The Swellest Thing

by David McGrath

_____________________________________________________________

I stood with my two daughters outside the red double doors of the two story white house on the lake on a June day in 1981. Pines and hemlocks lined the shore so that we waited in stripes of shadows, and the wind blowing across the water smelled fresh and cold with a memory of the fish that swam in its depths.

It had been aberrantly hot in the north Wisconsin town of Hayward, where earlier I had bought a bakery apple pie before driving ten miles east for our first visit to the lake home of Maryhelen Ryan. We had met ten years earlier when I began work as a Chicago high school English teacher, and she was one of the veteran clerks who kept the place up and running.

Her first words back then were hardly portentous of a friendship:

“Oh my God, will you look at this?” she had said.

Such was my welcome when I reported for my duty period as a rookie instructor at Chicago Vocational High School (CVS).

“I’m supposed to report here for fourth hour,” I said, digging in my briefcase for a copy of my class schedule.

“Are you sure?” she said. She was looking at me but speaking loudly for the other clerks and students in the three-desk office to hear.

“Yes, Room 128,” I said, holding the blue schedule sheet up in the air—it was folded over and I inclined my head to read from it. I held my new Zayer Department Store vinyl briefcase in my other hand.

“First hour, I have x, which stands for nothing,” I said, “and second hour, English I Regular. Third hour is English I Basic, and fourth hour is duty in the Attendance Office, which is here.”

“We know all that, honey,” she laughed. I made myself believe it was a sympathetic laugh. “We just want to know are you sure?”

From someone else this may have been insulting. But this woman—this Maryhelen Ryan, a matronly 55 years of age, heavy set, her gray hair helmeted and sprayed to the consistency of tree bark, a face furrowed for laughter or trouble, blue eyes that would fix on you and not let go—made me feel on this first day that someone was finally paying attention to me. I felt like extending a hand or a limb so that she could bandage it.

“Come here, honey—what did you say your name was?—and we’ll show you the ropes all right. Let’s hope you don’t hang yourself with them.”

That first dizzying year in a big city school, Maryhelen did, indeed, help me from falling overboard, advising me on everything from what mail you could toss (textbook solicitations), to what you’d better save (notes from students’ homes); or whom you could ignore (a certain blustery, assistant principal), and whom you’d better heed (the program officer).

Most important was what she told me about my students: concentrate on the good you find. “Most of the kids are swell,” she would say, and that I should not fall into the trap that so many teachers have, of becoming embittered by the disappointments. “It kills them inside,” she said.

This morning at Round Lake, she opened both doors wide and put her finger against her lips, while cocking her head for Jackie and Janet and me to follow her within. She stepped back to let the children go by, glancing connivingly at me.

We entered the great room of the house, its walls paneled in 1x4 mahogany planks rising to a twenty foot high ceiling. A ten foot oak dining table sat in the center, and a brick fireplace filled the middle of the opposite wall. Above us, a catwalk was built around the entire perimeter, for getting to the bedrooms over the laundry and over the screened-in porch. Sun was splashing off Round Lake and through the windows, and it felt like church.

“Jackie?” said Maryhelen. “Such a name? Is that for Jacqueline Lee Kennedy? You are something special, do you know that?” and Jackie nodded.

“May I touch your hair, honey?” she said to Janet, who at three was at that perverse stage when a child’s first response to everything is no, and I was poised to reprimand her. But wordlessly she complied, leaning her head toward this serious grownup woman who mixed her thick fingers in with Janet’s brown curls.

I had heard Maryhelen engage coolly in chit chat at school, heard her joke about the trouble that streamed daily through the attendance office—truancy, illness, discipline problems, gang assaults, shop accidents. Once I saw her butterfly a knife puncture while telling me and the others in the office another funny story involving Alex Amison, the gruff auto shop instructor at the high school. But up here she didn’t need any armor.

“You realize you’re going to be responsible now for some heavy duty mirror time,” I said, and Maryhelen dismissed my caution with a wave of her hand.

“I am so glad you have come to visit me,” she said to them both, as if they were equal partners for afternoon bridge. The children stared, as they had not encountered an adult before who did not bend and raise the pitch of her voice the way others did with children.

She accepted the apple pie with the disapproving glower that the overweight show for confections, left to stow it somewhere in the kitchen. Returning, she sighed dramatically as she looked upon the girls again, raised her eyebrows to indicate some matter of impending importance, and then she headed for the porch. The girls followed, I followed, feeling foolishly edified that she chose us for whatever was the mission.

The screened-in porch cantilevered over the lake, its thirty foot square enclosure surrounded by trunks of white pines 100 feet tall. Between their branches, the 5,000 acre Round Lake shimmered and wafted.

When I was a child and would draw a picture with trees on the side of a house, that’s what these white pines looked like from far away: large balls of green puffing out both sides of the trunk. Standing on the elevated porch, among branches tangling and limbs reaching toward water and sky, I experienced a moment of not unpleasant vertigo.

“Who wants to be first?” asked Maryhelen, and Jackie raised her hand. She had blonde curls, and at 5 years of age was an old hand at the game of indulging the grownups who mostly wanted her to pose for pictures.

“Back up, honey, till the back of your head touches the screen,” said Maryhelen, and she put her stubby fingers on Jackie’s shoulder, delicately, as though she were playing dolls. Jackie watched her own feet shuffle backwards, in white socks and wicker sandals.

“Now see the trunk of tree? No, right here, honey, like an elephant’s trunk only much bigger,” said Maryhelen, and Jackie giggled. “Follow it all the way up to the top, and…”

“Heckel and Jeckel,” Jackie squealed, pointing, eyes bulging.

“They’re eagles, honey,” said Maryhelen. “The one on the left is Vera and the other John—this is your left side, honey—but we haven’t named the babies yet. We have to get a better look at them first.”

Vera had been the name of her mother who had died five years earlier in a nursing home back in the south side Beverly neighborhood of Chicago where Maryhelen had lived the other 9 months of the year while managing the attendance office at CVS. Her father John had been dead two decades.

Maryhelen had no children, had never married, and the only man I ever heard her speak of was her father, and that with either reverence or fear. Over fifty years ago, her father decided to build this veritable fisherman’s lodge in the famous Wisconsin North Woods. Involved in precinct politics in the regime of the later Mayor Richard Daley I, he was “amused,” she said, when he was told what parts of the plan for his dream home were either not physically possible or against county regulations. It took him about ten days, she said, to figure out how much money to pay to which loggers, Indians, carpenters, and zoning inspectors to get what he wanted.

Marianne was suspicious about this woman whose stories and gossip I brought home each day, this “Mary Helen,” until I explained she was an older woman—“mature” was the word I used— who ran the Attendance Office and kept me from going crazy the first year of school.

But what really connected the two of us were our feelings for this place, the Chequamegon National Forest. As impossible as it is to explain, it is like no other. Surely, there are glacial lakes in other parts of the country where muskellunge, freshwater cousins of the barracuda, prey on anything that moves. And there are other forests with tea colored rivers that snake along side old logging roads—roads traversed these days by neighbors who share coffee on mornings of 30 below zero and converse in level tones about winter projects like replacing birdfeeders demolished by black bears, or pets slain by horned owls. Nor is this the only woodland where Ojibwa people still harvest wild rice in September, camp out in the maple “sugar bush” in March, and spear walleye pike on cold starry nights in April.

But on a certain summer morning when I leave Moose Café in Hayward, and drive ten minutes north of the town and the tourists, I can tiptoe to the edge of the Namekagon River to spy on the brook trout rising for breakfast. In pulse-slowing solitude, listening to the two-note plaint of a chickadee hidden in a spruce, and thinking how the river’s bronze skin and seaweed smell are likely little changed from a century ago when it floated white pine logs to the Hines mill—it’s times like these when I’m certain there is no other land like up here.

It was a serendipitous accident that the lady from work had a summer home right in the heart of it. She had understood its singularity long before I ever arrived. So that when we saw each other at school, in the midst of the youthful turmoil, the occasional bloodletting, and the concrete and metal concerns of the daily urban winter, there was an unspoken understanding between us. We shared a secret that transcended it all.

The first serious writing I had ever done was about this place. And the first reader I trusted to read it was Maryhelen.

“Your story, David, I thought it was just the swellest thing,” she had said of my first publication

I had received three complimentary copies and $50 from Carolina Sportsman for “Northwoods Incident.” I kept a copy, my wife got a copy, and the last went to Maryhelen. The story was about her country, and the thought of her reaction caused many a pre-emptive revision. She was my lie detector and didn’t even know it

*********

“It was just starting to get dark,” said Maryhelen.

That same summer, we were all seated at a table in Club 77, a Wisconsin supper “club” on State Highway 77, its back to the Chequamegon National Forest. The children knelt on their chairs, watching hummingbirds vie for position at the feeder hanging outside their window.

“Hear the birds, Daddy?” said Jackie.

“Those aren’t the birds you’re hearing, honey,” said Maryhelen. “Those are the peepers.”

“Peepers?” laughed Jackie.

“Frogs,” said Maryhelen. “Back in the bog singing away. Peep, peep, peep, looking for love.”

“Frogs say ‘croak, croak,’” said Jackie.

“These are itty bitty frogs, barely an inch long,” said Maryhelen. “They make a peeping sound, trying to find another peeper to marry. The gals pick out a husband who sounds like her type, and they live happily ever after.”

“Do you have a husband, Aunt Maryhelen?”

“No, honey. I’m an old maid. A very old maid.”

“So get on with this fishing story,” I said.

“Do you have big children?” said Jackie.

“I have lots and lots,” she said, holding out her arms to Jackie, who succumbed, dunking under Maryhelen’s embrace.

“Nighttime,” said Maryhelen, “Daddy used to go out each night, seven o’clock till dark, without fail. Never went out during the day. And he had his spots. Kurt Johnson from across the bay said Daddy took all those secrets with him—if only he had written them down.”

“So this night you went out with him?”

“I’d a gone out with him every night if my mother let me, but she didn’t. So it was real treat, you see.”

“Did you ever get a muskie?”

She bunched up her lips, pointing them at me, as though this question were superfluous.

“Oh, sure. But not this night. All evening we don’t see a thing. And then we were about to go in, and Daddy is passing by the boathouse in Richardson’s Bay, and he says, ‘Peaches, let’s just toss one back there.’”

“He had a feeling,” I said.

“Like that, yes. So he takes this rod and already had this big black wooden thing on it, I forget what it’s called, a wobbler or creeper or some damn thing, and he sails it in the air, and you can hear the line buzz off the spool of his reel, and the splash right in front of the boathouse door.”

She leaned forward in the chair as though she needed to be ready to restrain me after giving me the next piece of information.

“I swear to God, what happened next sounded like a horse was out there in the water,” she said. “And I know, because the rodeo’s here every August. Sometimes they cool off the horses down by the boat launch.”

“You mean the fish sounded like a horse.”

“Fish?” she frowned, to indicate that the single syllable word was clearly an understatement. “I tell you, first there’s the plop when the lure hits the water. Then all holy hell breaks loose when that muskie leapt out and took it. Like a horse plowing through the waves.”

“You knew it was a muskie.”

“We didn’t see it right away. I could barely see the hand in front of my face that night. But Daddy says, ‘Hang on, Peaches. I think it’s Old Ironsides.’”

“He knew the fish?”

“Oh, yes. Muskie are territorial. One takes over a whole bay and stays there for a summer. Nobody can catch him, and then the same fish may be back the next summer. This one Daddy called Old Ironsides because the first time it rolled on one of his lures, its flanks looked silver in the sun.

“Do you kids want dessert?” she said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We have cookies in the car.”

“But I thought while we’re talking they could have…”

“Don’t say it,” I pleaded. “They’re fine, knock on wood, just watching the hummingbirds.”

A gray one with red markings on its neck was hovering like a helicopter on the outer edge of the feeder. We stared and listened to the thrum of its invisibly fluttering wings. It dipped its beak into one of three holes, drew it out, hovered, dipped—directed by some internal rhythm that I thought I could feel. The bird veered away.

“Didn’t get in till eleven o’clock that night,” said Maryhelen. “Fifty-one inches, and Daddy thought 40 pounds, give or take an ounce.”

“What did you do with it? Did he have it mounted?”

“Never even took it out of the water. Daddy says it was a female and we had no business lifting it out of the lake. He measured it in the water using the oar, made a mark with his knife. Then he unhooked it right there and I remember waiting and waiting, what seemed like forever, while it floated kind of sideways in the water, until it got its breath and swam away. It flicked its tail and was gone, like flicking your hand in the bathtub water,” and she made a wavy motion with her hand. Jackie imitated the gesture with her own hand, and then again. Janet cupped hers to try, but when she saw everyone watching her, she thrust her hand between her knees and put her forehead against the table.

“Do you still have the lure?”

“Oh, it’s down there, all right, in the basement with everything else just the way Daddy left it.”

The kids were watching another hummingbird, this one gray with no red marking. In and out of the feeder with its beak, like a miniature oil rig. Maryhelen was watching the kids watch the bird.

“That fish pulled us, me and Daddy and that boat, nearly out of Richardson’s Bay. It was trying to get back home. Back into deep water. He really knew those fish. He loved that fish.”

*********

Chicago Vocational High School (CVS), though not legendary, was not unknown. A sprawling campus complete with an airplane hangar, CVS was used as a training facility by the Navy during World War II. It had since graduated thousands of southeast side Chicagoans, somewhat typified by alumni “Moose Cholak,” of professional wrestling notoriety, and Dick Butkus, Chicago Bear hall of famer and actor. Maryhelen had known both “boys” in the nineteen-fifties.

Her tenure continued through the racial turnover and tension in the sixties, the drug proliferation and dwindling test scores in the seventies, and the gang violence in the eighties. CVS continued to turn out individual success stories (Keena Turner, Bernie Mac, Chris Zorich, Juwann Howard), but the surviving faculty and staff were weary and wary.

The spatial dynamics of the faculty lunchroom at CVS were likely the same as at any manufacturing plant or, perhaps, a municipal prison, with employees staking out one of the 8 place settings at any of the twelve tables according to comfort, interest, and commonality, and eventually settling in so that there was little movement or changing among and between tables by the middle of October. The dynamic also included the natural evolution of table “heads,” those who commanded attention and loyalty for whatever charismatic components in their persons, inexplicable or otherwise.

Alexander Amison (some characters’ names have been changed), a six foot three, 350 pound shop instructor with a Rollie Fingers moustache could have headed the first table by the door for his sheer presence alone; but his baritone voice, his caustic wit, and his power to confer auto mechanical favors on privileged faculty members probably made him rogue king—at least when the principal was out for the day.

Maryhelen Ryan was at the head of Table 3, which should not have been remarkable in consideration of her own voice, which, when projected with purpose, could slice through even Amison’s thunder over at the door. Maryhelen was the only table leader who was not a teacher or administrator.

I arrived late to lunch on a rainy October Monday, in the middle of some banter between Tables 1 and 3. Jessica, also a clerk and in charge of payroll, was seated at Maryhelen’s table. She often inquired about Maryhelen’s house in the northwoods, less out of interest than in order to have a starting point for her travel “epics” about Door County and the Dells, Wisconsin tourist meccas just 3 or 4 hours from Chicago. Maryhelen would glance at me during Jessica’s enraptured description of a Door County fish boil, a sympathetic “it’s not the same” signal in her eyes.

Jessica also routinely used the lunch period to air her latest grievances against the school, the students, the Midwest weather gods, and Maryhelen was one of the few who practiced patience with her. This morning Jessica had reported indignantly that she stood at the bus stop in the rain that morning, watching several teachers whisk by in their cars, including Alexander Amison.

“Well, honey, maybe he didn’t see you,” said Maryhelen.

“I watched his blue Cadillac cruising down Jeffery Avenue, and Amison looked right at me standing there in the rain. Didn’t even slow down.”

“Al,” Maryhelen called. Not a shout. A nasal, crow-like imprecation piercing through the din. Amison shot back a look, picked up his fork, and stabbed a wedge of school issue oatmeal-meatloaf.

“Why didn’t you pick up Jessica this morning? You roared right by her in the rain.”

The entire room quieted to hear his response, which was not immediately forthcoming. Amison was chewing, his eyes downcast. But then he raised his buffalo-like head.

“I didn’t have room in my trunk.”

Maryhelen’s eyes bugged out for one second, and then she turned and dropped her head, convulsing in laughter. The whole room erupted’

“Shame on you,” said Maryhelen. She was trying to recover for Jessica’s sake, her cheeks puffed out to compress another laugh.

“You shouldn’t fool with the woman who handles your paycheck, Al,” she said, at least allowing Jessica to glare at him.

***

Are you lost?” asked Marianne.

I shouldn’t have been. It was the second of many summers we’d visit the big house on Round Lake. This was Marianne’s first time.

“No.”

“Weren’t we down this road before?”

“Maryhelen said take Schoolhouse Road.”

“To where?”

“That was the last thing she said. ‘ Take Schoolhouse Road and you can’t miss it.’”

“David, we’ve been back and forth on this road three times now. Do you have her phone number?”

“I’m not lost.”

“Daddy got lost at Jewel, Momma,” said Jackie.

“We seem lost now,” said Marianne.

“No, we are not. You can’t be lost when you’re in the country.”

“How so?”

“Because, when you’re in Chicago, you know you’re lost when the street names are not the right ones. In the country, if you’re not where you are supposed to be yet, there are no named places, so you are no place else. No wrong place.”

I wrenched the wheel to pull over and stopped.

“See? You have to be someplace else in order to be lost.”

I walked to a phone booth in front of a service station. There were three Ryans in the Sawyer County Wisconsin telephone directory, and none was Maryhelen. One in Winter, another in Spooner, and “John Ryan” was listed for Hayward.

“Her father’s dead. Been dead for ten years,” I said, back in the car.

“Did you get directions?”

“Yes, Maryhelen is home, said we didn’t go far enough north.”

I turned the car back around for a 4 th and final run down Schoolhouse Road. It curved slightly to the left and into the woods and crunched onto gravel, and I kept going till I could smell water, and then we saw Round Lake shimmering like a mirror turned face-up to the sky.

The road turned sharply to the left and there it loomed, the big white house. A bastion, really. Where Schoolhouse Road ended and Round Lake began, an impregnable fort is what John Ryan must have had in mind. Anchored to tree stumps on the edge of the forest ridge that plummeted sharply 60 or 70 feet down to the water’s edge, the house was so steeply elevated that a winding cedar stairway was required for access to the dock and the beach. I backed up the car, angling into the dirt driveway. I got out of the car. The curtained attic window high at the peak made me think of Rapunzel.

“What about her father, now?” asked Marianne.

“He’s dead.”

“So you said. But why did you tell me that?”

“Her phone is still listed in his name.”

Maryhelen seemed energized, probably because Marianne was with me. The synchronous flow of women’s conversation—no effort at asking and replying in the way you have to tread water to sustain dialogue with a man.

The names that Maryhelen dropped in her story of her trip to Duluth, or about her letters from Chicago, or of visitors from last week—the people she was always speaking of as if I already knew them but could never remember, let alone know their connection to her—all of these Marianne sorted out with ease.

“So Elaine is like your nephew’s wife,” said Marianne.

“Yes,” Maryhelen hesitates. “Pete.”

“If they were married,” Marianne laughed.

“It’ll never happen.”

“Because she’s Ojibwa?”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that would bother him or anybody else in the family. But Pete’s mother is very religious.”

“Elaine’s not Catholic.”

“Exactly. Beautiful girl. Pete’s crazy about her. I’m crazy about her. But it’ll never happen.”

It got so that I wouldn’t visit Maryhelen without my wife. Demoted to chauffeur, I would sit on one of the maple rockers on the breezy porch, sipping from a bottle of Leinenkugel’s beer that Maryhelen took to keeping cold for guests, keeping an ear open for the girls down at the lake’s edge. With Maryhelen’s binoculars, I’d snoop on the fishermen and bathers and the eagles, while enjoying Marianne’s conversation with Maryhelen, more than I had my own.

“Did I ever tell you about the Hansen boy?” she said.

She had not.

She settled back in the rocker to collect her thoughts, it seemed. We could hear the girls below at the beach, their voices like a faraway piano.

“I was eighteen,” said Maryhelen. “No, wait, nineteen. Never owned a dress.”

Now she hunched forward, a space between her and the dark red maple chair back. Marianne and I sat across from her by the screen, but sideways, so that we could see her and the children. Maryhelen’s head was slightly declined, her eyes peering from the upper arcs of her sclera, as if she were speaking from some secret place below.

“Bobby Hansen’s boy lived across the lake in the summer. James. Bobby Hansen owned a road construction crew in the city. Used to throw the biggest parties,” and here she laughed, rolled her eyes.

“He was a drinker,” she continued. “But we were crazy about him. Could listen to him all night long. And we did.” She resumed rocking, sitting back, closing her eyes. I imagined she was seeing a July night in the nineteen forties on what was a wilderness lake, when the meager few residents would gather with that rare closeness and desperate celebration peculiar to islands or remote outposts. Midnight swims, citronella torches, highball glasses.

“James was a year older,” she said. “No, two years older. Because he was going away to school the next September. He took me fishing once, and, of course, I out fished him. Daddy out-fished everyone on the lake. I out-fished everyone but Daddy.”

“He wasn’t too happy, I’ll bet,” I said.

She seemed not to have heard me.

“James, I mean,” I said. “Not liking it that you out-fished him.”

“Never said a word,” she said. “Quietest boy there was. But handsome. He looked like… who is that fellow on the TV show, used to be a singer on the show?”

“Danny Thomas?” said Marianne.

“No. Handsomer.”

“Perry Como?” I said.

“Why, no. A TV show. A story.”

“Andy Griffith?” said Marianne.

“That’s the one,” said Maryhelen.

She related how the usually taciturn James had asked her out, and she had said yes, thinking he meant for some nighttime largemouth bass fishing since it was June and a full moon; but it turned out he meant to the dance at the bowling alley in Hayward. He would come for her in his Daddy’s car, a brand new black Packard, and when she understood it was to be a real date, she was afraid.

“Absolutely petrified. Didn’t have a dress. Never owned one. Had to borrow one from Celia.”

I didn’t know who Celia was, either, though I saw Marianne nod and turn back to the lakeshore. It turned out Celia was an older cousin spending a week at the lake house.

“I look awful, Celia,” Maryhelen said, looking toward the door as if Celia were on the porch that moment. “Celia says, ’You look different. You’re just not used to it. You look like a girl.’ And she pulls out the most gorgeous necklace, a little red stone encased in silver on it—it wasn’t a real ruby, but it was lovely—and she gives it to me to wear. Says she was waiting for when she could finally give me something besides a knife or a fishing reel.

“So I’m upstairs, all dressed, and it’s past 8 o’clock. I’m getting antsy. It’s 9. It’s 9:30. I’m a wreck. I take off the dress, wash my face. Maybe he mixed up the time, Celia said. I put the dress back on, put on lipstick—imagine me with lipstick? Finally, Celia and I go downstairs and Daddy’s sitting in the chair listening to the ballgame on the radio. I go back upstairs—didn’t know whether to cry or to laugh. No James. And I never saw him again.”

She sat back in the chair, her face in shadow. I waited for Marianne to say something.

“Fifty years later,” Maryhelen finally said slowly, “and this is after Daddy died, my mother tells me the truth. James showed up, all right. In his daddy’s car. All dressed in a dark blue suit. Even had flowers. And she tells me Daddy sent him away.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?” she said, back to rocking. “I stayed dressed up waiting till eleven o’clock, and he never says a word.”

She turned to look at us level eyed. No tears. But she grimaced as though she had back pain.

“I just wish I had something from him so I can remember, you know? Maybe the flowers, or a picture, or just the sound of his voice in my head. The only thing that comes to me is Bob Elson on the radio calling balls and strikes.”

Here she smiled, and with her hand waved away the memory as though it were cigar smoke.

“Would you just look at that Jackie. Your kids are gorgeous. They’re playing so swell down there.”

Our first full summer in the northwoods was two years later. It was June, a 70 degree humid day. No breeze, and the deer flies were pouncing.

When Maryhelen’s white Monaco finally crawled down the gravel drive, I thought how things had come full circle. Previously, we had been the renters and tourists, envying and visiting Maryhelen in her mansion on Big Round Lake. I had built a cottage on a small lake 40 miles east, which Maryhelen was driving out to see. Retired now, she lived in an apartment in town ten months of the year to be closer to the hospital where she had to check in sometimes for two or three days because of her asthma, and because the Round Lake house was too much to maintain in the cold season. When I offered on the phone that I would pick her up and take her back to town after, she told me she may be old and had to take her “S.C.U.B.A.” tank wherever she went, but she was no invalid.

“This is really something,” she said, as she exited the car and inspected the treetops. Her statement was open to interpretation. Compared to Round Lake’s old white pines, whose canopy prevented undergrowth, our second growth woods of aspen, birch and maple were lean and, therefore, choked at the ankles with goldthread, starflowers, and other weeds which I hadn’t yet been able to clean up since I was working furiously to finish the house’s inside.

“Do you want to see the lake?” I said.

“Oh, God, yes, honey, but maybe later when these damned bugs aren’t so bad?”

The cottage was 20’ x 40’, about as large a structure and roof span I was able to manage as a lone amateur carpenter. It was about the size of Maryhelen’s Round Lake house’s dining room, except that it was divided into two baths, a kitchen, living room, and a sleeping loft. I had not thought of it as miniature until this moment as we stood with our first guest just inside the door. There were the five of us: Marianne and I and Maryhelen standing abreast in front of the homemade maple plank door, and the two girls, who raced directly to the ladder to invite Maryhelen aloft.

“Want to see, Maryhelen?” said Jackie, swinging around the base of the ladder.

“Isn’t that swell?” said Maryhelen. “Why don’t you go up honey and I’ll wave to you from down here,” which must have seemed just as good an idea to Jackie who started climbing immediately, Janet scrambling up after.

Maryhelen kept shaking her head as I showed her the kitchen, the homemade cabinets, the bathroom, the double deck washer and dryer, the screened in porch—all the walls covered in “popple,” the local term for quaking aspen, trees harvested and then planed at the Felser Mill several miles away. I assumed that her bewilderment was at all the work I had done.

But as she stood on the loft ladder’s first step to peek at Janet and Jackie’s mattresses laid out on the three quarter inch plywood loft floor, it struck me how like a rough dollhouse this must appear to the woman whose father had hired three dozen Ojibwa men, and a barge, just to get the finished planking to his building site.

That same summer, after Marianne had already left for the city, the girls and I took a last drive to Round Lake.

Twilight. Pillows of vapor lazed in the farm fields off of County Highway A. I rounded a left hand curve and reflexively braked at an undulation of color in the roadside weeds.

“Deer,” said Jackie.

A lone doe stood hoof high in water in the ditch, staring back at us. The headlights were on, but they glowed weakly in the dusk. I stopped the car, and the animal was a statue, watching us from just a few feet away. Kneeling by the window, Janet inhaled, and I wondered if she could smell the animal. All I could pick up was a hay-like scent from the ditch, mixed with cool air.

The deer flicked its tail and lifted into the woods, but then it stopped behind the first row of trees, again staring back. Maybe it wanted us to chase. To play. Maybe it was lonely. This must be why they were so easy to kill. The engine idled in the middle of the empty highway. The deer remained frozen. We drove on.

Maryhelen called to us to walk through the door, her voice small from the front porch. It was dark in the house, the only beacon being the remaining skylight illuminating the doorway to the front porch.

From her rocking chair in the center of the porch, Maryhelen waved the girls over but continued to stare straight ahead.

“Firecrackers,” cried Janet.

“Fireflies,” Jackie corrected.

Kept open just through July and August, the big house was overgrown with brush between the porch and the lake, which made a more fertile breeding space for a blinking ballet of fireflies.

“Well, she got the “fire” part,” said Maryhelen, squeezing Janet who was old enough now that tolerance of grownup affection replaced embarrassment. “I like to watch them with all the lights off. Isn’t that the swellest thing, ladies?”

“And gentleman?” said Janet.

“Of course,” said Maryhelen.

“Can we get some, Daddy?”

“Sure, but you have to put on some mosquito repellent.”

“We need a jar.”

“Oh, no, you don’t want to do that, baby,” said Maryhelen.

“We’ll put holes in the lid,” offered Janet. She was looking from me to Maryhelen for affirmation, permission.

“Oh, yes, honey, but they live for only two weeks,” said Maryhelen. “Two weeks to find the right partner and live an entire life. You don’t want to keep them in a jar all night. One night is like years to them. Like jail, sweetheart.”

“Do they cry in jail?”

“Yes, but too softy for us to hear.”

“So we can’t catch them?”

“Sure, honey, you can catch them. Let them go, though. That’s more fun anyway because you get to see them twinkle again. The trick is to catch them without squeezing them, like a retriever dog.”

Janet liked this idea and started yapping like a hound.

“How about first we go in the kitchen and get one of those giant oatmeal cookies, and then we’ll go out front and you’ll see that tossing them back into the sky is way more fun.”

Flicking on a small fluorescent light above the sink, Maryhelen made great ceremony out of dispensing the snacks, making the three of us line up, and then doling out the 6 inch diameter cookies, warm and soft from the bowl on the counter.

“Did you thank Maryhelen for those cookies?” I said, but they were running and already clattering out the screen door

“Oh, let them go—ain’t they swell?” Maryhelen said, gazing after them with such sincere amazement that I had to turn and see them myself.

The girls fell asleep on the way back to the cabin. Fireflies floated over the roadside ditches, and I wondered if Maryhelen were still on the porch, the insects’ green light flickering in the mirrors of her eyes. The house dark and cavernous behind her.

She died the following winter. Her sister called to tell me a couple of weeks later. She said that the funeral took place in Hayward, and that when going through Maryhelen’s things afterwards, she had found a file Maryhelen kept with everything I had written over the years. That’s when she dug up my phone number.

When summer came, on our return drive to the north woods, we were pretty quiet after crossing into Sawyer County. The Namekagon River slithered along side Route 70, sparkling in the late afternoon sun. It twisted north, ducking under a bridge and disappearing into the trees.

That evening, as I rowed across our bay on the lake, a bald eagle floated, banked, then landed in the highest white pine at the end of a promontory. The tree bough bent beneath the bird’s weight, springing slowly up and down. I held the oars steady for a moment and thought about Maryhelen, about how her life was like a promise made to this place, and a solace in the eagles and bears and one-hundred foot pines and fireflies, and maybe a waiting for something else. Don’t we all wait for something else?

A dragonfly descended, landing about halfway down the right oar. Water drops fell from the hanging oar, making circles on the lake’s black skin. The dragon fly flexed its iridescent blue wings but stayed put. Darkness was coming, and I was on the wrong end of the bay; but I held the oar still.