and I felt the hand, resting like sunlight on my head. And I knew that the line of light led not to a realm but to a Being, and that the light and the hook were his, and that they were made of love alone. My heart was pierced. I began to weep. I felt the Ancient One drawing me toward him, coaxing me out of this autumn landscape, beckoning me on toward undying joy.
The hand was lifted. The nameless presence faded, and the light around me blended with the sunlight I knew. But in my heart the wound stayed, and the good hurt. I rose from the road, brushed off my knees, wiped my eyes, and drew breath. Then I walked—though I knew that from this point on the road, and from this point in my soul, there was no escape, and nowhere to go.
BOOK FIVE
AT THE END OF THE LINE
Rains pour down without water,
and the rivers are streams of light.
One love it is
that pervades the world;
few there are who know it fully.
—Kabir
God lies in wait for us with nothing so much as love, and love is like a fisherman’s hook: without it he could never catch a fish, but once the hook is taken the fisherman is sure of the fish. Even though the fish twists hither and yon, still the fisherman is sure of him. So, too, I speak of love: he who is caught by it is held by the strongest of bonds, and yet the stress is pleasant; he who takes this sweet burden upon himself gets further, and comes nearer to what he aims at, than he would by means of any harsh ordinance ever devised by man. Moreover, he can sweetly bear all that happens to him; all that God inflicts he can take cheerfully. Nothing makes you God’s own, or God yours, as much as this sweet bond. When one has found this way, he looks for no other. To hang on this hook is to be so completely captured that feet and hands, and mouth and eyes, the heart, and all a man is and has become God’s own.… Whatever he does, who is caught by this hook, love does it, and love alone.…
—Meister Eckhart
Wherever He drags me
I go
with no say in the matter.
—Jalal al-Din Rumi
Last Chapter
There’s not much more to tell. It was of the line of light and of the touch of the hand of love that I wanted to speak. Now I’ve spoken, or tried. Maybe now old Izaak Walton’s shade and book and controversy will let me be. Or maybe they won’t. I don’t much care now; I’m not so particular as I used to be. Taking the good with the bad, I’m just living happily ever after. That is, I’m being hung by the heart until dead. Dreefee dead. Who could ask for more?
Eddy came back at sunset, just like she promised. I did my best to tell her what had happened through the night and at dawn, but I was exhausted and excited and my best wasn’t very good. Yet when I finished she sat still for a moment, considering. Then she said, “I love you.” Can you imagine? She’d never said anything like that to me before! And I hadn’t even done anything. The God in the Light did it: all I did was dangle at the end of the line. But that’s what she said. She said she’d stay the week, too—but she didn’t: she stayed the month, stayed three months, stayed six months. Then one day in May we drove into Portland, nabbed Titus and Descartes at their flat, kidnapped Bill Bob out of fifth-grade PE, drove up to a podunk county courthouse in central Washington, and had ourselves an old-time Justice-of-the-Peace-style wedding. Bill Bob was best man. Titus gave a speech on the Chivalric Code and the Figure of Beatrice and Mystical Union and Avataric Consorts and Majnun and Leila and so on and so forth till Eddy whispered that we should have made Titus best man and let Bill Bob do the speech. Meanwhile, Descartes just sat in a chair, witnessing—but he sat in the swiveling office chair behind the Justice of the Peace’s desk, and when he began to rock it the chair began creaking, and when the Justice heard it he turned to the dog in mid-ceremony and barked, “Hey boy! Git down!”… Descartes stopped rocking; he furrowed his formidable brow; he turned his sky-eyes upon the Justice and kept them upon the Justice, and he sang. It was a silent song, sung with the eyes alone: it was a song of power, and of fangs, of sudden leaps and rending flesh, of spurting blood and horrible pain. The Justice heard the song, turned red, turned white, turned blue, cleared his throat, straightened his tie, and completely mangled the dearly-beloved-we-are-gathered speech he’d been suavely making for thirty years. The song added some much-needed solemnity to the solemnities. (The best man was in gym clothes, slurping a grape pop while we said “I do.”) Afterward Descartes hopped down, wagged his tail, licked us both, and, according to Titus, growled, “Gus and Eddy Orviston by God and that’s it!” It was touching to see him at a near loss for words.
We dumped our pals off in Portland and returned to the Tamanawis. What “honeymoon” we had we had at home: there was the cedar grove, the river, the fire and wine and loft.… What the hell did Niagara Falls or Waikiki Beach have to offer us? We just strung a rope across the driveway with a board on it and painted on the board,
JUST MARRIED. GET LOST.
And the rope stayed strung there for two weeks. I know it doesn’t make for a spicy story to censor things this way, but hells bells, we still live here: the neighbors will be reading this, and our parents and friends. What can I say? It was a nice two weeks. Get lost.
We took the rope down on the evening of May 21st, a Friday, because May 22nd was all sorts of things: it was opening day of trout season on the coastal streams; it was a year from the day I’d signed the lease on the cabin; it was my twenty-first birthday, which meant that I was now a man—because in America a man is defined not as a person who can vote or think or be drafted or carry guns or preach or pray, but as somebody who can get drunk legally (a definition I like!). But most especially, May 22nd was the day I met Julie, which made it the most amazing day of my life. I didn’t say important: the most important day was the night I traveled with the chinook. And I didn’t say enjoyable: the most enjoyable day was the sixty-some-hour one with Eddy, starting Halloween. But it was the most amazing. And it began as everything in my life has begun—
with a fishing trip. Eddy and me and Rodney and Rodneyetta (Eddy’s eight-foot flyrod), hoofing it up the Tamanawis, ascending the same swirling stairway I’d climbed with the seeing-eye salmon, but this time stopping to catch native cutthroat. Neither of us had fished since mid-March when the last few steelhead were in: it was good to be taken by the old magic. There’s just nothing like the feel of a trout dancing through the river, making the pole pulse like a heart in your hands. It does to the hands what the sight of your sweetie does to your body, what dreams of eternity do to your heart, what milk chocolate does to your mouth.… And yet we killed two trout. It’s strange to kill your dance partners, but that’s what we did. We did it because the world is strange—because this is a world where no matter who you are or where you live or what you eat or whether you choose or don’t choose to understand and be grateful, it is sacrifice—sweet, bleeding sacrifice—that sustains you. So we killed two trout, but knew no sacrificial prayers, and so simply knelt by the river, commended them on how well they’d fought, whispered, “Swim, little soul. Go be a bird, or a singing mouse, or a whale,” then broke their bodies to sustain our own.
As we hiked back down to the cabin we passed a fisherman out on H2O’s drift—a highbrow lady, her tweedy back turned as she made spectacular casts to the slot on the far shore—the slot where Eddy had hooked the chinook. Evidently women liked that piece of water. Away down in Ma’s pool was another fisherman, an old plunker—a straw hat down over his nose; a pipe clenched in his jaw; two-thirds asleep; an adherent of the Crawdad Benson School of Fishing. Then up by the cordwood Chipmunkdominium we stumbled onto Bill Bob.
He was building something—we couldn’t tell what, but he’d obviously been at it since early morning. He had a small chainsaw, hammer and nails, a level, a drill, bolts and wrenches, and out of a pile of scrap lumber and molding and cardboard tubes he was building a labyrinth of ramps, tunnels, trestles, and over-and-under-passes that looked like a Reader’s Digest Condensed Versio
n of the Los Angeles Freeway System. He also had his two radios plugged in and turned up so loud that he wasn’t aware of us till Eddy pulled the plugs. He jumped, then grinned, then gave us hugs—especially Eddy—and she asked what he was making. He said it was something for the chipmunks and me on my birthday. She asked what it was called. He said, “A Ratrace.”
“Oh great,” I said.
“Don’t be sourcastic,” said Bill Bob.
“A Ratrace. Just what the chipmunks and me always wanted.”
“Don’t worry. There won’t be no rats in it.”
“Oh swell,” I said.
“What’s it do?” asked Eddy.
“You fill it up with peanuts, then you stand back and watch and the chipmunks come out and run all around on it. It lets ’em sort of find out what it’s gonna be like when they get to be people.”
I snorted. “You’ve been talking to that blasted Titus.”
“I have not!”
“Then where’d you get the idea chipmunks were going to be people? Or that they ought to find out what it’s like to be people?”
“Descartes.”
“Hmph. And who did Descartes’s talking for him?”
“Titus. But so?”
“So even if Titus can speak Descartes’s mind, Descartes ain’t no chipmunk.”
“So?”
“So how does he know chipmunks want to know about people?”
“How do you know they don’t?”
“I don’t,” I admitted.
“I know ya don’t,” said Bill Bob. “But Descartes did. He told me so.”
“You mean Titus told you so.”
“I mean Descartes.” Bill Bob glared at me. “You’re just jealous. Don’t be jealous, Gus. Don’t worry, I’ll ask you and not Titus or Descartes if I ever wanna know what it’s like to be a shitepoke!”
“What’s that?” Eddy asked.
“A compliment,” I said.
“A scraggly ol’ cowlick-headed goony-lookin’ long-legged fish-stabbin’ heron,” said Bill Bob. “Now go on, Shitepoke. Go beak some bullheads or somethin’. I got work to do.”
I shrugged and started for the back door—
and there, in the sun, in a tiny wicker chair slept the smallest human being I’d ever seen—a girl, not two months old. Barely one month old. Eddy gasped. Bill Bob giggled. I gaped. “Who in the hell is that!”
“Shhhhh,” said Bill Bob. “That’s Julie.”
Julie? Who was Julie? Or whose? I hadn’t known a pregnant woman since Ma ten years back. I whirled on Bill Bob, a lurid suspicion lurching into my mind.… No. Impossible! He didn’t even have any peach fuzz on him. But where did she come from?
I joined Eddy, who’d rushed up and knelt by the baby. Bill Bob slipped between us and put his arms around us. Julie was so small and her face so fat and innocent and her arms so full of folds and her hair so blond—what there was of it—that it took me a while to see that she looked familiar. Uncannily familiar. The face was not pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it was wonderful: looked like the world’s smallest, sweetest old man. But which old man? This took time to sink in—not because it wasn’t obvious, but because it was so implausible. At last, however, it sank:
“Oh my God! Bill Bob! She looks just like H2O!”
He laughed. Pointedly.
“Holy shit! This is our baby sister!”
“Yep,” said Bill Bob.
“Mind your manners, Gus,” said Eddy. “She’s come a long way to meet you.”
But I couldn’t mind anything but Julie. “Judas Priest! Look at her! Like an H2O that got shrunk in the wash!”
Eddy and Bill Bob laughed and hugged each other and me, but I was like a lump of mud. I was flummoxed. The baby’s existence made no sense. She was obviously not adopted—poor thing. But what was Ma, forty? And what was H2O, ninety? Julie. Named after Juliana Berners, no doubt—the mother of modern flyfishing.…
Bill Bob turned off his radios. He was watching my face. “What’s the matter, Gus?”
“I don’t know. Nuthin’.”
“Come on,” he said, smiling and grabbing my arm. “Come on down here and see what Julie can do.” We leaned down close to our sister’s face. He whispered, “Hear? Hear her? Hear how good she can make the air whistle in an’ out her nose, all by herself?”
I listened: sure enough, in went the cool cedar-scented air through an H2O-shaped nose the size of my fingernail, then out it came again all warm and moist and Julie-scented, and she did it all by herself. I began to feel the old place in my heart. I began to blink and swallow. “Where’s Ma?” I croaked. “Where’s H2O?” I hadn’t seen them for so long—not since the day I’d climbed Sisisicu. The day I’d thought Ma was getting dumpy—hells bells, she’d been pregnant! God, I wanted to see them! They probably thought I hated them.… I hadn’t let them meet Eddy, hadn’t written, hadn’t called,
but what was Bill Bob doing?
He began pulling me along to the bluff overlooking the river and pointing down to H2O’s drift: there was the woman Eddy and I had passed. She wore chest-waders and English tweeds—like a female H2O-doppelgänger—and while we watched she sent out a ninety-foot cast so wonderfully controlled that her fly dropped like manna beneath an overhanging log; then a trout slashed the fly and she struck hard. But not till the Comanche warwhoop splattered our ears did I let out a whoop myself: Ma! I scrambled down toward her, Bill Bob right behind me, Eddy following with Julie—but a weird notion so quickly froze me in my tracks that Bill Bob ran into my back: I looked upstream. There sat the plunker by Ma’s pool with his bib overalls and cob pipe, terrorizing a can of worms. And when he saw me turn his way he doffed his straw hat and waved it Hopalong Cassidy–style—exposing the bald pate of Henning Hale-Orviston. I didn’t know which way to turn then: I wanted to hug both of them so bad I ended up just standing where I was, waiting for them to join us. While we waited, Bill Bob talked:
“Your friend started comin’ t’see us last fall.…”
“Which friend?”
“Ma calls him ‘Perfesser Pockets.’”
“Titus comes to see you?”
“Sure. Him and Ma and H2O are pals. All of us are, Descartes too.”
“But—what do you talk about? I mean, Titus and H2O? Titus and Ma?”
“Well, we have High Teas, with dogs allowed. And the first thing Titus ever told ’em was…” (he fell into a pretty fair Titus impersonation, except his voice was two octaves higher) “‘Henning, Carolina, I thought you ought to know that in Arabic the word “ma” means water. So you see, Ma, H2O, without knowing it Gus has given you both the same name.’”
“What’d they make of that?” I asked.
“They started calling each other Ma and H2O and told Titus and me to do the same if we wanted, and now everybody calls ’em that, even the High Churchers. But that ain’t what changed ’em. They been differnt ever since that night you burned Nijinsky. That’s when they started goin’ fishin’ together an’ each learnin’ how the other fished, an’ that’s when I started goin’ too ’cause it started bein’ fun. An’ along in there is when they made Julie I guess. An’ that was when H2O got a bike an’ started goin’ ridin’ with me.”
“H2O goes ridin’ with you?”
Bill Bob nodded. I pictured him with his flags and cards and orange-juice tubes and radios, and H2O in his tweeds, huffling along behind. It was too much. I started blinking and swallowing all over again.
“He does lots of stuff with me now,” said Bill Bob. “An’ he wanted t’start doin’ stuff with you too ’cept Ma decided they should surprise ya. That’s why I said we was playin’ musical chairs, remember that time, ’cause Ma was fly-tyin’ an’ H2O was makin’ a plunkin’ pole an’ it was a secret we was keepin’ so I lied t’fool ya.”
I shook my head. “It sure worked.”
“An’ sometimes me an’ Descartes just go t’the park t’pee and stuff ’cause Titus brings Ma an’ H2O crap to read an’ they
help H2O on his new book. An’ don’t tell Titus, but only H2O reads the crap, then he tells Ma about it so they can both gas away at Titus.”
“What’s Titus’s ‘crap’ about?” Eddy asked.
“Oh, fishin’ an’ souls an’ that, I dunno. An’ Julie. One book was by the lady Julie’s named after.”
“Juliana Berners, right?” I said.
“Juliana Burners wrong,” said Bill Bob. “Who’s she s’posed t’be? Some arsonist or somethin’?”
“No, Flamebrain. She was an old-time flyfisherman. But who is Julie named after?”
“Lady Julian of Norwich.”
“Who’s she?”
“Some kinda ol’ English lady Titus wanted H2O t’know ’bout ’cause she talked to God an’ people like that.”
“Oh.”
“Know what he said?”
“Who?”
“God, Dummy. To Lady Julian.”
“Oh. No.”
“Want me to tell ya?”
“Yeah. You tell me.”
“He told her, ‘I may make all things well: and I can make all things well: and I shall make all things well and I will make all things well: and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of things shall be well.…’”
I looked at Eddy, and she looked at me: we felt the hook twist. Bill Bob puffed up his chest. “I rememorized it,” he said, “’cause of Julie.”
Ma reached us first. (She’d released the trout after landing it!) She came striding up the bank in her H2O outfit, threw her arms around Eddy, and said, “Daughter!” Eddy smiled and said, “Ma.” And I couldn’t hold back any longer.… Ma took one look at my face and screeched, “Cripes O. Riley! It’s Glum Gus!” But she laughed and hugged me. Then she asked, “What ya think of yer sister, boy?,” and I tried to say but started to sob, and H2O came up and saw me and his face started to quiver—and all at once I was flooded with the memory of riding on his back across fast, deep streams when I was small, how I’d cling to his neck and watch the current crash against his staff and legs, how never once did he fall. And I threw myself on him, and again clung to his neck—and we lost it completely and hugged and sobbed till Ma was utterly disgusted.
The River Why Page 36
