by Tim Poland
18
THE SNOW BEGAN TO FALL JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT. A FINE, light snow, it would not bury the ridges or impede movement, only coat the trees and ground with a thin, delicate layer of white, an intimation of the deeper winter yet to come. Sandy had watched from the bungalow porch for a while as the darkened clearing brightened to a hint of gray as the snow collected. Keefe sat slumped in the armchair, asleep, his copy of Whitman lying open against his chest. Sandy stirred the fire, tucked a blanket around Keefe’s legs, scratched Stink behind the ears, and went to bed.
When she awoke in the morning, Keefe was at his tying bench. A half-empty cup of coffee sat on the edge of the bench, a cigarette burned in the ashtray. Keefe smoked so rarely that the pungent odor of burning tobacco startled Sandy as she walked into the living area. He greeted her with a brief glance when she emerged from the bedroom, then turned back to the view through the lighted magnifying loop, concentrating on the fly taking shape before him. He was quiet, withdrawn today, but he was aware. Sandy was learning to read the signs. A day like this, it was harder for him to hold on firmly, to retain access to the record of what he knew and didn’t know, to what he recalled and what he might forget. He constricted the range of the world he inhabited, pulled inward, created a smaller world, one he could manage more confidently. Sandy would let him be. He would be fine.
The snow lay over the clearing and the slopes as she’d expected, a thin, light layer of white, no more than an inch, if that. Keefe would stay at his bench much of the day. She would fish.
SANDY cast into the agitated water beneath the chute feeding the head of the pool and let her line drift smoothly through the gentler riffles at the pool’s midsection. This early chill of winter, settled so suddenly upon the headwaters, hadn’t yet reached very far below the surface of the stream. Fish would still be active for a while before the changing weather spoke to their flesh, signaling them to slow down, conserve their energy, and seek secure holds in the deeper water, where they could survive the leaner season.
The fish struck as her fly drifted out of the midsection into the widening tail of the pool. It made one desperate dive for the deeper water, but Sandy set the hook and guided the brook trout swiftly into the shallows. Though it writhed fiercely, she brought it easily to hand, removed the hook of the hare’s-ear nymph from the fish’s bony lip, and released it. She had tied this hare’s-ear pattern herself. It was a good fly for a beginner to tie, not overly complicated in construction, intended to be rather rough and ragged, to imitate the larvae of any number of insects. She had asked Keefe to teach her to tie her own flies mostly in hopes that the act of teaching her would help focus his mind. And it had helped. A little. She hadn’t thought much about it beyond that. What had surprised her was how taking a fish on a fly crafted by her own hand had deepened the act of fishing for her. The fish came to her hand as a result of knowledge and skill brought into play at both ends of the line.
She’d been fishing casually but effectively for the last hour, bringing a fish out of each pool into which she cast. Now she reeled in and walked downstream, passing three or four good pools until she reached what had been her primary destination for the morning. A thick shock of water poured through the gap between two humped boulders, each the size of a small car. From the fissure between the boulders, the chute of water plummeted several feet into the head of one of the larger, deeper pools in all of the headwaters, easily thirty feet across and six feet deep at its center. Here, in the deeper holds of this pool, she would find the larger fish she sought today.
Sandy approached the head of the pool in a low crouch, keeping herself concealed behind the two boulders. The little hare’s-ear pattern now on her line would be far too paltry an offering to lure this larger prey from the safer depths into which they would already be settling. She sat and leaned her back against one of the boulders. She would need a more enticing, more extravagant temptation to seduce these large, wily fish. If they were to expend their precious energy at this time of year, it would be for something that promised a return greater than the strength spent in the pursuit. She clipped off the hare’s ear and tied on a gray ghost Keefe had tied for her, a pattern large enough, exotic enough to tease these crafty fish out and into play.
She rose to one knee, peered over the boulder to the pool’s surface. From this vantage point, she would spot no movement in the pool, would not see the dark, drifting shadows of fish holding in current. Here she could rely only on that combination of skill and experience, of knowledge and faith that might send her line out into this wild water to induce a big fish to rise one last time before the winter fully settled in.
The dark blue-green of the pool rippled in striking contrast to the snow-coated slopes of the ravine that rose around it. Loam and dead leaves on the forest floor showed through the thin blanket of snow, giving the hillsides a speckled appearance in the waxing morning light. To Sandy’s eyes, the even spread of the snow throughout the ravine seemed to draw all she saw around her into a single, connecting embrace, confirming what she knew intuitively, that the headwaters were a single, coherent entity. She wanted to slow the moment, make it last as long as possible. She laid her rod aside and sat back against the boulder. From her vest, she removed a cigarette she’d taken from Keefe’s pack before she left the bungalow and lit it, blowing the gray smoke into the gray morning. The cloud cover was breaking up. In a couple hours the sun would top the ridge, spill over into the sheltered ravine, and the snow would begin to melt.
AFTER the charge against her had been dismissed and the situation resolved, she’d left the house on Willard Road behind and moved fully into the bungalow. The years of living simply had left her with little to transport. Those few things had been easily folded into the space of the bungalow without overwhelming Keefe with a sudden disruption of the hermitage he’d inhabited for so long alone. Since the rent on the house was paid up through the end of the year, Sandy left the few things she wouldn’t be bringing there, in temporary storage. When the lease ran out, she figured she’d put them in storage elsewhere, or simply dispose of them. They were no longer needed. One thing Sandy had brought was the old tractor tire Stink had always been so fond of curling up inside of. She had laid it at the end of the bungalow near the woodpile. But here in the headwaters, the old tire had lost the allure it held for her dog on Willard Road. He’d never stepped into his tire once, never even appeared to notice it, much preferring his corner of the old leather sofa inside the bungalow.
Throughout the years Sandy had lived in the Ripshin Valley, the headwaters had come to epitomize for her that perfect, palpable sustenance that might satisfy her craving for solitude. And now she had full access to all she had desired. Keefe’s welcome partner and legitimate, legal heir. She had found the home she had never known, that she had never known she longed for. We live up there. Ironically, as Sandy’s dream of headwaters solitude had morphed into concrete reality, her assumption that entry into this private paradise would complete her began to be mitigated by occasional feelings of isolation. She had not stepped naked and newly formed from the mountain waters to take possession of a pristine world inhabited solely by her, Keefe, a river of ancient, native fish, and a smelly old dog. Costs had been incurred. Prices had been paid. And there were people, other people, at every step along the path, people critical to the progression she had made to this place and time. Paradise was not enough.
A day had yet to pass since Edith’s death that Sandy had not thought of her or longed for the touch of the old woman’s hand on her head. She could have sacrificed anything, Keefe, the headwaters, all of it, to carry Edith’s withered, living body down the embankment to the river’s edge one more time, to pour her one more glass of sweet tea.
When she ran into Joyce Malden while grocery shopping at the Food Lion in Sherwood, she hadn’t tried to manage a brief greeting followed by a quick exit from the chatty woman. Sandy had, in fact, lingered, happily soaking up Joyce’s gossip, even initiating a couple strands of
the conversation herself. She was visibly pleased, even gave Joyce a sort of congratulatory embrace, when Joyce informed her that she and Tommy Akers were, as she said, “keeping company” some these days.
“He’s a good man, in his way,” Joyce had said. “Of course, gonna have to do something about all his ‘damn government’ talk, but I’m working on it.”
Her attorney, Jackson Stamper, had called, allegedly to ask a couple of minor questions to wrap up a couple of minor details regarding her case. He’d informed her that one of his poker buddies was the new human resources director at the Old Dominion plant, had taken that position after the disappearance of Randy Mullins. And the nurse who staffed the plant’s first aid station had given her notice, was leaving to join her husband, who was in the army and had been transferred to a base in North Carolina. Stamper gave her a name and number, and Sandy called as soon as she got off the phone with the lawyer. She made an interview appointment with the man for shortly after the Thanksgiving holiday, surprising herself that she was eager to return to work and hopeful she’d get the job.
Waiting to pull out of the Citgo in Damascus one day, she’d sat in her truck watching the activity around the wrecked diner across the road. The red-haired woman she’d spoken to the day after the flood stood outside the entrance, smoking a cigarette as she watched a crew of workmen carry a load of new sheetrock panels into the building. Her red hair was at least a foot shorter and pulled into girlish pigtails. Large gold loops dangled from her earlobes. She wore blue jeans, a flannel shirt open at the neck, and a pair of bright red cowboy boots. Sandy had wanted nothing more at that moment than to go to the woman and see if she might help her with the work, but she couldn’t imagine how to word her offer without sounding like a lunatic.
Margie had called recently to invite Sandy and Keefe to join her, J.D., and the boys for Thanksgiving. Sandy had accepted readily and offered to make two pumpkin pies for the occasion. Margie had hesitated, assuring her that she had it all covered, but Sandy had persisted.
“Are you sure, honey?” Margie had said. “Pies? Why not just bring a little wine? Probably safer that way.”
Sandy was fairly certain she heard Margie snickering, perhaps with her finger over the mouthpiece of the phone. Thinking, no doubt, of Sandy’s disastrous attempt at making a pie for Edith.
“Please,” Sandy had said. “Let me try.”
Keefe had shown no sign of being disconcerted by her daily presence at the bungalow. In fact, most of the time he seemed openly relieved she was there, more at ease. True, he had the occasional bad day, as was to be expected. From time to time, he would have to grapple for a word, but it came eventually if he, if they, were calm and patient. Only once had Sandy seen that confused look in his eye as he fought to remember who she was, but it had passed quickly, punctuated with “Yes, of course, my dear.”
He’d been visibly enlivened when they realized the mountain lion might have taken up residence in the cave across the river. Sandy had been on the porch one night, calling Stink back inside from the clearing, where he’d been barking, raising a bit of a fuss. She was afraid he’d reverted to his old ways and was off rousting a skunk. A half-moon hung over the ravine. In the dim light, as her dog passed by her on his way back inside, she thought she had caught a glimpse of the cat. Again, not the whole creature, just a momentary flash of what could have been that long tail vanishing into the depths of the cave. Keefe was delighted. The next morning, he had waded the shallows to the far side of the stream. He hadn’t caught sight of the mountain lion, but he’d found definite pawprints in the streamside silt in front of the cave. “It well could be we have a new neighbor, my dear,” he had said.
“What do we do now?” Sandy asked.
“Live together peacefully, I hope. Best keep it a secret from J.D.”
“And Tommy Akers, bless his heart,” Sandy said.
Keefe slid his arm around Sandy’s waist, pulled her closer, and gazed back across the clearing at the cave. “I’m glad it’s there. Makes me feel better, more . . . more content. Now, when I’m irrevocably demented and shipped off to the home, where I belong, you won’t be alone out here. It’ll be here to watch over you, to keep you company. Certainly make for a more reliable companion.”
“That’s not funny, James.” Sandy pretended to punch him lightly on the shoulder.
“I don’t know that I intended it to be, my dear,” he said as he pulled her still closer. And still, a wry grin crept across his face.
Paradise, it turned out, was itself a porous thing, wrapped in another world—a wonderfully odd, flawed, and uncertain one—and this paradise took its value from the infusions of that cracked, bent, encircling outer world.
SANDY stubbed out her cigarette and dropped the butt into a vest pocket. She rose to one knee behind the boulder, turned toward the pool, and began to inch into casting position. The fish she stalked would spot her the moment she stood upright, so she scooted to the outer edge of the boulder, careful to keep herself as concealed as possible behind the rock. She would need to drop her line down into the pool, just ahead of the chute of water feeding the pool. If she hit her target, the large fish holding under the low rock shelf beneath the back eddy would see her fly drifting before them. In the deeper, swirling water at the head of the pool, she would have as many as three, maybe four casts to draw a fish out. After that, it would be clear to the fish that her fly was a dangerous intrusion to fear and avoid, not a succulent smaller fish to eat.
As she settled into position at the edge of the large rock above the pool, she thought she detected movement at the far edge of her peripheral vision. She turned in that direction, but saw nothing moving other than two crows flapping and squawking in the branches of a half-dead hemlock tree. A trick of the eye, attributed to the excitement of the hunt. Leaf-flecked, snow-covered ground rose up the slopes of the ravine around her, a sparser terrain than it had been a few months ago, newly opened around the stark trunks of leafless trees as the season slipped into its dormancy. Sandy shook off the distraction and turned all her attention back to her fishing, collecting herself through a series of steady, deep breaths. Three, four casts, at most. She was ready. She cocked her rod to her side and shot her line down into the wide, deep pool below.
On her second pass through the head of the pool her fly was hit. Hit hard. The resistance in her arm on one end and that of the fish on the other nearly bowed her rod in half. She rose from behind the boulder, held her rod high over her head, and scrambled down over mossy stones and snowy scree to the bank of the pool. The fish spun at the end of her line, fighting savagely. Judging by the force and ferocity of the struggle, she had found the prey she sought. Knowing the season was coming to a close, that this might well be the last good fish until next spring, Sandy delayed for a few moments, letting the fish run, dive, and spin a bit longer than necessary. She held her breath and luxuriated in the electric vibration pulsing from the fish, up her line and rod, on into her arm, her heart, not wanting the delicious tension to end.
She exhaled, inscribing the chill air above the pool with the long, vaporous plume of her expelled breath, and drew the fish to hand. She twisted the hook from the bone plate of the brook trout’s upper lip and held the fish in the shallow water until it could regain its equilibrium. She held what she had sought, one of the deep-bellied old patriarchs of the deeper pools, his fins so orange they seemed ablaze, a slight hook to his aged lower jaw. She relaxed her grip on the fish. With a brutal slap of its tail, it was gone, disappeared back into the deeper holds of the pool. Sandy reeled in her line and stood for a moment longer on the snow-lined bank of the pool. Her hands were cold and red from the air, from the water. She cupped them together and filled the space within them with her own breath until they began to warm, then rested her rod against her shoulder, turned upstream, and headed back to the bungalow.
Rather than crossing over to the narrow trail on the opposite side, Sandy kept to the more rugged route on this side of the upp
er Ripshin. The upstream hike home led her over jumbles of rocks, gnarled tree roots, and downed tree trunks. By the time she’d climbed to the pool just below the wide clearing pool in front of the bungalow, she could feel the blood pulsing through her veins, heating her flesh as it burned off the last of the morning’s chill. She paused to gather her breath. In the thin film of snow still coating the ground around the pool, she saw the tracks. Impressions of large padded paws, topped by the gouges of long claws, the imprints made even larger as they pressed through the snow into the soft riverbank ground. Sandy was no tracker, but these pawprints could have been the cat. The mountain lion might have been out in the night, returned to the cave well after the snow had fallen. She hoped so.
Sandy stretched to her toes and peered up to the clearing pool above her. She could just see the front of the ledge at the cave opening. She backtracked to the tail of this lower pool, crossed over, and walked up the bank from the stream into the clearing. As she walked to the bungalow, she glanced over her shoulder at the dark mouth of the cave, hoping for a glimpse of what she knew she wasn’t likely to see today. Keefe rounded the end of the bungalow as she approached, carrying an armload of firewood, Stink following at his heels. He showed no sign of seeing Sandy as he mounted to the porch and entered the bungalow. Her dog spotted her, however, and waited for her, his tail wagging, until she reached the porch and scratched behind his ears.
“Hello, sweetheart,” she said, tousled his head once more, and leaned her rod next to Keefe’s walking stick by the door. Stink walked inside to the sofa as Keefe reappeared, his arms empty now.
