The Secret of the Lake

 

by Brett Rutherford

Edinboro Lake, PA 

Day after day the sodden sky refills the lake, quenches the thirsty graveyard with migrant tears returning to the eye that wept them.

The used and tattered rainclouds come here like derelicts, like old dogs homing, revisiting one place — one secret lake which has berthed all waters (sea to sky to drawing mountain peak in flash of storm-drop —  this unassuming kettle of liquid clouds, gray-black beneath   the lidded heavens, shimmers at night  under the nodding Dipper,  the stars that empty it  of excess rainfall.

Now I come back to you, wait for respite of thunder, tread mud, walk flooded grass to the neglected graveyard, hark to the wind waves at your overfilled edge, the lapping song of your careworn banks, the hollow silence of your glacier-ground heart.

Elms and maples stand sentry. The ground is a riot of toppled tombstones, limbs torn by gale or lightning thrust, fence pickets torn off by age or vandals. The winds — or cautious townsmen —  have removed the old gray trunk that hoarded the shore like a sentinel (how its unmoving spindle arms alarmed the midnight visitor! how ravens and owls perched there to read the runes of the waveforms, the prophecy of wind and season! how poets and lovers sought it, the artist’s brush absorbed it as silhouette defining the lake beyond!)

I miss that tree. If one of the graves should vanish I would not miss it so much as that withered guardian.

It was the life work of a living thing, an epic of cambium in heartwood. Its wisdom was sublimated from soil, drunk from the lake of all waters, tapped from the abundance of sunlight, shielded from frost and lightning fire. It made itself sculpture, transcended its own passing, a defiant singularity, useless, unwanted, beautiful.

I shed my clothes to wade in the lake, letting the chill-cold waters accept me, sinking until the rippled plane of water licks at my shoulders, pacing with caution the rubble and sand of the lakebed. Not for a decade have I touched these waters, communed with the throwaway songs of the bullfrogs, the chirl of crickets, the paper-thin presence of curious insects, the nudge of fishes at my knees, the velvet black flurry and sonar symphony of the bats.

Cars hiss by on the distant roadway. House lights blink out. Water goes lull, takes on the hues of blueberries ripening — black and gray and Prussian blue.  The loudest of sounds  is the breath in my lungs, my voice as I call to you, lake of my youth: Remember me.

I too have come back to this navel of the world, this womb of the waters, this quencher of age and weariness.

Finally, your secret is revealed to me in God’s Eye weave of the thread of time:

The Eries came here for a winter festival, carried a gourd with the old year’s sadness, weighted it with stone, canoed and dropped it at your quiet center,  singing—

Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows — Heed not the crane, the fish, the deceitful song of the serpent — Heed us, mother of tears and rivers. We bring you a gourd, the gourd our ancestors taught us to make. Surely you are hungry, O Lake. We have come many days to offer it,  suffered such dangers to please you!

Calmly the lake accepted the present. The gourd sank fast and never returned. In silence, the men returned to the shore, banked their canoes and shouted with glee:

Jiyathontek! O Konneahti! Onenh, wete-wenna-keragh-danyon! Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows! Today we have made the signs. Again you ate the gourd and the stone. You did not know the gourd was hollow. You did not ask what was in it! Do not inquire, O Lake our mother.  We have promised never to tell you!

The gourd had passed a year in the longhouse. Each mother who lost an infant held it until the stream of her tears had dried. The father who watched the forest trail for the sight of the hunting party clenched it and wept for his eldest son. (They spoke of wolves at the council fire.)

In years of war or famine the gourd was heavy. Women put beads or locks of hair inside it, stained it with rust and blueberry paint. Feeble ones took it when their memory failed; it calmed the mad to sleep beside it.

Unburdened now of the Gourd of Sorrows, the Eries leave the forgiving lake, wash off their paint, their red-brown faces young with laughter and courage, their eyes as bright as the ardent sun, their strong legs running, running.