Mistakes by the Lake

Brian Petkash

Description

"Set in Cleveland, Ohio, from its earliest beginnings as a forested frontier to the urban blight of modern times, Mistakes by the Lake is a collection of ten thematically linked stories spanning the many faces of the city's history: A motorman navigates his 1920's back-and-forth trolley until he snaps; A stockyards knocker encounters the Virgin Mary during the 1954 World Series; A wannabe wrestles his unruly mind along the flammable 1960's Cuyahoga River; In a reinvention of Henry IV, a young man must either stick with his bumbling criminal crew or uncover legit ways to support his mother and transgender Gramps."--Amazon.com.

Sujets

• Historical
• Ohio
• Cincinnati
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 28 mai 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692335
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

M ISTAKES BY THE L AKE
P RAISE FOR M ISTAKES BY THE L AKE
In Mistakes by the Lake , Brian Petkash writes, I learned then, and I know now, that there is no insulation from tragedy. Part adventure narrative, part love letter to Cleveland, this collection uses history to illuminate and elevate trailblazers, troublemakers, and tinkerers. This book is a tribute to the American experience.
-Tasha Cotter, author of Astonishments
With a tender and transportive love note to a city-with shades of Richard Powers s feel for people and land, spiked by flashes of the odd experimentalism of underground poet d.a. levy-Brian Petkash has written a muscular, inventive, and engrossing novel in stories, each one set in a different Cleveland decade. From 1796 to 2013, we travel from wilderness to street car, from the day a steer escapes the stockyards to the awful day a star little leaguer disappears. Each chapter about this city in Ohio throbs with love, intensity, devotion, and creativity. Epic, ambitious, gorgeous, and deeply felt, all of the stories in Mistakes by the Lake add up to a book at least as old, important, and beautiful as the grand old city of Cleveland itself.
-Nathan Deuel, author of Friday Was the Bomb and frequent Los Angeles Times book critic
Evidently, Brian Petkash was somebody s big secret until now. I don t know how they kept him from us. No one writes this good the first time out, do they? Well, secret no more, folks: this genie s out of the bottle. Brian Petkash s Mistakes by the Lake is a stunning literary achievement. The prose is luminous and compassionate, the themes are complex and resonant, the characters are riveting and heroic. You won t soon forget them, and you won t want to. They ll haunt your dreams. This is not a book that you can put down until it s through with you. Yes, it s that good, and you re going to thank me for telling you about Mistakes by the Lake .
-John Dufresne, author of I Don t Like Where This Is Going
continued on page 194
M ISTAKES BY THE L AKE

Brian Petkash
Copyright © 2020 by Brian Petkash All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Mistakes by the Lake is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
  Permissions   Madville Publishing   P.O. Box 358   Lake Dallas, TX 75065
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
These stories, in slightly different form, appeared in the following journals: “And the Moon Shimmered” in Bridge Eight Literary Magazine ; “Flood” in Southword ; “Our Lady of Cleveland” in Midwestern Gothic ; “Up in the Sky” in El Portal .
Grateful acknowledgment is given to Reason magazine and Reason.com for permission to use the quote by Drew Carey.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “What the ants are saying” from THE LIVES AND TIMES OF ARCHY AND MEHITABEL by Don Marquis, copyright © 1927, 1930, 1933, 1935, 1950 by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is given to Western Reserve Historical Society for permission to use “Seth Pease’s Map, 1796/Pillsbury, I.H., 1855.” Comments: “A plan of the city of Cleveland” reprint “Jan. 5th, 1855”.
Author Photograph: Adrianne Mathiowetz Photography Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis; Cleveland skyline in black watercolor on white background, Cristina Romero Palma / Shutterstock; Cleveland USA city skyline silhouette, YurkaImmortal / Shutterstock.
ISBN: 978-1-948692-32-8 paperback, 978-1-948692-33-5 ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931925
for my parents
T ABLE OF C ONTENTS
Skywoman and the Cayagaga, 1796-1797
The Last Ride, 1928
Up in the Sky, 1938
Dispossessed, 1946-1947
Our Lady of Cleveland, 1954
Butterflies on Fire, 1969
Flood, 1975
And the Moon Shimmered, 1984
In the Shade, 1999
Mistakes by the Lake, 2013
Afterword and Acknowledgements
About the Author
Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. -Henry IV, Part 1
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. -Oscar Wilde
I love the normalcy of Cleveland. There s regular people there. -Drew Carey
S KYWOMAN AND THE C AYAGAGA , 1796-1797
The story is thus, or so I ve been told: Skywoman, the mother goddess-pregnant with her daughter, Tekawerahkwa, Breath of the Wind-fell through a hole in the sky, a celestial being cast out, an Eve without her Adam. In her attempt to hold fast to Skyworld, her grip stripped the branches of the Celestial Tree. And as waterbirds carried her down, down, down to the back of Turtle Island, her hand released the Tree s seeds, sprinkled the land with plenty.
Here, in this New Connecticut, this Western Reserve, there grew oak and walnut and beech and chestnut and maple and sycamore so thick and breakless that day seemed night and night seemed pitch. Skywoman, she planted in spadefuls.
This land, this endless land, ripe for exploration and settlement, summoned me. My failures in Old Connecticut, my failures to my wife and child, could here be washed away.
I d had to play catch-up; my surveying party left without me while I stayed behind to finish interring my son s empty casket. I made my way from Connecticut to Schenectady where I purchased supplies: lantern, surveying compass, porringers, yarn for wicks, cooking utensils, bread, pork, and liquor. I also encountered an impossibly weird beast, an elephant on display beside an old tavern. I marveled at it for hours. As it lumbered in its too-small pen, the impressive footprints it left in the mud-larger than any animal s prints I d ever seen-were washed away in a storm that left me wondering why we do anything in this world.
It was September, what was once called by the people of this land The Full Corn Moon. My route took me up the Mohawk and into Oneida Lake, up the Oswego into Lake Ontario, and I arrived at the landing above the falls. It was breathtaking. I dropped a stone at the top; it took three seconds to fall. Esau, my son, dwelled deeper than three seconds.
I fell in and out with various traveling groups. Some were moving from one fort or garrison to another. Others were like me: looking for fresh starts in virgin lands. After getting some help over the portage to skirt the falls, I continued along the southern shore of Lake Erie, passed Catawaugus Creek, Presque Isle, and, finally, I crossed into the eastern confines of New Connecticut and into a new world.
The first night after I d overtaken my party at Conneaught, we encamped by a pond. It was now November, The Frost Moon. After our fire, our meal, our storytelling, our bed-making, I lay in the open land and enjoyed the sensation of an unusually warm rainfall dripping through the thick canopy. Drops struck my face, rolled and glided down my nose, cheek, and neck and melted into the soft earth. And I could swear the wind, in my Sukey s voice, whispered my name. Jacob, it said. A plaintive plea.
Much of the land had already been surveyed in the summer of 1796 by Moses Cleaveland and his team. But the Connecticut Land Company wanted additional and re-confirmed information prior to opening it up for settlement. And we needed to finish quickly: there was already talk of a few men, Lorenzo Carter and, separately, Judge James Kingsbury, on their way behind us, champing at the bit to start anew.
The first few months of our surveying went as it should even with considerably fewer men than Cleaveland had at his disposal: twelve miles a day, axeman clearing the straight-line path through the forest, the flagman sighting the surveyor, and my fellow chainman and I running the lines with a Gunter s chain, measuring distance and setting marks. By the time of The Long Lights Moon, the winter snow proved difficult, chest-high at times, but surveying in the winter could keep Indians at bay.
While our work continued in earnest, I couldn t help but feel my vague hopes were cursed. In rapid succession: one of our packhorses, carrying a fair amount of our supplies, wandered off, never to be found; our other packhorse succumbed to the blind staggers; we lost Samuel, our jocular and watchful trailing spy, to an unlikely accident involving a felled tree; Gideon, our lead hunter, took ill-the ague, the Cayagaga Fever, often blasted him into feverish fits; and my eyes, which had started to degrade in Connecticut, seemed anxious to fully hobble my vision. My wife had said, even before Esau s death, that pinpricks of fog had erupted from within the centers of my eyes and had sought to usurp them slowly, wholly. Abraham, the surveyor, often wondered aloud how any of my survey lines could be straight.
As we settled in for a cold night, I got the fire going. I dragged Gideon near to it. He was a young humorless man but physically powerful. More than once we d overtake his three-hundred-yard lead to find a bear felled by his knife, a claw mark across Gideon s cheek, a patch of his heavy beard abraded. He d smile in a way that reminded me of Esau just after we d had a row, and Gideon would say we d be eating well tonight. He d leave the carcass for me and continue ahead to scout more game or savages. His ague now weakened him and he felt lighter, so much lighter, than I expected.
I prepared our food. Gideon ate little; instead, he took some rhubarb and a dose of tartar emetic which puked him several times while the rest of us ate. Seth, ou