The Pond Nine Fathers Flooded

Walt’s shed

I went to the shed.

I had not been in the shed since October either, but the shed was different from the window. The shed was tools. Walt’s shed is a church of coffee cans full of bolts, sorted by size, labeled in his square handwriting, and the smell of it steadied me the way the coat did.

I found his wooden snow shovel first.

It is an old-fashioned grain scoop he cut down and reshaped himself, wood worn so smooth over the years that the handle shines like a stair rail in an old house. He liked it better than the aluminum ones because it did not gouge the ice. I carried it out and handed it to Danny.

“Push, don’t chop,” I said. “That gouges. This doesn’t.”

Then I went back for the fire barrel.

The fire barrel is a rusted fifty-five gallon drum with holes punched around the bottom, set on three concrete blocks at the edge of the flat. Walt kept a stack of scrap pine and busted pallets beside it, and on skating nights he lit it so the kids and the parents had somewhere to warm their hands and the little ones had somewhere to cry when they fell.

There was still half a stack of his pine beside it, cut and split by his hands last fall. I had not thought of it. I put my hand on it and had to stand there a minute.

Then I lit the barrel.

And I showed them the water.

“Thin,” I said. “You lay down just a skin, no more than that. Then you walk away. You let the night freeze it. You come back tomorrow and do it again. Six, seven nights. You rush it and it cracks. He always said, thick layers crack, patience freezes clear.”

Danny ran the hose the way I showed him, low and slow, walking it in even strips the way you would paint a floor so you do not back yourself into a corner. The water laid down flat and started to silver over almost at once in that cold.

“Now the berm,” I said, and I walked them along the back fence and showed them the low corner where the water wants to run out, and how Walt had built the dirt up there to hold it.

We laid one thin coat and we quit for the night.

It was the right way to quit. Walt never did more than one coat a night in thirty-two years, and I was not about to let these boys do more on my account.