a novel
***
1.
With his first mug of coffee in hand, James Franklin opened the door to look out toward the lake, as he would on almost any morning, even in bad weather. He took a breath, as if it were his very first breath, and savored that a bit longer against the simple pleasure of the view. But there in the dancing glint off the water he noticed something else and pushed the screen door open then as well, and stood at the edge of the porch. It was a beautiful morning. The air was cool and almost sharp. The blue of the sky nearly joined the lake in the tree shadows at the far end—but closer, where the shatter of the early sun caught the water, there was something else. This was on his own dock. It was a dark figure of person where none should be. The kids would not be visiting again for a week.
Still holding his mug, he walked down the steps and then onto the grassy slope where he had just spread woodchips to cover the bear spots a few days before. The hard edges of the woodchips bit at his bare feet. The cool of the morning brushed his legs. Not expecting to be going out so soon, he had only pulled on his shorts.
His coffee sloshed in the mug and he took a larger sip to reduce the loss.
Whoever it was sitting there on the milk crate, was fishing. It was a boy. The pole in his hand was bamboo. And he did not seem to hear Franklin’s approach.
“Hello?”
The boy turned. “Hello!”
“Who are you? I might ask.”
“I’m Jack.”
“Ah…And where are you from?”
“Over there.” The boy flicked his hand to the south but did not raise his pole.
“The neighbors?”
“No. Beyond.”
“Why are you fishing here?”
“Because you have the best place on the lake. The shore drops off faster here.”
“It does. And it is. But this is private property, you know that, don’t you?”
“I know. I was hoping you would come out and talk to me like this so that I could ask if it was okay. I am sorry if I’m bothering you. Coming around to the driveway is a long walk. And you usually come down in the morning and swim. I thought I would be able to ask you then.” There was no attempt to look pitiable. “Can I fish here? You don’t do it so often now, yourself.”
That was a fact. Those were all facts. The boy knew that much.
He was barefoot, as well, and in shorts and a loose shirt, and with his dark hair, fully looked the part James Franklin would play if he were that young again.
“Yes. It’s okay…Maybe I’ll even join you!”
Franklin was suddenly inspired by the idea, turned too fast, sloshing more of his coffee, and walked back quickly to the house, dancing a little as he went on the chips, grabbed his tackle box and rod, and another milk crate from beside the porch and came back within minutes. But the boy was gone.
Franklin fished then anyway, by himself, as usual. As the boy had said, he had not been out recently. He wasn’t sure why. But he chalked that up to a simple word that he didn’t like to use, ‘loneliness,’ or at least didn’t like to admit to, but that was probably the matter. That, and to the wheel of thoughts that came around again and again. In fact, he was a very lucky fellow. How could he be as unhappy as he was?
The wheel of thoughts came through and stopped there, and he ignored it as much as he could, whistling imitatively at some loons to get their attention instead, but they ignored him in turn with their own fishing to do. He fished until he was too hungry to ignore it and had two brook trout on his line and then went back up to the cabin. Those he cleaned up, and fried with corn meal in some fresh lard. He couldn’t eat two but he would save the second one for dinner. And he still had a few biscuits from the day before.
The coffee was still hot, if not as sweet. He was a very lucky fellow, indeed
The boy’s words played at the edges of his brain when he napped. ‘Because you have the best place on the lake. The shore drops off faster here.’
That was the very reason why he had first gone into debt to buy what he could. The old estate, over 800 acres, had been auctioned in 1973, but he already knew it then. So he had borrowed from anyone who would listen. $24,000, for the best sixty acre parcel! He had borrowed $30,000 and it had taken him five years to pay it back. Two jobs and five years. And the thought of ever losing it had plagued him ever since.
His father had rented a house—a double wide trailer really—near the beach at the other end, for two weeks, in 1959, for five years in a row. The best five years of his life. Until Kennedy was shot. Things changed then. But for a time, that smelly double-wide was the focus of each year.
That was the shallow end, where the beach was. A crummy beach. Just a dump of coarse sand. But the water was warmer there. And the old house of the estate had once been there, until sometime after the war. He had seen pictures of that. It was a dark and rangy place. Shingle style. They had used it for the vets returning with injuries. But it had burned years before, and the old fieldstone foundation looked like castle walls. He had climbed on those, endlessly around and around. He had been a knight then. He had conquered the Saracens there. Single handedly.
James awoke to the sound of a voice.
“Mr. Franklin?”
Knuckles rattled the porch door.
Through the darkening of the screen the boy’s face looked in, nose against the mesh.
“Hello again.”
“Can I go in the pit?”
He hadn’t heard that word in years—not in reference to the dip in the woods where the geological cleft of the lake drifted upward toward one of the springs. That was the very best place to get minnows.
“Going fishing again?”
“Tomorrow. I have my bucket,” he said, raising it high in one hand.
“Sure!”
The boy wandered off into the trees, toward ‘the pit,’ seemingly unconcerned with anything else in the world but doing what he was doing. That was the way to be. The way he had once been. Once. A long time ago.
The pillow on the chair had fallen away and his head was against the wicker when he sat back. The sound of his weight shifting in the chair was an old friend.
‘Shallow ambitions.’ It was an expression he had used many times over the years. To others. To his children. To himself…But in truth, he had never wanted much. He wanted pretty much what he had…But it seemed now that he wasn’t too happy about it. Why was that?
“Shallow ambitions,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice was a slap on the head. It was hardly his own voice anymore.
But he was a very lucky man. Why wasn’t he very happy about it?
He had met Kate at one of those jobs, when he was working overtime to pay off the loan. Kate of the sky blue eyes. But Kate had ambitions.
Just a word. ‘Ambitions.’ Funny how it lingered. Like a smell.
He would have to admit, now, such a long time later, that Kate was the reason he owned this place.
He was working then, in the marketing and communications office at Liberty Mutual Insurance, when he had heard about the auction. It was right there in the very company newsletter that he was employed to write. One of the principal founders of the company had owned the estate. James might have heard about it anyway, but he had considered that fact to be some sort of fate.
He had taken Kate up here, to go camping. It was just a lark. A wonderful lark. He had brought her up to see it. They had caught their minnows in ‘the pit’ and they had fished right there at the shore. It was overgrown then. No dock. A log. They had made love right there in the tall grass near the shore, and they had caught a dozen fish and he had cooked them all. Right there. On the shore.
He had been happy then. Gloriously happy. deliriously happy.
But she had said to him, “What do you want?”
And he had told her, most sincerely, from whatever depths he could plumb in his own heart, “This.”
What he had meant, at that moment, was all of it. The place as well as her.
And she had said—most of whatever she had said then, he had forgotten now, except for this. “Those are shallow ambitions.”
And he had answered, trying to keep the pieces of his heart together, “But this is the deep end. This is the best!”
And that was the smell. It was her. She smelled of something. Ambition. Maybe bergamot. Bergamot and peppermint. He had thought of that while making tea one day, and remembering that moment once before.
Later, he had married Ann because of her name. That was a fact, too.
He had told his son once, “When you ask yourself why you have done something, be honest. Go back to the beginning.”
With Ann, it was her name.
‘Ann’ had been the wife of James Franklin. The original James Franklin. The man who—through some permutation of generations—he had been named for. Was maybe even related to—but that was an old family dispute—the man who was the brother of Benjamin Franklin. He had always liked to think that he was related to the rebel and radical brother of Benjamin Franklin—a man who had been a rebel before rebels were fashionable, who had taught his younger brother to print, and to write. And it was Ann who had carried on after her husband had died. An incredible feat, at the time. She had been a rebel too, and a hero as well—a ‘heroine’—although his Ann had told him, the first time he had explained the history to her, that she didn’t like the idea that the original Ann Franklin was thought of as a dangerous drug. She had actually said that. They had both laughed, but now he was not so sure of the joke.
What do you want? Kate’s voice was clear even now. That was another question to answer. He thought he had, many years ago, but maybe not. And he was getting a little old for that.
The rain patter grew in the leaves, finally rising to the sound of an ocean against the shore of treetops above his head. The leaves were angry. Pine needles hissed in background. Soto voice. The white pine that filled the slope above, ended here, likely an old logging line, and the oak and beech and maple began, going down all the way to the lake. There was no thunder so he stopped and stood close to one large pine—the largest there alone at the edge of the divide—to let the cloud borne wave above him pass. He was standing beneath the eaves of a cathedral, he thought, as he had thought many times before.
He knew that the trail he followed went on for three miles, fully around the lake, passing the ruin of the old estate house, and was first worn by his own feet. This had long been his usual walk now and he knew it by heart. Even standing beneath that particular pine to get out of the rain was something he had often done before. He stood still, back to the trunk, and listened for changes as the wave played itself out.
The thumping of footsteps on the pine needles on the upper slope came to him instead, and then was not surprised to see a familiar face appear through the trees there.
“Jack!”
“Mr. Franklin. You have the spot!”
“I do.”
“Out for your walk.”
“I am.”
“Can I tag along. I’m going to the castle.”
“Yes. So am I, when this abates a bit.”
“Abates?”
“Just an old word. It means lessens.”
Funny he shouldn’t know that word. He must be about twelve. What was the vocabulary of a sixth-grader these days?
The boy answered, “But this is the best! The onslaught. The siege!”
He had answered with his own thought then, “Where is the thunder of canon?”
The boy was not to be toyed with.
“There is no canon! No musket! This is the Thirteenth Century!”
“Yes! I’m sorry. I forgot.”
They both stood there in silence for a time then, with the rain holding steady, and the cathedral eaves of the pine sheltering them.
“What grade are you in?”
“Sixth—this year.”
“Where do you go to school.”
“At the junior high.”
There was a lessening to the rain fall. He thought they both noticed.
“What subjects do you like?”
“None. History, maybe.”
Franklin looked down at the mat of wet hair atop the boy beside him.
“You should wear a hat.”
“I do. It was a Red Sox hat. A good one! Some kid stole it.”
That had certainly happened to him at that age. More than once.
Looking down past the boy’s body pressed against the tree he could see the toes of sneakers. At least he wasn’t barefoot.
They seemed to both have the idea to move along at the same moment, and followed the old trail again, first at the lumbering line and then along a rise of bald granite that cleared the trees. From there they caught sight of blue sky and knew they would soon be out of the weather.
At last the low ruin of the old house foundation that made up the parapets of the castle rose low amidst the trees like a misplaced garden wall, with garden on both sides, for there were trees now within the ruin as well. The wall was fieldstone and the mortar was broken above the stone but not between. The wall simply ended about four feet from the ground and followed a contour that bespoke the original size of the house. Jack scaled that height immediately and looked down as a knight would.
Franklin said, “I wish I could still do that.”
“At least you did it!” The boy answered.
It was an odd statement for a boy to make. Hard to know what might be in that mind.
Stone steps still arose from the woods up to the rim at what must have been the front of the house and Franklin made his way around through the overgrowth to those, and then stepped up to where the view of the lake was still open. At the far end, his own small house was only obvious across the length of the lake because of the clear lawn in front of it. Behind him he could hear Jacks yelps and yells as he defended himself from imaginary foes, while wielding a old pine limb he had peeled to the sun-bleached wood.
He asked, “Is this the defense of Jerusalem?”
“No!” Came the quick response. “This is the battle at Jaffa. King Richard and Saladin!”
Yes it was. The boy had that right too.