The Pond Nine Fathers Flooded

The nine men in the alley

I came out the back door in Walt’s coat, and the cold took the breath out of me.

The men heard the door and stood up straight, all nine of them, the way men do when the lady of the house comes out and they are not sure if they are in trouble.

I knew some of their faces and not their names. They were young, most of them in their thirties, fathers from the three or four blocks around us. I had watched some of them grow up skating on that very ice, and now they had kids of their own.

Danny Kessler had the hose. He is a big soft-spoken man who drives for the co-op, and he had been a boy on Walt’s pond himself, maybe twenty-five years back. He turned the water off when he saw me and stood there holding the dripping end like a kid caught at something.

“Mrs. Byrne,” he said. “We should have asked. We just, the kids have been asking about it, and we couldn’t stand the thought of them not having it this year. Not after everything.”

Nobody said the word Walt. They did not have to.

I looked at the flat. In the truck light I could see what they had done. They had shoveled the snow off clean, which was right. But they had flooded it all wrong, two inches at a gulp, swinging the hose, and it had frozen in those white ridges I knew would crack by February and dump some child through to the mud.

I could have thanked them and sent them home. Part of me wanted to, so I could go back inside and shut the window on it again.

Instead I heard myself say, “You’re going to crack it doing that.”

Danny looked at the hose like it had betrayed him.

“Shut it off,” I said. “All the way. Let me show you how he did it, or you’ll have nothing but a skinned knee factory out here.”

And something turned over in me when I said he. It was the first time in three months I had talked about Walt in front of anybody without my throat closing. Out there in the cold, with a job to do, I could say he.