The Lake Wakes

The lake woke first. Superior lifted her long gray shoulders and breathed, slow and steady, against the stony ribs of the shore. Fog lay in folds over the channels, not moving, only waiting—like a dog planted in the middle of a road with no intention of budging for wagon or king. Battle Island’s light kept its lazy wheel, white and sure, cutting pale lanes through the mist.

Rossport rose in small noises: a kettle lid rattling; a door thumping; a gull’s cry pulling a fisherman out of sleep by the sleeve. Nets hung stiff with yesterday’s water. Cedar breath drifted from the islands. Donald Murray and Harry Legault were on the wharf before the rest, as was their custom, leaning their weight into the boards and listening to the gossip of the water underfoot. They didn’t trust the lake—no one with sense did—but they understood it. That was enough.

It was then the white yacht came ghosting out of the haze: paint too clean for such country, brass rails winking at a sky that did not care. The name on her bow—Gunilda—looked like a peacock dropped among crows. She moved proud and careless, a city thing set loose among cedar whiskers and basalt teeth.

A City Man on a Country Dock

A launch hissed from her side and tapped the wharf. A captain stood within it, hat neat, jaw tight. Behind him, taller and altogether brighter, was the owner: William Lamon Harkness, belly first, mustache trimmed to points, white hat riding his head like a little crown. He stepped ashore with a crispness that said the wood ought to be grateful.

Donald tipped his cap. Harry spat without ceremony.

“Shoals run tight here,” Donald said. “Waters hide teeth sharper’n saw blades. Best hire a pilot.”

Harkness’s smile sharpened. “My good fellow, I have crossed oceans. This lake is but a puddle. I require no fisherman’s hand to show me where to point my bow.”

“The charts don’t tell you when the bottom stands up,” Harry said.

“They do if a man can read.” Harkness’s gaze slid over the harbor—nets, smoke, the low roofs. “In Manhattan, fifteen dollars pays the boy who keeps my boots. I’ll not be shorn by bait knives and fish tales. Good day.”

The captain’s eyes flicked apology and followed his paymaster. The launch scuttled back to the big white hull. On the wharf, the two guides stood with their hands buried in wool, the shape of a judgment forming between them without words.

“Three feet below today,” Harry said after a while.

“She’s in a humor,” Donald answered. “Pride’s a poor pilot.”

Offers Refused

By the time the fog thinned the yacht had slipped down-channel, her smoke a thin scrawl in the lifting air. At Jackfish, a man named Legault—Harry’s cousin twice removed—offered to put her in Rossport for twenty-five and the price of a train ride home. Harkness didn’t bother to pretend. He laughed, a soft, sharp thing.

“Gentlemen, I am not buying stories. Charts will do.”

The women in hats tittered. The men in striped coats smiled with their mouths and not their eyes. The captain made one more quiet attempt on the Gunilda’s bridge, pointing at the pale smear where the water ran wrong.

“Sir, I’d like a little less way on. The bottom comes up fast off Copper.”

“Captain,” Harkness said, not loud but with a neat edge, “I did not purchase the finest yacht in the New York Yacht Club to crawl through a pond at a fisherman’s pace. Proceed.”

Copper Island stood with its iron-red face to the noon, cedar beards dangling, the cliff like a judge who had already decided. The channels pinched, crooked, shouldered the careless into their lessons. Beneath the surface: a cliff of rock that rose from 280 feet to the breath of a hand below daylight. The lake wore it like a hidden blade.

The Gunilda came fast—too fast for those narrows—decks bright with luncheon, children skittering, waiters with silver, the captain with his glass, Harkness with a fresh polish of certainty.

“Fresh water is a kind sea,” he told his guests. “Danger here is exaggerated by provincials who profit by fear.”

Men nodded because they were paid to nod. Women smiled because wealth asks that favor. The captain looked where the water paled against the wrong wind and felt the little lift under his soles that says the world intends to rise up and instruct the living.

The Strike

It wasn’t a crash. It was a long, rising groan that arrived first in the feet, then in the bones, then in the teeth. The bow heaved, not triumphant but astonished, and came to rest on something unarguable. Glasses jumped. A piano string gave a single metallic cry. The guests’ laughter snapped off like a string.

The Gunilda sat with her nose pinned to rock and her stern hanging over a black fall. Doors banged shut too late. Ports were dogged with guilty hands. A steward stood with a tray tilted and did not know where to set it down anymore.

“Send for a tug,” Harkness said, like ordering fish on ice. “A competent one.”

“Two,” called Harry Legault from the skiff that had come, quick and low, out of Rossport. “One to pull and one to hold her from rolling.”

Harkness did not deign to look down. “One will suffice.”

The captain’s hands tightened on the rail. “Sir—”

“You will attend your station,” Harkness said. “We proceed.”

The Tug

The James Whalen came chuffing from Port Arthur at a pace that said this wasn’t her first hard day. She was black and practical and not ashamed of either. Her captain came aboard the white yacht and left wet prints on the polish. He looked forward to where the bow sat on a stone shelf, looked aft at the open, hungry dark.

“You need two,” he said. “If she frees, she’ll want to swing to starboard. Without a brace, she’ll turn her ports to the lake and that’ll be the end of it.”

Harkness applied the smile he used for children learning their letters. “Sir, I will not indulge the expense of superstition. One tug. Do your work.”

The tug captain didn’t waste breath on a second warning. Men like him give counsel once, maybe twice; after that, the world does the talking. They ran lines. The tug dug in. The rope sang a high, tight note. The lake held its breath.

“Easy,” Harry called across the water. “She’ll take a notion to roll.”

The tug pulled. The yacht rose a fraction, grudging. Harkness lifted his arms as if he had done it with them. “There you are,” he said to his guests. “You see?”

Then the stern moved—not a swing, at first, but the thought of one. Unbraced, obedient to the shape of the cliff and the push of the current, she turned her starboard cheek. Dark mouths of ports met the skin of the lake and kissed it.

The Roll

Water goes where water is invited. It slid in with a burglar’s confidence, down staircases, across carpets, through rooms where money had taught wood to shine. It found the piano and pressed both hands upon the keys, and a last sound rose—a bright, wrong chord that had no business here. Men ran. Women cried out and clutched at bracelets no one intended to steal. The captain shouted and the crew obeyed, though there was no more sense left to be done.

The Gunilda took on the lake and turned her face toward judgment. She eased from the rock like a tooth that had been teased too long. For a moment she paused in a crooked poise, as if pride itself could still be a plan. Then she went. The bow dipped, the stern hiked, lines snapped, bubbles roared, and the lake accepted her without ceremony.

The surface smoothed. The tug sat gasping. The men who had warned stared at the quiet water and said nothing that had not already been said.