In the Lake of the Woods

In John’s second tour of duty, nothing seems to come of the rumors about what happened at Thuan Yen. During his last two months in Vietnam, he works in the battalion adjutant’s office, where he painstakingly erases himself from Charlie Company, or Company C, and remakes all of his orders and records to look as if he has always been a member of Company A. He literally makes himself disappear.

In this theory of Kathy’s disappearance, John Wade boils her to death with water from the teakettle. A mixture of rage, humiliation, evil, and madness overwhelms him as he thinks of his life, his defeat, and his desire to never lose Kathy. He wraps her in a sheet and carries her outside to the boat dock. He gets the boat out and attaches the engine. He goes back inside for her sneakers, her white sweater, and her blue jeans. He takes the boat out to deep water, not far from the cabin, and he sinks Kathy with rocks from the slope near the cabin; he also sinks her clothes. Then he tips the boat and sinks it too.

John Wade heads north in Claude Rasmussen’s boat. Crossing over into Canadian waters, he deliberately gets lost. He allows himself to go mad, choosing to let the Sorcerer control his last behaviors. He reads Claude’s letter, in which he tells John that he knows John was in for a “lynching” (279) no matter what happened and that John shouldn’t blame himself for anything. Claude knows that John is taking the boat out to disappear. One way or another, John Wade won’t be back. There is a radio on board pre-set to a frequency that Claude plans to listen to, just in case John wants to talk.

For two days and nights, John hallucinates and calls out for Kathy. He revisits Thuan Yen; he revisits his father’s suicide. In a more lucid moment, he talks to Claude on the radio, and Claude tells him that the police have torn apart the cabin and found nothing. Claude tells him to run for Canada, but John doesn’t answer; he plans to end things here. It’s cold, and it’s starting to snow.

On the third day, after broadcasting his love for Kathy, he drops the radio over the side of the boat. He guns the boat, heading north into Canada.

The narrator describes Kathy Wade looking up from the bottom of Lake of the Woods at the natural beauty above her.

Lake of the Woods lies against the Great Northwest Angle of Minnesota, the northernmost point in the lower 48 states, surrounded on three sides by Canada. The narrator recounts the history of the Angle, which remains largely unsettled wilderness.

John too imagines Kathy looking up at him from the water.

The quotations in this section are all from people who knew John and Kathy Wade or who were involved in the investigation. Taken together, these quotations suggest that Kathy planned to disappear, with or without John. Other quotations indicate that John and Kathy may have run away together. Pat, Kathy’s sister, once again says that she doesn’t want to discuss it, because when Kathy found out about the war crimes and John didn’t come home all night, Kathy was more worried about John not coming home than what the news reports said he had done. Pat knew then that Kathy would never leave John.

In the narrator’s final hypothesis, John and Kathy run away from their broken lives and create new ones in another place. Sorcerer could certainly create passports for them. Though the narrator says that it’s more likely that they both drowned, in the face of uncertainty, he suggests that we focus on happiness and love winning out over death and destruction.

The chapter ends with John’s broadcasts rambling about Kathy and his love for her. At no time does he admit that he knows where she is. The snow comes down heavily that day, October 26th. John was never heard from again. Perhaps the simplest answer is the truth: John Wade was a man who was “innocent of everything except his life” (303). He was both monster and lover, mad and innocent; his heart forever unknowable.