Yellow Stonefly

by Tim Poland

  Sandy shifted her position so she looked directly at Edith. She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and listened.

  “Truth be told, you’d have to say I was more than a witness. Truth be told.”

  As Edith unfurled her memory, Sandy heard in the words just that—a telling, something to be told. Nothing in the old woman’s voice trembled with confession or catharsis.

  “Smoke was already coming thick out of the chimney when I came up around the woodshed and looked in the window. Didn’t take but one look to see how it was. Like it was most always. Daddy was passed out on the settee, his mouth all drooped open the way it did when he was good and pickled. Before he passed out, he must have walloped mama a good one because she was out cold, her head leaning up against the wall, her legs spread out in front of her. I could see in the firelight she was breathing.”

  Sandy pulled her legs tighter to her chest and leaned her head closer.

  “Little bits of flame were already licking out the seam in the stovepipe, and the door to that old wood stove was hanging open with smoke coming out there, too. And then, just at that moment, the fire in the stove shifted and a chunk of burning stovewood fell out, right on that old braid rug.”

  “What’d you do?” Sandy asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Stood there for another minute, just to make sure the fire was taking. Then I turned around and walked right on out of there. Never looked back once.”

  Sandy couldn’t be sure if her heart was beating or air was moving into and out of her lungs, but she thought she saw just the faintest glimmer of a grin at the corners of Edith’s mouth. Not a grin of derision, but a grin of some manner of satisfaction, as with a job well done.

  “Knew for a fact that the world would not be one speck worse off without those two, and there was a damned good chance it’d be a sight better without them.”

  Edith took a long breath and looked down at the younger woman beside her. In Sandy’s vision, the old woman seemed to expand before her.

  “Folks who fret about sin call that a sin of omission. You know what that is?”

  Sandy remained silent, knowing that she may very well have known what it was.

  “Not that you did something you shouldn’t but that you didn’t do something that you should. Heard about that from a traveling preacher who stayed at that rooming house in Sherwood for a while. He knew a lot about sin but, far as I could tell, not much about anything else. And I never felt sinful, not once, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”

  Sandy leaned forward, wrapped her arms around the old woman’s stick-thin legs, laid her head against her knees, and held on as tightly as she dared. Edith set her hand on Sandy’s head like a benediction.

  “Enough now,” Edith said. “Between this heat, that wine, and all this nonsense about sinfulness, I’m likely to burst into flames any minute. You’d best be taking me back now before we both regret it.”

  “Yes, Edith.”

  Sandy held the old woman in her arms with something like reverence as they walked up the embankment to the truck. When they were halfway up, Edith looked down at the pool by the rock ledge and nodded toward it. “There. Right there. My special place.”

  Sandy paused and followed Edith’s line of sight. “What?” she asked.

  “When I die, if I don’t catch fire all on my own, I’ll be cremated, and I’d surely like it if what’s left could be tossed out there. In the water, right there. Maybe you could see to that, dear?”

  “Yes, Edith.” Both women stared into the pool for a moment longer before Sandy carried Edith back up the slope to the truck.

  7

  SANDY WRITHED AND KICKED IN HER BED, AS IF STRUGGLING against restraints that held her tethered in place, until she kicked herself free and awoke from a fitful sleep. Her legs were tangled in the single bed-sheet she slept under during the summer heat, and one of her two pillows had been knocked to the floor. Stink, who’d been stretched out on the cool wooden floor at the foot of her bed when she went to sleep, had moved to the side of the bed and now lay with his head on Sandy’s fallen pillow, snoring. She propped herself up on her elbows and blinked in the gray dark of the room. A light breeze blew through the open bedroom windows. After leaning over the edge of the bed to see Stink snoring happily on the floor, she lay back onto the mattress, her head sunken into the one pillow remaining to her. A week ago she was blaming her restless sleep on the heat wave, unable to get comfortable in the muggy night air, irritated by the film of perspiration covering her body despite the efforts of the little fan she trained on herself while she slept. But the heat wave had broken two days ago. The air tonight was lovely, carrying a slight scent of rain. Sandy could no longer deny it. She had, as a general rule, slept much better, far more soundly, before love had been stirred into the mix.

  Sleep had always been a simple business. After a certain number of hours of work and wakefulness each day, the body had to shut down for a while to replenish itself. Nothing complicated about that. And since the mind was clearly one of the many parts of the body, it required the same degree of downtime. Simple. Sandy dreamed, as all humans must, but her dreams were ordinary, never disruptive, and always forgotten immediately upon waking. Never had she been tormented by dreams that even remotely qualified as nightmares. Until now.

  Even the nightmares were simple enough in form, easily understood. Tonight there had been two nightmares, occurring simultaneously, like a split-screen effect in a movie. On the left, Keefe sat naked at his fly-tying bench in the midst of a vast and cartoonishly barren desert landscape. He was hunched over his vise, staring blankly at his fingers, which were hopelessly ensnared in a tangle of yellow thread. On the right, Edith sat in her wheelchair, on the rock ledge by her “special place,” in the shade of a massive hemlock tree. When Sandy reached for her hand, the old woman exploded in flame. The architecture of these dreams was obvious to Sandy, readily explained. What she didn’t have an easy explanation for was how such dreams had suddenly begun to rattle her awake at night, leaving her sweating and shaking with terror. Love was making a mess of things.

  And Margie had been right. Except for Margie herself, when the barbs of love had finally sunken into Sandy, they’d all been attached to someone or something much older than her, all of whom she was more than likely to outlive. The watershed, and the headwaters in particular, were dying, as all living things were. But they were perishing at such a glacial pace that her stunted human sense of time could never comprehend it. At least the watershed would outlive her. Keefe and Edith were another issue entirely. Why now and why them?

  Sandy looked at the red, glowing numbers of the clock by her bed. Four-thirty in the morning.

  “Goddamn it.” She kicked the sheets off, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and sat up. Her feet grazed Stink’s back as they came down. He emitted a faint grunt and continued snoring.

  And Stink, too. In dog years, a calibration Sandy found ridiculous but still succumbed to, he was well into his eighties, older than Keefe and not much younger than Edith. She’d outlive her smelly old dog as well. Love was, apparently, a condition reckoned in direct proportion to imminence of the demise of the beloved. Of course it was. And it was getting to be a damned nuisance.

  Edith was safely tucked away in the nursing home. If she was ever in dire need, there would be someone there for her, twenty-four hours of every day. Still, Sandy would look in on her first thing when she got to work that day. Keefe, on the other hand, was all alone in his little bungalow. If she was so worried about him, why didn’t she stay overnight with him more often than the once or twice a week she normally did? True, she wasn’t at all certain there was anything medically wrong with him in the first place. Also true, it was a far shorter drive to work from her house on Willard Road than from Keefe’s. Also true, Keefe didn’t always want her there.

  If she got going now, she could drive up to Keefe’s and look in on him before going on to work that morni
ng. She tapped Stink on his backside with her toes and rose up from her bed. “Get up, you lazy old thing. Leaving early today.” After a night like this one, the dog was going with her, whether he wanted to or not. He could stay with Keefe for the day. Just now, she couldn’t bear the thought of either of them alone. “Come on, get up,” she said as she walked to the bathroom.

  Stink raised his head, scowled after her a moment, yawned, and flopped his head back on the pillow.

  THE rain was light, little more than a mist. It glittered like dust motes in the headlight beams from Sandy’s truck as she struggled with the old padlock on the fire-road gate. Her fingers and hands, coated with the mist, glowed in the glare of her high beams. The lock was being stubborn this morning. Sandy wiggled her key gently, sliding it back and forth in the lock, her movements calibrated in millimeters. As she fought with the rusted old contraption, she wondered why in the hell they continued to battle this old lock when it would be so easy to replace it with a new one. Then again, something so seemingly simple would have to be coordinated with J.D. and the fish-and-game office, as well as the people with the forest service, who all needed keys for access. In all the years she’d fiddled with this lock, old and rusted when she first faced off with it, the idea of a new lock had never occurred to her. Not until this morning, when her lack of sound sleep and recurring nightmares had worked her into an uncharacteristic state of anxiety, convinced somehow that Keefe, at this very moment, wandered helplessly lost in dementia, desperately in need of aid only she could provide.

  A curse was beginning to form on Sandy’s lips when the padlock finally gave and popped open. She spit out a gruff sigh of exasperation and walked the long pipe-rail gate open. After pulling her truck through, she got out of the cab and closed and locked the gate, grumbling that she’d have to go through the same process again in another hour or so.

  As she clicked the old padlock shut on the gate, she could just hear behind her the sound of footsteps rushing across the fire road, in front of her truck. Feet, hooves, paws—she couldn’t tell. By the time she turned from the gate and walked back to the truck cab, whatever it was had fully disappeared through the thick stand of roadside rhododendron. In the headlight beams she could see the stiff, glistening leaves still shaking and dripping water at the point where whatever it was had run through. And whatever it was, it had roused Stink’s attention. He stood on the seat in the cab, his bent tail not so much wagging as quivering, as was his entire body. His eyes were wide, frantically alert, trained on the spot in front of the truck where whatever it was had passed. The hair on his back had risen in a fine, bristled ridge the length of his spine, and a low, incessant growl rumbled deep in his chest.

  “Shhhhhh,” Sandy said as she slid into the cab and closed the door. “A deer?” She ran her hand once along Stink’s ruffled spine, then shifted the truck into gear. “Probably just a deer. Nothing to get so worked up about.” Her dog ignored her completely.

  When Sandy pulled in beside Keefe’s truck on the gravel apron beside the bungalow, the gray sky above the ravine had only begun to show a hint of diffused morning light. Here in the ravine it remained fully night-dark. The light was on in the kitchenette, spreading an elongated rectangle of light from the window onto the ground of the clearing in front of the bungalow. Stink nearly leapt from the truck cab and trotted a few steps into the clearing, raising his snout into the air and scenting heavily. Satisfied that what had so aroused his fur a mile back down the fire road was no longer in the vicinity, he resumed his usual routine for their arrival at Keefe’s. He peed on the bottom step, toddled up to the porch, and waited for Sandy.

  Coffee was in the pot on the counter, its aroma permeating the bungalow’s interior, but Keefe was nowhere to be seen. Nothing whatsoever was unusual or suspect in the scene Sandy walked into. Nothing whatsoever out of place or out of keeping. This was exactly what she could have found any morning at this hour in Keefe’s bungalow, and she damn well knew that. And yet, today, it spoke to her only of catastrophe. Her heart pounded frantically, her lungs heaved her breath in and out in bursts. Leaving Stink already curled on the sofa, she rushed back out the door, desperate to locate Keefe, certain he was in distress. No sooner had the bungalow door swung shut behind her than she saw Keefe’s flashlight cut through the dark on the far side of the stream. He’d been in the cave.

  WEDGED into the base of the slope on the side of the upper Ripshin opposite Keefe’s clearing, the cave sat nearly even with the tail of the pool. In fact, the cave wasn’t so much cut into the slope as it protruded from it. The persistent rush of ancient waters, the innumerable centuries of primeval shifting and buckling of the hardening earth’s crust that shaped the headwaters, had at this spot folded and split a massive slice of the granite shelf. Thick, unimaginably heavy, the shelf here had broken, collapsed, and settled into a roughly triangular formation, with a nearly flat base under the two overhanging sheets of dense rock. At the rear of the cave, decades of the collected sediment of leaves, branches, and soil had plugged a small opening that led into a little cavern, no more than a few feet across, buried behind the visible portion of the cave. Rather than a cave, in any conventional sense, it formed a sort of lean-to of immense stone. Keefe had once suggested to Sandy that the cave’s shape was not unlike a hollowed-out pyramid. “Of course, our little pyramid here is far older than the ones in Egypt,” he’d said. “Nor did it require slave labor to be built. And every bit as grand, in my estimation.”

  The flat base within the canopy of stone made for a snug, sheltered enclosure in which to sit, to observe the fluid procession of the stream just below. Whether to monitor the movements of brook trout or simply because he was in a contemplative mood, the cave, Sandy knew, was a favorite and regular retreat for Keefe. “A good place to get away from it all for a bit,” he had once said.

  Incredulous, unable to imagine a life more “away from it all” than Keefe’s, Sandy had been on the brink of pointing out this ironic fact to him when she was stopped short by the grin curling up the corners of his mouth.

  At any other time, the cave would have been one of the first options to occur to her when finding Keefe absent from home. This morning, not until she saw his flashlight beam bobbing across the stream and up the bank into the clearing did her heart and respiration rate begin to subside.

  Keefe began to come into focus as he stepped through the slash of light thrown by the kitchen window. He wore a threadbare gray sweatshirt and baggy khaki trousers, rolled up to the knees, exposing his pale, slender legs. His legs were still wet up to the calves from wading back across the shallow shoal at the tail of the pool, and his feet squished inside his soggy old deck shoes. In one hand he held a flashlight, in the other, a coffee mug. On his head, as always, the old brown fedora. On his face, a smile of pleasant surprise. To the outsider, he looked the picture of exactly what those who knew of Keefe considered him to be—an eccentric old widower who lived alone in an old shack up along the headwaters, the kind of old kook who would have his morning coffee sitting in a cave in the dark. To Sandy, as he walked through the light toward where she now stood at the bottom of the porch steps, he looked to be the very thing she longed to find here this gray, misty morning—a water-weathered man, in full control of his faculties.

  “I saw you pull in,” Keefe said as he approached her. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected visit, my dear?”

  Keefe kissed her lightly on the cheek as he passed, walked up to the porch, and sat on the top step. He clicked off the flashlight, set it and the coffee mug down, and removed his wet shoes and set them aside. His bare toes flexed, almost clutched at the lip of the step as he rolled his pant legs down. Thin, diluted light began to trickle into the ravine.

  “Really,” he said, “what brings you up to my little hovel in the wee hours? Is something wrong, dear?”

  Sandy stood like a lump of mute stone, staring dumbly at Keefe. She had no idea what to say, no idea how to answer his simple question.
She’d worked herself into such a snit, presuming disaster and having come prepared to triage the emergency she’d imagined, that finding Keefe at ease, utterly himself, she couldn’t think of a single reasonable word to speak.

  “My dear?” Keefe leaned forward, rested his forearms on his knees. “What is it?”

  Sandy gained a moment’s reprieve to collect herself when Stink began to whimper inside and paw at the door. She hopped up the steps and let the dog out onto the porch. Stink went immediately to Keefe, tail wagging, and eagerly ran his tongue over the man’s face. She saw in her dog’s unqualified affection for Keefe an indicator of some fundamental goodness in this man, despite his eccentricities and penchant for aloof melancholy. Stink had taken to Keefe immediately. There had to be something in that.

  “There’s the old guy,” Keefe said as he draped his arm around the dog’s neck and vigorously scratched his chin. “I suppose I should be flattered you got off the sofa just to see me.”

  Stink sat beside Keefe, and Sandy recognized a way to explain her presence here this morning. “I was wondering if, maybe, he could spend the day with you today while I’m at work.”

  “Of course. We can be old coots together, retired to our hermitage in the backwoods.”

  She hadn’t expected him to agree so quickly. She went on explaining as if he hadn’t. “Been some coyotes around below the dam lately. I don’t want to leave him outside in his tire, and I can’t leave him stuck inside the house all day.”

  There were coyotes everywhere these days. What could make today so especially dangerous? It was a lame explanation, but she’d have to stick with it now. She wondered if, perhaps, she was the one who might be losing her mental clarity.