The Fishing Pond in the Back Pasture

The Kitchen Table

Steve came in from feeding at a little after six. He stomped the snow off his boots on the porch the way he has for thirty-one years of marriage, and he knew something was wrong before he got his coat off.

I was at the kitchen table with the savings book open in front of me, looking at the number like it might tell me something.

“What happened,” he said. Steve does not put a question mark on things. He hung his coat on the hook by the door and sat down across from me, still smelling like hay and cold air.

I showed him the phone. I showed him the trip, and my message, and her answer, and the message that never went through. He read it all slowly with his glasses down on his nose.

Steve runs about forty head of Angus cows on the home place and some rented ground north of the road. He calves in March and April. He has pulled more calves at two in the morning than I could count, and he does not rattle.

“Well,” he said. “That wasn’t right.”

“I should call Ryan,” I said.

“And say what?”

I opened my mouth and then I shut it again, because I did not know. That was the whole problem. There was nothing to say to my son that would not put him in the middle.

You cannot make your son’s wife take you on vacation. There is no law and no rule and no phone call that does that. And I was not going to make Ryan choose between his mother and the mother of his children.

I had watched that happen to my own brother, years ago. My mother made him choose, every holiday, every birthday. He chose his wife, the way he should have, and Mother never got over it, and neither did he.

“Leave it be, Karen,” he said finally. “You can’t build anything with them right now. So build them something here instead.”

“Build what?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said, and he got up to wash his hands. “Something they can’t get at Disney.”

The Low Spot

I did not sleep much that week. I kept thinking about what Steve said, and somewhere in all of it I started thinking about water.

There is a low spot in our back pasture, below the strip of timber where the creek used to run before Steve’s dad tiled the field. It holds rainwater every spring. The cows stand in it in the summer.

When Ryan was little he used to catch frogs in it. He would come up to the house with his jeans soaked to the knee and his hands cupped around something, so proud he could hardly talk.

On Sunday after church, I asked Steve to walk back there with me. Pastor Dan had preached on the loaves and fishes, and I will not pretend that did not put an idea in my head.

“What would it cost,” I said, “to make this a real pond. Deep enough for fish. With a little dock for the kids.”

Steve looked at me a long time. Then he looked at the low spot, and I could see him measuring it in his head, the way he measures everything.

“Half an acre, maybe,” he said. “Ten foot deep at the dam end. The clay’s good here, it’ll hold. Dale Ritter did the Ostranders’ pond two years ago. I’d ask him.”

“How much?”

“More than a lawnmower,” he said. “Less than a trip to Florida.”

I prayed about it that night, and I want to be honest about what I prayed. I did not pray for Brooke to be sorry. I prayed that I would not spend that money out of spite.

Because there is a way to build a thing just to show somebody. I did not want that pond to be a sign stuck in the ground that said “look what you missed.” I wanted it to be a place.