The first time that connection became clear to me, I didn't smile. I didn't feel triumphant. I looked toward the subdivision roofs beyond the tree line and thought of the children who lived there, of the water coming from their kitchen taps, and of a woman so desperate to win a property argument that she might have put all of them in danger. I called the county emergency number before I called my lawyer. Whatever Vivian had done to me, those families had a right to know what might be happening underneath their feet.
But to understand why I was standing on that dock with a dead bass in my net, you have to understand what the lake was before Vivian Blackwater decided it offended her.
My grandfather, Thomas Reed, bought the first twelve acres outside Pine Ridge, North Carolina, in 1952. The county road was gravel then, the surrounding fields were mostly tobacco, and electricity had only recently reached some of the homes tucked into the ridges. Thomas was a carpenter by trade, a patient man with broad hands and a stubborn dislike for borrowing money. He wanted somewhere his children could grow up with clean water, open ground, and a door nobody could order him to close.
The spring was already there when he bought the land. It came out of a shaded bank beneath a stand of beech trees, ran over stone, and collected in a shallow natural basin that earlier farmers had enlarged into a pond. My grandfather spent years stabilizing the banks, planting trees, and shaping a modest spillway so the water would move without washing soil into the lower pasture. He called it the lake even when people told him it wasn't big enough to deserve the name.
By the time I was born, everybody called it Grandfather's Lake. There was a fishing dock at the southern end, built from rough-cut boards and supported by heavy posts driven down to firm ground. My father helped Thomas build the first version, and I helped my father replace the worn deck boards in the summer of 1987. The permit for that work, folded into an old brown envelope, would become one of the most important pieces of paper in my life decades later.
I learned to cast a fishing line on that dock before I knew how to ride a bicycle. My grandfather would place his hand over mine and guide the rod in a slow arc, telling me not to fight the motion. When I became impatient, he'd say, "Marcus, water doesn't owe you a fish. You have to learn to wait without becoming angry at the waiting." At eight, I thought he was talking about bass. At fifty-two, I knew he had been giving me advice about people.
My wife, Sandra, had been hearing stories about the lake since our first date. We met when I was still wiring commercial buildings and she was working at a county health clinic. She liked to say she married me because I could repair anything except my own tendency to worry. In the twenty-three years we had been together, she had watched me rescue turtles from the road, rebuild a broken pump during a thunderstorm, and spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining to visitors that Big Bertha was not interested in becoming anyone's trophy.