Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [95]
Throughout the month, I had gone back to the online classifieds in search of a heavy-duty, airtight and inexpensive woodstove. Either they were cheap or they were well built but never both cheap and well built. I was hanging tough, though, and waiting for my Scandinavian cast-iron dream to show up for three hundred dollars or less. The heating season had already begun, and I was sure that the demand for secondhand stoves had slackened. Some seller would weaken and prices would drop if I could be patient. In the meantime, Russell produced a box stove from his barn that would get us through Thanksgiving. Of course, it required a stovepipe to vent the smoke out of the cabin.
Paul and I wrestled with it for half a day trying to get it right. The challenge was to bring the pipe from the stove to the hole in the roof. It was not a straight shot. The pipe came in two-foot sections, and any turn required a prefabricated elbow with a limited range of flex. The pipe’s trip from the stove through the roof involved two elbows, neither of which had a simple ninety-degree angle, and a final piece of pipe that had to be trimmed short of its full two feet to make it fit the length. The entire span of pipe, from stove to roof, was about sixteen feet, which also meant that we would need to hang wires from the ceiling to support the pipe’s weight. We did all of this work, on ladders no less, but not without my resolving never to install another stovepipe ever again.
At about this time, a most astonishing thing happened. Actually, it was two astonishing things, and they converged on the memory of John Kababick. One of his sisters, in her sixties—someone I had last seen about forty years earlier, when I was a teenager and she was in her twenties—had tracked me down and sent me a warm and thoughtful e-mail. I remembered her as a young woman in nursing school, the youngest of Johnny’s three sisters. Over a period of months we exchanged e-mails and we talked on the telephone, revisiting some memories, both good and painful. In one of our last conversations, she told me she had found a tackle box with a collection of Johnny’s fishing lures that he had used as a boy and young man. She asked if I would like to have them.
They came as a gift in the mail, and they left me speechless. I opened the box and just sat with it for a while. I felt the loss of him all over again. Paul and I carried vivid and powerful memories of Johnny, but we rarely spoke of him. There seemed not much more for us to say, or to know. The verdict had been in for a long time. But the emergence of his sister and then of the fishing lures stirred the sediments of our past. There were six fishing lures that arrived, carefully wrapped in a box. With the lures was his seaman’s identification card:
JOHN W. KABABICK
DATE OF BIRTH: 3-1-30
ABLE SEAMAN
HEIGHT: 6-0
WEIGHT: 220
COMPLEXION: RUDDY
EYES: BLUE
There he was in the photo—much older than I had remembered him, but still with his open face and the slightly crooked nose that had been broken while he was the navy’s heavyweight boxing champion of the Pacific fleet. His mouth was drawn in as if he had lost his teeth, but there was the same handsome man, eyes turned slightly downward at their extremities, blond hair, strong jaw, an expression that said he was ready for an adventure or a laugh but always somehow ineffably sad. I stared at the lures and the photo for a long time. The lures were striper plugs with treble hooks and painted eyes of the sort that are used up and down the Jersey shore.
I had learned to fish from Johnny. We had begun with hand lines, not fishing rods. We had wound and unwound our fishing lines around sticks and cast the lines by swinging them overhead and throwing them over the water. We fished with a hook and sinker and night crawlers,