First Ice | Mary Ellen Gabriel
Skate where the puck is going and you’ll be ready for the shot, said my father. I was more than ready for it, even though I was only six, and small for my age. My father cut the stick handle down to fit me. He did the same for my brothers, who were younger, though not much smaller, than me. On Saturday mornings we walked to the pond, the four of us, on the packed snow trail through the pine woods. We carried our sticks at our sides; my father called it the farmer’s carry. Our skates we laced together and wore over our shoulders. Duke came with us, his yellow fur standing out thick, his hot breath pluming past his ears. Sometimes we met our friends on the trail, and their fathers, and the bubbly feeling would well up in me, the feeling that everyone around me was happy. We lived outside Medfield, Massachusetts on lots recently carved from the woods and fields. The walk to the pond seemed long; I wonder how far it really was?
If frigid weather came before the snow, the pond’s surface shone clear and black as a dance floor. First ice, the fathers called it. They tried to maintain it as long as possible, shoveling after storms, sweeping away any stray leaves, or “melters”, which warmed the ice they fell on as they decomposed, forming treacherous little pockets. They always went first, the fathers—tossing their boots aside, lacing up their skates, rocketing off the bank like birds released from a cage. The first “clock” of the puck made Duke bark, his deep woof joining the fathers’ eager shouts. My fingers numbed before I could finish helping my youngest brother tie his skates. My father spun around us, lazy and graceful as a broad-winged hawk on a current. Shaky but eager, we rode sideways on our blades, our knees knocking together, our sticks nosing out, sniffing the ice for the puck. Look alive, boys, look alive! my father called, his words ringing out joyous on the winter air. He wanted us to skate with our sticks up, push our bottoms out, cross one leg over the other when we made our turns. He gave up on my brothers—they were too young—but he tried to teach me these things, and I practiced over and over in a corner of the pond where the little kids had their own net, my eyes yearning after my father even as he dug the ice with one toe and skimmed off to join the men’s game.
On the coldest days—which were not the darkest days but instead came in February, when the light was returning and the fathers kept us going until the moon rose and there was woodsmoke on the air—we could hear the pond’s ice groaning, and once we saw a slender fissure race across it, heard a shot and felt the pond shiver with agony. That day, my big toe froze white like a new potato. My youngest brother cried and collapsed in a heap on the bank, and my father sent him home on the moonlit trail with Duke for company.
Skate where the puck is, and you’ll miss your chance. Skate where it’s going, and all you have to do is take the shot. It was years before I knew Wayne Gretzky said it first. All wisdom, all grace, came from my father.
For him, the puck was going to Atlanta. He left us at the end of that winter, heading south to sign a lease with the girlfriend he’d met while traveling for work. My mother took to her bed and various relatives arrived to make sure we boys got fed and sent to school on time. By the time she recovered enough to take up the burden of single parenthood, we were moving away from that place of piney trails and woodland ponds, of old stone fences buried in leaves. I never saw the pond again after that last frigid day, when the ice fired its warning shot and my toe froze and Duke guided my brother home on the moonlit trail. Knowing how quickly wetlands are drained and filled in, I doubt it’s still there, and even if it were, I would not know how to find it again. I’m glad I didn’t know it was the last time, and that I remember the day just as it was, full of fiery breath and freezing wind and the drive to skate, skate, skate into the next realm.
Thirty years after my father abandoned us, I held my newborn son and looked deep into his eyes. I had one game plan for fatherhood: be different from my dad. When I felt my boy’s papery new fingers close around mine, a silent crack opened in my heart. I remembered the earliest days with my father on the pond—before I knew anything about skating or anything else—how he bent at the waist, held my gaze and let me grasp his two index fingers like levers, while he traveled slowly backwards, drawing me towards him across an alien surface. The molecules parted under the pressure of my blades and the sensation of gliding traveled up through my feet and legs, into my belly. I was moving towards my father, but I would never reach him; that was not the point. The point was to imagine myself in some future state, some place other than where I stood awkward and trembling, barely able to trust that the glazed surface would hold me up.
Bonus audio of Mary Ellen reading from her story:
about the author:
Mary Ellen Gabriel is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. Her articles and essays have been published in Madison Magazine and Isthmus, along with other regional and national publications. After moving frequently as a child, she is now firmly rooted in the upper Midwest, where she has explored every square inch of her neighborhood lake in her kayak and on her ice skates.