U.P. Reader -- Volume #8

FICTION

A Hole in The Bucket

by Hilton Moore

I was only eight in 1952, too young to understand the term blended family. Of course, even that euphemistic term was far in the future. My father, a Methodist minister, was arm-twisted into taking a charge in the remote village of Nelson due mainly to an indiscretion on his part in the city of Alpena in the northeastern Lower Peninsula. The indiscretion became his third wife, Jeanine. She had two young daughters at the time, Susan and Karen. Father had two young boys, Donny and me, Arthur-Art for short hence the blended family. As for his assigned parish in Nelson, he did not consider his tryst with Jeanine, a married woman at the time, as a self-inflicted wound, despite the evidence to the contrary. I guess you could call that self-delusion as everyone around him knew otherwise. My father was a recent widower at the time, not that it matters now. My mother, Louise, perished in a head-on collision with a snowplow during a heavy snowstorm a year after Father began visiting with Jeanine. Suicide, perhaps? It doesn't matter now, but at one time it meant a great deal to me. The Methodist Church and the District Superintendent were unforgiving about father's affair and thought this remote parish was a due penance. My father disagreed vehemently, but it was a lost cause.

Nelson is the county seat, smack dab in the middle of Bishop County. Nelson is a town, maybe a village is a more appropriate word, of around fifteen hundred souls. The village is in the very heart of the Upper Peninsula, and a scant throw away from the enormous waves of Lake Superior when a wicked westerly comes crashing against the miles of rocky uninhabited shoreline. The tourists love it, but the folks who live in this harsh environment know you can't eat water. Truth is, some locals love it, and some don't. My father, William Langston, was in the latter category.

I have never thought of the Upper Peninsula in the same light as my father, but I do admit that, for the most part, it is not a bucolic picture at all. Still, there is an innate beauty here if you care to seek it. One must be willing to overlook the abandoned mines, and the anemic second and third growth timber left over after the lumber barons butchered the magnificent white pines, hemlock, and cedar. Of course, these immense forests were stolen from the natives, but hell, that's all in the past.

My father was, in his own way, a refined gentleman, enjoying fine cuisine and classical music and the better things in life which, as a poor minister in the Upper Peninsula, he could ill afford. William once caustically compared the Upper Peninsula to a third-world country but with more guns and chainsaws. (William was as caustic as ever, and out of his element.)

Reverend William Langston, though he preferred the appellation Reverend Will, owned an old farmhouse with eighty acres of overgrown, fallow land thirty miles from Nelson. The farmstead was on a hilltop about a mile from Lake Superior. On sweltering hot summer days, all of us children would go swimming on the stretch of rocky beach near the farmhouse. To say that this stretch of beach was rarely ever used would be a gross understatement. The major issue was the rocky shoreline that informs part of this story. There was no closer beach for miles, and given our parents' propensity for gin and tonics, they adamantly refused to drive us elsewhere.

To cast light on this story, Will and Jeanine, preferring to stay at the farmhouse, refused to walk the rocky shoreline, perhaps a hundred feet from the shore. They stayed instead under the shade of the farm's tin porch roof, made rusted by years of neglect, sipping cold gin and tonics. The Nelson parish was morally conservative, to say the least, and our parents enjoyed being away from the prying eyes of his uptight parishioners.

That brings me to the rowboat. Will and Jeanine were both good parents and were sympathetic about the rocky shoreline, but needed much convincing that the family needed a rowboat. We children, all four of us, argued how a rowboat could take us past the stony shore and out to the sandbar, some hundred feet from shore, where we would still be in shallow waters. We could throw out a cinderblock for an anchor, we reasoned, and use it as a diving platform. Just so you won't think our parents were negligent about water-safety, there was not a lifeguard for miles, and no one thought the better or worse for it in those days. It may seem incomprehensible now, but at that time, parents didn't hover over their children like hens.

Because I was the oldest male, and the girls weren't allowed to drive the tractor, I drove the faded red tractor pulling our rickety farm wagon behind it to the beach, all children aboard. This was before Henry, our rowboat, and fate, intertwined.

We children, William and Jeanine included, were very excited when father bought this faded grey wood rowboat and paid a local resort owner, in cold cash, for delivery at the beach.

Several days later, on a rainy summer day, I safely piloted the ancient Massey Harris down the old road to the beach where we would meet the previous owner and receive custody of our craft. Henry, my nickname for the heavy, homemade, plywood boat didn't garner any objections from the other children, so Henry it was. The boat was sixteen feet long and painted gunmetal grey, with two old oars. I felt I was justified in naming the boat Henry for a patch the previous owner neatly fixed on the hull. Hence, the name Henry, from the childhood song, "There's A Hole in the bucket dear Liza, dear Liza," and the second verse, "Well fix it dear Henry, dear Henry, a hole." Looking back, fate had its way. As the oldest male child, and despite all maritime history, I just preferred to name the craft with a strong masculine name rather than with a weak feminine name that would not be fitting to the boat. I got my way with what we would now label as toxic masculinity.

A week later, the weather cooperated and the whole family participated in what might be called the christening of Henry. Lisa, the youngest, broke a bottle of Coca-Cola on the bow. Afterward, we carefully picked up all the glass, and forced Henry across the rocky shoreline into the frigid waters of Lake Superior.

This was an all-hands-on-deck process as we half-pulled and yanked the heavy boat to the gentle surf, dragging the old craft into the cold water and out to the sandbar some forty feet from shore. We set a cinderblock as an anchor with old rope, and we swam and played for several hours on Henry. These were blissful moments I will never forget.

Returning Henry to his designation in the barn was another issue altogether. It only took a moment for the entire family to understand we had a problem hoisting Henry's heavy plywood frame onto the farm trailer and into the barn. With six of us, grunting and groaning, and with herculean effort, the task was completed.

Henry's paint was beginning to chip and peel, so father mixed some left-over paint that was in the barn that I could apply where it was needed. While the paint didn't match, it worked fine. I thought, if Henry was a steed instead of a boat, he most surely would have been an Appaloosa. I still believe that Henry liked the comparison.

I should add, that while the previous owner gave Henry a touch-up of paint, he had neglected to adequately paint or caulk the old boat, consequently Henry leaked like the proverbial sieve. I caulked and painted Henry the best I could, but neither paint nor caulk stuck well on the soggy old boat. I wisely restricted the others from caulking and painting. So, Donny, always head-strong, threw a tantrum, while Susan deliberately turned over a can of old paint. I guess you could call that getting even.

The weather turned grey and wet for the next several days and noisy games of cards and monopoly took up our time. Finally, the weather broke, and we headed to the beach, the small farm-wagon creaking and groaning from the overload, only to recognize we would have the same problem in reverse later in the day when we would need to bring Henry back to the farmstead. All of us children sweated over piles of stones and rocks to get him to the water's edge. Too exhausted now to swim, we had a problem. We couldn't just leave Henry at the water's edge, now that the vessel lay bobbing in several inches of quiet surf. We had to return the water-soaked vessel back to the farm for safe keeping.

I fetched William and Jeanine from their usual back-porch stoop. William, several gin and tonics in, and not pleased to be bothered, drove Missy, our nickname for the tractor, back to the beach with a twenty-foot length of chain and a steel fencepost which he promptly drove into the sand with our old sledgehammer. The family groaned from the effort but eventually dragged Henry up far enough and flipped him over and chained him to the fencepost with a hefty padlock. We children loved Henry but used him only on several occasions that summer, not enough to warrant the effort.

Except me. I would spend hours alone laying on Henry's overturned grey hull, imagining. Yes, imagining. What? Just everything. Sometimes it was as if Henry were animate.

Occasionally, on starlit nights I would pedal our old Monkey-Ward bike down to the beach and lie on the over-turned skiff, and just gaze at the endless firmament. The constellation Orion was my favorite, and I envisioned...