Philip Roth: The Human Stain

“Good enough. And you know your ice fishing now, don't you? Maybe you want to write a book about that instead of a whodunit.”

Shuffling backward a half-step at a time, I'd retreated toward the shore some four or five feet, but he was still holding the auger up in his one hand, the corkscrew blade raised still to the level where my eyes had been before. Completely bested, I'd begun backing away. “And now you know my secret spot. That too. You know everything,” he said. “But you won't tell nobody, will you? It's nice to have a secret spot. You don't tell anybody about 'em. You learn not to say anything.”

“It's safe with me,” I said.

“There's a brook that comes in down off the mountain, it flows over ledges. Did I tell you that?” he said. “I never traced its source. It's a constant flow of water that comes down into the lake here from there. And there's a spillway on the south side of the lake, which is where the water flows out.” He pointed, still with that auger. He was holding it tight in the fingertipless glove of one big hand. “And then there's numerous springs underneath the lake. The water comes up from underneath, so the water constantly turns over. It cleans itself. And fish have to have clean water to survive and get big and healthy. And this place has all of those ingredients. And they're all God-made. Nothing man had to do with it. That's why it's clean and that's why I come here. If man has to do with it, stay away from it. That's my motto. The motto of a guy with a subconscious mind full of PTSD. Away from man, close to God. So don't you forget to keep this my secret place. The only time a secret gets out, Mr. Zuckerman, is when you tell that secret.”

“I hear ya.”

“And, hey, Mr. Zuckerman — the book.”

“What book?”

“Your book. Send the book.”

“You got it,” I said, “it's in the mail,” and started back across the ice. He was behind me, still holding that auger as slowly I started away. It was a long way. If I even made it, I knew that my five years alone in my house here were over. I knew that if and when I finished the book, I was going to have to go elsewhere to live.

I turned from the shore, once I was safely there, to look back and see if he was going to follow me into the woods after all and to do me in before I ever got my chance to enter Coleman Silk's boyhood house and, like Steena Palsson before me, to sit with his East Orange family as the white guest at Sunday dinner. Just facing him, I could feel the terror of the auger — even with him already seated back on his bucket: the icy white of the lake encircling a tiny spot that was a man, the only human marker in all of nature, like the X of an illiterate's signature on a sheet of paper. There it was, if not the whole story, the whole picture. Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that's constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America.