The Pond Nine Fathers Flooded

Nine nights

It took us nine nights.

The second night I had the coffee on before the trucks came.

I do not know exactly why I did it. I think I just could not stand in my kitchen listening to them out there with nothing warm to put in their hands. Walt would have had the coffee on. So I made a big speckled pot of it, the way he did, and I carried the thermos and a stack of foam cups out to the barrel.

The third night I made two pots and a plate of molasses cookies.

By the fourth night word had gotten around the blocks, and it was not just the nine fathers anymore. It was their wives dropping off cocoa. It was a couple of the older men from church who heard what was happening and came to lean on the fence and tell me how many times their own kids had skated there. It was the old neighbor whose skid loader had built the berm back in 1991, in his seventies now, and he stood with me by the barrel and we did not say much and that was fine.

Each night we laid one thin skin of water and quit.

Each night the ice got better. You could watch it happen. The ridges from that first bad flood I had them shave down with the back of a hoe, and then skin by skin the surface came up smooth and dark and clear, until on the eighth night I shined a flashlight on it and you could see the frozen grass blades standing up underneath like something caught in amber.

Danny whistled at that. “I don’t remember it ever being this clear when I was a kid.”

“It was,” I said. “You just weren’t the one making it. Clear is the whole job.”

The sixth night it warmed up to twenty-eight and I made them stop early. Danny wanted to keep going, to get ahead while the men were all there, and I had to put my hand on the hose.

“Twenty-eight is too warm,” I said. “You lay water down tonight, it goes milky, and milky ice is weak ice. Walt would sit on his hands rather than put down a bad coat. Some nights the whole job is knowing when not to.”

He looked at me a second, then he coiled the hose and we all stood around the barrel and drank coffee instead and talked about nothing, and that was a good night too.

Somewhere in those nine nights I learned all their first names and most of their kids’ names. Danny and his boy, who is six. The two brothers from the corner, who between them have five children. A quiet welder who moved onto the block two years ago and whose twin girls had been pressing their faces to our fence every winter, Walt had told me, long before I knew their father’s name.

I started keeping a count, the way you do. Nine fathers. Twenty-one children on the block that I could name. Two pots of coffee a night, sometimes three. One plate of cookies that came back empty every single time. A hundred-foot hose and a fifty-five gallon barrel and two cedar poles Walt set in the ground the year the Berlin Wall came down.

Numbers are a comfort to me. Walt was the same. He could tell you the pond was ninety-one feet on the long side and that it took about four hundred gallons to lay one good coat, and he kept all of it in his head, and now some of it is in mine.

I had lived on that street for forty-six years and known it less well than I came to know it in those nine cold nights at the barrel.

That is the thing I did not expect. I went out to save the ice. The ice was not the thing that got saved.