An Infinite Capacity

From where Daniel sat on the rocky lakeshore, he couldn’t see the innards of the trout he was eating, but he could smell them. The heat of the morning was already such. He’d cooked the chowder over a fire that smoldered now, the wind casting the gray smoke over the lake and then back, burning his eyes. But the chowder was delicious. His Papps taught him how to make it from the lake fish, and he still observed his catches with a quick-made batch. In fact, he carried an herb sachet with him always, because he was never far from the lake or his pole. Simple things, really: some salt, a few peppercorns, thyme and a bay leaf. He would gather some wild onions on his way through the woods from his cabin to the shore to add a lift to the soup, as Papps said. This morning, the onions were plentiful, the fish were biting, and even his little fire, despite the dampness that lingered in the woods, caught and burned with a grudging persistence. A ritual, yes, but different today, for he had decided.

He carried little in his canvas haversack. Some lures, the day’s bait, flint and tinder, a small tin pail blackened by decades of flame. Daniel was almost twenty, but the pail was five times that. Papps said it made enough soup in its life to feed the whole county, which Daniel found funny. Papps had meant to express the pail’s almost infinite capacity, while Daniel figured there weren’t more than a few hundred people in the county, probably less.

And a silver spoon—her spoon. The trick was keeping it shiny, but Daniel knew the trick. A little ash from the fire, a little oil from the fish and the spoon would polish up like new. Now, as he sipped the steaming chowder, the sun caught its edges and threw a sparkle in his eyes, and he couldn’t help feeling nostalgic on this, its last day. But he never felt quite right about such an extravagance and the care it required. He’d tried other spoons, one he carved from a small piece of oak, another he fashioned from an elk antler, but none felt right on his lips. So he set them aside and returned to the silver.

His lips—that once touched hers. He held the spoon up so he could see his inverted reflection. His lips were red and full from the heat of the soup, his brown, thick beard flaring out in all directions. With the fingers of his other hand, he combed back the curls that fell in his face. And once again he remembered he was alone. He would forget most of the time, lost in his own head, and other times lost in the sounds and smells of the all-consuming forest. And there were even times he became the forest, immersed in its depths. But when he saw the face in the spoon, he remembered he was not, and he was a separate thing and the oneness was all an illusion.

Was she an illusion? She said she wanted more than this, the cabin, the woods, the lake. She said she would come back, but he doubted that even as her scent lingered in the cabin and then was gone, and now he couldn’t remember her face, nor her scent. They both shouted rash, inflamed words, saying things that were untrue. At first, he replayed the exchange in his head over and over a thousand times, fixing the words so he said more than his anger. Then, if she had left, it would have been for something real, not for affronts.

But the words would become hard to hold in his mind and he would doubt his memory. Was she real or just something the forest created, every day the same, but infinitely different, and yesterday dissolves and tomorrow was just one more day? No, she would not have existed, except for the ache in his soul, which told him, shouted at him she was. And for the spoon, her spoon.

Yet, as clearly as he understood the ache, he understood the futility of his hope. He dipped the spoon in the ash by the fire. With the oily skin of the fish, he rubbed at the bits of tarnish caught in the florid engraving on its handle, and after rinsing it in the lake, it glittered in the sun’s light, reminding him things can be restored.

But he’d been waiting so long that his hope had withered, and then he knew she would not be back, knew it as deeply and truly as the ache inside him proved her existence. So he threw the spoon as far as he could out into the lake, so far he didn’t hear the splash, but the shimmering surface was broken for a moment, then restored, as if the spoon had never entered there. He saw it sinking in his mind, to the depths, perhaps shimmying a bit this way and that to the bottom where the impact ignites a small plume of silt that will settle and cover it, and the lake will forget the spoon in time as the silt covers layer upon layer, until nothing remains except something that can’t be named.

And he remembered the elk antler. It was an adequate spoon. He dug in his haversack and took it in his hand. It felt awkward and rough, but also solid, natural. When he dipped it into the remaining chowder, it was done. Like everything else it would do, and soon he’d forget there was another.