Chapter 10 - The Clear Channel
The spring of twenty-twenty-seven arrived late along the western shore of Lake Michigan.
The ice in the harbors didn't break until the second week of April, moving out into the deep water in long, white floes that ground against the limestone piers with a sound like iron teeth chewing gravel.
The house in Elm Grove was sold on the twelfth of May.
It had not been difficult. A young couple from Minneapolis—he was an engineer at the medical device plant, she was an architect who liked the high ceilings and the wide trim—had offered three hundred and eighty thousand dollars on the first afternoon it was listed.
After the mortgage was settled and the equity line was paid to the penny, there had been one hundred and forty-two thousand dollars left.
I sat on the stone porch of the farmhouse in Green Bay—the house my father had built on the forty acres of high ground that looked out over the cranberry beds.
The house had needed work. The roof had been patched with grey asphalt shingles that didn't match the original slate, and the porch timbers had settled into the clover by two inches on the north side, but the well was sweet, cold, and forty feet deep into the limestone.
Ella sat on an old patchwork quilt spread over the greening grass, holding a wooden spoon from my grandmother’s kitchen, pounding the head against an empty lard tin with absolute, unclouded joy. She was six months old, with two white bottom teeth that showed when she laughed, and her hair had grown out into soft, golden curls that smelled of sweet oil and sun.
Beside her sat Diane.
She had sold the big house in town to a retired dentist from Oshkosh in March. She lived now in the small tenant cottage at the foot of our lane—a three-room house with a stone hearth and a garden that had already been plowed and planted with three rows of early peas and six hills of potatoes.
"The lawyer called from West Bend," Diane said, shelling peas into a blue porcelain colander between her knees. Her fingers moved with that swift, unconscious rhythm of sixty years of kitchen work, the pods popping with a crisp, green snap.
"Peter?" I asked.
"Arthur," she said. "The old man is still coming into the office on Tuesdays. He says the pension transfer cleared the state review board in Madison on Friday morning. The seventy-two thousand dollars has been deposited into the Green Bay First National account."
"And Ryan?"
Diane tossed a handful of empty pods into the bushel basket at her feet.
"He took the sales job in Dubuque," she said. Her voice had no bitterness in it now; it was the voice she used when she spoke of the weather three counties over—something that existed, that had its own seasons, but had nothing to do with whether the roof would hold the rain. "He’s living in an extended-stay motel near the river. Arthur says he’s driving a five-year-old Chevrolet with a dented fender."
She looked out over the lower field, where the red-winged blackbirds were flashing their scarlet epaulets among the dry cattails of the drainage ditch.
"He wrote me a letter," she added.
"Did you read it?"
"I burned it in the kitchen stove," Diane said. "A woman doesn't keep old trash in the woodbox when the spring is here."
A horn sounded from the blacktop at the end of the lane.
A blue station wagon turned into the gravel, its tires making that familiar, rhythmic crunch that had once frightened me, but now sounded only like dinner arriving on time.
Melissa hung her arm out the driver’s window, waving a cardboard tray of strawberry seedlings from the nursery in De Pere.
"They have the big berries this year, Han!" she yelled across the clover. "The ones that don't rot when the June rains come!"
Ella dropped her wooden spoon, looked toward the sound of the car, and let out a high, triumphant shout that scattered three starlings from the lilacs by the pump.
I stood up.
May you like
My back did not ache. The skin over my ribs felt cool, elastic, holding the breath that came deep and sweet off the wide green expanse of the northern flats.
I walked down the steps of the porch, my bare feet sinking into the fresh, cold grass that had grown through the salt of the old season, and picked my daughter up into the light.
