NYS Grade 8 Practice Test 11

What the Ice Says

¹Every winter, once the lake had frozen thick enough to hold a truck, my grandfather drove the island mail eleven miles across the ice, and every winter since I turned nine I rode beside him, the canvas sack slumped between us like a sleeping dog.

²Halfway out, he always cut the engine. "Listen," he'd say, and roll the window down, and the cold would pour in, and the silence, and then, beneath the silence, the lake: long booms, like doors slammed in a far-off house, a twang like a plucked wire, a groan.

³"That's the ice talking," he told me. "Booming means it's thick and working. It's the quiet you should worry about— the gray patches, the dark ones, the places near the point where the current keeps the water moving underneath."

⁴I thought he was teasing me. Ice was ice. It held or it didn't. I watched the island grow from a smudge to a shoreline and counted the minutes until hot cocoa in the post office kitchen on the island, where the woodstove ticked like a clock.

⁵The winter I turned thirteen, his heart began to skip like a stone on water, and the doctor said no driving, no cold, so my mother took the wheel, and I took his old place on the passenger side, the mail sack heavy on my knees.

⁶Halfway out, I told her, "Stop." She looked at me the way you'd look at someone speaking a language you had only heard in dreams. But she stopped. I rolled the window down an inch.

⁷Boom, said the lake, far off. Then twang. Then, toward the point where we always turned, nothing at all—a wide, gray hush that went on and on, the way a room goes quiet when everyone in it is holding a secret.

⁸"We go the long way," I said. My voice came out like his, low and certain, and my mother, who had crossed this lake a hundred times on her way to somewhere else, turned the wheel without a word.

⁹That night I sat beside Grandpa's bed and told him about the gray hush. He didn't open his eyes. He only nodded, and his hand found mine on the blanket and squeezed it once, the way you'd knock on a door you knew was strong.

¹⁰In March a fishing shanty broke through near the point, and the men who hauled it out said the ice there had been thin all winter, thin as a windowpane, though from above it looked like all the rest.