How to Survive a Summer by Nick White

Author:Nick White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-17T10:38:20+00:00

PART TWO

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THE SONS OF LEVI

■

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There’s a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

—JANE HIRSHFIELD,

“For What Binds Us”

SIX

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ORIENTATION

At dusk we followed Mother Maude to Lake John.

Behind the two cabins, a footpath cut across a clearing, running by the Sweat Shack and then eventually beside an abandoned house. I had never set eyes on it until that very moment—my mother’s childhood home. I didn’t react. Shingles and Sheetrock lay in dusty piles around the front porch like dead skin sloughed off; its windows were busted out. Just a house. A few yards more and we angled past the lime-green husk of a refrigerator and a warped metal bed frame half-sunk in red clay. Relics from another decade, from my mother’s time at the Neck. I denied these objects their history, their traceable connection to me. I was just another camper, no one in particular, and that was just a house and these were just things. Soon we entered the woods. Skinny scrub pines arcing out of thickets of weeds and piss-colored honeysuckle. Daylight was seeping away. Shadows abounded all around us. Insects hummed and wheezed in the growing darkness, a thousand baby rattles in tandem. “They’re just saying hello!” Mother Maude called over her shoulder. “Thisaway!”

The counselors, Rick and Larry, had encouraged us to be orderly, to walk single file, but our line had turned sloppy. Christopher led the charge, and Dale tarried far behind. In between them, Rumil and Sparse and I shuffled along in a cluster, side by side, speculating about the nighttime activity by the lake. No one had told us what to expect, and we were left to wonder about it like a trio of old men pondering this season’s prospects of our favorite baseball team. Rumil guessed a baptism. Which, Sparse and I admitted, made the most sense. Water was involved, and Father Drake and Mother Maude claimed to be an offshoot of Baptists, advocates of total immersion. But if we were getting rebaptized—for all three of us had admitted to being, as Sparse put it, “already dunked”—then certain other details didn’t make much sense. For one, the large mirror Mother Maude toted. For another, the way Rick and Larry were outfitted in coveralls, rain boots, and work gloves. The sort of clothing you wore to do yardwork maybe, not lead five teenage boys down to the waters to wash their sins away. Sparse wagered a commitment ceremony. “You know,” he was saying, as we sidestepped a large bed of fire ants. “You admit what a mighty fortress is our God and kaboom! You is saved, son. Go and lust no more.”

Whatever it was, I warned them, would likely be brutal. Hadn’t they looked over the brochures? “My God,” I said, not telling them how my father had helped Mother Maude and Father Drake with the wording of the camp’s literature.

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