The Cabin

the annual weekend that wasn't

Time to share with you another excerpt from the novel I’m currently writing. Like last time: will this make it into the final story? Who knows; this is all a work in progress, and it’s very much in draft form. But writing—and then sharing, with tentative trepidation—is part of this story’s writing process. I hope you enjoy it.

p.s. In case you missed it, here’s the first excerpt I shared, followed by the second.

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source

He was a kind soul, my grandpa, and supposedly back in the day he had some business acumen, but I never saw it. By the time I came along, he’d let people run up their store credit to the detriment of our spreadsheets, and I’d hear about it over the dinner table.

“Maggie, I just don’t know what to do with your father…” Dad would say about once a week, passing the mashed potatoes. “I know it’s hard for him, but he needs to let the mercantile go.”

“It wouldn’t be hard for him, Jack,” Mom would reply, “It’d be devastating. I don’t think he’d know what else to do with his time.” And so this conversation went on repeat for several years until a fall forced Grandpa to finally retire. He climbed the shop ladder to replace a lightbulb one afternoon and his balance bested him, breaking his hip in the process. The doctors discovered cancerous cells invading his bones, and though he went into remission a few years later, by then Dad had full control of the mercantile’s ins and outs and Henry didn’t even have passwords to the accounts.

Once he could walk again, Grandpa Henry substituted for the physics teacher at the high school when she went on maternity leave. The teenagers loved him instantly. He’d tell war stories and terrible jokes, and he went above and beyond his pay grade to see that almost every lesson was hands-on, as physics is best taught, and because he was never trained in the fine art of classroom management. Marble rollercoasters over lectures any day, in Henry’s opinion.

When Mrs. Jacobs decided she’d rather stay home with her newborn indefinitely after all, he happily accepted her position full-time. Except for keeping up with the grade book, it turned out teaching suited Henry McIntyre like a man about town. He became beloved Mr. Mac for the next fifteen years, and no one could call him otherwise, even when his students graduated and had kids of their own. He was Mr. Mac of Oakley: Physics Teacher Extraordinaire.

He still insisted on helping out at the store in the summer and on holiday breaks, and Dad reluctantly saw this as a reasonable compromise. Instead of running the mercantile, Henry McIntyre became the town’s oldest stock boy for several weeks a year, which meant the store’s profits increased just when they needed it because his former students, now living elsewhere, would come back for the holidays and stop by just to say hi to Mr. Mac. When a former student would walk in with their toddler on their hip, Henry would stop everything to reminisce. They’d leave with Ms. Knoop’s homemade candles and Tom’s legendary caramel sauce as gifts and pocket a story to tell their city friends that sounded straight out of a Rockwell painting about their beloved teacher.

During his holiday shifts Henry would slice open boxes and talk to the inventory: “Well now—hello there, sunscreen; you must mean school’s almost done” he’d say during Spring Break, or “Well if they haven’t changed your label yet again” to canned pumpkin during Thanksgiving week. Henry at the mercantile was a way to mark time.

He was a stickler about lining up all the boxes and canned goods on the shelves just-so, making sure everything faced the right way, and he wasn’t a half-bad holiday display window designer either. That crossed one more thing off Jack Green’s to-do list, making the situation truly a symbiotic relationship: Grandpa kept one finger in the family business and did the work Dad wouldn’t be bothered with, and Dad got to finally keep McIntyre’s Mercantile in the black.

I never knew my Grandma Heidi, Henry’s wife and my mom’s mom, because she died before I was born. So once he really and truly retired from teaching—he finally felt his age in his bones which made marble rollercoasters and balloon cars simply too exhausting—he’d spend most every morning with his fellow widower friends, kindred spirits he’d known for forty years, minimum. At 7 am they’d nurse black coffee, newspapers in hand, at the neighborhood coffee shop, four gray-haireds talking politics and sports and retelling the same stories. When the weather suited, they’d go fishing together at the watering hole off of Lake Sanderson, hardly catching anything but reveling in the view of long-necked herons and their kept company. They’d reminisce about the war and the days when their knees worked properly. They’d admire each others’ wives, each of them no older than thirty in their imaginations and still wearing tea-length dresses and red lipstick.

Once a year, this good-natured grumble of gentlemen drove two hours away to Walter Cook’s lakefront cabin in the woods to do some “real” fishing. Lake full of catfish, Walt, Martin, Bob, and Henry would spend hours on the fishing boat collecting fish for their families’ chest freezers, then spend the early evening and on smoking cigars on the back porch and listening to the Canadian geese passing through on their way north. This pilgrimage became Henry’s highlight of the year, the sundial in his life’s liturgical calendar for marking time. Autumn became Cook Cabin season for Henry.

Which is why it was baffling when he never showed up.