The Pond Nine Fathers Flooded

Caleb

My grandson Caleb came up from Cedar Falls that last weekend.

Caleb is seven. He is my daughter Lisa’s boy. They live two hours south, and we only ever saw them at Christmas, which meant Caleb had never once seen the pond frozen, because Walt always waited until after Christmas, after the deep cold set in, to flood it.

So Caleb had heard about Grandpa’s pond his whole short life and never set a skate on it.

Lisa called on the Thursday. She had heard from a neighbor what was happening in the backyard, and she asked me, careful, the way my children had all gotten careful with me, if I thought it would be too hard to have them come up.

“Bring his skates,” I said. “The ice will be ready Saturday.”

I heard her go quiet on the line.

“Mom,” she said. “You sound like yourself.”

I had not heard that in my own voice until she said it. I sat down at the kitchen table after we hung up and I cried, but it was a different crying than the fall kind. It was the kind that lets something out instead of holding something down.

They came Saturday afternoon. Caleb had Walt’s old wool cap pulled down over his ears, a thing Lisa had kept, and his skates were secondhand and a size too big with two pairs of socks. He stood at the edge of the flat and looked at all that clear dark ice and he looked up at me.

“Grandma, did Grandpa really make this?”

“Every winter,” I said. “For thirty-two years. And this year a lot of good men made it for him.”

The night the ice went clear

Saturday the ice went hard and clear, the way Walt liked it, and the whole street came.

I have not seen that many people on our back lot since the last really cold winter years ago. The lights were burning on the two cedar poles. The fire barrel was going, and somebody had brought a second barrel so there were two. There was cocoa and coffee and a card table of cookies and bars that the wives had set up without anybody organizing it.

There were more than twenty children on the ice, and parents I had never once fed before standing in a loose ring around my fire, stamping their feet, laughing, holding paper cups.

Danny came and found me by the barrel. He had his cap in his hands.

“We want to show you something,” he said. “If you’re ready. The men and me, we made you something. We’ve had it covered up down by the gate all week. We didn’t want you to see it till the ice was ready, because it didn’t seem right to show it on bad ice.”