The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [153]
I lifted out the insert with its bounty of lures. Everything was so ordinary, so much as it had always been, that I half expected to see the space below filled with rolls of wire and twine, small pliers, extra fishing line. Maybe my father had simply forgotten the tackle box, left it in the car after a trip to another lake, and found himself out that night on the still, dark waters with his pole and no lures. It was possible. However, when I saw the bottom, I knew my intuition had been right. The space, usually orderly but cluttered with equipment, was empty except for a bundle of papers, several sheets together, folded in thirds, bound with a dark red rubber band that disintegrated when I tried to slip it off.
The page on top was unlined, with a single sentence in my father’s handwriting: Found in kitchen, west wall.
I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, in and out, a pulse like the sea, waiting until I calmed down. Remembering the night I’d come in from the gorge, rushed with wind and guilt and anger, to find my father standing in the garden, smoking and thinking. Remembering that last spring, the kitchen torn apart for several weeks, walls stripped down to their studs, the air tasting of dust and metal, the new appliances sitting in their boxes on the porch, my father in his work clothes, pulling a bandana from his pocket to wipe the gritty sweat from his forehead and glancing through the broken plaster and dust to find these pages. I opened them, as he must have done, slowly, because I both wanted to know and did not want to know, and my hands trembled as I moved the cover page to the back and started reading.
It was a formal document, the last will and testament of my great-grandfather, Joseph Arthur Jarrett. The boy with his comet dreams had grown into a man who built a lock factory and restored this house, and who wrote, at the end of his life, in a firm, slanted script not so different from his sister’s. I moved closer to the quivering golden light of the lantern, its faint hiss, the scent of kerosene, everything falling away into shadows except this paper, these words. There was a tribute to Cora, and a memorial bequest to the flower guild she had enjoyed. There were several other small bequests, to the library, to the church, to the hardware association. The bulk of his estate, however, was to be divided between his son, Joseph Arthur Jarrett Jr., and his niece, Iris Jarrett Wyndham Stone, who had last resided in Elmira.
To amend for the things I denied her. To remind my son that the world does not owe him a living by any reckoning.
It was dated May 1972, about six months before he died.
There were bats in the barn; one swooped low as I sat back, the papers in my hand, trying to assimilate all the dates, all that these pages meant and implied. In 1972 Rose had been dead for thirty years and Cora for more than a decade, so when my great-grandfather died there had been no one left alive in the family who remembered Rose directly or knew her story, no one to testify to the envelopes that had arrived every month in the early years, money that was spent on Iris, yes, for the new dresses and shoes or the books and tea sets, but that may have gone for other purposes as well—to help pay the expenses on the new business, to buy the grand falling-apart house on the lake and ensure its restoration. It was impossible, from this distance in time, or maybe ever, to separate good intentions and mistakes from calculated moves, impossible to know exactly what had transpired all those years ago, but it was vividly clear from this will that he’d carried regret with him always. At the end of his life, he had wanted to make amends, and it seemed he died believing