Lemonade
by Raymond Carver (who lived and is buried in Port Angeles, in a cemetery plot that overlooks the Strait and is graced by a marble bench and his poems, engraved)
When he came to my house months ago to measure
my walls for bookcases, Jim Sears didn’t look like a man
who’d lose his only child to the high waters
of the Elwha River. He was bushy-haired, confident,
cracking his knuckles, alive with energy, as we
discussed tiers, and brackets, and this oak stain
compared to that. But it’s a small town, this town,
a small world here. …
Six months later, after the bookcases
have been built, delivered and installed, Jim’s
father, a Mr. Howard Sears, who is “covering for his son”
comes to paint our house. He tells me–when I ask, more
out of small-town courtesy than anything, “How’s Jim?”–
that his son lost Jim Jr. in the river last spring.
Jim blames himself. “He can?t get over it,
neither,” Mr. Sears adds. “Maybe he’s gone on to lose
his mind a little too,” he adds, pulling on the bill
of his Sherwin-Williams cap.
Jim had to stand and watch as the helicopter
grappled with, then lifted, his son’s body from the river
with tongs. “They used like a big pair of kitchen tongs …
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