Cairn

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more walleye than they bothered to count. These were sportsmen, Don reminded himself, but the fish didn’t know that. Their bait looked same enough. This lake, a hundred miles north of Nowhere, Ontario, had no roads, service, or even plumbing—nothing but water, wood, and fish. If men weren’t equal here, equality anywhere was a joke.

They floated alone in a murky bay. Jigging, their lines were taut with sparkle beetles and curly tails. Nothing was biting. They were the first on the lake, and if need be, they’d be the last to come in, even under thunderheads. Don’s wife would not approve, but this wasn’t her world. This land was untouched, primordial. When Hannibal marched on Rome, this land looked no different. This was Nature as it should be—a newborn. The wind picked up, snapping at his hood.

The boat shifted. His son squirmed in his seat. Bo was an eighth grader already, scrawny and still afraid to unhook the fish he somehow caught. Don knew how important this week was. Bo needed something special, like a good look at something majestic or maybe a long crawl through adversity. He had bailed on his first campout—which was in the backyard—but Don had higher hopes for this trip. There was no easy way out here, only the floatplane, an aluminum tube tossing around in the clouds for hours. This was the real deal. A man had died here a month ago, slipped on some rocks, and hemorrhaged. It doesn’t get more real than that.

“Dad, I saw lightning.”

Don looked. Gray clouds rolled along. The wind, barely sharp, was hollow and silent. “It’s fine,” he said. It was a thirty-minute drive. They would stay and maybe catch a lunker to bring in for the others. Those fishermen, hard and wise, wouldn’t be going in yet. They’d sit through the rain no problem, but they’d hear Don and Bo driving in, privately judging them as they’d continue to catch and string their walleye.

“I didn’t bring my rain pants,” Bo whined.

“Whose fault is that?”

“I’m not sitting in the rain just to keep catching zero fish.”

“Shut up,” Don snapped. Bo turned to the water. The wind moved between them, rattling the trees. Don didn’t like shouting, but it had its place. It was certainly better than not caring at all or giving in to Bo’s every whim. No, his patience had its limits. But, he was still more patient than his father had been with him. Don’s old man was tough, raised in a different time. He belittled him for every small failure. Coward, prissy, nancy, runt, he had called Don everything. Just imagine what he’d call Bo, gripping the boy’s neck or wrist in rage whenever he was running behind. No, Don needed work, but he was doing well.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Bo said.

“Go off the side.”

Bo stood on the thwart, rocking with the waves. He tilted and swayed for several minutes before sitting back down. “I can’t, it’s rocking too much. I’m afraid I’ll fall in.”

“I guess it’s not that pertinent,” Don said.

“Just park it somewhere.”

Park it. Don scoffed and continued to jig. He thought more of his father as the silent gray churned above them. He remembered how his dad would drag him to the truck to get feed, his cheeks red and stinging. Or how he’d hate hearing the front door burst open, knowing he had come home. He remembered his father’s funeral, bright and cold in the heart of winter, his eyes stinging from the wind.

Bo was silent, fixed on some other place. Don reeled in and started the motor.

The boat glided on the water before scraping against the flat rock of a wooded island. Bo stumbled out and rushed to the trees as waves swept along the shore. On the other side of the boat, by a heap of moss, Don saw a small stack of stones. Gray and fixed, they looked like a child’s project. Bo returned from the trees and approached the pile, leaning down to pluck off the top.

“Don’t,” Don broke out. The rocks were neat, balanced, even reverent. “They might be for the man who died,” he said.

Bo backed away. A heaviness settled there.

Don looked around. The wind tumbled through the dark green tamaracks. They were sharp, pointing up to nothing and swaying like casual fanatics. Those thunderheads, heavy and creased, were above them now. Don felt a third one with them, a stranger he recognized but didn’t know. He stared at the wet rock beneath Bo’s feet, dark with mindless malice. It was time to go.

They left the island, cutting into the tattered lake. Darker, darker dawned the sky. Don thought of the men already inside the cabin, wondering where he and Bo were. He imagined rain filling their rundown Lund, shoring them somewhere remote and overgrown.

The wind and whirling chop thrashed against them. They braced and moved against it until they came across red cliff faces. Don sped back the way they came, passing through a narrow strait. The wind was somewhere above them, the waters calm. Bo deflated into his raincoat, covering his shivering legs.

The going was slow through tight corners and narrow gaps. Don’s mind wandered and he thought of the island. A video played in his head of a boot slipping up, followed by a thud and swift crack of bone. Another fisherman would’ve been there, twisting his head at the sound. After a single, hanging moment, he’d call and wait for some suggestion that the man was embarrassed and sore but fine. But he’d hear nothing. Maybe a soft, rattling whimper. He’d rush over, holler, pat his face, and jolt his coat, watching a world end. It could’ve been his friend, a brother, even his son leaking through his fingers.

Don thought of what his own father would have done if he had fallen. He remembered his sister spraining her ankle, flailing and crying as Dad tenderly opened the screen door to bring her inside. He remembered him old and gray, smiling in his La-Z-Boy as Bo rolled a Hot Wheels car up and down his shinbone. Or him teaching Don to fish at the lake with red buoys an hour out of town, fingertips slowly knotting the line. He wouldn’t have screamed or shaken Don’s body. He would have knelt in the wake, quietly panicking as he wrapped his old arms around the limp body of his boy, the terror of nature driving away his harshness. He would rock him, muttering for his only son to wake up. Please, please, son. Please wake up.

Don drove the boat out of the straits into a larger basin. The wind slammed against them, peeling away his hood. He saw a slight green in the clouds to the south, and a sober terror carved into his gut. It was the sick color that stalked cornfields on childhood evenings when the sirens would blare. They bounced on the waves, floating in the air for long seconds. Bo, light and high on the prow, pitched to the left and right by the boat’s edges. Don wanted to shout at him to hold on tighter but thought of him turning to listen at the wrong moment and going over. He only watched, as though by staring he could hold his son safely in place.

The lake took an age to cross, even as fast as he went. In Don’s mind, an image flickered of a covered figure resting between the seats. How fast that boat would’ve gone, he thought, as the body was returned to the cabin. They would have placed it somewhere while waiting for the plane. Not in the kitchen. Not outside either. In the bunkhouse, on a bed, and under a blanket. It would take the plane an hour to fly in. Then it would leave as those remaining cooked and prepared a quiet dinner. When the outside air was indigo, they’d lay in bed and drift to sleep.

No, not drift. Sink. Hours of a mind floating before a sudden plummet. One by one as night would rise, a darkness deep and ancient would sweep over the arctic waters, encroaching on the cabin, docks, and boats.

In town would be a phone. Calls would be made, names would be said, gasps and wails and huff-huff-huffs. Details would be discussed. Under the sterile lights of a hospital or the yellow glow of a fishing outpost, pens would be clicked and papers signed. What happened on the rocks would become legal and accounted for in the places where streetlamps, corner stores, and highways burned endlessly and night—true night—was not welcome.

But in the dark, that void pool surrounding the lake, there would be no thought or memory but the fading gray. On and on forever as the rolling stone of time continued its slow crush. The blood on the rocks seeping down, down into elder earth, thinning and dissolving and washing away in the black water. No identity but night, patient, hungry, and final, swallowing every last day and fleeting flash of brilliance. The lights of the fishermen would dim until sleep doused the last of their thinking wicks, leaving nothing but reality: raw oblivion, an abyss beyond sight and sound save the eternal lapping of water on rock.

Rain came at last, first as pellets, then as a sheet, smothering the man and his son. Don closed his eyes, swerving the boat. He blinked and covered his face. The lake was breaking apart. Water rushed over the side, seeping ice cold on his legs and hands. The cabin would come up on the left, or maybe it was on the right. It all looked the same. He couldn’t even squint. The puddle in the boat grew.

He had waited too long. His son would have been fine if Don had only left earlier, listened to him sooner. If only he could open his eyes and see. But he saw only the rush, the quick sweep of unthinkable violence destroying everything by simply passing. The boat crumpling on the rocks. A vaulting green flood. Bo’s shadow disappearing under the rabid wake. Don stopped and listened, thinking to receive some signal of instruction from a place outside of rain. In a blossom of thought before the end, all he saw was his father, holding him and kneeling in the wake.

Three shrouded figures stood at the dock as the boat came beside it. One hunched down and whisked away his son. Another took the boat’s ropes while the last held out his hand for Don, guiding him onto the dock. They shambled across the sopping grass, coming toward the cabin. He moved through the group to Bo. Don held the boy’s jacket, making sure his shoulder was underneath, that he was really with them moving to safety. He felt Bo’s small, cold fingers wrap around his own.

They swung the door open and the fishermen dragged them inside, cheering and handing them towels. The barber was frying fish, and a tin of coffee sat on a low flame. The men shed their dripping jackets, patting themselves dry as rain thumped on the roof. The men told of their journeys back, along with other stories as walleye sizzled in the frying oil, and the wind outside screamed.

Don poured himself some coffee. He stood at the window, watching the storm tear the ground and branches apart. Then, he heard his son speaking from the table. The other men fell quiet, listening as Bo retold the story of border agents stopping and searching them as they came into Canada. It was a favorite in their developing canon. The men had agreed it was the van driver’s fault, fumbling over his words, but here was Bo evoking the shifty eyes of the teacher who had been sitting shotgun, which no one else noticed. Now the men were drawn in as he mimicked their scared faces in the holding area, jutted eyebrows and trembling lips. He was pretty good, working the timing like a pro. The men laughed from the gut, raspy cackles like what Don would hear from his dad.

The rain never stopped. All through the night, it rapped on the roof and pelted the windows. Don lay in his sleeping bag. He saw the past, fishermen waking up the morning after the death, unhitching a boat to return to that silent island. Perhaps they’d think of nature as a murderer or as something cold without thought or feeling. Maybe they sat in silence thinking of nothing. All he knew was that they beached the boat as he had done, gathered some stones, and made themselves a cairn. It was a small effigy. To see it would be to know it wasn’t enough. But cairns aren’t meant to be enough. They are meant to be there and that is all.

Like fingers on a keyboard, the rain on the roof drew Don again to the image of his father in the wake. It wouldn’t leave him, sticking to his mind like a dart. It was more real than the ceiling. He saw a creased shirt and runny nose, shriveled hands holding his hair. He built the image piece by piece until he found he missed his father a great deal. Maybe forgiveness is wishing there was more time between us, he thought, and a stone inside him turned into a stream. He slipped under a blanket of sleep as raindrops pattered on the window, the small, powerful things trying desperately to get in.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.