“Let’s go get some water,” said the man with a coarse salt-and-pepper beard, grabbing his parka from a hook on the wall behind the wood stove.
“Can’t we do it tomorrow morning when it’s light outside?” replied the son, looking up from the book he was reading and then looking out the frosted window. “It’s pitch black out there.”
“No. Let’s do it now. Grab your coat.”
Josey marked the page he was reading and scooted his chair out from beneath the table. He placed the book, a collection of stories by Jack London, on top of a well-used edition of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.
To confront the forty-below-zero night, both men put on insulated boots and warm gear before stepping into the cold. The temperature outside was so low that no one else was on the lake. The few cabins along the edge were dark and empty and buried beneath a mantle of snow, cold and clean. The closest other person was thirty miles downriver.
“Grab the jugs,” commanded the father in a tone long practiced in giving orders. Then he added, “You think you’re better than me ‘cause you read all that shit?”
“I never said that,” replied Josey, unable to look his father in the eye. “I just like to read, that’s all.”
The father spat on the wood stove. The spittle hissed like a snake.
“That shit won’t make you a man.”
Josey grabbed the two plastic five-gallon jugs from beside the sink, along with a filling pot he grasped in one crowded hand, and stepped onto the porch.
“Shut the door, and make sure you close it tight this time,” snapped the father, pulling his hat over his ears.
In the middle of winter, the lake was frozen solid. The only part that was open was an area the size of a swimming pool a hundred yards from shore where warm water bubbled up from a natural spring at the bottom of the lake. Ice fog rose from the spot whenever, as now, it was very cold. Josey followed his father across the ice through the darkness. The wind-swept surface of the lake shone eerily from the full moon. Josey hated fetching water. The thin ice around the edge of the open water terrified him.
“Why can’t we just melt snow on the stove?” he always asked his father when ordered to shuffle out the last remaining feet to the edge, which was as thin as a knife blade.
“Because it takes too long to make even a little water. Shut up and do as you’re told.”
Josey stepped toward the hole in the lake, sliding one foot after the other ahead, testing the ice cautiously. It never escaped his mind how he would weigh eighty pounds more after the two containers were filled with water. Sometimes he poured them less than full, to keep his weight down. But his father always caught on to what he was doing.
“Fill them all the way!” his father would demand from his safe distance where the ice was thick enough to support a car or a truck. “We didn’t come all the way out here to fill those damn jugs halfway.”
Josey held his breath the last few steps, as if doing so made him lighter. He wondered if birds did the same thing before taking flight, as if they didn’t entirely believe the air would support them. The young man knelt and filled the first can with the old cooking pot, which was blackened from years of use over campfires. It took twenty dips of the pot to fill the blue plastic container. The ice beneath him groaned from the extra forty pounds. Josey heard it crack around him. He stood up and started away from the edge.
“Where the hell are you going?” his father complained.
“The ice cracked. It’s not safe.”
“It’ll hold. Get back there!” his father demanded in a tone that left no room for discussion.
“But, Dad, the ice here is really . . .”
“Quit cry-babying,” interrupted the father sternly. “Act like a man, goddamn it.”
The father was always saying things like that to his son, ever since he was a little boy. Josey wasn’t like his father. He was different. He didn’t want the same things his father had wanted when he was a young man. He wasn’t as tough as his father. He wasn’t as practical. He listened to the wrong kind of music. He read too many books. His hair was a different color or it was too long. There was always something between them, like a perilous stretch of unfrozen river. Despite their differences, Josey tried to make his father proud. He tried and tried, and he always failed to measure up to his father’s ideal.
And his love.
Josey looked at the two blue jugs perched at the edge of the open water. He thought about the thin ice and the extreme cold and the frigid water, only a degree or two above freezing. His head and shoulders slumped, and he breathed an audible sigh.
“For chrissake! Do I have to do everything myself?” the man grumbled as he took a step forward in a gesture as if he would do it himself.
“I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”
Josey shuffled back to the edge with his arms extended to the side, the way nervous people always walk on ice. As he had done before, he knelt and dipped the black aluminum pot into the lake twenty times to fill the blue container. Twenty times. No more, no less, unless he spilled some. Even though Josey pushed both jugs backwards onto the thicker ice, as he stood and then lifted both jugs, one in each hand, the ice gave way with a terrible crack beneath him, and he plunged into the water. For several minutes Josey tried to pull himself onto the ice, calling to his father for help all the while. But the thin edge always broke off under his weight and he sank beneath the water.
His sodden parka and heavy winter boots didn’t help matters.
Josey tried to grab onto the plastic jugs barely floating in the ice-strewn water, but filled as they were they offered no buoyancy. His core temperature plummeted with every passing moment, as the entire lake—three miles long and a hundred feet deep in places—proceeded, patiently, to raise its temperature by the warmth of a single man. Josey’s strength waned until he could do nothing but hold his head above the water at the edge of the ice, his breathing reduced to a pant.
No longer shivering, and no longer able to speak or to call out for help, Josey looked up at the starry sky and the northern lights high above, green and shimmering and silent. From a safe distance, he saw his father light a cigar. The flash of the match illuminated the grizzled man’s face and Josey saw the stern countenance—stoic and unmoved.
Watching.
Waiting.
For the first time, Josey understood what separated him from his father. It wasn’t a gulf of indifference, as he had always thought.
It was hate.
But why? he wondered, as he struggled ever more feebly to grip the ice. But there was no time left to wonder about that. Soon there would be no more time for anything.
The father watched his son for a little while longer, and then he turned and walked back to the cabin with yellow light glowing though frosted panes. Once inside, he tossed the books into the wood stove and warmed his hands over the rising flames.
____________________________
John Smelcer is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Songs From an Outcast, Tracks, and Raven Speaks. His short story collection, Alaskan, edited in part by J.D. Salinger, received a gold medal in the 2011 eLit Book Awards as the best short story collection in the nation. His novel, The Trap, received the James Jones Prize for a First Novel and was named a Notable Book by the New York Public Library and the American Library Association. His stories, poems, interviews and essays appear in over 400 periodicals. Learn more about the author at his website.
See John Smelcer’s poems, published in Asymptote‘s January 2012 issue, here.