A Better Place

They are cutting ice on the lake again. You can hear it crack when the chisel breaks through. A groan, like a bone being set in the trenches. Or a cow birthing a dead, misshapen calf. Futile pain.

When people tell you it’s a kindness, what they really mean is “Your sorrow is tiresome.”

They are building a causeway to the islands, a giant dock you can drive on from here to South Hero. So no one has to drive on the ice anymore. Remember when a truck broke through one winter? We thought we’d swim out to the wreck come summer. But he was only hauling hay. No point diving for wet grass.

“She was too good for this world” sounds an awful lot like “She had it coming.”

People used to get stranded on the islands. Too much ice for the boats, not enough for sleds or trucks. They’d hunker down with their provisions. Wait for a freeze. Or a thaw.

The old ladies say, “At least she never had to grow old,” but what they mean is, “Thank you, God, for sparing us.”

Next autumn, I’ll take the causeway to the islands. The Jamaican apple pickers will be there, stripping the orchard as fast as locusts, their arms flying like mandibles. Then they’ll stretch out on cots in the bunk house. They’ll change into crisp whites and play cricket on a grassy airfield, a green rug unfurled between the trees. Halfway through, they’ll stop the game so a plane can land. A little red thing. Flimsy, like wind-up tin.

You were going to have a house here. You were going to park your airplane right here, up against the cortlands and the mackintoshes. Next to all the other single-engine crafts that could be taken for farm equipment, if not for the yellows and blues—and words like “Angel” and “Osprey” on the nose (because nobody names a tetter. Or a harrow).

People who say “She’s gone to a better place” must not know about this one.