The Boy had found a squarish little two-man boat behind the Old Man’s barn, and nothing would do until he could bring it to the ponds he’d been fishing every day.
Though some responsible for him objected, he was right to insist, the Old Man knew, because boys and boats just go together. The set this pairing made was just right. One afternoon, the Old Man watched the Boy go.
The boat slid quietly into the water. He shoved off, pushing the blade of his paddle into the muddy bank. After a jiggling of cables, the trolling motor kicked on and the Boy powered silently away, small ripples spreading outward in his wake.
Watching, the Old Man felt a terrible sadness. The source was hard to identify. Maybe it was selfishness or maybe just compassion. Time makes a mockery of us all, he knew. He and time had been going steady for many decades, and he knew all its favorite moves.
In all things, his philosophy was to fix what he could and forget the rest, and generally that served him quite well, until the rest all came back unforgotten.
When nothing else would do, the Old Man took to the water alone, just as the Boy did now. There were no answers there, of course, just a pause in the uptake of new questions, but that pause, when it came, was enough. The waters’ silence had always been there, and his heart had been there too.
The Old Man was sad now, for no reason and for all of them he supposed. He thought of the unknowable array of disappointments that undoubtedly lay in the Boy’s life ahead, because disappointments surely come to us all. There was nothing to be done about any of it, which meant there was no solution to make it go away. The Boy didn’t know this yet. The Boy was not yet operating on his own primary responsibility. At least, not yet. But life wouldn’t be holding off much longer.
The Old Man watched the Boy guide the little boat across the pond to a stump bed, saw him casting for bass along the way.
He was not worried for the Boy’s safety. Of all legitimate possibilities, this one troubled him least. Though indifferent in his studies at school, on the water the Boy was an avid learner. Outdoors, inspired by his passions, the Boy understood what he’d been taught and was quick to figure out the rest. He acted with a confidence that stopped just short of vanity. The Old Man knew he would be fine.
He could not tell him how to solve the sadnesses that were sure to come, so instead he outfitted the Boy’s escape. On a low-lying pond on a summer’s afternoon, on a lake’s mirrored surface, this much he knew to be true.
For most of its breadth, the lake reflected the blue of the sky with its harmless white clouds. Deep in the reaches of one overgrown corner, the water turned dark with stain from a bed of fallen leaves. Over there, the world was a different place, dark and mysterious. It was a place where tiny round tadpoles darted and lithe brown moccasins slid. In the day’s sunlight, a clear line marked the place where blue skies stopped and uncertainty began. Life was not clear this way, of course, but he hoped, with his best and strongest hope of all, the Boy’s course would mostly run clear.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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