake monster that had devoured a Seneca village at the top of Bare Hill before being shot by the arrow of a little boy, and then rolling down the hill in a death struggle.
The monster is still out there, some people say, dwelling in the depths of the lake, the pet of a lonely giant that lives on Squaw Island, where no one is allowed to go.
As a child, Grant would climb one of the trails marking the snake’s path to the top of Bare Hill just to feel the rough wind rushing past his face. Looking out over the gold-gray water returned him to himself, time and time again. When trying to will away the resentment over his mother’s death or his confusion over his father’s distance, he’d squeeze his eyes shut, trying to invoke the legendary Peace Maker, a Huron prophet who taught negotiation instead of violence to five warring tribes and united them as the Iroquois Confederacy. Still, the area continued to be filled with bloodshed. In 1687, in a battle over fur trade, French soldiers decimated the Seneca village of 4,500 people, at a place now called Ganondagan, at the north end of the lake. A period of darkness crossed the land after that. The earth there was once swollen with artifacts, but many had since been stolen from the site, including a rare silver tomahawk from the 1600s. Grant knows the spirits here don’t like it. And that they still won’t let go of this place.
ACROSS THE LAKE, WHAT’S left of the moonlight is turning the water a smoky lavender. Grant gets up from the porch and wipes the sweat from his forehead. Tying his long braid back with a piece of twine, he walks into the living room to check out the damage to the window.
He rubs his eyes in case he’s imagining things.
Pieces of broken window glass form a perfect circle on the carpet. He’s not easily shaken, not by the pull of lost spirits. But the circle of glass in the middle of his living room has him a little worried. Then, something catches his eye—one small soot print, then another, then a whole trail of tiny prints leading from the broken window to the basement door. If he were crazy he’d say these were footsteps.
Grant has tried not to think too much about the blithe spirit that has moved into his dreams each night since his arrival three weeks ago, rousting him out of bed to float over the brambles lining the lake. Grant knows who the boy is even if he won’t tell anyone about it. He remembers the midnight house calls his father made to the home of a sick child named Luke Ellis. And the old dugout canoe and paddle his father had made from a birch tree, and had carelessly left out under the Diamond Trees one winter, the one the Ellis children found that rainy spring night twelve years ago, when they managed to paddle out to Squaw Island. No one will ever forget the accident, the tragic loss of the boy, and the subsequent rumors of a terrible giant that loomed from Squaw Island, hacking the moon apart with an axe.
The men dragged the lake for a month, all 15.5 miles of it, down to its 276-foot depth. The water was so cold Luke’s small body didn’t rise to the surface for almost a year. Then, on a particularly warm May morning, it floated right up to the shore of Squaw Island almost exactly where Luke had disappeared. The eyes a shocking moonstone blue. The golden curls uncommonly smooth, as though they had been freshly washed and combed.
Grant doesn’t know why Luke Ellis has moved into his dreams. But he doesn’t mind being taken up by the little boy. He doesn’t mind the company.
Night after night, the boy tugs him out the door, barely leaving him enough time to pull on a shirt. When Grant is with the boy, he can fly. Luke is weightless, floating effortlessly through the air. Together, they travel the entire lake from south to north, skipping over the creek bed that runs through the gorge of Clark’s Gully, then darting in and out of two cascading waterfalls dropping over sixty feet, and down through Vine Valley. Then to the top of Bare Hill where they can see the whole lake for miles. Afterward they climb among the forgotten vineyards, where Luke likes to blow the dew off the clusters of grapes peeking out from the broken wire trellises. Sometimes they hover over the dusky blue road that leads north to town, floating in and out of old barns, half-charred from a fire that seared the woods one summer, leaving everything thirsty. Luke likes mischief, likes to race to the northern end of the lake to pull hay from stacks that dot the farmlands, to tickle the udders of cows, his blue eyes dancing as they rise above Ganondagan State Historic Site, 10 miles north of the city of Canandaigua, where a replica longhouse now stands.
With Luke leading the way, they zigzag through the city of Canandaigua, stopping at Scoops Ice Cream Stand near the marina, and then to a place on the shore, where they can see Squaw Island.
From there, they drift near the people who still long for Luke. It is because their thoughts call to him; they are sweet, like the sugar “rock” candy he used to get from the Feed & Grain. They go into the backyard of Luke’s mother, Leila, where Luke likes to rest in the branches of her overgrown lilac bush, so full with blossoms in May that it dwarfs the headstone that bears his name; then across the rooftop and along the leaf-swollen gutters of her next-door neighbor, Clarisse Mellon; and finally to his sister Melanie’s new apartment in town on Highland Avenue, with its fire red door and purple trim, before careening back to the place where the deep pink bloom of wild peas meets the highway. On their way back to the c
abin, Luke is trying to lead Grant to O’Connell’s Feed & Grain, but Grant is not ready yet. He isn’t ready.
GRANT CAN STILL REMEMBER the months in Rochester after Susanna left. The weeks of bad winter storms. The darkness of dense, ceaseless snow. The three errant blackbirds, wings coated in ice, that circled above the house, landing each night on the telephone wires like glistening upside-down icicles. The wet spot on the doormat where he left his boots that never seemed to dry. He vaguely recalls digging a neighbor’s car out of the driveway. Other than that, nothing. He’s sure he taught his English classes at Hallandale Arts Academy, an alternative school for underachieving boys. Positive his students thought he was losing it, coming in day after day with bruisy eyes and an absentmindedness they’d whisper to be the effects of alcohol, or pot. He was a favorite teacher, but even a wry sense of humor couldn’t hide his ineptitude after a while. These boys weren’t the types to suffer with a teacher that just showed up to hand out, God forbid, worksheets.
Still, that’s exactly what Grant had done for months, until Dean Stiles called him into his office to say he was letting him go a few months early to “get himself together.” Arrangements had already been made for someone else to handle final exams even though Grant’s contract was being renewed for another year.
“I deserve a lot less,” Grant said, as sunlight bleared in through the shades. His fingers traced cracks in the leather arms of a chair that had supported hundreds of young boys with dignity, whether they knew it or not.
“It’s time to deal with it. You’ve got to address this thing.”
The dean removed his glasses and pointed to a paperweight in the corner of his desk. The egg-shaped crystal was a gift from the parents of a failing student named Alden James whom Grant had turned around.
“You did this,” the dean said, holding the crystal in both hands. At the start of his popular ninth-grade “Not Nice Novels” class, Grant had created an entirely new curriculum for Alden, tailored to his only interest—horror. All the after-school hours of tutoring paid off. No one could believe that the gaunt-faced delinquent had scored 750 on his SATs. Grant had become a school hero, and Alden, Hallandale’s greatest success story.
“You saved that kid. And others. Good teachers are worth fighting for, just like good kids,” the dean said.
Sunlight rushed through the crystal and into Grant’s eyes, causing them to water. He felt unable to locate an ounce of faith in his body. Grant had argued, the words shooting out with force. He felt unable to tolerate positive feedback for fear it would rip into his delicate armor. He had become more like his students than he realized.
“Look,” said the dean. “You need to figure out how much of the stuff you have going on is out there, and how much is in here.” The dean held his hand over his own shirt pocket. “Come August, I’ll fire you if that’s what you want, all right? But a few months of introspection won’t kill you.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Grant told him as the dean walked out, leaving him alone in the leather chair.
That night Grant packed a bag and drove 35 miles down the New York State Thruway to exit 44, for the first time in five years.
IN THE LIVING ROOM, Grant eyes a patch of sunlight that has spilled all around the broken glass. He kicks apart the circle, displacing the pieces of glass. Grant grabs his mother’s old gardening gloves and a plastic garbage bag. He could take off the gloves. He could clear the rough edges of the window frame with his bare hands until they are cut up and bloody. But he opens the screen door to let the air wash his face clean of these thoughts. At once, he’s caught by the hiss of wind sweeping over leaves as it rushes in from the head of Canandaigua Lake.
OUTSIDE, THE EARTH IS cold and wet under his bare feet. The sun is beginning to spray hints of lacquer across the lake. Ahead, an old birch has fallen into the water. Grant steps carefully onto the smooth trunk, pacing farther and farther as though the lake were pulling him toward its center. He has always felt things in his body first, his mind taking longer to catch up. Sometimes the intensity of the feeling has propelled him into action. Other times, it has paralyzed him.
Grant can feel the soul of the old tree beneath his feet, ceaseless and forgiving, knowing it has only itself to blame, never having settled its roots deep enough into the rocky ground. He moves forward as waves crash against the breakwall, their frothing crest swelling back as the water underneath rushes forward. Does he have a right to anything more than a few moments of clarity?
If he can just get out there near the fallen tree. There, a bit farther, where the trout are dancing.
Grant is suddenly aware of the scent of a dying bonfire trickling in from up shore. He looks up. A heron is standing on the dock a few feet away, its narrow head tucked between its shoulders. Its ember eyes are motionless. This bird’s meditative quiet reminds him of something he has lost. Every morning after carving, Grant walks out to the dock to join the herons in their perfect stillness. Years ago, the heron’s lightning speed awed him as it speared its prey. Now it’s the bird’s patience that impresses him.
He glances back at the screened-in porch in the front of the cabin, which looks small and dark, with its rough graying wood, wide broken window, and slatted sunken roof that may not withstand another winter. It looks safe somehow, huddled under the trees.
He’ll throw himself into fixing up the cabin. Hadn’t his father rebuilt his mother’s kitchen four times in the years after she died? That was the way his father dealt with loss. It was then that Grant saw how human beings needed a way to put their hands on grief, to hold it as though it were the lost loved one. Grant was twenty-three when his mother passed, and after years, he still hadn’t gotten over his breakup with Echo O’Connell.
He had listened outside his parents’ bedroom door to his father’s muffled sobs over the loss of his mother, to the footsteps pacing back and forth, sometimes until dawn.
Each day Grant stood motionless as his father wore his grief deep into the wooden floorboards. As Grant placed his hands on the door, he could actually feel them going numb. Later, Grant would creep downstairs into his father’s dark study, where light slithered through the blinds and across the shelves lined with animal carvings, and across the dust-heavy desk, circling the stethoscope, and the pencil case, which always held freshly sharpened pencils, tips up, along with one tall feather, and then around the mahogany-framed photograph of his mother smiling sideways at someone Grant had always imagined was himself, though he did not remember it. Grant sat in his father’s high-backed chair, just as he had done as a child, trying to position his head so that it fit into the impression of his father’s head. He would stare at his father’s black doctor’s bag on the floor in the corner. Then, he’d close his eyes and wait for the scene to become clearer, that of his mother waving from way out in the water, and his father’s six-foot, six-inch giant frame walking toward her right into the lake until only the back of his head could be seen. Panicked, Grant had rubbed the worn velvet over the arms just as he had seen his father do after his mother became ill, to hold on to every piece of her, even the skin and the prints.
His father strongly believed the words of his Seneca ancestors. That when a man left this lifetime without repenting for his sins, the Punisher would take him in his hands and turn him into ash. Then he’d spread him into earth to do everything all over again.
Two years later, when Dr. Ben Shongo died in his sleep, they couldn’t find a thing wrong with him. Even though a man of his height was prone to heart trouble, they hadn’t found one medical irregularity. But even Grant knew about his father’s broken heart. And he still hasn’t forgiven himself for his cowardice, for not going into his father’s bedroom and trying to help way back then. Too afraid of what he might have seen.
Coming back to Canandaigua is about making something new.
When he actually thinks about it, the list is manageable. Repairing the phone can wait. There’s no one he wishes to talk to. But both the window and th
e linoleum that’s peeling up from the kitchen floor are another story.
The wooden entryway is scuffed from hiking boots and could use a good sanding. Scattered embers from the fireplace have singed the yellow shag carpeting. It’s not all a throwaway, though. The canary yellow walls are actually not as dismal as he’d remembered. Perhaps he’ll buy a watercolor from one of those galleries in town. Maybe one with autumn trees. He could even plant tomatoes if he wanted, the kind that grow so furiously and impatiently, they’ll split themselves open right on the vine.
Thankfully, there’s work to be done. This is why he is about to walk to O’Connell’s Feed & Grain. It’s eight miles down the road but it’s the best place he knows for supplies. He has to get his mind off the tracks of coal footprints now zigzagging all across the room, leading right to the basement door that has suddenly been thrown open. The spirit of Luke Ellis will get what he wanted after all.
2
ONE DAY OUT OF the year, the mayflies swarm Canandaigua Lake. Their lifespan of twenty-four hours is entirely consumed by the search for a mate. In that time, they are so frenzied, so drunk with love, that the faintest wind blows them into cobwebs and porch screens. Their sail-like wings stand perpendicular from their thin bodies as they tumble and collide, mating in the air. There are so many of them that they coat the docks, landing on everything in sight. After mating and just before dying, the females fly over the water, dropping thousands of eggs back into the lake, their children sinking to the muddy bottom.