My last summer at the lake (Part 4 of 4)

Jack Benjamin | Sep 09, 2010

Summer fiction by Jack Benjamin
The Conclusion (Part 4 of 4)

October 23, 2013

I'm sitting at my kitchen table, looking out the front window. It is a bright day. The sun is shining through thin cloud cover. A breeze picks up, sending a shower of leaves onto the path in front of the house. It's just after 11.

From this spot, the house has all the appearance of a cabin in the woods, but just out of sight the path drops off. The view out the back window is different. The back of the house sits only 20 feet from the edge of the hill, overlooking a wide valley. At the bottom of the valley, just out of sight, is Bobs Lake.

The house is small, which is good for me. But it was the two views, the hilltop and the wood view, that sold me on it.

My son is walking up the lane, wearing a backpack and carrying a plastic bag with the rest of his stuff. Liam is 20 years old, and he doesn't know what to do with himself. Welcome to the club.

“I parked below,” he says, “I was nervous about touching bottom with Mom's car.”

“Neither of us need that,” I say.

“Don't start,” he says.

Liam's sister is 10 minutes older and better in school. She is a bit driven. She jumped from high school to CEGEP to Université without looking sideways. Complications will come later in life for her.

But Liam started to wander a couple of years into high school. I blamed it on Anne Marie.

“He never chose to move to Montreal,” I told her when she phoned to complain that he wasn't going to school, that he was smoking pot and drinking and what not, that he wasn't coming home until 4:00 or not at all.

“That's a big help,” she said, and hung up.

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand, eight thousand.

The phone rings.

“How can you say that, you bastard? What have you done for anyone? You just sit there and mope in your little town,” she said, or something to that effect.

I hate to admit it, even now, but she was partly right. Liam was 17. He would have done what he would have done no matter where he was. It might have been neither of our faults. There are 17-year-old kids that smoke and drink and don't care about school or their parents just about everywhere.

Now he's 20. He did finish high school, but he hasn't done much since then. He's had a few jobs, but he either quit or was fired after a while.

Meanwhile I've begun to forgive Anne Marie. Not completely, but a bit, maybe as much as I'm going to. I had to sell the house in Verona. I had to find my own place. I had to start teaching somewhere else. I had to do some things. I had to be ready to look my face in the mirror.

Now I think I can.

“Come on in. I made some coffee. Do you want some lunch or something?” I ask.

“I'll have a beer,” he says. I say nothing.

“I think I'm going to Kingston tonight,” he says, pulling out his phone to check his messages.

“Oh, I thought we would visit. I bought some steak.”

“I'll stay for supper first.”

“I want to start right away. I was planning to rent the splitter tomorrow.”

Liam is here to help me cut and stack wood. I bought enough for most of the season, but I took down two pretty large maples and a lot of dead elm for late season wood, and to give me enough for next year as well. I offered Liam some money to come and help cut it all up, and bring it up the hill to the house. I've got an ATV with a wagon to help, and my chainsaw is working, so with his help we should be able to get a fair bit done. As long as he's in a mood to work. I was also hoping for a visit, but I can't push him.

By the time we reach the first maple we are already warm. The tree had been cut in the summer, and I had made a path to it, but the path was pretty rough. I cut brush, while Liam basically drags the ATV down the hill.

“You could have gotten this a bit more together,” he says.

We are both starting to sweat a bit, and I think we are already not liking this whole idea, but I am determined to get this wood cut and up the hill.

We take turns cutting and hauling the cut pieces to the ATV. It's a pretty large tree. When we are cutting up the trunk and the thickest branches, we have to cut from both sides to get through, and it takes both of us to haul the pieces to the wagon. Some of the pieces fill up the wagon.

After a while the path is worn down, and it only takes minutes to drive to the top, unload the wood, and scoot back down. If we're lucky, the next piece is almost ready.

We work like this for quite a while. We start with the trunk of the tree, and we're getting some momentum going when we move on to the smaller branches. We only stop to re-fuel, but even then one of us keeps hauling cut pieces to the top.

Liam is doing most of the cutting now. His 20-year-old back is more supple than mine, but I'm not too old to manoeuvre the wood into the wagon.

We work for hours. I'm getting tired and stiff, and I think Liam is too, but I don't say anything about wanting to take a break and neither does he. I'm feeling pain in my shoulders, in my back, in my chest, but I still have strength to carry wood.

“Oww ... shit,” Liam yells out, and I turn and see blood.

“Are you cut?” I yell, running over, afraid of what I'll see.

The saw drops to the ground and keeps running, and I can see Liam throw his right hand over his left thigh. His face is white.

I reach him as he is pulling his hand from his thigh, releasing a flow of blood. He sits down, and I manage to cut his pant leg off from the bottom. It's bleeding a lot. I grab my lumber jacket from the ground and tie it around his thigh to stop the bleeding. The flow finally slows and we both try to calm down.

“It hurts, but I don't think I hit any veins or anything,” he says.

I'm breathing heavily, and feeling dizzy, and I've got a pain in my chest.

“Shut off the saw,” he says.

We get him to the ATV, and somehow we get him into the wagon.

“Don't bump me off the wagon,” he says, “I'll tell Mom if you do.

I look back at him from the ATV to see a thin, smile coming across his white face. I figure he might be alright. I don't feel so well.

Once inside we get a chance to take a closer look, and while his skin is torn up and the cut is pretty deep, it doesn't reach a bone. The blood flow is held back by keeping up pressure and keeping his leg raised.

I clean the wound, and we bandage it up.

“Should we go to the hospital?” I ask him.

“No, I'll be alright. You got any beer?”

“Ya, I got beer, and scotch too.”

“Good.”

We drink for a while, and then he falls asleep. I sleep, too, only for a few minutes, but I wake up feeling a bit better. Liam is sleeping soundly. Blood has seeped out onto his bandage, but it is drying and turning brown. I have some gauze, and I'll put a better dressing on it when he wakes up.

With nothing more to do, I start up the barbecue on the porch.

“I want mine well done,” Liam calls from inside, “I don't think I want to see any more blood.”

We eat and drink and talk for a couple of hours, without tension. I don't ask him what he plans to do with his life and he doesn't ask me either. By the end of the night, he can put some weight on his leg.

“It's just a flesh wound,” he says.

He passes out on the couch and I throw a blanket over him.

I get up early the next morning. I don't know if Liam will be able to work. If he's ok, and we can get a few hours in, maybe I can show him the trail I've made to the lake. There's even a swimming spot that we can use, maybe not today, but next summer.

I ease the ATV down the trail to the spot where we were working when Liam had his mishap. I fire up the saw and begin to cut up the last of the maple tree.

I'll feel a searing chest pain one day when I'm sawing up some maple. It'll be the last pain I feel.

But this is not that day.

On this day my heart feels rather light.