MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT​

Mentor Commentary
Nardine Taleb

Recipient Reflection
Mark Gilson

Davey

Fiction by ​​Mark Gilson

NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

When her husband left for the war Audrey could no longer sleep past five in the morning. Davey, her son, would hear her in the kitchen making coffee and preparing for the day and they would both be up in the quiet hours before dawn. Davey liked Cream of Wheat, thick not runny, with dark brown sugar and two small slices of butter. If he could not wait for it to cool, he added a brief precise pour of milk from the glass jug that was always in the refrigerator. Davey was seven years old with no siblings and his mother sought each day to contain his boundless energy. From the veranda across the front of the house they could hear the Lake. Sometimes they could hear it raging from inside the house. On this day it was almost silent and they set out across the yard, across the street, and through the field with a flashlight in hand. Tall milkweed and leaning golden rod waved in the narrow illumination as they made their way into the park and then beneath the tall maple trees to the edge of the cliff. Audrey switched off the flashlight and they descended the cliff in the eerie glow of a full moon. It was not really a cliff, more of a gradual descent amidst nearly-mature silver maples, young sumac, arrow-wood and the gnarled remains of aging apple trees. Near the bottom of the descent there was a clapboard changing room, forbidding in the darkness, and then the path spilled out on the beach, white in the moonlight. 
 
There were fishermen on the beach. There were always fishermen there. Some traveled from Cleveland angling for yellow perch, blue pike, catfish, sauger and smelt. Their dying beach fire cast a warm glow. Audrey waved and they waved back. She could tell they were talking about the arrival of the woman and the boy, as they always did in the hours before dawn. One of the fishermen had a smooth bass register. She could not see but knew their rods were propped up against whitened beach branches. When the lines slackened they turned the reels a few clicks. The sound of the clicks carried further than their low voices. There were liveries offering small Lyman wooden boats all along the shore and a few were anchored far out in the light chop illuminated by gas lanterns. 
 
Davey was everywhere. He scampered along the beach searching for skeletons of sheepshead, calling out with each discovery. Sometimes he found a tree branch chewed by beavers or wooden floats from fishing nets. Each discovery created new mysteries and imagined stories. A lively blue tick hound bounded between him and the fishermen. The Lake in the night nurtured a deep well of remembrance and rediscovery.
 
Somewhere far across the Lake and far across the world there was a war going on. This was 1942. Davey’s father was island-hopping towards Japan following MacArthur. He did not go in with the marines on the first boats, he told his wife, and he would always stay safe far behind the fighting, he insisted.
 
Audrey and her husband used to walk the beach each night. They conceived Davey on the beach one evening in the fading sunlight. She knew it was sunset across the world when it was almost daylight here. They still shared that time as long as she was up and walking the darkened beach with Davey when he was visiting the end of day somewhere in the South Pacific. It was their time of communion separated by the world and the war but joined by Davey and the darkened hours that provided the beginning and the end of days. 

‘What the hell?’ said one of the fishermen loudly. 

There was a quality in his voice, different from the accustomed cajoling and exclamations of fishermen in the night, that caused her to take notice. They all looked out to the darkened Lake where nothing appeared awry until they all saw it. The black moonlit horizon was lifting up in a vast shadow from the corners of east and west. It drew toward them with silent implacable progress.

‘Jesus Christ!’ hollered another fisherman in disbelief. 

‘Gather it all up, quick,’ said one, bending to grab his tackle. 

‘Leave it, save yourself!’ cried another. 

‘Davey?’ called his mother. ‘Davey!’ 

She turned from the nightmare, registered Davey’s questioning face a short ways behind, then looked back, and screamed. The wave drew nearer to the small boats with lanterns. She grabbed Davey’s hand and dragged him across the beach towards the upward path. Her feet pressed into the sand slowing her progress, increasing the maddening sensation of immobility and impending destruction. With his free hand Davey still clutched a baseball cap full of precious treasures. 

‘The dog?’ he cried. 

They turned at the changing hut and raced up the hardened path, passing the oldest fisherman who wheezed and held one hand to his knee. The others gained the top of the trail beneath the tall maples and looked back.

‘The boy!’ they cried, pointing behind her. 

Davey had escaped her grip and was running impossibly back towards the beach. 

The lanterns on the small boats lifted up and disappeared as one. There was no sound. He may have been seeking the hound which had found its own path to the top and stood now with the fishermen. He may have been going after the cap full of treasures dropped in their flight. Perhaps he never saw the approaching wave and assumed the shouting and running was all just the continued madness of grownups in a world at war. 

Inevitably, the waters drew back at the edge, awakening the gleaming small rocks on the bottom like blackened teeth in a sinister smile. At last there was sound, a low rumble of rocks and sand and massive water unleashed from a prison deep below the earth and guided by hands high above. The beach fire disappeared. Davey was nearing the beach and then he wasn’t. There was no beach. Trees cracked and the changing hut caved upward as water crushed the land in a horrible embrace until the evil was spent against the cliff in a torrent of white foam that reached above the fishermen at the top. Wet, horrified, but still standing in the path near the top, she ran back down past the old man picking himself up. The beach revealed itself again, full of wreckage. She was almost there when the second wave arrived, smaller but no less deadly. Near the turn in the trail, she longed to throw herself in and search for Davey as wreckage from the changing hut was pulled hungrily back into the Lake. She was still crying his name later when the first sun appeared. Fishermen, even the old man, traversed the cliff amidst the debris searching for the boy. The small hound ran about barking with his tail upraised in the quiet air. 

There was much speculation about the wave which extended from Bay Village to Geneva. An earthquake in the middle of the Lake? A military weapon? But there was no wave in Canada sixty miles to the north. Newspaper stories settled on a freakish change in wind and atmospheric pressure called a seitche. Only Davey’s mother comprehended the real reason in the fullness of her grief and the depths of her soul. 

Remarkably, owing mostly to the hour of the occurrence, only seven persons were lost, mostly fishermen. Several on a dock near Cleveland. A few in boats. And a small boy in Perry. 

Mark Gilson is a former nursery owner, landscape worker and CPA, Mark Gilson currently is employed as a part-time accountant in Mentor, Ohio.  Recent gigs since closing the family nursery in 2018 include a stint with the laundry and trash team during an outage at Perry Nuclear Power Plant, Census Enumerator and bookkeeper at Lake County Historical Society.  

In a former life Mark obtained a degree in English from The Ohio State University where he took classes in creative writing. Subsequently, he obtained a second degree in Accounting from Lake Erie College, Painesville, Ohio.   Although he has published a number of articles about nursery history, local history, immigration reform and horticulture, this is his first fiction piece to be accepted.  

Mark grew up near Lake Erie in the ‘nursery belt’, a short drive from Cleveland. Both the Lake and the Green City on a Blue Lake are featured in his writing   The story, Davey, involves a historic weather anomaly that took place at North Perry Park, a short ways from where Mark currently lives with his OSU sweetheart, from a former life, Kristine.