The Dark Truth of “In the Lake of the Woods”

[My Rubbish Excuse for my first English Assignment for this Semester]  

   John and Kathy loved each other, and even in the midst of defeat they continued to love each other. They made plans, grand plans of what the future would hold; a family, Verona. But John and Kathy were people with secrets, from each other, and even from themselves. Many secrets have a way of making themselves known, like Kathy’s dentist and the massacre at Thuan Yen. Some secrets though, the ones that are kept secret, even from oneself, they have a way of destroying you from the inside out. 
   In the dark of the night, somewhere past midnight, John Wade woke, but he wasn’t quite himself. For years there had been something buried, deep within himself, beyond even his full knowledge. It was this presence, a creation of his mind used to deal with the unbearable, that took control of his actions, keeping them from his conscious mind.
    Picking up the teakettle, John began to lose himself to the thing that lived within the depths of his mind. As he watched Kathy sleep, teakettle full of boiling water in hand, John rose to the surface once more, thinking about how much he loved her, how much she loved him, and the future they had been planning together as they lay on the porch of the cottage. 
    Then, in an instant, John was gone and the thing from inside, Sorcerer perhaps, was there. The teakettle, filled with it’s boiling water tipped, the contents raining down upon the unsuspecting Kathy. The scorching pain would of course wake her, and she would flail, cry out, but the water would keep coming, drowning her when she tried to scream.
    Sorcerer, as it is as good as a name as any, would go through the motions to make what happened disappear. He took the twisted wreckage from the bed and carried it to the boat house, laying it upon the floor while he readied the boat. He wrestled the boat into the water, returned for the motor, the oars, the wreckage.
    Sorcerer would take the boat down the river, someplace out of the way, secluded, where no one would think to look, and even if they did, it would be near impossible to find. He dove beneath the water, deep as he could, dragging the wreckage with him. At the bottom of the river he would secure the wreckage, stuff it under a fallen log, pile large rocks upon it, whatever would keep it from raising to the surface. Further down he would sink the boat, tipping it on it’s side, letting it fill with water, then place it securely upon the bottom. Once things were disposed of properly Sorcerer would return to the boat house, and John would find himself waist deep in the water, unsure of how he got there, or what had transpired.
    John would eventually find himself alone in the bed, Kathy gone, with no recollection of what had happened. He’d spend weeks, trying to find her, yet inside something told her she wouldn’t be found. Deep within the recesses of his mind, he was vaguely aware something had happened, though he couldn’t say what for sure. Eventually, knowing full well that he was a suspect in many eyes, John Wade would head off on his own towards Canada. He wanted to believe he was not to blame; She’d gotten lost, there was an accident. Inside though, behind the mirrors of his mind, the truth lingered. He pulled up on an island, somewhere between Minnesota and Canada, and allowed nature and the cold snows of the North to take him back to Kathy’s arms.
    Why did it happen?
    At age 14 John Wade lost his father, and gained an anger and a desire to kill that would shape who he became from underneath. He retreated to an inner world, the world of mirrors, where he could finally gain the love and respect he had wanted from his father.  “At the funeral he wanted to kill everybody who was crying and everybody who wasn’t. He wanted to take a hammer and crawl into the casket and kill his father for dying” (14).
    While experiencing the atrocities happening at Thuan Yen, John dissociated from what was going on, literally becoming ‘Sorcerer’. There were dead everywhere, animals and humans alike. All around him, the men of Charlie Company were shooting at anything that moved. He said “No,” and “Please,” not wanting to be witness or part of such happenings. “This could not happen. Therefore it did not happen…He would not remember…” He devised a trick within his mind to help him forget, and it worked, a section of time was forgotten (106-110).
    It was common occurrence for the men who returned from Vietnam War to experience flashback, or act out in their sleep, and John was no different. “Married veterans or guys who married when they got back…Waking up with your hands around your wife’s throat is frightening to the vet and to the wife.”  Pat Hood even said that Kathy told her he woke up screaming things (146). “It wasn’t even your voice…It wasn’t even you.” Kathy’s own words to John in one of the instance’s he had awoke from what he called “Bad dreams” (75).
    Despite being ‘Sorcerer’ and disassociated from the events that had happened, the knowledge was subconsciously there. He went to the boat house and had the sense of knowing that something had happened there. The smell of the dirt from the floor “revived facts he did not wish to revive.” There was the knowledge of things he knew for positive, and things that he wasn’t quite sure of (188).