Zanes beached the bark canoe and told Lung where to find the sawhorses. He told him to keep his voice down. Lung came from the barn with a sawhorse in each hand, his elbows back. There was actual work to be done. Why was Lung here? Zanes turned.
I saw through the sifting darkness of the shore across the lake, but I could not see the split of light in the summerhouse. The moon had gone on. If there was a car over there it would be silver.
They carried the canoe up the bank, an inch of water shifting fore and aft, and they set it on the sawhorses. The bottom was wet and they might need more water inside to show the leak. Zanes went to the barn and found the shiny rock of roofing tar inside a bucket. Would tar work? Every minute things showed more. Lung had on a jean jacket and green chinos. Then Zanes saw the bicycle. Find some dry wood, he said, I think I’ve got a pot in the garage, keep your voice down. He filled the bucket at the lake. Lung hadn’t said a word.
Over there the sky filled the trees out like growth and darkened them with a dawning darkness. I found the silver car, part hidden by house or trees or distance. Like the canoe, it had been used by others for the summer. The bark canoe waited above the ground. I poured in my water, a drip had appeared only near the stern between the seventh and eighth ribs.
Only one awl hole was broken, but the stitches were loose or ragged or out. Zanes pointed out the loose stern thwart. Lung moved it gently on the hinge of its one good binding at the other gunwale.
I took my sheath knife and I split, not too well, two slender lengths and we put them between the gunwales to check the span. Length of thwart is width of gunwale.
The whittling took time, the tapering and the shortening. I had no awl. It got light. A narrow bit did it even better. But the patch — the tar to tar the leak! I said we should have started the tar before cutting the wood because the patch would take time to dry. Lung said what was my rush. I went to the bank and looked at the cove and the silver car. Some tree gum had been used for one already existing patch, you could smell it. The patch takes time to dry. Like putting a potato in to bake long before the hamburger gets into the frying pan, we needed to do the patch.
Or one person can do one job and one can do the other. But Lung wants to be in on the patch.
That’s it for that pot, I said quietly. Turn it into your tar pot from now on, said Lung. He poked the fire in the barbecue. What were you doing here? I said. I was here before you, said Lung. I was here when you came down and got the canoe and took it out, he said. I didn’t have much time left, I said, unconsciously putting things together now. You busted that piece, Lung said. Better go back to the lashing, I said. How did I know that the owner of the canoe was coming soon? Was it my time device operating again?
A canoe is what it makes you do. In the dewy cool the patch was soft still. He had used a fraction of the tar he had broken off to heat, and it was receding now to glassy bituminous hardness. He had wiped the putty knife on the grass.
I felt my wife awake, but not my son. Have you seen my son at Glyph Cliffs? I asked. Lung drew a thong of bark taut from the thread hole and, holding the bottom of it, knotted the rough lashing as tightly as he could. He checks everything out, Lung said, he helps them get off.
I’d like to do this again, Lung said thoughtfully. I mean I didn’t get to go out in it. Maybe you’ll have to bust it again for us to repair it. Then again we could make one from scratch now that you see how it’s put together, it’s a very cool thing. I used to like to shoot birds you know but I was never that crazy about boats, I’d like to take a spin in this one but I got to go to work now.
Why didn’t you speak up when I came out here in the dark in the first place? Zanes asked. Felt stupid, said Lung. I guess I did say catch me early, Zanes said.
Across the lake the silver car moved and its length seemed to collapse. We had a smell of road work from the tar. We went and ran our hands over the tough skin of the hull and lost track for a minute. Lung got under it and looked at his handiwork. I thanked him. He didn’t look at me. We stared at the hull for a while.
This has to go back to the owner, Zanes said. You always have the other one, Lung said and laughed. Why are you called Lung? Zanes asked. It’s whatever you want, Lung said. Answer me, Zanes said, laughing.
What’s going on here? my wife occupying the moment in her blue robe said through the screen door that shone in the sun. I said, Lung, I don’t know where the time went. I’ll bet you didn’t even know I was here, my wife said. You weren’t, I said. My wife asked Lung if he would like some breakfast. He said he never ate in the morning.
Lung’s bike seat was too low and I offered to raise it, but Lung was on his way. So long, Lung, said my wife humorously. Let’s have dinner on camera, Lung called back. The patch was of course not dry, but the canoe could be moved. The alarm clock in my son’s room started distantly ringing. The patch was soft and the hull of the canoe was damp. The alarm got turned off. I think Lung likes you, my wife said, but he certainly picks an early hour for his visits. We had to work on the canoe before the owner came, I said. The owner? my wife said. Is he going to take it? thank goodness. Well, what do you know, she said — for just as Lung had pedaled out of sight onto the town road, the silver car had entered the woods. This particular canoe trip was over.
Low and slow it made its way among the potholes and ruts. The driver was a blond fellow. The clothesline was in the barn.
Who’s that driving? asked Zanes’s wife.
Don’t you remember? asked her husband.
Above me, I felt the presence of my son at his window. If I didn’t take down the screens, it would soon be summer again.
ANNALS OF PLAGIARY
It came to my attention that a person in the news had voiced a thought at her press conference as if it were hers, when the words that came to her were not her own but mine. Little enough to get exercised over. I reread the sentence (or was it two sentences?) quoted in the not normally sensational Post and it was she being quoted answering a question about the effect of some damn thing in, as she called her work, “my piece,” but her answering words were not hers but mine — my own written and printed words speaking at me. Still mine, though in her thirsting-for-attention mouth (caught curled and half-open in the photo of her) exposed and used by — stolen by — someone already so much in the news as activist, award-winner, artist and woman that I thought of my children, to tell the truth, who might be proud of their father. I had come upon the newspaper interview myself; nobody had phoned to tell me.
Why would they? The words were nothing much in a book small and distinctly technical of a lifelong water engineer, a hydrologist, we say — the one and only book he would ever write.
But the artist-woman quoting my thought as hers and as easily as if the words had come to her out of nowhere — from the wit and wisdom of her gift — kept only me in reserve.
The words? I recognized them at once, even from a book of 176 pages — my thought in the paper next to her picture, as if I were describing her. In my unmentioned work it had been sandwiched between two passages of analysis as a bridge, inspired or subtle, though probably an indulgence. I closed my eyes and saw a picture, and then another, as if the words of my book on the effect of two small dams and a converted tannery upon the gradient flow, solvent power, and erosive meander in a Delaware River tributary to the Water Gap had been absorbed or, yes, dissolved, yet now re-precipitated. So that I must open my eyes and look again at the newspaper column (that was all it was) and the photo of the dark-haired woman, my borrower both frowning and smiling — and my words, “Water is always water — above, below, in flood, trickle, rapid or sea, but the traces we leave in it last like our changing thoughts.” (I had said, “may last.” So to add negligence to offense, the artist had got my words wrong.) The article quoted others in praise of her.