She did not call again. Her hair awake like a perfume over my cheeks, unconsciously I savored the fresh herbs in her hair, the scent of baking in the material of her dress and the moisture along her collarbone; and though she must raise herself a little to bring her knees forward rib by rib along the floor planks where the cradling gunwales were widest apart, with my hands like a gentle massaging shoehorn I made sure the small of her back and her strong, flaring behind did not exert pressure on the thwart and so she rubbed it only in passing.
If a thwart broke, then the other four would be under increased tension, and if another broke, the gunwales could begin to spring and the canoe would begin to open, undoing the maker’s work. Flat on his back but not quite flat, Zanes smelled the sharper, gamier cedar and the sweeter birch, he gripped a thwart like a ladder rung. Who made this boat? Who really owned it?
Inside the canoe his arms imagined themselves reaching out. Lengthways bark flaps along the inside of the gunwales as well as the outside were sewn in with bark and you had to believe with a tool made by the maker. Parts became distinct; the beautiful canoe could loosen in your mind. Zanes thought how you would begin, once you had skinned a great tree. Stake it out.
He had forgotten the cushions. He could see that her knees hurt as she drew her paddle blade back through its stroke and lifted it to bring it forward, she sat back on her behind and leaned her back a little against the bow thwart. Can you lean against there? she said, showing her her profile. I guess so, he said. She paddled once and held her paddle across the bow for a moment having earned what came next. Zanes, what are you going to do about the hang glider question? she inquired. She started paddling bravely, so Zanes had to bring them back on the blue buoy they were supposed to be making for. It was October time, a lovely bond of early chill, leaves small and preciously sharp among the pines. I want him to have the equipment, Zanes said. I can feel the water under me, his wife said, I can just feel it. You know, Zanes said, you better not lean back too hard on that thwart. She said, It feels like it’s vibrating right up my legs, you know?
She did not care what we did, we were there, she did not need to look around.
Zanes worked the slings toward each other along the beam. Now they could cradle the seventy-pound canoe upside down — so he could get in under it and raise it out himself. The beam he and his son had chosen put the canoe directly under a small leak in the roof. Zanes didn’t hesitate to leave the canoe outside on the grass if he would need it later, but he sensed that the bark hull didn’t like direct sun. He could go and look at it, the seam pitch softening on a warm October noon, and he would tuck for the time being a lashing that had come loose back into the awl hole.
They had an accident off Glyph Cliffs. The Californian-looking fellow had borrowed a rig and, launched, it had simply fallen as if there were big holes in the wings.
You have a canoe there, the voice said over the phone late at night. Which one are you talking about? I said, not thinking where I was. The good one, the young voice said cuttingly. I hung up on the insult, guessing it was the absent owner, it didn’t sound as nasal as the Mayor. It was certainly the middle of the night, I was in my time device probably and thought nothing of the interruptions to my sleep. I would speak to Lung in case the Mayor had some mischief in mind. I had perhaps not actually been asleep. I was taking the canoe apart. Opening it. I went back to bed. Would I put it back together?
Clear apologized for calling so late the following night. I was asleep. The blond woman had asked Clear to phone me, but she, then, would not get off the phone with him. Her son was coming to collect his canoe the day after tomorrow. He said you didn’t want to give it to him, Clear said, and I told her you were right. It’s his turn, I said, and Clear laughed.
He woke to the window, a darkly single, ghastly or friendly, occupied light lifting the maple from below, but it faded and moonlight from the lake came down, as he came awake. He listened to his hair rub and pull between the pillow and his scalp and he laid his fingers upon his wife’s hunched shoulder. He listened with hearing as sharp as his mother’s the day she died. What was she listening for?
Along the cedar gunwale of the bark canoe, feeling the flaps of the inwale and the outwale and the bound stitchings which, he now believed, were of slit spruce root, somebody was running a hand. Running ahead all along the edge of the canoe fore and aft, both sides, foreseeing use, recollecting the method part by part of the maker. But who was the thief? And was it thievery? A night engine soft as an electric car would not have been able to mask tires mashing driveway gravel and dirt: and he had heard nothing, he had seen on the great canoe only hands. The canoe attracted others to it, they were in its future. It was not the Mayor making off with the bark canoe or taking a two-by-four to it in the middle of the night. Zanes felt only the silence of four in the morning near him on his way to the bathroom with his clothes. He would risk his wife’s waking, because he and the thief were going to take the canoe out.
Some forgetfulness softened the piney night air — was it humidity? — and the descending clarity of late October waited moonlit in the sky. In balance the bark canoe held by its gunwales above your shoulders might have lifted off above your head if you had given it the exact path it asked. You know your ground and where the spongy bank gives way toward the dim beach, the active little wash at the edge and the summer detergent froth. Water at the shins, and the long frame balanced is flipped over into the water, the paddles loosed from their coupled lashing at two thwarts amidships.
It’s light above but the canoe is dark, is it that the light of night at whatever distance needs extra speed to catch our canoe, or is it a clandestine humidity we turn upward in as the paddle lifts forward? There’s no one else in the canoe, it quivers slightly on the dark water feeling you with a sideways quickness that is a promise of forward speed. The paddle stroke gives heart to the boat. As if an hour has passed and you’re meeting yourself coming back, a cough comes from the north or from the shore. Pulling hard on the paddle with the hand just above the blade, you lean joyfully back against the thwart and it gives way and tears free.
Upright, you go on, you control it all with your torso and you find the water in its powerful give nearer than the skin of your knees, or is it water on the floor planks and if so where has it come from, China?
We have a serious leak. Is the leak like worry, no more than worry? Like a brief time, the split of light visible in the cove is between the boards of a window belonging to that house and you have already seen it, yet this may be the actual first time, and if you got right up next to it the lighted space inside would open to you.
Light rose to the surface of the lake and how long had this trip gone on? It’s a measure of its own leak — this canoe — but the inch of water around your knees, does it come from one leak, and at what rate? — there’s no wristwatch, it’s on the bed table near your wife, and this canoe needs to be repaired on home ground.
At a hundred yards your trees and the brick end of your house and the person standing on your bare, barely visible dock are beginning to take shape though it won’t be day yet. Is water itself pressing against the leak now, and is this another part of the bark canoe, this leak? The person dwarfing the dock second by second is certainly Lung, and it must be five-thirty. Why is there not much time?