Soldier's Son

9. A Cabin of Family Stories

3 ICIIIO OF HIM ST!IIE$ Lake oy the Woods, West Virginia 1946-1954 We stopped going to the cabin at the lake nearly fifty years ago.And it's been about forty yearssince I lastsaw it. Well, glimpsed it. It looked small—puny, really— viewed from the four-seater when my brother made a flyoveron our way to visit Cousin TommyDick. Years later,on alark,somebody droveup the mountain again, but couldn't locate it. Yetthe cabin still lives within us all, the locus of a significantperiod in our family's history . We keep it alive—as we have all our valuable moments—through storytelling. {108} A CABIN OF FAMILY STORIES { 109 } I don't remember anything of the cabin's beginning. I learned of it piecemeal years later as the men told stories after Sunday dinners at home, long after the cabin had been sold. But despite truth's matter-of-factness,I needed to envision its beginning from a slightly different perspective. They built it in a single summer during the days following World War II, bittersweet days for Mom: her brothers and her brother-in-law returned home from the war against Hitler, but her husband did not. Mom's second-oldest brother, my uncle Tom, who had taken over the family automobile dealership business from Pop, bought the lakefront property in northern West Virginia for a mountain retreat. An avid fisherman, Pop was aging. This would be someplace closer to home where he could enjoy his sport. Uncle Tom procured wood from army surplus materiel. As barracks were dismantled, the beams and boards, windows and doors were sold for use in building homes, businesses, and in this case,a summer cabin. When a teamsters' strike shut out all truck traffic into Pittsburgh, Uncle Tom learned that a truck driver who was parked at a roadside rest on the PennsylvaniaTurn- { 110 } A CABIN OF FAMILY STORIES pike waslooking for someone to buy his load of building material. He was eager to unload and get his truck on the road again. Uncle Tom struck a deal with the driver and ledhim to the cabin site, where,withthe help of several mechanics from the shop, they unloaded and stacked the wood. They set up severalarmytents on the hillside. Some protected the wood from the elements. Others housed the men as they worked throughout that summer. When the cicadas arrived—we called them seven-year locusts—they inhabited the tents as well as the trees. Uncle Tom and Aunt Rose's kids, my cousins Tommy Dick and Rosemary, thought the locusts were great fishing bait. I remembered the next infestation when we collected the empty shells that wefound attached to tree bark. Although it belonged to Uncle Tom and Aunt Rose, from beginning to end the cabin wasa family affair. Pop and his three sons wereall expert carpenters. With Pop planning and supervising each day's work, the brothers threw themselves into digging and pouring footers, erecting the frame, and nailing on the sides and roof. They hired a plumber, a cabinetmaker, and a stonemason . Others pitched in from time to time, but the cabin A CABIN OF FAMILY STORIES { 111 } rose out of the skill, strength, and dogged persistence of an aging father and his three sons. For Pop, a self-taught engineer, it was the familiar challenge of creating something useful and beautiful.In his prime he had supervised the building of imposing, multipurpose structures for his business and for our home as well as for his community government, which he headed for over two decades. This job was different, however. It was an opportunity to work with his sons as grown men, reunited after a long separation during the war years—years of uncertainty and worry, through which Pop sat night after night in his radio room, listening to the day's news reports, hoping to learn how his two younger sons were faring in the battles across the sea. Now,he could displace anxiety with good, hard work, as he measured boards precisely, mitered their ends true, and shouted from the ladder's base to his sons to nail them just so in order to make a solid joint. For the sons it wasthe chance to pound away frightful memories, knowing that the claps of sound were their hammers echoing off the woods across the lake, not a round of enemy artillery fire...