South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [63]
Greyson shook his head. “I saw a shooting star. I’m waiting for another one.”
The Fourth of July had turned hot by the time Madeline reached the old fire tower, though it wasn’t much past seven in the morning. She’d gotten Up at five to get an early start. Now she stopped, easing the shifter into “Park” with care, and got out to study the choices of two-track to follow. A chickadee called from a nearby tree, and Madeline smelled the dust of the road swirling behind her. Despite all the rain they’d had, most of the road was dry, though it was true that she might not have made it in the car. She’d crossed three flooded spots that were long and scary—where was the bottom?—the ruts leading in and out of them churned deep with muck. She’d have to wash the truck. She glanced at it, still Unnerved to be piloting a late model, three-quarter-ton, four-wheel-drive truck through a vast Unbroken tract of wilderness. If Richard could see me now, she thought fleetingly. He’d never believe it. She scrambled back Up into the cab.
At last, after another half hour of driving at a snail’s pace down the ever-narrowing track, she had traveled just over nine miles in from the main road and the trail petered out. With a great sense of anticipation she climbed out of the truck. Just ahead was a low, sandy hill. The brink of the lake. She hurried Up it to the top.
Stone Lake lay before her, a shallow bowl that spread perhaps a mile off into the distance and half that width to the opposite shores, which were ringed all around with pines. But “shores” wasn’t quite the word for it, not anymore. The lake was dry.
15
Madeline stood there for a long time, smiling she guessed. What else to do? Her namesake lake was a swale of swaying grasses. Finally she scrambled down into it. Sand and tiny pebbles crunched Under her feet, sharp-edged sedges flicked against her calves.
After the first wave of disappointment, and then cynical acceptance—of course! Of course the lake was dry and empty—Madeline felt Unexpectedly peaceful. She was like any other animal, or plant, or mineral. Just a soul alone in a wide, wild world.
She felt the sun on her back, smelled pine needles and hot sand, heard the breeze whispering in the trees. The rustle of grasses echoed the long-gone water. She was in this clearing deep in the woods in a forgotten place, and for at least this moment needed nothing more or less. She walked, and with each step she let another inch of the long furl of her expectations go. The place itself was like a steady hand, a low voice, a very old person who’d seen too much to get overexcited anymore. Stop now a minute, it said. Stop searching.
It was only when she heard a woodpecker—it must’ve been one of the huge pileateds she saw now and then, it was so loud—that she turned back and began to search the shoreline for the cabin Arbutus said might still be standing. The woodpecker seemed to say that this was not a ghostly, forgotten place, but simply a place that had changed over time. Life was going on there still.
Madeline found the cabin, a low-slung building made of massive logs, around a curve in the shore of the vanished lake. In the years of neglect the cedar-shake roof had rotted, exposing the structure to the elements. She ran a hand over the logs and pushed open the front door, which hung by a broken hinge. The interior was nearly empty and the wide plank floor had begun to rot like the roof. All that was left of the furnishings were a couple of rusting metal bedsteads, some wooden cupboards hanging crooked off the wall, a rickety table, and a mammoth cookstove, coated with rust.
Her great-grandparents had lived here. Joe and Walter both had been born here.
She walked all around the cabin and the outbuildings—the remains of an outhouse and a few small sheds. Poked into every corner, investigated every inch of ground within strolling distance.