A Love Story And A Canoe-Trip
©September 10th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
Every night, Jacob cleaned his hoe, his rakes, his pitchfork and his trowel, and put them away. He’d take out his fiddle, and play a slow tune on his back porch. His Bernese Mountain Dog, Buckminster, lay at his feet. The sunset stretched into infinity. The corn-stalks were ripening. The rain had been good this year, and the lake nearby was full of fish. He felt he should be happy.
He stopped playing, went inside, put the kettle on the stove, cracked open two eggs, made an omelette with onions, fresh-picked tomatoes and green peppers, and ate it with brown bread, smeared with yellow butter. He heated up coffee, sloshed in some rum, and drank deep and fully.
Then, he washed himself noisily at the large kitchen sink, and towelled himself off, humming tonelessly all the while. Something moved at the corners of his vision — a shadow, perhaps. He turned and looked. There was nothing, nothing at all. Disappointed, he went on towelling.
He had been born mute. He was not deaf, though. Everyone but his wife had thought he was a loser. Josie had been beautiful, dark-eyed and adoring — and he had loved her deeply during the ten years they’d been married. Then, one day, after the rains failed to come for three years in a row, she had left him, quietly, without awakening him, at dawn.
He had awoken to the sound of her car hitting a tree.
They say he was never the same after that, but he thought he was. Here he was, playing his fiddle, with his dog at his feet, working the fields, eating normally, sleeping at 10:00 every night. Here he was, sowing, tending, reaping the corn, with a few hired men and women. Here he was, playing at the local coffee-houses with the local Old-Time group cobbled together from old friends and school-mates, who’d come to see him for who he was — a strong, unspeaking, gentle giant of a man, with music pouring out his being, and with love for all things that grew. With grace, he had dealt with everything that was handed to him, even this, the most devastating blow of all.
Of course, he was fine. Wasn’t he?
He went upstairs, changed into his night-clothes, and took out the photograph of Josie. He looked at it carefully for a little while, then put it away, after wiping both the photograph and his eyes with a rough face-cloth.
Then, he got into bed, flipped open Robinson Crusoe, a book that Josie had loved, and read for a few minutes. Reading was always difficult for him, but he loved it, carefully mouthing the words to himself, loving the words, as his wife had taught him to do. He came to a description of a canoe, and paused in his reading.
Somehow, this canoe brought him pleasure as no other boat had before. He loved rowing, loved going onto the glassy stretch of water on the lake near his fields, loved seeing the reflections on it, the darting fish, the languidly waving fronds below, the rocks that slipped past his vision into unfathomable depths. His eyes closed, and the book slipped from his hands, and he was asleep.
And he was rowing, rowing, rowing onto a faraway lake on a canoe that gleamed silver and black in the moonlight. And at the prow of it sat his wife, smiling, holding out her hands to him, and gleaming silver and black in the moonlight. And his dog, Buckminster, sat proudly at the stern of the canoe limned in light, his tongue hanging out gladly. And Jacob sat in the middle, resting his paddles, smiling back at Josie, his eyes shining black and silver in the moonlight. His heart was filled with song, and he reached out to hold her hands.
In the morning, when the sunlight streamed in, and illuminated the room with gold, washing out the paler gold of the reading light, it found Jacob asleep, with a smile on his face, and the dog at his feet.
Neither of them stirred, even as the sun rose high overhead.
Somewhere, a beautiful shadow detached itself from the wall, and walked towards them. Golden dust-motes danced into the room.
The air was still. Outside, a fly buzzed outside on the window-sill, and a lone loon called across the lake for its mate.
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