The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham Page A

school it was Dad’s turn. They did this for a week or more until it was hard enough to stand on. Then he began to flood the ice by hand with a hose, filling the valleys with snow and water, scraping off the hills with a shovel. After two weeks it was ready for skating.
    He taught me to skate when I was four, first pushing a chair as he told me Bobby Orr learned, then with a hockey stick in my hand for support. In the beginning I was such a bad skater that Dad stood in front of the net, in his boots, while I wobbled in and tried to score. He never let me get the puck past him that first winter. He poke-checked me whenever I brought the puck too close. But my skating improved, and in subsequent winters, I was good enough that he pulled out his old glove and blocker from when he played goal at teachers’ college. Some afternoons the two of us would be out there for two hours after school taking shots. By the time Mom called us in for dinner we could barely see the puck.
    Chasing me on the lawn, 1982
    There were things he shared only with me and, now that he’s gone, I can only rescue them from obscurity by writing them down. He would hold up his two fists and glower at me with feigned menace. “See this,” he’d say, holding one fist higher than the other. “Sudden Death.” Then he held up his other fist. “See this? Kick of a Mule.” Then I ran away, squealing with delight when he caught and tickled me mercilessly.
    Sam Peabody, May 1984
    We didn’t go camping again until I was eight. We were sitting at the dining-room table and Dad was reminiscing about our trip to Bennington. He got a gleam in his eye and looked at me. The next thing I knew we were packing the car with the tent, stove, lantern, and sleeping bags. He looked so excited, like a little boy, that Mom couldn’t have said no. And I think she must have been pleased that we were leaving her by herself for the weekend. She packed the cooler for us, my big orange towel, and my bathing suit.
    It was a two-hour drive from home, and it was dark before we got there. As we approached the campground it began to pour. We sat in the car as sheets of rain washed over the windshield like we were in a car wash. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun. We set up the tent and got in our sleeping bags.
    The next morning I woke to the sound of poplar and cottonwood leaves rustling in the little breeze there was, sounding like water. Waves broke on the sand dunes not far from where we lay. A bird sang into the space between the leaves, clean and pure as the blueness of the sky.
    Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.
    Dad said it was the white-throated sparrow welcoming us. I ran up and down the beach, swam in the gentle waves. I lay on my stomach, pressing my hips and knees into the sand, enjoying the warmth of the sun on my back. The cool onshore breeze masked the intensity of the sun. This was before we learned about sunscreen and the ozone layer disappearing, and by suppertime my skin was pink. Dad said I looked like a lobster. By the time I was in my sleeping bag the itching on my back was crazy-making.
    We stayed out of the sun after that and hiked in the woods. My father bought me a set of watercolours and paper, and I painted birds we saw. An oriole, seagulls by the lake, and a white-throated sparrow.
    Running home from school, Spring 1985
    It wasn’t as if we tried to exclude Mom from what we did. The inflexibility of a triangle, especially in a family like ours, meant that one of us always felt left out. More often than not it was Mom, since she wasn’t interested in the things Dad and I were. She liked being inside, reading, and she painted sometimes. She had worked as an artist’s assistant when she was a teenager. When I was an infant she used our den as a painting studio. I liked this because it was something she and I did together when I was young. Over time my toys filled up the space in the den, and when we got a TV