Lake Effect

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Lake Effect
• William Henry Lewis (bio)

The evening Edward Stokes was sure his wife had left him, he took a longer walk than was customary into the winter woods. Just recently, without ever following such a ritual, he had begun walking stretches of his acreage at least once a day. He had been out of work since late spring and had too much time on his hands. After three years teaching at a boarding school, he found a way to get himself fired when he had had enough of that and walked away from Belle Isle Academy and teaching history. He was sure he would not return to either, and did not much want to return to any work at all. He could take shorthand dictation, offer butler-style service for a twelve-guest table, and was as fluid digging footers with a backhoe as he was negotiating the more esoteric realms of Micro-soft Office Suite. Ten years back, he had been a night-shift janitor, cleaning the seminar rooms he sat in by day as a graduate student. He and Janeece had moved north for him to teach in Upstate New York, but now that he had left that job, and Janeece had left him, he wanted to do little more than drink rum and walk his property. He would cross the near pasture, ranging off-trail, into the spruce-covered hills that cupped the back acres, crest the ridge until he could see the house, and then return. He would find his way back to the road and pass through the barn, taking stock of the cherry logs that needed splitting. The uncut cherry had been delivered that day to the barn entrance, the road-side of the pile dusted with snow, and only a half-face cord left in the mudroom. He would survey from barn to house, checking powerlines for downed branches and the insurgence of ice along the gutters. Sometimes he would inspect nothing at all, but pause on the deck, not yet ready to sit down for supper with Janeece. He would stand in the new dark of evening, holding himself as still as he could for long stretches, certain he could hear the trickle of the backyard spring in the field, even in winter.

Edward first walked just the berm of the road, where more people would see him. Janeece was sure he would be shot by locals who might run into him on his own land. He had bought it, it was his—it's my got-damn land, he would say—but locals walked it like it was theirs. They still trapped and hunted it, the same trails, the same blinds, just as their great-grandfathers, regardless of whose name was on a deed in the county office. Nobody, out here, expects to see folks like us, out here, Janeece would say, worried he might walk up and surprise some hick, drunk on schnapps and poaching deer, and then you wake up dead on your own 'got-damn land.' So, for a time, he walked the extent of his acreage that fronted the byway, shouting high-pitched hellos! to trucks that sped past while he made a show of picking up the trash they tossed. When Ed grew tired of this shuffling act on his own damn land, he turned away from the road. He cut through brush and fallow fields, avoiding the trails he had cut across his eighty acres. He would take hours to wander a quarter mile home. [End Page 144]

The walking didn't start out as a Zen sort of thing. That came from Janeece. She said he was stinking up the place, having taken up his couch-bound residency in the same sweats and hoodie. One night she pulled the TV cord from the wall, said the couch smells like armpit and ass, and she pointed the plug at him, take that stank someplace else, and pointed to the barn, where wood needed splitting. That got him out of the house, but when he got to the barn, he cursed her in the brisk air and walked past the unsplit logs. Ed cut through...