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/ 101 night skating It was one of the things my father tried to do. It was something he worked on with a shovel and a garden hose, at five in the morning while we slept. And when we woke, he was out there without a hat or gloves. For days the temperature had been below freezing. Snow had iced over the ground, so that we had to stamp through a hard crust to keep from falling. Mother and I stood at the window staring down into the backyard.“Go get him,” my mother said, cinching her robe tight. Our backyard was tiered, not flat. At the bottom, below the last tier, lay a gully that had been a tire dump before my parents had it filled in. The water from the hose was arching like a summer sprinkling stream for kids to run through, and where the water landed looked more like a slushy broken edge of a tadpole hole than the ice-skating rink he said it was when I asked him. Most of the water was running off the first tier and following a steep path into the gully where my parents always planted a garden in the spring. He 102 / cathryn hankla was standing there holding an empty coffee mug in one hand and the hose in the other. His nose was red and his hands had turned claw-like. “The water’s not freezing fast enough,” I said. “Give it time.” “Mom says to come in.” He tightened his grip on the hose. “We used to go skating,” he said. “We did?” “Not you, I did, on the farm.The lower pond would freeze over. Sometimes hell does.”My father stopped to laugh a bitter laugh.“Your grandmother and I took a couple of Uncle Joe’s horses and rode down to the pond through the snow. We’d skate all afternoon. Then Uncle Joe built us a fire down there so we could go night skating. We went on skating right into the night.” “Who’s Uncle Joe?” “Your grandmother’s brother, you know Uncle Joe.” But I didn’t. I’d never met him or heard his name before. “The skating,” I said, “that sounds like fun. Did Granddaddy skate, too?” “That bastard?” He hunched under the weight of his words, and still the water poured down the slope from the hose. He focused on the water without seeing it. “Do you have any skates now?” I asked, to fill the dead air. “Of course I do.” “Where are they?” “Around here somewhere. I was going to find them just as soon as the rink froze right.” I glanced back up to the window and saw the vague shape of my mother. She was too far back for me to see her face.“Mom said to come in,”I repeated. It was pretty raw out there, even with my hat pulled down and my collar pulled up and my gloves. The wind was catching the spray as it exited the hose and pitching it here and there. The air held the promise of more snow, and a few stray flakes bobbed around our heads. “Aren’t your hands freezing?” I asked him. “I don’t know. Maybe.”He shifted the hose slightly, and the water poured out at his feet drenching his shoes. He had tugged brown rain rubbers over his dress shoes. I stepped quickly away, avoiding most of the spray. night skating / 103 “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to get ready for school,”I said, hoping to encourage him to come in and get ready for work. “Maybe by the time you get home you can skate,” he said. “I don’t know how,” I said. “You can skate. It’s in your blood.” “What does that mean?” “It means what it means. Tell your mother I’m busy.” I went in and told her that and the rest of it. “Oh no,” she said, looking away. “It’s starting again.” “What?” I asked. But I knew as well as she did what was coming for us—another round of early mornings with various questionable “projects” begun around the house and the yard. The driveway still sported a concrete plug over the asphalt from one of these seasons of industry. We had a halfpainted house and a window with only one shutter, a broken set of plates, and a barbecue with a makeshift, bent grill because he had thrown it against...

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