When I was 12 my father decided he wanted to make his own barbecue pit. Not a particularly handy man, my father, but industrious and always willing to learn. It's not seeing our fathers fail that hurts us, but seeing them stop trying. That's why I don't resent him now, I suppose. He got a shovel brand new and pulled the plans from a home improvement book loaned to us by our neighbor Tim Haversham. Dad started digging one Saturday morning, a piercingly sunny day like all the rays came down in a handful of concentrated beams. Not a foot down he uncovered his void, a splotch of perfect black about the size of his hand just sitting there in our back yard.

Dad stared at the void for a little while and told my mom to keep us, the kids, out of the way. He didn't dare mess around with it. No, he wasn't that kind of guy. Eventually Ma called him inside and he forbid anyone to go past the screen door, not that I wanted to. Every once in a while Dad would walk past the window and look out at the mound of dirt around the void, a glass of lemonade in his hand he hadn't touched all day.

Then, right around sunset, a squirrel skittered down from the old oak and tumbled right into the void on its way across the yard. Without a sound the void got a little bigger, maybe a foot in diameter. Dad charged on out and peered into the blackness like it was the eyes of a dog shitting on our porch. He reached into his pocket and picked out a nickel that he flipped into the void. Ma yelled out to him and he said, “Just an inch or so.” Right then and there, Dad put a bunch of garden fence, those real short ones that keep the tomatoes separate from the chives, around the void so no more animals would fall in. Birds had no problem flying over, which was good, I guess.

The fence only slowed things down for a bit. Squirrels and such, no bother, but there's no stopping the rain. The void would move out six inches easy every time we got a proper storm. When the void started getting close to the deck, Dad knew it was time to take care of things. He couldn't have that thing crossing over onto somebody else's property, into the house... and if it hit the mailbox that'd be a federal offense, I think.

So, Dad got a considerable length of good chain and bolted it to the brick of the house then fastened a loop of it around his waist. We could hear him rappelling down the sides of the void for a minute or two, then all we heard was the chain unraveling a few inches at a time. He was down there about a half hour when it started to shrink. Nothing quick, just an inch or two every couple of minutes. By the next morning it was all closed up and we had a chain going right into the ground. Ma took the shovel and dug up around it, but all she got was dirt. She went down three feet, same story, then six, eight, ten. No joy. Twelve feet down and she hit a rock bed. She called in a crew and they tried to go around it then they took a jackhammer to it but all they got was more rock. After that, everyone up and quit.

A lot of people thought it was a fool thing to have a swimming pool in New Hampshire, and it was, but then again, there's no stopping the rain.