Page 24 - WTP Vol. X #7

For two summer weeks, on and off, we’d seen one another, the fisherman and I. He was in an old motor boat out at the end of the C of the New Hamp- shire cove, and I was sitting on a boulder well within the center of the letter at the lake’s edge. I’d just turned fourteen, brought by my aunt and uncle to take care of my cousin. When three-year-old Kenny napped and my aunt did whatever she liked in the large cabin, I was free to search about the woods and shore. I often ended up at what I named Lonely Rock that looked out onto the wide Winnepesaukee. The water around the giant rock was deep and clear. I often watched minnows in miniature schools. Out at the pine-covered point of the cove was the fisherman. I never waved at him, but each day he brought the boat in a little closer. By the end of two weeks, I could see more than the silhouette of the man. He looked old, in his late fifties, his long face a mottled tan. It seemed to me that every time he threw in his line,
he reached back with a shining fish he’d admire and then toss back before it drowned in air.
When he brought the boat right up to Lonely Rock, I held stiff as the stone.
“Hey, you,” he said, his thin body shaking at the steering wheel. I knew how to handle a boat as big. My uncle rented one, and I was proud he’d taught
me to dock the twenty-four footer easily even though home in New York, I was two years too young even for a learner’s permit.
I didn’t answer him. The breeze blew across his back, from the lake toward the land. I breathed pine and water, pipe smoke and sweat stink. It was a strong male smell, like the beer another girl in the cabin colony and I had discovered. The brown glass bottles had been hidden in a stone-covered roadside culvert. Kathy and I tasted some of the beer before we broke all the rest, shattering them against a low stone wall nearby.
“Hey, you,” the fisherman repeated. “Wanna ride?”
He nudged the boat up against Lonely Rock. In the stern, I saw feathery lures arranged in a metal tackle box. I looked over my shoulder to the hill clearing and cabins.
“Wheah ya friends?” he asked. 17
“I don’t have any friends. No one’s talking to me.” “Me eithah.”
“What did you do?” I said.
“Long stawhy,” he said.
The teeth he wasn’t missing were brown-speckled, like pebbles in the sand at the lake’s edge.
He moved quickly for all his shaking, leaning over the boat’s glass windshield, giving me a hand stepping onto the bow. Then I climbed over and sat on
the mate’s seat. He turned on the ignition, which coughed wetly a few times, and backed the boat
out into the cove. In a few moments, we were well beyond it, on the open lake. Speed lifted the prow out of the water and gusted the summer air. I shook out my loosened braids.
“You look’t like a Penacook boy,” he said, disappointed, “but ya eyes ah blue. Y’act like a boy. Why’s no one talking to you fah?”
“It’s a long stawhy,” I imitated. Then I blurted, “I did something bad.”
“Who ain’t?” He cut the motor. “No one likes me anymore.”
“I don’t like guhls. Name’s John.”
“Well, John, where’s all this forgiveness you hear about in church?”
Summer John
l. sHapley Bassen