Stories from the Dirty Wu By Jake Hogan
Chickadees in a Chain-Link Fence
I am nine years old and I know everything. A month ago, Anthony and I were staring up at the sky from the half-acre of asphalt where we have recess. There were no clouds, but the sky was dotted with the white shapes of seagulls circling us above, sojourners from the shore ten miles east. “Why are they here if the ocean is far away?” he asked. “Do they think the pond is the ocean?” “No, they came here for these,” I told him, as I shook the last Cheez-its from a Ziploc bag into my palm. “They like it here because it’s dirty,” he said. “My dad says in Winchester they call it the Dirty Wu because when the wind blows over there from Woburn, it smells bad.” I didn’t like that statement. I’d heard it called that, but I’d never been told that the name referred to a smell. I wanted to tell him that I thought he was mistaken, but if I’m wrong, he might think he knows more than me. So I just said, “I know,” and decided to fact-check later.
The truth is, I am nine years old and I know everything, but I learned it from people who know even more, inheriting information in anecdotal adages. My grandmother has lived here for all sixty-four years of her life, and her mind hosts a dense compendium of things I ought to know—all the stories they don’t write down. Like how before fridges made ice cubes, Puggy next door was the iceman, and he took horses out onto the pond in winter to cut ice. “Don’t you ever walk on that ice. You’ll fall through like the horses,” she would say. “Their bodies are still under there.” It’s a no-go in the summer, too. “There used to be a beach on Horn Pond,” she told me, pronouncing the name like ‘honpon,’ “and when I was your age I nearly died because the weeds pulled me under.” “And when she was young, your mother ran out the front door screaming ‘cause a man in the pond was drowning. She was gonna jump in the pond and I had to hold her back. Guess what the man was caught on? A mattress spring! Someone dumped a mattress in there and killed that poor man.” If the pond could talk back to us, I wonder if it would apologize. My grandmother told me that before I was born, my great aunt Sheila had just graduated from the high school and was driving with her friends when she swerved off the road and plummeted into the water. But you can’t really blame the pond for that. Besides, there are good things, too.
Headwaters Magazine 16
