Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  Near the end of October, I got some very good news. My son, Adam, was returning from Peru for a brief trip to the United States I would have his company for a few days. He would visit me, his mother in New Hampshire, and several parishes and college campuses in New England as part of his work for the church. He had entered a Catholic religious order based in Peru soon after college and had been in continuous formation and training since then. I had not seen him since the previous year when I had traveled to Lima and together we’d prepared a Thanksgiving dinner for his community of brothers and aspirants. I had missed his companionship these last few years. His absence had knocked a big hole in my life.

  Adam had been my closest fishing partner when he was a boy, and since he had been away I had mostly lost the urge to take my fly rod down to the brooks. Fishing by myself held little interest for me. An awful lot of the enjoyment I had gotten from fishing during his boyhood, I had come to see, had derived from being able to introduce him to the wonders of the streams and woods as I knew them—how to read the water, how to identify insects and match them with our homemade trout flies, how to induce a fish to strike, how to release a fish so it survived. He had been a good student. Without him to take along, I didn’t feel the same excitement about getting out to the stream. Here’s another thing we learn as we get older: sharing a pleasure magnifies it.

  After he had gone to Peru, Adam would write to me from time to time of mission trips to the Sierra highlands, and he included details of the streams, insects and fish. I replied with regular updates on the cabin. It was a treat for me now to have him home, even if he could not stay long enough to be with us at Thanksgiving. At the cabin, we painted window trim together, ate a big dinner at Melby’s and spent the night at the inn before returning to Boston the next day, but not before I had taken a moment to show him Great Brook, which, I told him, held some nice-sized wild trout. We agreed that one day we would fish it together. I hoped that day would come.

  Paul and I gained ground, and Thanksgiving in the cabin seemed attainable. We built a platform for the generator, which Paul hauled up in his truck, and we slid it—all five or six hundred pounds of it—into place. Bam! On that day, in the second week of November, I saw the first skim of ice on the pond and ice crystals on the damp leaves. The maples were now bereft of all foliage. Responding to pressure from Paul, the electrician showed up the weekend before Thanksgiving, and so did Paul’s friend Steve, the plumber. There’s nothing like having a couple of competent men on the job who really know their trades. They worked along steadily, and soon we had both power and water. Russell came up another day with Paul, and the two of them put a shed around the generator to protect it from the weather and muffle the noise when it was turned on to power the well pump. I had forgotten to get a building permit for the shed. I bought the permit after it was up and paid the fine.

  Throughout the month, I had gone back to the online classifieds in search of a heavy-duty, airtight and inexpensive woodstove. Either they were cheap or they were well built but never both cheap and well built. I was hanging tough, though, and waiting for my Scandinavian cast-iron dream to show up for three hundred dollars or less. The heating season had already begun, and I was sure that the demand for secondhand stoves had slackened. Some seller would weaken and prices would drop if I could be patient. In the meantime, Russell produced a box stove from his barn that would get us through Thanksgiving. Of course, it required a stovepipe to vent the smoke out of the cabin.

  Paul and I wrestled with it for half a day trying to get it right. The challenge was to bring the pipe from the stove to the hole in the roof. It was not a straight shot. The pipe came in two-foot sections, and any turn required a prefabricated elbow with a limited range of flex. The pipe’s trip from the stove through the roof involved two elbows, neither of which had a simple ninety-degree angle, and a final piece of pipe that had to be trimmed short of its full two feet to make it fit the length. The entire span of pipe, from stove to roof, was about sixteen feet, which also meant that we would need to hang wires from the ceiling to support the pipe’s weight. We did all of this work, on ladders no less, but not without my resolving never to install another stovepipe ever again.

  At about this time, a most astonishing thing happened. Actually, it was two astonishing things, and they converged on the memory of John Kababick. One of his sisters, in her sixties—someone I had last seen about forty years earlier, when I was a teenager and she was in her twenties—had tracked me down and sent me a warm and thoughtful e-mail. I remembered her as a young woman in nursing school, the youngest of Johnny’s three sisters. Over a period of months we exchanged e-mails and we talked on the telephone, revisiting some memories, both good and painful. In one of our last conversations, she told me she had found a tackle box with a collection of Johnny’s fishing lures that he had used as a boy and young man. She asked if I would like to have them.

  They came as a gift in the mail, and they left me speechless. I opened the box and just sat with it for a while. I felt the loss of him all over again. Paul and I carried vivid and powerful memories of Johnny, but we rarely spoke of him. There seemed not much more for us to say, or to know. The verdict had been in for a long time. But the emergence of his sister and then of the fishing lures stirred the sediments of our past. There were six fishing lures that arrived, carefully wrapped in a box. With the lures was his seaman’s identification card:JOHN W. KABABICK

  DATE OF BIRTH: 3-1-30

  ABLE SEAMAN

  HEIGHT: 6-0

  WEIGHT: 220

  COMPLEXION: RUDDY

  EYES: BLUE

  There he was in the photo—much older than I had remembered him, but still with his open face and the slightly crooked nose that had been broken while he was the navy’s heavyweight boxing champion of the Pacific fleet. His mouth was drawn in as if he had lost his teeth, but there was the same handsome man, eyes turned slightly downward at their extremities, blond hair, strong jaw, an expression that said he was ready for an adventure or a laugh but always somehow ineffably sad. I stared at the lures and the photo for a long time. The lures were striper plugs with treble hooks and painted eyes of the sort that are used up and down the Jersey shore.

  I had learned to fish from Johnny. We had begun with hand lines, not fishing rods. We had wound and unwound our fishing lines around sticks and cast the lines by swinging them overhead and throwing them over the water. We fished with a hook and sinker and night crawlers, and our catch was typically catfish or perch. Fishing with Johnny was always wrapped in some adventure. First we would have to start whatever broken-down car he happened to be driving, and this might involve pushing it down the street and hopping in and popping the clutch. Then would come the search for some secret spot that might require traversing an active railroad trestle with the tides rushing below, or renting a wooden boat and rowing into the current and dropping a concrete-block anchor to hold us steady as industrial barges passed by. The lures not only brought John back to me in a way, but they had the added poignancy of bringing him back to me as a boy and a young man. He was not only younger than I when he had used these fishing lures; he was younger than my son. They were artifacts of his life before he had come into ours, my mother’s, Paul’s and mine. I was surprised to learn that the lures even existed. I had never known him to own very much—a secondhand car, a good seaman’s knife that he brought along on his merchant marine trips, a watch with a metal band, some changes of work clothes, and one good suit and a pair of polished black shoes. That was about it. It seemed that his entire life always had been able to fit in a seabag. The few things that he had given me—my first shotgun, a brass double-edge safety razor that operated by turning the handle to open the place where the blade was placed, those hand lines for fishing—had been lost through the years. Nothing more. So for me—who had brought no possessions from childhood into my adult life and had nothing to remember Johnny by except a few photographs—these lures instantly were prized possessions. I planned to
clean the rust from the hooks and hang them in the cabin.

  And then, almost at the same time, as if some sort of cosmic mechanism had been set in motion, I got a note from Johnny’s niece, who, as it happened, was living in Maine. Would Paul and I like to have lunch with her and her mother? She had been a child of maybe four or five at the time that I was growing up in Silverton and living my life as a fisherman and trapper. Her father had been John’s brother, and her family had lived not far from us. Her mother had been a close witness of my mother and John’s marriage, and she had continued to see John after he’d disappeared from our lives. Chapters that I thought had closed for good were opening.

  Over lunch, Paul and I asked a few questions and sat quietly and listened to the story of the final twenty years of John’s life—the years of his life after he had left us. He had lived at first with his brother Charles not far from where we were living—so while his whereabouts were a mystery to us then, he had been only about ten miles away. Then he began drifting—he went to Florida, worked construction off and on, got involved there with a woman, whom he eventually would bring back to New Jersey, and shipped out again as a merchant seaman. All the time, his drinking worsened. He eventually found his way to New Orleans, where he lived for a number of years—maybe because there was a merchant marine union hall there—but then he returned to New Jersey. He was always the same John, she said, except that each year of drinking took a deeper toll on his health and appearance.

  In the year before he died, she told us, he had been making a plan with his brother to visit my mother, Paul and me in Maine. It was going to be some sort of grand reunion. He was outfitting a van, she said, for the trip. (This had the ring of truth in it for me. He could not simply drive up; it was only an eight-hour trip with traffic, but he’d need to make it an adventure.)

  “He loved you boys,” she said.

  By then, his hair was long and his cheeks were sunken between his jaws. His teeth were gone. In the last year of his life, his health had seriously deteriorated, and he was living at his mother’s house in Spotswood and rarely came out of the bedroom where he slept. He was depressed and marking time until his death. It came as heart failure. His mother arranged for his burial at sea by the navy. There was no funeral.

  Paul and I left the lunch stunned, trying to absorb these details.

  Then, a few weeks later, came another bombshell. Paul told me that he and his wife had separated. The knot in the rope that I had sensed tightening inside of him through the previous year had suddenly come undone—and the rope went slack. He seemed relieved. I asked him if he needed to talk about it. “Not really,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.” He took a long ride on his bike, and I saw him again the week before the holiday. He seemed okay. I guessed that he had already worked through the worst of the pain and disappointment of the break. Maybe this was the change I had witnessed over the summer.

  Thanksgiving that year fell on November 26. By the weekend before that Thursday, it was clear that we would be close to completing the cabin but not fully done by the holiday. Paul’s children had their hopes set on dinner at the cabin, and really so did Paul and I. We decided it would be our new family tradition. The cabin had heat, from Russell’s woodstove, and water for the sink and toilet, and even gas for the lamps on the walls. The one missing item—so small yet so consequential—was a regulator, a fist-sized device necessary to connect the gas cooking stove to the pipe that brought the propane into the cabin from the storage tank outdoors. No regulator meant we had no stove, and no way to cook the turkey.

  Paul had a solution. He bought a big turkey and stuffed it at home. (His stuffing was a sumptuous mix of bread, celery, sweet and hot Italian sausage and chunks of apple.) I rented a room at the inn the night before the meal, and he cooked the turkey in the oven of the kitchenette. The bird barely fit inside it. He also made gravy, mashed potatoes, lasagna, French-style string beans (with bacon and vinaigrette dressing), sweet potato casserole and cranberry relish. I brought Italian pastries from a bakery in Boston’s North End and apple and pumpkin pies from Melby’s. The kids came up in the afternoon—there was Paulie and Kevin; Katherine, her boyfriend and their two children; and Jodie and her boyfriend. I brought a friend from the university, a visiting scholar from Greece. He came with two bottles of wine from Crete. “So this is an American Thanksgiving?” he said, surveying the table and the rough interior of the cabin. The kids made a punch of raspberry ginger ale and sherbet. Paul had also brought a folding table and chairs from the church. We used a paper tablecloth and set the table with paper plates and plastic forks and knives. We built a fire in the woodstove and lit the gas lamps for light and a little extra heat.

  “I’m hungry!” shouted Paulie.

  “Everybody sit down,” Paul hollered in a fake gruff voice.

  We gathered around the table, and I said grace. I offered thanks for the food, for the presence of all of us together. I acknowledged the absence of my mother as I did each Thanksgiving. I said thanks for the cabin in which we were sheltered and for the plants and animals in the forest and for the gift of a year with my brother.

  Paulie, squirming in his chair, spoke up. “Okay, okay. I’ll say Amen to all that. And now let’s eat!”

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  EPILOGUE

  DREAMING OF APPLES

  The winter following our first Thanksgiving in the cabin brought plenty of snow, but spring eventually made its welcome appearance, and I was there to greet it, pacing off an apple orchard. I liked the spot that I had been considering throughout the cabin’s construction. I asked a state orchardist to have a look, and she thought its position on the slope was good.

  Paul, Andrew and I cleared about half an acre for the orchard in March, about fifty yards above the cabin. We took down the oaks, maples and red pines that were there and bucked them into stove-sized sticks, which we heaped into four big piles of firewood. Then we laid out five lines for five rows of trees. I rented the auger machine that I had originally wanted to use for the foundation, and Paul and I dug fifty holes. If we hit a rock, we moved the machine a couple of inches to the right or left. Paul was less conscientious about the placement of the trees than he had been about the foundation piers. Maybe he was mellowing. The day was warm and the black flies made an early and fierce appearance, but we persisted and finished the job. We rewarded ourselves with a day 236 of fishing in Great Brook. We caught a half dozen small trout and released them back into the stream. We napped in the sun and fished upstream toward the mountains with dry flies and napped some more. We pronounced it a successful day.

  I ordered Macouns and McIntosh as my first apple varieties. They are good for eating, cooking and pressing for cider. The tiny trees, four-foot whips actually, came in early May from a nursery in Pennsylvania. They arrived in a cardboard box at the inn. Paul and I planted and watered them, and they have since thrived and put out new leaves and shoots. There was the one incident involving a hungry moose who took a liking to the green tips of the young trees on his way down to the pond, but he has since found his meals elsewhere and the trees have recovered. I’m pricing out a fence. I’m dreaming of that day when we put the ladders against the trees and fill baskets and barrels with apples. I will send them to friends, bake apple pies, sell them at the roadside and fill jugs of cider for distribution to my neighbors. Maybe I will learn to make applejack.

  A cabin is an unending source of pleasant labor. I put down a little grass around its perimeter, which needs to be mowed every couple of weeks. There’s painting indoors that remains undone, and I would like to build a bookcase in the bedroom. The barn is still a pile of beams stacked near the cabin’s porch. I think I will carry it around in my head for another season or two to extract all the pleasure of anticipation before I turn it into the reality of work. I’m also thinking I could use a small sauna, and I’m wondering what it takes to build a cider press. I also have in mind a set of raised beds for a vegetable garden, and
I would like to have a patch of raspberry vines. I’ve begun reading about the varieties. They bear fruit from summer to fall, and some, especially the yellow varieties, bear fruit continuously from June through September. I have a good sunny spot in mind for them. I have also been reading about honeybees. I like honey in my tea, and all those bees would help with pollination in the orchard and raspberry patch.

  Then there’s the cabin’s furniture. I’m adding to it slowly, from junk shops and the classifieds. I found a leather chair and ottoman for $150, which I dickered down to $125 and picked up at a swank condo on the Boston waterfront. It is a dark chocolate color and the ottoman is reddish brown. They make a handsome combination. My big find was a leather sofa. I had wanted a leather sofa for the cabin from the start—something comfortable and rugged and long enough to stretch out on for a night’s sleep. I found one at a good price ($400) but it was on the third floor of a row house in Boston’s North End, a famously dense neighborhood of narrow streets. It was too big to come down the stairs; it required a window exit from the third floor. I showed up with four long ropes and straps that tightened on ratchet wheels. The owner and I lashed two ropes around the sofa and took a turn around a beam inside the row house; then I lashed a third line to one end of the sofa and stationed a boy on the street to pull it away from the building as it came down to the sidewalk. A crowd gathered. The sofa descended slowly with all of us handling our ropes. There were no broken windows, rope burns or torn leather. I also found an inexpensive brass bed, and Paul donated a mattress and bedding.

  As for the boys, Kevin is back to work. It’s a job with a company that cleans and refurbishes boilers in generating plants. The work is hard but he makes good money. He’s often on the road. Paulie is helping Andrew in his thriving boat engine repair business as he looks for a job as a motorcycle mechanic. Paul is now divorced, and he’s still putting up commercial buildings in and around Portland. As I write this, he and I are planning a week at the cabin in November. We will have the boys and others who helped us along the way up for the opening of the deer season. Paul will be the cook and I will be the documentarian, and if nobody shoots a deer that will be fine too. It will carry on a long family tradition. I feel good about all of this. Later in the month, I will visit Adam and together we will try to get in some fishing. It will be spring in Peru. And there’s this: a hawk has been visiting the hillside. He lands in a tree near the cabin and sits menacingly on a branch looking for quarry among the creases and folds of my hillside. I pay him no mind. He is casting no shadow.