by Paul Harding
I rolled the end of the rod against my nose in the dark garage bay and fitted the rod together. I held the rod at arm’s length and flicked it up and down a couple times. I laid the rod across the top of an old dresser and found my grandfather’s favorite reel in the tackle box. It was still fitted with a fly line and leader. I tightened the reel into the reel seat at the base of the rod and balanced the rod and reel in my open hand. A grainy, chalky light came into the garage from the back window, and I could just see the overgrown yard, beneath a chest-high layer of mist. The mist hanging over the yard looked like the mist we often found hovering over the pond we fished in Maine in the morning. The mist in the yard seemed aqueous and the high grass just beneath it like weeds in an outlet. The grass in the yard had clumped and braided and was all brushed in the same direction, as if it were being combed through by currents. No doubt wind had made the patterns, but with the mist billowing over it in the near dark, the yard seemed like a phantom body of water.
I drew the line leader through the eyelets along the length of the rod, the reel clicking out its length. I pulled the line through the tip of the rod and yanked a couple more yards of line off the reel and set the rod back on the top of the dresser. My skin felt tacky and I suddenly felt as if I were contracting inside my skin, or as if my skin were dilating, I couldn’t really tell which, in a way that I have felt many times near dawn, after having been up all night, when the adrenaline of nocturnal wakefulness suddenly burns off, and whatever energy it is that holds your muscles to your bones and your skin to your muscles evaporates and you suddenly feel as if all your tissues and organs are made from soft lead, and you falter under the sudden burden of exhaustion. Whatever combination of drugs and alcohol had sustained my late-night foraging disintegrated. The cool grainy, plastery smell of the garage suddenly felt like sleeping gas, a perfume no longer tonic but now sedative. I had a sudden urgent need to get back into the house and onto the couch, under a single, cool quilt, and feast on sleep. But, oddly, along with the necessity of sleep, there came the succinct, imperative thought—which the instant before had not existed and in the next permeated my entire mind, to such an extent that it seemed as if my brain had never been made for anything other than to contain it, and which I experienced not as a thought but as a newly acquired but no less deep-seated instinct—that before I could sleep I had to wade out into the early dawn mist and weeds in the backyard and cast. Just as suddenly as I had been transformed into a new species living in a new world, the implications of that new world began to elaborate themselves, and my first thought as an angler of rivers of grass was that, whatever fly I chose for fishing the yard, I had to clip off its barbed hook, so that it would not snag in the fibers of the grass-water. I selected a yellow grasshopper from a tin of flies and snipped off the hook. I tied the fly to the end of the leader and stepped out the back door of the garage into the mist and the snarled flow of long grass. I waded out into the yard and stepped up onto the old oak stump in the middle, slightly above the fog. Reflexively, I let go the fly on the end of the line and began to flick the rod back and forth over my head and yank arm lengths of line out from the reel, pausing a bit longer between each back-and-forward cast to allow the longer and longer lengths of line to uncoil behind me and roll out in front of me properly, so that when I finally laid the line out the fly would plink onto the surface of the water with no more disturbance than an actual bug. I threw the first cast toward the tree line at the end of the yard, near a tree that had fallen out of the woods and just into the yard. The line rolled out and dropped the fly down into the mist, just to the right of the tree. I meant to lure any fish that might be hovering among the tree’s submerged branches. Because I was casting into a meadow, for wicker fish, I had to jerk and haul at the line to retrieve the fly. I realized that I was using the same sort of fly that I had when I’d taught Kate how to fish, and that I had clipped the hook off that fly, as well, so that neither of us would get hooked on the ear or the back of the head, should Kate have trouble with the pace and timing of her casts.
After five casts at the same spot near the tree without a strike, I turned forty-five degrees to my right and presented the fly out to what looked in the gloom like it might be a clump of locust saplings. I listened for rising fish and by habit focused on where I knew the fly rested under the surface of the fog, waiting for the sudden grab of a fish at the bait. Light rimmed up against the horizon behind me and sparkled inside the dark mist. As I beat at the fog-submerged yard and the line sizzled above my head, and, when I mistimed a cast, the fly snapped like the frayed end of a whip, and I turned a few degrees at a time on the stump, presenting the fly along the circumference of the yard, and the light slowly rose up into the world, and I could see the large, dark roots of the trunk radiating out from below in every direction, it seemed for a moment that I was standing on the hub of a great spoked wheel suspended in a cloud and spinning at breathtaking speed and that the force of my centrifugal casts and centripetal retrievals acting on its axis might just create some kind of torsion where, for a fraction of an instant, I might find myself standing next to my daughter in a wooden rowboat at dawn.
Instead, the light increased, the mist shimmered and rain-bowed and began to lift away. The lawn appeared, neglected and literal. Exhaustion overtook me again, this time along with the humiliation of being high and drunk, fly-fishing off a tree stump in my backyard. I began to crank the line back onto the reel and the fly snagged in a hump of weeds. I pulled the rod and it bent into a U, but the line would not break. I checked my pockets, but I had nothing with which to cut the line. The first heat of the day coated my skin, and sweat began to run out of my hair, along my jaw, down my nose, along the nape of my neck. My eyes and my head ached. I dropped the rod and reel where I stood and hurried back through the garage, across the driveway, and into the silent, arrested darkness of the house, where I rummaged through a plastic food container full of prescription bottles, found some sleeping pills, popped four of them, curled up on the dusty couch, among the old newspapers and books and bottles and ashtrays, and tried to keep thoughts about Kate away from myself in my decrepit state, holed up in what, as I passed out, struck me as the kind of nest in which a rat would live.
KATE HAD A PART-TIME job as a tennis instructor at the Enon playground the summer she died. She had taken lessons at the playground for six years and become an excellent player. She was co-captain of her middle school team and certainly would have made the high school varsity squad her first year. I knew Sylvia Black, the woman who ran the summer program at the playground, from my grandfather, so I talked to her and she agreed to let Kate teach some lessons, even though she was only thirteen. I never mentioned it to Kate because it would have embarrassed her. Anyway, she was thrilled to have a real job. She took it very seriously and sometimes was a little too intense with the kids, I thought. The first lessons she gave were at eight in the morning, and she biked to the playground by seven-thirty every day. The playground was located behind the Enon Tea House, where mostly women went every day for tea and cucumber sandwiches. The tennis courts were located below the playground, down among a stand of trees, near a vernal swamp the fire department flooded every winter for skating.
I tried to visit Kate at the tennis courts a couple times a week, when I had the chance to take a break from my job. There were two tennis courts, side by side, surrounded by a cyclone fence and a long bench outside the gate, made from two long planks nailed down to three evenly spaced sections of telephone pole that had been sunk into the ground. The planks had been painted a dark green, but much of the paint had worn off over the years, exposing the smooth, bare, purplish-gray wood. The courts radiated a kind of coolness that early in the morning, as if they absorbed the night’s cold and released it with the rising sun. Kate’s job was to give lessons to the littlest kids, and they showed up at the court bleary and mussed, dragging their rackets behind them. Before she started the lesson, she gave them a pep talk and made them run around the
court twice and do ten jumping jacks, to get them going. They seemed like little animals that had just uncurled themselves from dens hidden in the woods. The lessons amounted pretty much to half a dozen kids chasing a bucketful of fluorescent green tennis balls around the courts, and usually Kate yelled encouraging things at them. I loved the sound of the tennis balls pocking off the rackets and the jangle of the chain-link fence every time a ball hit it. She taught six twenty-minute lessons every morning, from eight until ten-thirty, and I mostly made it to the courts by the fourth or fifth lesson. I sat on the bench, trying to be quiet because, although I thought Kate liked me being there, I knew she was self-conscious about being independent with her first job, too. She wanted to show me how hard she worked and how competent and dependable she was. I always brought her a bottle of orange juice and a corn-bread muffin, and, after she finished her last lesson, we’d sit together on the bench and she’d drink the juice and pinch little bits off the muffin and eat some of them and throw some of them on the ground in front of us, for the sparrows.
Sometimes Kate’s competitiveness overtook her and she became too intense with the kids. She barked once at a girl that she had a crummy backhand.
“Come on, Emma. You had that! Put some effort into it!” She turned away from the girl and shook her head and muttered, “Jesus.” I had to stop myself from yelling at her to cool it. It was the first time I’d ever seen her turn her temper like that toward anyone but Susan or me. It was the first time I found myself angry with her in a way I might have been angry with an adult. My anger burned off immediately and transformed into shame, then into that sort of sorrow you feel when you see that time does pass and that you and your children really will perish. I stopped myself from telling Kate to knock it off because her emotions were new and raw and complicated and of course I had felt the same kind when I’d been her age. As much as I wanted to tell her to knock it off I also marveled at her seriousness and at what that seriousness might mature into, at what an intense, amazing woman my daughter might someday grow to be.
After the lesson I told her that she’d seemed harsh with her student and she replied that the kid had some talent and needed someone to push her to get better.
“But she’s like five years old.”
“Exactly. If she’s going to be any good, she needs to get rid of her bad habits now.”
“Okay, okay. I guess that’s a good point. Just try to go easy on the tykes, all right?” Kate picked at the muffin I’d brought her. She rubbed her fingertips together to get the crumbs off and wiped her hand on the side of her tennis skirt.
“Sure, Dad.”
“What’s up for the rest of the day? Want to go for a walk in the sanctuary or go over to Gull Harbor and look for sea glass?” I knew she wouldn’t want to do either of those things, but I hoped that she’d still like that I’d asked her.
“Carrie and I are going to the beach.”
“Who’s giving you a ride?”
“We’re going on our bikes.”
“Wait. Did you ask Mom about this or anything yet?”
“No. It’s okay. We’ll be safe.”
“Ah, no. Sorry, kid. But no. I don’t like the idea of you riding around the lake there and down Grapevine. It’s too winding.”
“But Dad. You did it! You used to do it when you were younger! Come on. That’s not fair. Why not?”
I wanted to tell her that I didn’t care if it was fair, or if it was thoughtful or mean or capricious or bad parenting or anything. I wanted to tell her, Because I just don’t want you to, and I’m the parent and that’s why not. Instead, I closed my eyes and frowned and feigned an exhausted sigh and said okay, she could go.
“But be careful, especially around the lake and along the shore road,” I said.
“Especially there, Dad,” she said. I stood up to go and she grabbed her racket and a bucket of balls.
“Home by six,” I said.
“Seven,” she said, and kissed me on the ear.
“Not a minute later. I’ll make you guys dinner.”
“Get corn.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Dad.”
THERE WAS A HEAT wave in July. I had no working air conditioners, only two fans, one a large, dust-caked window fan and the other a small, plastic desk fan. I put the window fan on the floor near the couch and the desk fan on the coffee table by my head. Frankie had come through with all of the drugs I’d asked him for the week before, and I was set up for a while.
I drank a glass of grapefruit juice mixed with the extraction from four pills and lay on the couch in my boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, with a rolled-up washcloth soaked in cold water across my forehead. A book about Enon’s history lay on the floor near the couch, so I picked it up and leafed through it. There was a photograph of Main Street in July 1890, taken from the middle of the road, facing east, with the caption “Beating the heat with Conant’s grapes.” The elms on either side of the road look parched and papery. The photo is overexposed and light floods out much of the detail that would otherwise be visible. A single white house sits behind the trees, on the apparent verge of evaporating into pure light. Two children stand hand in hand across the street, on the right. One is a small boy wearing short pants and suspenders and a wide-brimmed straw hat. The other is an older girl in a plain white cotton dress, black socks, and ankle-high leather shoes. They are nearly swallowed in the light.
I closed my eyes and imagined what it must have been like standing in the center of the road, directly in the sunlight and heat, which was so intense that it seemed like liquid, difficult to breathe in and out, scalding, nearly asphyxiating. The boy and girl are both looking at me standing in the middle of the road, and the boy, young as he is, perhaps four or five, is wondering in a straightforward, practical way why I am standing out in the middle of the road, where it’s so hot. The girl wonders the same thing but with a twinge of suspicion about me that the young boy is too young to have. Her suspicion does not frighten her, but it makes her cautious and curious at the same time. The unpaved road is smooth and dusty in the heat. The dust seems nearly to hover just above the ground, in a sheer plane, and twists up into dervishes when a molten gust of air coils down the road, and spins off out of the frame, into the backyard behind the house, and dies somewhere among the hot red pines and oaks. I am aware that there’s a good chance that the children will disappear, that the photograph itself will dissolve if I try to approach them. Some kind of boundary exists, one familiar from dreams. The girl is Kate, but not quite Kate. She is obviously who I want to approach and have turn into Kate, but not deliberately, not by an act of my will, but by hers or some other, external accord, because whomever we most want to meet in our dreams always vanishes the moment we intentionally try to preserve her. I stand in the wide, open middle of the blazing road, suspended. If I take a step closer, the boy and the girl I want to be Kate will evaporate in the heat. If I turn away, the entire picture will give way. It seems that the best I can hope for is the preservation of my desire for the girl to be Kate, which is not quite but very nearly as painful as her not being there at all. Just as I feel a kind of prevenient, atomic ripple approaching the threshold of my awareness, which will scatter this fragile notion and replace it with, say, a coarse, literal thought about the washcloth on my forehead, the girl speaks.
“These grapes are as big as apples.” I notice for the first time that she and the boy are standing in front of a yard to another house. The house is invisible, but I see that the near corner of a grape arbor is discernible beneath the canopy of elm behind the children. The details of the boy’s and the girl’s figures are mostly blurry, but now I see that each is holding what looks like a large, translucent, deeply colored purple apple. The girl holds her piece of fruit out, as if to give me a better look.
“It’s a grape,” she says. “I always think they should be heavier, like apples, but they’re not.”
Although I cannot see them, I can feel, al
most as a pressure inside my chest, the weight of fist-sized grapes clustered on stems as thick as ropes in bunches the size of bodies hanging from the vines in the arbor. It must take a buck knife to cut them off and wheelbarrows to move them. When the grapes are ripe, Benjamin Conant, the man who owns the house and the arbor, and two of his neighbors, Jonah Fisk and William Dodge—Joe and Bill—harvest them. Benjamin sets a stepladder under the arbor and wriggles up into the vines. He cuts the clusters free with a whetted knife. The largest weigh close to sixty pounds. Joe and Bill stand beneath the grapes, holding between them a small, round mattress filled with goose down that Benjamin devised and sewed himself. When Benjamin cuts a stem, the cluster begins to sink. As it does, Joe and Bill position the mattress so that the cluster will lower onto it like an infant laid in a crib.
Just before he makes the final pull of the knife, Benjamin says, “Hup,” which signals the coming weight of the fruit. He draws the blade back and the grapes tear free from the vine and are delivered onto the pillowy mattress.
The men at either end of the mattress each bark out a terse, “Yep,” and spend a moment adjusting it to make sure the grapes are properly bedded. As he does every year during the hottest months, Benjamin has the men take the clusters of ripe grapes to an underground stone bunker in his backyard, in the coolness of which he has stored half a dozen one-hundred-pound blocks of ice, cut from Enon Lake the previous winter, in piles of sawdust. He has the men lay clusters of grapes over the blocks of ice and chills them for two days. Then he has the men bring the grapes out to his front yard, where most of the children and younger people of the village have gathered. The men hang the clusters of cold, nearly frozen grapes, spitwise, in the crooks of two upright poles. Benjamin Conant then makes a brief, explicitly religious speech.
