SUTTER’S POND

SUTTER’S POND

Abel Ankrum walked out of the house.  It was an early Saturday morning in late May, and it was raining.  It had been raining all week.  As he crossed the lawn behind his house, his knee ached, and he limped slightly to take the full weight of his body off it.  He was carrying a large coffee tin filled to the top with crushed egg shells, used coffee grounds, wilted lettuce leaves, and other such scraps and matter that he made in the course of preparing meals.  When he reached the garden, he dumped the contents of the tin into a little hole between the spirea bushes.  When this hole was full, he would cover it over and dig another. 

     His knee ached.  The rain seemed to make it worse.  But with the look of one abstracted by some deep train of thought, he stared a moment into the hole, then slowly turned and walked back across the lawn, following the trail of footsteps through the wet grass that he made on his way there.  For late May, it was very cool, and as he limped and strode, he made little clouds of breath, until he reached the door.  There he stopped and looked up at the rain gutter at the edge of the roof.  He gave a little yelp, for the gutter dripped right over the door, and as he looked up, the thin stream of water that flowed down spattered in his face.

     He entered and went for a dish towel in the kitchen and mopped his face.  The kitchen was dark, for the sky was very heavily clouded, and he had not turned the lights on.  In the morning, he never turned the lights on.  He sat at the kitchen table and poured another cup of coffee.  When his wife was alive, both the radio and the lights would be on.  But he never turned them on anymore, and he seldom watched television, either.  He was a news freak at one time, always watching the news on television and listening to NPR in the mornings while reading the newspaper.  But now he seemed to have fallen out of concern for the world, which would go on being what it was and doing what it did whether he paid attention to it or not.

     It was now a little more than two years since Veda died, and he was still always expecting to see her walk into the kitchen or come through the back door in the evening as she usually did, just before supper.  As their schedules worked out, he got home before her and started supper, and she would come in and say, “That smells so good, I’m starving.”  And he would kiss her, and together they’d set the table, either on the back porch or in the dining room.  But now he had that aching emptiness in his stomach, and he always ate in the kitchen, sitting at the little table near the door, where he could look out the window onto the garden.

     Abel was still young, but he felt like life was over for him and it was just a matter of putting in time.  He worked--in the sheet metal shop of an engineering company where he designed duct systems for heating and air-conditioning commercial buildings--he slept, and he ate.  His work held no more interest for him than the news did, doing by rote what he used to do with ardor and a sense of pride, pointing out buildings that were a particular challenge for him to his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews when they’d come to visit.  He was only forty-three when Veda died and had no gray hair and no bulge at his waistline.  Since then, he had grayed, but he had also lost weight and become seriously thin.  He was a tall man, so his thinness seemed all the more serious and made those who knew him worry about his state of mind and health. 

     And these, his state of mind and health, were precarious.  He and Veda had no large circle of friends, though they had many acquaintances with whom they spent evenings out, mostly people connected with their work.  After Veda’s death, Abel dropped out of these social circles and lived like a monk in a house whose lights he seldom lit.  But a monk has prayer to fill his mind and discipline his emotions.  Abel had nothing.  He could not pray, for the thought of it filled him with moral revulsion.  In the days following the interment, Abel sat alone in a darkened living room or lay on his bed in a darkened bedroom and filled his mind with longings until he felt like he was going mad.  He seriously thought about seeing a priest.  And one night he had so resolved.

     But the inertia of stillness could not be overcome, and he thought about his own past experience with priests.  Once, when he was very young, still in high school and not yet a senior, a close friend, a good and decent Irish Catholic named Timothy O’Shay, had gotten the girl he had been going steady with pregnant. Being a responsible youth, Tim had owned up to it and proposed to marry her. The wedding date was set and he, Abel, was to be the best man.  They went to church together, one Saturday evening, to make their confessions for the ceremony.  Timothy went in first and Abel was to follow him.  But when Tim came out, instead of going to the altar to say his penance, he grabbed Abel by the arm and motioned to the pews.  He was pasty white and trembling.  He told Abel what the priest had said to him in the darkened little closet of the confessional.  He, Timothy, could not receive absolution, for his sin could not be forgiven.  He might marry, and the wedding be legal in the eyes of the law, but God would never sanction it, for he had brought an unsanctified soul into the world which was the cause of another losing her salvation.  As the cause of these damnations, his sufferings in hell would be the worst, for God would not forgive such sins.  He had gasped in fear and asked the priest if he was serious, but the priest had slid the door shut and left him kneeling in the dark.

     Timothy was so shaken that he could hardly walk, and Abel had to help him leave the church.  Then, Abel had an idea.  He took him to a neighboring town and into the Catholic church there.  They were still hearing confessions, and Timothy got on line and waited his turn.  When it was all done, he had gotten his absolution.  He didn’t tell the second priest what the first had said, and so he wasn’t quite sure his confession was honest.  But Abel persuaded him that it was, since what the first priest said was not any sin of his own and he didn’t have to talk about it.  This was the first in a series of revelations about holy men and women that made Abel indignant at the thought of them.

And so he had no comforts or solace, and his long slide into depression and isolation continued. 

     His knee ached and he rubbed it, massaging the tendons on either side.  It was Saturday, a day on which he and Veda would have had plans, even though it was raining.  They would have planned to go somewhere or to do something, for they seldom sat around on weekends.  But he had no plans, to do or to go.  He just sat rubbing his knee, thinking about nothing, looking out the window.  He remembered the injury that now caused the pain he felt.  He was eighteen, a trainee in the Air Force, being marched back to the barracks at midnight after tech school.  It was a very cold night and the ground was covered with ice, and he slipped and went down, and the next two troops in the file behind him had crunched his knee as they marched on, for the speed of his fall didn’t give them time to react.  So he lay on the ice with a parka under him and one over him, his knee smashed, waiting for an ambulance.  He healed, and that seemed the end of it.  But these last few years, the knee ached worse and worse and seemed at its most painful when it rained.

                He was dumbly staring out the window when a gold swath of light suddenly lit up the garden.  But then it faded and got dim again.  It had been raining for days, but now, he thought, it must be breaking up, finally.  And as he thought it, the sunlight returned, and this time it held.  So he rose and looked out the window and saw patches of deep blue amid shreds of gray clouds scudding rapidly across the sky.  He sat down again and scratched his head and went back to rubbing his knee.  He felt more keenly now the absence of motivation, the sense of waiting. 

     Then he saw the woman next door come out into the yard behind her house.  She was younger than him by ten years and had a six year old son.  There was no man, but whether she was divorced, widowed, or never married he didn’t know.  She had moved in just before Veda died, while she was still suffering in the hospital, and he had never introduced himself or welcomed her as a neighbor.  She had come to the funeral service and offered her condolences, and since then he seldom saw her.  He couldn’t even remember her name.

     He often saw her and the boy coming and going from the house, but he never paid attention to them, they were just fixtures in the environment, there but not there.  However, he looked at her with interest now.  She was wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and sneakers, and her brown hair was done in a ponytail.  He wondered what she would do out there, since everything was drenched. Her house was small, a two-bedroom ranch with a double garage, but it had a large concrete patio in the back which was bordered with shrubs--neatly trimmed golden yews--in front of which flower beds were prepared for the spring planting.  His house was a large nineteenth-century two-story structure which sat on  an irregularly shaped plot of ground that shot at an angle which made her lot in the back narrow to a near triangle’s apex.  There, at the apex, was a roofed gazebo, with lilac bushes, now in bloom, surrounding it and two maple trees, one on each side.  She headed there across the wet grass and he could see her, once she had entered and sat down, light a cigarette and let out a long stream of smoke, which came through the lattice-work side of the structure.

     “Huh,” he said to himself and turned away.   He hadn’t smoked in years.  Veda hated the smell of smoke, and he gave it up for her sake, long before the fanatical cultural rejection of smoking took place.  He had a sudden yearning for a cigarette, and the impulse took him to go over there and introduce himself and ask her for one.  But the inertia of two years of motionlessness could not be overcome, and he sat there and just looked out the window.  What did she do for a living, he wondered?  Theirs were the only two houses at the end of the block.  Behind them ran McKinnon’s creek, on the other side of which was a shallow wood that bordered Sutter’s pond.  His house was the original in the area and was a stately building when all this property belonged to its first owners.

     She had come out of the gazebo, with her hands tucked into her back pockets, and was looking at the sky.  Then she turned toward his house and saw him through the window.  At first she seemed surprised, like she had been intruded upon, but then she waved at him and he could see her smile.  She gestured for him to come out, and he waved back at her.  But she gestured again and then began walking across the wet grass and slipped through the forsythia bushes between their yards.

     He got up and went out the back door to meet her, his knee still throbbing.  When they neared, she said, “The sun has warmed things up and it feels like May again.  It’s nice to be outside, everything seems so fresh.  How have you been?”

     “Fine,” he said.  “I saw you go out to the gazebo and light a cigarette, and I had a sudden yearning for one.  I haven’t smoked in twenty years!  Odd, isn’t it?”

     “You’re welcome,” she said, taking the pack out from her shirt pocket and offering him one.  He took it, and she lit it for him with a zippo lighter.  He took a drag and coughed and they both laughed.  He felt a little dizzy but took another drag, a smaller one, and it felt fine.

     “How is it?” she asked.

     “OK,” he said, “I like it.”

     “I guess you’re going to blame me for starting you up again,” she said, with a smile. 

     She was a very pretty woman and he liked talking with her.  He didn’t want to admit that he couldn’t remember her name and was thinking how he could get by the problem when she said, “Do you get along all right?  I hardly ever see you.  Sometimes I think about you all alone in that big house.  I should have come over sooner and gotten to know you, I hope you don’t think I’m antisocial.”

     “No,” he said, “I don’t think that.  Actually, I get on OK.  I should have been more social as well.  It’s as much my fault, more, since I was here when you arrived and it was my duty to welcome you.”

     “You were going through a hard time.  I’m sorry about your wife.  Sorry I never got to know her.”

     He didn’t respond to that, but he took another drag from the cigarette and let out a thin stream of smoke, and it felt good.  She made a motion like she wanted to go, and he was reluctant to let her, so he told her he couldn’t remember her name.

     “Oh,” she said, “my name’s Lila, Lila Park, and my son’s name is Jimmy.  Yours is Abel, isn’t it?  I remember.  Do your friends call you Abe?”

     “No, I prefer Abel.  It’s pretty short and doesn’t need to be shortened.  Like Lila.  Do people call you Lil?” he asked with a smile.

     “I prefer Lila,” she said, smiling, and offered her hand, which he shook. 

     It was his first real human contact since Veda died, and he lingered on holding her hand.  She looked closely at him, taking in his thinness. 

     “I never see you out of doors,” she said.  “What do you do with yourself?  You should get out for a walk when the weather is nice.  We should do that together, I don’t get enough exercise, either.”

     “I’d like that,” he said, almost in a whisper, feeling the slightest of stirrings and an awakening curiosity about this woman who has lived beside him for so long.

     “I’ve got to look in on Jimmy,” she said, pointing back to her house.  “He’s watching TV, but if I’m not there he’ll raid the refrigerator and make a mess in the living room.”

     ”Thanks for the smoke,” he said, and watched her as she crossed their yards and went into the house.

     As he turned, the pain in his knee almost dropped him.  But he caught himself and limped on into the house.  He went to the cabinet over the sink where he and Veda kept their vitamins and aspirin, and popped a couple aspirin into his mouth and washed them down with a sip of tap water.  Then he sat at the table again, poured himself another coffee, and thought about Lila.  But after a while she faded, and he felt his old numbness return.  By afternoon, it had gotten quite warm, and between the drying out of the air and the aspirin, the pain in his knee finally subsided.

     Since Veda died, he spent his weekends reading, when he got his chores and meals done.  He never went out, except to buy groceries and necessaries--replace his clothing, buy furnace filters, fuses for the circuit box, light bulbs, things like that.  He seldom thought about life outside the house, except when he went to work, and even then he seldom thought, having shut himself down almost completely.  He was now reading--he picked up an old syllabus from a course he took in college, the notes for which he kept with his other college coursework in a file cabinet in the basement--William James’ essay, “The Will to Believe.”  He was never interested in this dry cerebral stuff, but since he began reading again, and going through his old syllabi, he came naturally upon these old texts and read them again with much more interest than he would have imagined when he was taking the classes. 

     It was late afternoon when he heard a knocking at his back door.  He put down the book, went downstairs, and saw a boy, apparently the boy next door, Jimmy, standing outside, patiently waiting.  When he opened the door, Jimmy said, “Mr. Ankrum, my mom told me to come here and ask could you fix my fishing rod.”

     Abel smiled, thinking that the woman was trying to flush him out, using her son as a means.  But why not? he thought.  He could probably help.  So he said, “Let’s see it before I make any promises.”  And he followed Jimmy over to the patio, where he had been playing with his rod, getting it ready before going to the pond.  He sat down on a lawn chair, took up the rod, and found that two of the eyes had come out of the threading that bound them to the pole.  So he said he could fix it and that he would need a sharp knife and a role of line.  When the repair was done, he asked Jimmy where he was going at the pond.

     “I don’t know,” he said, “no one place.  I just walk along the bank and cast into the water as far as I can.”

     “Well, maybe I should go with you and show you where to fish.  Do you know where the falls are?”

     “Yea, I stay away from them because it’s too rocky and I lose my lures when I cast into the water around there.”

     “Right.  It’s risky.  But that’s where the fish are, the trout, the big brown ones.  I’ll show you.”

     He spent an hour with Jimmy, fending off the mosquitoes, getting his shoes drenched, but reviving long-dead memories of the cool shade and green light of the pond and the clear cold water.  He showed Jimmy where to cast and how to reel in the lure with a motion the trout would strike at, and he caught two nice size trout.

     On their way back, cutting through the woods, he asked Jimmy about his father, and he said that he never knew him, but that soon he would have a stepfather, since his mother was going to get married.  They were going to move, he said, to New York, where his stepfather worked.  His mother was very happy, since that’s where she grew up and her family still lived there and she would be going home.

     “How come you moved here?” he asked.

     “Because mom had to get away, but everything is OK now.”

     It was clear that Jimmy didn’t know the details of his mother’s life, and he didn’t want to pry any more than he already had, so he let it drop.  When he got home, he began to make his supper, which was usually nothing more than a sandwich.  But tonight, looking at the dead thing in his plate, and feeling agitated, and worse, feeling confused, he decided to go out to eat.  He hadn’t gone out to eat since before Veda started failing, and he anticipated the experience with a certain excitement and dread.  He showered, shaved, dressed, and left the house.

     He had had two brief inconsequential conversations that day, one with a woman he didn’t know, and one with a boy he didn’t know.  And somehow he felt his life was changing.  He didn’t know how or why, but he felt it.  He was going to go to a little restaurant he and Veda always enjoyed, but then he decided against it.  Instead, he went to a place he had never been before.  When he had taken a table, he ordered a glass of wine.  He and Veda always drank beer with their meals, and he didn’t want to do familiar things.  He felt he should break from his old habits.  He even ordered a meal he knew he wouldn’t like, just to be different.  And when the meal was done, the loneliness he feared hadn’t come.

     He had not had a vacation in the year before Veda died and refused his boss’ advice to take one afterwards, not wanting, in the days and weeks following her death, to be unoccupied.  And as the weeks and months passed, it had grown to be another two years, a time during which he seemed to stay sane by following an unvarying, rigid routine, a routine that was designed to keep him from people and to keep his feelings for Veda alive.  As he sat at his table, sipping coffee, he noticed no one, paying no attention to anything going on around him.  But thinking of taking a vacation caused him to feel confused and agitated.  He tried to suppress the idea, but it kept coming back.  Without Veda, what would be the point?  He would be alone.  Would that be worthwhile?  Would it make him more unsound than he knew he already was?  Where would he go?  For how long?  He had no answers to these questions.  But he was astonished that he was asking them.

     And even more astonishing was the thought that he felt like he needed to quit his job.  “What in God’s name would I do?” he thought.  “Why do you have to do?” he heard himself reply.  Take a year off, take two years off.  Go somewhere and find something to do.  “What the hell,” he said to himself.  “I’m losing it.”  But a change had come in him and it would not be stopped, reversed, quieted.  He knew that something, either dreadful or desirable, was going to flow from it.  

     That night he dreamed of Veda.  She was young in the dream, and she was very beautiful.  She was standing at the edge of a cliff, which he knew was the place on Cape Ann where they had honeymooned.  They had a cabin on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, and they used to sit there in the evening watching the lobstermen come to empty their pots.  And then they would go to Rockport Harbor for supper.  She was standing there as the sun went down, the breezes pressing her dress between her legs, outlining her body.  He felt a powerful stirring in his chest and throat, for she was beautiful, he thought, almost beyond his enduring.  The dream lasted only a few moments when the emotion awakened him, and once awake, he felt a great drop of despair come over him, and he rolled on his side, tried to clear his mind, and lay awake the rest of the night. 

     And when his windows began to brighten, first to a dim gray and then slowly brighter till the morning sun came straight against them, he kicked his feet over the side and sat up.  He felt rested.  He also felt good.  Remembering the dream now lifted his spirits.  So he showered and dressed and went downstairs and put up coffee.  He decided to do something he hadn’t done in more than ten years.  While the coffee was brewing he went into the garage and took down off its pegs his old fishing rod.  It was dusty and grimy and looked unusable, but he cleaned it up, changed the line, oiled the reel, a Garcia spinner, and then rummaged through the cabinet for his little tackle box, which he finally found under a pile of rags behind a bag of fertilizer.  Most of the things inside were useless, the hooks were rusted and the rust begrimed the feathers on his flys, and his rubber worms and frogs had melted out of shape, and the lures were dimmed by age and spotted and pitted by corrosion.

     But he found a few things he could use, and he also took two of the pitted lures to the kitchen when he returned.  These he rubbed with Bon Ami, removing the pits and the corrosive film on them, and when he was done, they were fine.  He took his old thermos out of the cabinet above the fridge and filled it with coffee, then he set out for the pond.  It was a fine morning, sunny, cool, calm, and the water was clear, and, being Sunday, there was no sound of traffic on the roads, no sounds of people up and doing at all.  He went to the place where he had taken Jimmy the day before.  Here, in the spring, the pond sluiced to a narrow rim and fell over the rocks down a channel into a creek bed, which carried the pond’s overflow across the fields and under the roads to the Connequot river, which carried it, finally, to the bay. 

     The woods were dense around him, and the pond reflected the sky like a mirror, being as smooth, though here and there clumps of new water lilies shone brilliantly green in the sun that rayed through the limbs of the trees.  There were iris beds growing out of the pond on the other side, and though these were in shade, their blooms still vibrated deep blue against the gray of the tree trunks behind them.  There were no dry places along the bank to sit, so he matted and sat in the wet grass and tied a fly to his line.  Then he stood up and began casting the fly toward the big rocks between which the water raced to the edge and fell over. He had to touch the water just in front of them, and if he did it right, he would get a strike.     

     It was still very early, the sun only just now beginning to rise above the trees on the far side of the pond.  Everything was drenched.  The long period of rain made the morning’s dew very heavy.

     After a few casts, he was surprised by the weight of the fish that struck and the violence of its splashing and twisting and turning.  He regretted not taking his scoop net, but he didn’t know where it was or if it was any good.  So he would have to try to land it without.  He judged the fish to be five pounds, and he struggled to keep its head up.  The rod bent so much he could hardly control it, and it jerked side to side violently against the fish’s movements.  He began to doubt he would be able to land it.  He played it for almost ten minutes, and finally the fish tired enough for him to get it along side the bank, and he held the line in one hand and reached down to grab it by its gills with the other.  He lifted it out of the water, and it was a rainbow, beautiful to look at, and fat.

      He had also forgotten to take his canvas catch bag, and he looked around to see what he could do with the big fish, but he decided then to go home, since his objective in coming was to catch his breakfast, not to spend the morning fishing.  He had been there such a short time that he hadn’t opened his thermos for any coffee.  So he did that now.  And when he finished the small cup, he rose, his left knee beginning again to throb, and took up his fish and rod and cut through the woods, crossed the creek, and came to his yard. 

     He heard a voice, then, say, “Hello, you’re up early.”

     Startled, he stopped and turned and saw Lila sitting in the gazebo smoking.  He said, “Hello, you’re smoking early, too.”  Then he walked over and sat down on the bench across from her.  He showed her the rainbow and she admired it. 

     “What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

     “I’m going to cook it for my breakfast.  Want to come?” he asked, hoping she would.

     But she said no, she had cleaned and cooked the two Jimmy had caught yesterday, and they had them for supper.  Besides, she said, she wasn’t a breakfast eater.  Then she offered him a cigarette, and he took it and thanked her.  He laid the fish on the floor beside his pole and rested his back against the lattice. 

     “How long were you married?” she asked.

     “Twenty years,” he said, “when she died.  Twenty-two years now.” 

     “I wonder if that isn’t a record in today’s world.  None of the people I know who have been married are still with their first spouses.”

     He didn’t answer, but her own situation came to mind and he thought she was commenting more on herself than him.  She lit another cigarette and blew out the smoke in a quick steady stream.  Then resting her elbow in the palm of her hand, squinting her eyes from the smoke that curled into her face, she said, “I’ve hardly seen you in the two years I’m here, now I’ve seen you twice in two days.  What’ve you been doing all this time?”

     “Nothing,” he said, “dreaming of skeletons.”

     She thought for a moment he was joking, but when she saw he was serious, her eyebrow went up.  “You’ve been holed up in that house a long time.  I’ve really been a bad neighbor.  I should have been looking in on you, getting you out in the air.  I’m really sorry.”

     “I don’t think it would have mattered, Lila,” he said, taking in her concern, “I don’t think there was anything anybody could have done.”

     She got up, then, and sat down beside him.  Her nearness made him feel strange, and he could smell her, the scent of her soap was still vivid.  She too leaned against the lattice. 

     “Your wife,” she said, turning her head toward him,  “maybe you were too close.  Is it possible that people can be too close?  Did she work?”

     “Yes, she was a lawyer, she worked in the District Attorney’s office, one of the support staff.  She was good.”  He didn’t answer her question about being too close, but he thought that he would change nothing in his life with Veda, even if he could.

     “Did you have children?’ she asked, then, and he took a long sideways look at her.  “Am I prying?” she said, “We’ve been neighbors for so long, I have a lot of lost time to make up.”

     “Before you leave?” he returned.

     “Leave?” she said.

     “Yesterday, Jimmy told me you were getting married and moving back to New York.”

     Her eyes went wide in surprise when he said this, and for a moment she seemed to be contemplating it.

     “Ah,” she sighed, finally.  “No.  We’re not leaving, not going to New York, not now, not for a long time yet.  Maybe not ever.” 

     And they both fell silent.  He wanted to ask her all kinds of questions but didn’t want to pry.  The difference between Jimmy’s view of things and hers made him feel that there were problems he shouldn’t be asking about.  He noticed that she didn’t mention anything about getting married.  

     “Look,” he said to her, “Veda and I didn’t have children because we couldn’t.  We never went to find out why, whose problem it was, or to do anything about it.  We felt that sort of thing was too invasive, and neither of us wanted to submit to it.  That’s all.  I don’t want to pry into your life.  But I think that, being neighbors, as you say, we should at least be frank.  With Veda and me it’s all over.  I took her death very hard.  I’ve been in a way wishing to die myself since she passed.  But I’m coming out of it.”

     Then he rose, took up the trout and his pole, and said good morning, but she rose, too, put her hand on his arm, and asked him to stay a moment longer, “Please, sit.  You’re right.  I haven’t been frank. What happened to me doesn’t make for a romantic story, but an ugly one, full of shame, and your life has been so much the opposite.  That’s how we’re different, that’s what I wanted to know about you.”

     “Don’t, then,” he said.  “Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to.  I have no need to know.”  His curiosity was aroused, but he also felt that what she wanted to say might be more than he’d want to hear.  He didn’t know her, and this conversation had gotten intimate so quickly he felt slightly ashamed.  He never talked like this with anyone.  He had just said something to her he had hardly even admitted to himself.  He felt he was entering unfamiliar territory and didn’t know where it would lead.

     They were standing facing each other, and for a while she considered what he said.  He asked her for another cigarette, and she gave him one and lit it for him.  Her hand holding the zippo was shaking and he couldn’t connect with the flame, so he grabbed it and held it still.  She sat back down in her original place, and he sat in his and leaned against the lattice, looking at her.  She was looking through the lattice toward the house, and she seemed agitated and nervous.  In the silence he began rubbing his knee.

     Finally, when she had not said anything for several moments, he said, “Lila, I’m hungry, and I’ve got to gut and scale this fish before I fry him.  I’m going, but why not get together later.  Do you have plans for the day?”

     She looked at him, then, and her face was pale and empty of emotion.  “No,” she said.  “I don’t have anything planned, but I was going to plant flowers in the beds I spaded last week, there,” she gestured toward the patio. 

     “I haven’t done that in a long time,” he said.

     “Well, I’ll come over later and plant some for you.”

     “I’d like that,” he said. 

     Then he got up again, grabbed the pole and the trout, and left.  His knee was aching and he tried not to limp, but he couldn’t help it.  By the time he reached his back door, he was limping badly.  Damn, he said to himself.  Damn and damn.  The first thing he did was take a couple of aspirin.  Then he gutted the trout, sliced off the dorsal and pectoral fins, chopped off its tail and its head behind the gills, scaled it, rinsed it off and while it was wet rolled it in flour and set it on a plate beside the stove.  He oiled a frying pan and when it was hot, he gently placed the trout in, and let it cook, turning it when it was ready.  Meanwhile, he made himself some toast, poured coffee from the thermos, and, when the fish was ready, scooped it out and sat down to eat.

     He ate, and ate.  It seemed to him he never ate anything so good.  And the coffee tasted better than he ever noticed coffee tasting before. 

     It was mid-morning now, and he had gone up to his bedroom, changed clothes, and then sat at his desk and went over his finances.  He was in good shape.  He could take a month’s vacation and go just about anywhere.  In fact, he could take a year’s vacation and go just about anywhere.  But he couldn’t imagine himself doing that.  In fact, he couldn’t imagine himself going anywhere, since there was nowhere he wanted to go.  But he decided that he was going to go, somewhere, and he had better figure out where. 

     Just then he heard voices outside, like someone shouting in anger and another answering in a beseeching tone.  He thought it must be Lila having a spat with Jimmy, and he got up and looked out a window on that side of the house.  But he saw a woman in Lila’s yard whom he did not recognize, and then he saw Lila, who had come into view from the side of her house, and she was gesturing wildly and crying.  The other went up to her and tried to embrace her, but Lila broke away and stomped off again out of sight.  The strange woman went toward the house then, and when she neared the door, someone threw it open and he saw a man in a dark suit and tie standing in the doorway.  After a few moments he heard a banging on his own back door.

     He went down and saw Lila through the window.  He let her in, and she was distraught, her face wet with tears. 

     “What’s the matter?” he said, as she stomped passed him into the kitchen.  She crossed the kitchen to the door that opened onto the dining room, turned and paced back, and turned again.  But he grabbed her by the shoulders and stopped her and turned her around. 

     “What’s the matter?” he said again, looking into her face, “I can’t help you unless I know what’s going on.”

     “My mother’s come to take Jimmy.  He was right, and I didn’t know anything about it,” she said through her tears, her voice shaking.  She couldn’t go on. 

     “Get hold of yourself,” he said, holding her by the shoulders and trying to steady her.

     “When you told me what he said this morning, I couldn’t believe it,” she cried, in a tone of woe that broke his heart.  “My mother’s been in touch with him.  She’s got him all ready, and he thinks I’m going with him.  She’s taking him back to New York.  She told him I was going.  The liar,” she screamed.  “She lied.  She lied, the bitch, the miserable manipulating bitch.”

     “I don’t understand any of this,” he said.  “What do you want me to do?  Shall I go over there and fetch Jimmy?  Bring him here?  Would that help?  What does Jimmy want?  Does he want to stay with you?”

     But she had fallen silent and didn’t answer him. Instead, she wiped the tears from her face with the palms of her hands.  She seemed lost and hysterical, and he was uncertain what to do.  He shook her by the shoulders again and told her to calm herself and answer him or it might be too late. 

     She looked at him, then, and said, “It’s already too late.  I can’t stop her.  But I won’t be there.  I won’t make it easy for her.  If she’s going to take him, it’ll have to be like this, like she stole him from me, the miserable bitch, and let it be on her conscience.” 

     “Why?” he said.  “Why is it too late?  What hold does your mother have over you and Jimmy?”

     But she didn’t answer him.  She turned away from him towards the dining room and walked out of the kitchen.  He followed and stopped at the door, looking across the dining room to where she had gone to sit.  She leaned her head into her hands, elbows on the table, and was crying again.  So he left her there and went outside and crossed their yards and knocked at her back door.  He peered in through the glass on the door, but it was dark and silent.  There were no signs that anyone was in the house.  He tried the door and it was open, so he walked in.  He called out for Jimmy, but there was no answer.  He went to the front of the house and opened the front door and looked out.  There were no cars visible.  He went to the door in the kitchen that opened into the garage and looked in, but there was only one car there, which he assumed was Lila’s.  He checked the bedrooms.  They were gone.  Her mother, with whomever she had come, was quite efficient.  She got what she wanted.  Damn, he thought.  Who are these people?  He should have listened to Lila’s story this morning.  Did he just witness a kidnapping? 

     While he was standing in the kitchen thinking over what he had just witnessed, he heard the garage door go up, and he paced quickly across the room and stepped into the garage.  But Lila was already backing out.  He waved to her, but she didn’t respond, though she saw him.  She backed out into the road and took off, peeling rubber and leaving two clouds of gray smoke.

     Abel went back to his own house, limping still, but not so badly as before, wondering about all that happened in the last two days.  He has had two, no, three conversations now with this woman who has lived next door to him for two years, a woman whose name he didn’t know until yesterday.  She seems to have precipitated him out of his mourning and despair, gotten intimate with him, aroused his curiosity and interest in her own problems, and then disappeared in a cloud of smoke, chasing after a kidnapping mother.  Only the day before yesterday, he would have been oblivious to it all!  He felt a tremendous excitement.  He wanted to do something.  But he couldn’t imagine anything he could do, ignorant as he was of what was going on.  His sympathy for Lila could very well be misplaced.  He just didn’t know.

     So he went in, and it was still morning!  Only ten thirty!  He felt like the day had already lasted a week, and it was still mid-morning.  He had no coffee left.  God, he thought, I drank a whole pot!  What to do now?  He would normally, in the days of his depression, have gone to his study to read, or he would have pulled down the window shades and sat with his eyes closed and done nothing.  God, he thought.  I’ve got to do something.  So he left for downtown, then he decided to buy some plants and make a flower garden. It’s something to do, he said to himself.  But when he drove to the nursery, he decided instead to keep on driving, to head for the bay and drive along the shore.  And if he found any place that made him want to stop, well, he’d just stop.  He was going to begin his vacation.  Tomorrow, he’d go in and tell Harry, the engineer who supervised his section of the company, that he was checking out for a month.  What could Harry say?  The company owed him three years’ worth of vacations. They weren’t starting a new project, so there was no reason he should object.  He wouldn’t anyway.  He’d be glad. 

     The bay shore was like one vast urban complex, but every couple of miles or so, between the condominiums and commercial buildings, apartment complexes and shopping malls, he would come to a village huddled against the docks and piers that fifty years ago would have been its economic lifeline.  These villages he loved and he stopped in many of them and walked along their Main Streets, staying as near to the water as he could.  On the docks, he’d look at the pilings, just below the water, and see little crabs, maybe three inches from point to point, clinging to the weeds that would grow there.  And after a while he began saying a prayer, “Little two claws, feeding on the dead, I’ve been under water and felt the dread.”

     By supper time, Abel had gone east as far as Bellport.  Now he turned for home.  But he drove slowly, along the route he followed out, staying away from the parkways and the Interstate, with all their busyness and rush and clamor.

When he got home, it was dusk, and he saw that lights were on in Lila’s house.  He had an impulse to look in on her, for he felt near to her, even though everything about her was strange and mysterious.  But he resisted the impulse.  When he came in, he turned all the lights on downstairs, and turned on the radio, too.  But this he turned off again in a fit of irritation when he heard seven advertisements in a row and then a sportscaster, mispronouncing words, giving a play by play in a tone of fraudulent excitement.  “God!” he said in exasperation, as he pushed the button.  He turned on the stereo, instead, and played an old Dave Brubeck tape.  He turned down the sound, and was about to fix himself a sandwich when he heard a knocking at the back door.

     He expected it would be Lila, and when he opened the door, she was standing there looking helpless and dejected.  He reached out his hand to her, and she took it, and he gently pulled her in and closed the door. 

     “I have a lot to tell you,” she said.  “Eight years’ worth of shame and bitterness and running.”  And the tears started flowing.  She wiped them with the palm of her hand and stepped towards him, and he put his arms around her. 

     “Jimmy’s gone,” she said, “and I won’t see him anymore.”

     He knew there was nothing he could say to comfort her for this loss.  “Tell me,” he said, holding her still.  Then together they walked into the living room, and he believed he could find within himself what this woman needed him to give.