The gravel road through the pines was narrow and rutted, and my mother sat in the passenger seat of my Buick with her purse on her knees and her eyes straight ahead, not saying a word. I had known her for fifty six years, and I had never seen her look so young. She wore her good navy dress and the pearls of her mother. The trees leaned over us like old men listening. After eleven minutes, the road ended in a clearing, and there, beside a small dark lake, stood a gray cabin with a porch and a rope swing.
The white haired woman was waiting on the steps. Her name, she told us, was Helen Brandt, and she had been a teacher of the deaf at the state school in Northern Wisconsin until she retired. She took the hands of my mother in both of hers. “Mrs. Wojtaszek,” she said, “I have been afraid of this day for thirty years.” My mother said, “So have I.” Then they looked at each other and began to laugh, quietly, the way two women laugh when they have both been carrying the same stone.
Inside, the cabin smelled of woodsmoke and old paper. Every wall was covered. Drawings in charcoal and pencil, of loons and pines and the lake in every season, hundreds of them, pinned in rows from floor to rafters. In the center of the room stood a worktable with a wooden box on it, about the size of a bread loaf, with a brass lock. Helen said the brother of Ray had been named Teddy. He had drawn every morning of his life. He had died in June, in his chair by the window, with a pencil in his hand.
“He wanted Ray to have this,” Helen said. “But Ray is gone, so it goes to the son of Ray. He made me promise. The key is in the tackle box of your father, in the false bottom. Ray told me about it years ago.” I stared at her. Then I remembered the old green tackle box in my garage, the one that had never held a single hook that I knew of. I had driven it up with me that morning, without knowing why, on the back seat of the Buick. I went out to the car with a pounding heart.
A man can spend a lifetime protecting a secret and discover that it was never a secret at all, only a love that did not have the words.
The false bottom came away with a screwdriver. Underneath, wrapped in a bit of flannel, lay a small brass key and a folded photograph of my father as a young man, standing with his arm around a boy of ten. On the back, in his heavy hand, he had written, Teddy and me, Lake Tomahawk, 1974. First day he said my name. I carried the key into the cabin like a candle. My mother stood by the table. She nodded at me. I turned the lock, and the lid lifted with a soft creak.
Inside lay a sheaf of drawings tied with twine, and a bundle of letters in the handwriting of my father, thirty years of them, one for each Sunday he could not come. Beneath them lay a ledger. Every week, a line. Paid to Mrs. Brandt, sixty dollars. Paid to the grocer. Paid to the doctor. And on the last page, a deed. The cabin, forty acres of pine, and the lake frontage, all in the name of Teddy Wojtaszek, passing now in equal shares to the four children of Raymond Wojtaszek of Wausau, Wisconsin.
I sat down on a wooden stool, because I could not stand. I asked my mother how she had known. She told me that in 1971, after their third child was born, she found a letter in his coat pocket from the state home. She read it in the pantry, with the door shut. She did not confront him. She waited three nights. Then she put his flannel shirt and the tackle box by the door on Sunday morning and said, Go see your brother, Ray, and bring him a loaf of my bread. He had wept like a child.
“Why did you never tell us?” I asked. She looked at the lake out the window. “Because his mother sent that boy away to hide a shame,” she said. “And your father could not bear to hand the same shame to his own children. He thought if you knew, you would think less of him for not saving Teddy sooner. He was wrong. But I let him be wrong, because it was his to carry. A wife can love her husband enough to let him keep his dignity, Jimmy. It was the hardest thing I ever did.”
Helen brought out a thin book from a shelf, and my mother took it with a trembling hand. It was a book of signs, hand drawn, the ones Teddy had invented himself. At the very back were four pages in pencil, with the face of my father on one, my mother on another, and then each of the four children, drawn from memory, from the family Christmas photograph my father had brought him. Under each picture, a sign, and a word. The word under mine was a brother. He had known my name. He had practiced it with Helen every winter.
I called my sisters that night from the porch. By Saturday, all four of us were at the cabin, with our spouses and ten grandchildren. Helen taught us the signs for family and thank you. A nine year old niece learned faster than any of us and spent the afternoon teaching her grandmother. My mother laughed so hard that she had to sit down on the steps. We scattered some of the ashes of Teddy from the dock, where my father had stood in 1974, and the lake took them gently, as if it had been waiting.
Late in the afternoon, my youngest grandson found the old fishing rod of Teddy in the shed and begged to try it. We sat on the dock in a row, five generations of one stubborn family, and cast into the cold dark water. For a long time nothing happened. Then the line went tight, and the boy shrieked, and I helped him reel in a long, silver, snaky fish with a mouth like a crocodile. It was thirty inches, at least. My mother clapped her hands. “Well,” she said, “they finally bit.”