The Lake Will Be Blue, by Kara Archer

Sometimes he says he wants, when he’s dead, that people should say he was a man who knew how to run a business. A man who knew the chemical industry inside and out. A man who really knew manufacturing. Other times, he says, if he only had done what he wanted with his life, he would have been a farmer. In either case, he must have been born for hard work. He works like a machine. Won’t quit until it’s done, no matter what. That is the feature that has earned him his place. Starting out the ninth and youngest child of a weathered widow on a farm in the strip-mined hills of West Virginia, he went on to become a family hero. He put himself through college and kept climbing at work. He advises and leads, helps cousins and nephews in financial distress, travels all over the world. Now he visits in a shiny black Mercedes SUV, and he wears wingtip shoes with black suits.



But I have seen pictures of his origins, the farm of his childhood, his father’s brothers, the whole herd of them, looking untamed and severe in black and white, smileless, lined up in a pose like desperados of the Wild West, the kind of people who look like they might shoot rifles at trespassers from broken-down porches. I have also seen pictures of his family’s farm. In one, he lolls on a riverbank with Rex, his dog. He’s got a stalk of hay in his mouth and a straw hat pushed down over his eyes, a country boy at home in the country, soaking the sun like a part of the field. There is another photograph – he is three years old, he clutches a limp sock monkey by the neck, a desolate shack makes the background – my throat feels tender when I look at his expression.



All of us have always known about his dream. He has made it clear; one day, he will have a farm and a herd of Black Angus cattle. The circumstances of life have kept him from it all his life, but here lately, now that he’s in his sixties, he’s started moving toward it. He purchased a piece of land about an hour’s drive from his suburban house, about as close to West Virginia as you could get in the middle of Indiana. The neighbors on one side of his farm have a flowerbed full of real wooden cutout figures of the Easter Bunny, and the neighbors on the other side have mounted the front end of a Model-T Ford to their garage to advertise their admiration of all things that eat diesel. And like West Virginia, his farm has rolling hills and woods filled with delicate wildflowers. The jewel of the property, however, is the lake. A lake is essential for a cattle farmer.

But the cows will come later. His wife wants to keep the herd modest, fearing the prospect of spending all her golden years shoveling cow poop. Worse, the farm might turn out like everything else upon which her husband expended his labor: big and prosperous, a full-scale meat packing plant and the stench of a slaughterhouse replacing the little cottage she imagines nestled in lilacs at the water’s edge. We’ll get three, maybe four calves, she says, sometime later.

As it stands, however, all the enthusiasm he might otherwise direct to a rutting bull, a pregnant cow, or an injured steer finds refuge in the lake. As soon as he bought the place, he contacted a fishery and had them sow eggs of bass and baby trout. They’re getting big now. You can see them take leaps into the air and plunge back into the water, although more often you just hear the splash, and you turn around to see the ripples slowly radiate across the surface. The farm neighbors come with their coolers of beer and their country music and their lawn chairs, and they fish in his lake. He stands behind the window of his part-time farmhouse and vocally unwelcomes them to us, but he’s reluctant to post those orange and black “No Trespassing” signs.

There is a tiny island in the middle of the lake where the geese lay their eggs. Grass and brambles and cattails like to grow up together there in disorderly fashion, the whole island sprouting upward and unruly like Don King’s hair. So he bought a pontoon boat, and as soon as the island starts looking shaggy he loads the boat with a lawn mower, a chain saw, an extra tank of gasoline, a Rototiller, a weed-whacker, a hoe, a shovel, and a pair of hedge clippers. Then he put-puts twenty feet across the lake and hacks away until the sun goes down and the island is shaved bald again - all except a patch of weeds he courteously leaves to the nest and its clutch of future geese.

One day, he stood behind the window of his little part-time farmhouse, observed the lake, and decided that the lake had one shortcoming that would be easy to correct. He is the sort of man who gets things done, and so immediately he sat down on the couch with the Yellow Pages balanced on the crests of his white knees. For a good fifteen minutes he thumbed through it, but those Yellow Pages just didn’t have the kind of thing he needed. He scratched his chin and thought. Then, he got out his briefcase and searched through the business cards he’d collected over the years. He picked up the phone.

Before the week was through, UPS delivered sixteen small, unexpectedly heavy cardboard boxes to his house in Indianapolis. His wife wondered why he was in such a hurry to get dinner over with. While she put the dinner dishes in the dishwasher, he loaded the boxes into the back of his SUV and drove out to his farm. There, he transferred them to his pontoon boat, hitched the boat to the trailer, hitched the trailer to the tractor, and towed the boat to the edge of the lake. He clambered in and set the motor going - put put put - and pushed off into the water. With the Swiss army knife he kept on his key chain, he slashed one of the boxes open and sprinkled its contents over the edge of the pontoon as he directed the boat in lazy circles. When the box was empty, he leaned over and stared into the depth of the water. It was good, and it got better and better with each box.



His wife was amazed when she came out to the farm that weekend and saw the lake. She got out of the car and walked slowly to its banks. She sat on her heels and touched the water timidly with one finger, rubbed finger against thumb and wrinkled her forehead, puzzled, at the wetness on her skin.

“It’s blue!” he said, beaming.

“Yes,” she said. “It certainly is.”

No one had ever seen a lake like this. It nearly glowed. Its blueness shamed the sky and all other natural shades of blue. The fish appeared unharmed, but ghastly in contrast with the water, like dingy brown monsters trapped in a pool of molten plastic. The geese went around with blue legs and bellies and seemed like a hybrid of real, living geese and giant bathtub toys. The neighbors stopped coming with their lawn chairs and fishing poles, although they did sometimes return to stand on the banks and shake their heads slowly back and forth, discussing the situation amongst themselves.

But it did not last forever. Over the course of several months, the lake reclaimed itself. Who knows where all that blue went…