Copyright © 2007 Matthew Babcock
All rights reserved, Wild Child Publishing.
Allan Douglas sat in a lawn chair on the deck of his late father-in-law's cabin and listened to the June air hum with death and lakeside sunlight. On one knee, he trapped a red-orange Top Crest writing pad. With his other hand, he aimed a pencil at time and space, point upward, as if handling a syringe. Years ago, he'd found Jesus in Toronto. Late in life for a man of his years, as a true lost-but-now-I'm-found-blind-but-now-I-see Christian, he'd married a beautiful woman just over half his age, Mandie Hendershot. Mandie's family, according to Allan, maintained a smattering of homegrown if not profane religious sentiments and habits. Nevertheless, these two "awakenings"--toward love of God and love of a woman--arrived so suddenly and under such similar circumstances that he never questioned them. Instead, he regarded them as the supporting struts of his life, two burnished pillars in the marble temple of his history. Now, he surveyed the glassy surface of Skaneateles Lake and watched his wife's family congregate on the boat dock. He listened for the voice of God in the breeze. He tried to tune his soul to the spirit that would enable him to compose a letter to his wife's sister, Rory, to confront her about the way she beat her children.
He waited. The words from his late father-in-law's funeral, spoken less than an hour ago, droned with the cicada music in the glossy carpet of forest myrtle. A delicate sediment of spores and spider web lifelines cycled through the air, each filament and speck a charge of white-gold fire that blazed in the slanting sunlight and expired in the shadows of overhanging trees. He waited and listened. As he listened and waited and watched, he kept his body and mind still. Though the day was pleasantly warm, in the shade of the shaggy tree canopy he wore a lightweight gray jacket; a two-inch Harriet Tubman Home souvenir button pinned to his jacket breast. At his feet, like a sentry, sat an insulated aluminum mug of iced tea in which floated a wedge of lemon. Mandie's family had just returned from burying the old doctor with full military honors in the Lake View Cemetery in the village. On the strip of rocky beach that approached the boathouse, the doctor's children and grandchildren--who included Mandie and Rebecca Ruth, Allan and Mandie's fourteen-month old daughter--filed toward the dock like a solemn conclave of well-dressed geese in mourning. In memory of their father, Herman "Manny" Hendershot, they were performing their annual ritual, the "casting of the bread" upon the "many waters," as their father had with them over the last twenty-five summers. The doctor had always struck Allan as a godless man, devoid of sensibility or spirit, and so, to Allan, Mandie's family's actions appeared perverse and grotesque, this annual tradition of breaking and tossing stale Wonder Bread hamburger buns and scraps into the bottle-green waters of the lake without any acknowledgment as to the source of their actions--Jesus, the New Testament, nothing.
Allan shook his head, expelled a sigh.
He dropped his pencil to the pad to compose his first line.
Then he noticed something about the pad's paper. The surface was dimpled. Someone had composed a letter on the pad and torn off the top sheet. The impressions from the previous letter, still legible, rippled like shadow-blue plover tracks across a beach of white sand. For the moment, he forgot the Hendershots and studied the cabalistic ghost-text. He tried to guess the meaning, author, purpose. Although the sentences weren't entirely clear, they had been pressed--passionately engraved--into the paper's surface. He felt a secret thrill, knowing that he might have stumbled on the private communications of the cabin's former or present inhabitants. He could read the impressions on the paper and remain undetected. He could keep the letter. He could destroy it, ignore it, copy the contents and return it--it didn't matter. As he examined the simple pad on his knees, his imagination spun like a carnival betting wheel. It was possible that the blue-lined notepaper in his hands contained information regarding a broken confidence, forbidden love affair, unclaimed inheritance, or family scandal, something from the now-not-so-secret vaults of the sacrosanct Hendershot saga. As he puzzled over the mystery, he let his eyes ramble across the coded scribbling. His fingertips brushed the indentations. He felt like an archeologist deciphering an ancient form of Braille.
He sat back.
He noticed something else.
As if making a charcoal rubbing of a rune, he shaded his angled pencil tip over the first few lines of impressions. The initial message stood out and resembled a familiar freehand script, like loops of light etched into darkness.
The letter had been written by Mandie.
It began "Dear Allan."
The Hendershots had reached the dock. A Nautica sport boat buzzed past, towing a female waterskier in a cherry life vest and sending waves to the dock. From where she stood, Mandie glanced up and sneaked Allan a toothy grin and wave. She manipulated Rebecca Ruth's arms so that their daughter flailed and laughed like a ventriloquist's dummy. Allan replied with a firm-lipped half smile. He raised a thumb and two fingers, his forearm remaining on the armrest.
He scanned the shaded-over lines: Dear Allan, it hurts me to have to tell you this way, but there's something about me you don't know.