Machine Without Horses

by Helen Humphreys

  Somehow, I limp over the finish line and complete my version of a Jock Scott. The whole exercise gives me new respect for both Paul and Megan Boyd, which is not a bad thing.

  Paul unwinds the vise lever, extracts my completed fly and hands it to me.

  “Do I have to take it?” I ask. “It’s just going to be a reminder of how bad I was at this.”

  “Here.” He removes his perfect Jock Scott from the vise and gives it to me as well. “Yours will remind you of the effort it takes to do this, and mine can remind you of how it’s actually meant to look.”

  “Thank you.”

  I like the messiness of the workbench, all the bits of feathers, the bobbins of thread and tinsel. I have to think that Megan also found the ordered disorder comforting. The work of building a fly out of the bits of dead birds maybe felt like she was reassembling the bird, felt constructive and positive. Each lure, made from the parts of other living creatures, became a sort of living creature itself.

  “Did you think about what I said?” asks Paul. “About Megan Boyd and the salmon? About that being a relationship?”

  “I did, actually,” I say. “But it would be such a tragic story: the salmon swimming up the river, Megan making the fly in her shed, and then the moment that the salmon is killed by that fly. A kind of inevitable doom. I don’t think that’s the story I want to tell.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s part of it,” says Paul. “That you have to be comfortable with what you’re writing about.”

  “More than ever,” I say. “Like you, I’ve had a lot of death lately.” And experiencing so much death, thinking about it constantly, has made me want to concentrate on life and the living. “I just want to write about something good. It’s all I can handle.”

  “Come upstairs,” says Paul, “and I’ll make you out an invoice for your taxes.”

  I already gave him a cheque for the fly-tying lessons at the beginning of the week.

  We go into his living room, where there is a piece of paper and pen laid out on the coffee table, ready for this exact moment. I walk over to the fireplace while Paul starts filling out the invoice. On the mantel is a photo of him with his arm around a tall, smiling woman. They are standing in a park. Behind them are benches and trees, the edge of a duck pond.

  “What was your wife’s name?” I ask. I don’t remember this photograph being here the first day I was in the house, the day I was convinced that Paul lived with his elderly mother.

  Paul looks up from the invoice. “Sonia,” he says. “That was from our honeymoon.”

  The photo appears to be quite recent. Paul looks no different in the picture than he does now.

  “You weren’t together long?”

  “Three years.”

  That is hardly any time at all. They still would have been in the first throes of love, full of happiness and plans.

  The Jock Scott flies are on the coffee table beside the invoice. From across the room, they look like small birds lying on their sides. It has been nice this week to work on the salmon fly, to build something with my hands and not just with my mind.

  “Sonia is a pretty name,” I say.

  “Yes. She was a nice person.” Paul hands me the invoice. “You probably would have liked her. Most everyone did.”

  I used to wonder where the dead went. I used to think that something of them floated free when they died, remaining with those of us they had left, or lingering in the atmosphere. Now I don’t think anything like that. Now I just feel them gone and wish they could come back. I wish this all the time.

  But in my better moments, I like to believe that they are full of their days, of the brightness of their days—my father sitting in his deck chair, reading the paper; my friend in her garden—and that they will shed this light, slowly, like fireflies, into the long darkness where they now find themselves.

  In the photograph on the mantel, the sun lays down a path through the trees. Everything is so green that it must be spring. The trees have just come into leaf. All that newness that happens every year and makes life so hopeful again.

  I feel that I have started at the wrong end of things.

  “Maybe I should try and tie some simpler flies,” I say. “Easier than the Jock Scott. Do you think that I could have another week’s worth of lessons and you could teach me how to tie some beginner flies?”

  “I’ll adjust the invoice,” says Paul, not missing a beat, reaching out his hand for it. I pass it over and watch as he scratches out one number and writes in another.

  We don’t look at each other, but we’re both smiling.

  22.

  I NOTICE THAT IT’S A LITTLE COOLER TONIGHT when I go out with the dog. Something has shifted very slightly in the air. We have moved deeper into August, and even though the heat is still unrelenting, I can now feel that it will end, that September will come and with it, a release from summer’s fever.

  I go out to the river, walk along the bank from the small waterfall up to the dam and back again. Soon, the river will be boiling with salmon, but for now, it is quiet. There are a few ducks on the water’s surface, some sparrows overhead in the branches of the willow.

  We meet George on our way back to the car. He’s trotting along beside a tall woman. She has the look of Carlos about her—the same cheekbones, the same dark hair.

  Charlotte knocks against George with enthusiasm. She hasn’t seen him for a while and is giving him her best, most robust, greeting, the one usually reserved for people who have given her biscuits in the past.

  “She likes George,” I say to the woman. “She doesn’t like many dogs. She’s a bit of a snob.”

  The woman smiles. “George seems to have quite a few friends,” she says. “I’ve been meeting them everywhere.”

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” I say.

  “Thank you.”

  “I talked to him briefly the day before he died. But it wasn’t anything important, just the boring things dog walkers say to each other.”

  “Boring is good,” says the woman. “I think that the boring life is probably the best life of all.”

  “Yes. I do too.” I pause, not sure if I should say what I’m thinking, but I do. “What happened to Carlos?”

  “I don’t really know. We think that George might have fallen into the river and Carlos went in after him and then slipped and hit his head on a rock.” She looks down at the ground, and when she looks up again, she has tears in her eyes. “Frenchies can’t swim,” she says. “Their little dog bodies are too dense. They just sink.”

  I recall from the news articles that the woman’s name is Ana and that Carlos was her younger brother. I know what it’s like to lose a younger brother.

  The sun has slipped below the tops of the trees, but there’s still hours to go before it’s dark.

  “Shall we walk together for a bit?” I ask. The dogs have trotted up ahead and are companionably sniffing around a garbage bin.

  “Yes,” Ana says. “I’d like that.”

  23.

  MEGAN BOYD TIED A GR EAT MANY DIFFERENT salmon flies, but these were some of the ones she tied regularly: Silver Doctor, Durham Ranger, Jock Scott, Thunder and Lightning, Popham, Green Highlander, Snow Fly, Wilkinson.

  The “Silver” in the Silver Doctor refers to the tinsel that is wrapped around the shank and forms the body of the fly. Invented in 1850 by the Scottish fly dresser James Wright and very popular in its day, the Silver Doctor is still used and still popular, particularly in Norway and Canada.

  The Durham Ranger was also tied by James Wright but was probably invented in the early 1840s by William Henderson, who came from Durham. Meant to be an imitation of a butterfly, the lure contains ostrich and junglecock feathers, kingfisher, blue macaw, blue chatterer and also a twist of black pig’s “wool.”

  Thunder and Lightning was also invented by James Wright and has proven to be one of the best salmon flies in the world, good on almost every type of river, and it’s still in high usage today. It w
as once called the “Great Storm” fly because it was particularly effective on rivers that were naturally dark in colour, and was then only used when the water had risen after a storm.

  The Popham—the favourite fly of both Megan Boyd and HRH, Prince Charles—is a complicated pattern that uses seventeen different kinds of feathers, as well as tinsel, silk and thread. The fly was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by Francis Leyborne Popham, from Wiltshire, a racehorse breeder of some renown. His most famous horse was the Epsom Derby winner Wild Dayrell, named after one of Popham’s ancestors who had murdered a baby and whose ghost, apparently, haunted the Popham estate.

  The green in the Green Highlander comes from seal fur dyed the bright green colour of a Highland tartan. A nineteenth-century fly devised by a Mr. Grant from Wester Elchies, it is a derivative of the Highlander salmon fly and was used to fish on the River Ness, which runs into Loch Ness.

  The Snow Fly is an early salmon fly that is distinguished by four tufts of pig’s wool set along the shank, each one dyed a different colour. The wool makes the body of the fly very strong so that it can resist the teeth of the young spring salmon and they cannot easily tear it apart.

  The Wilkinson was first tied by the Reverend P.S. Wilkinson for fishing on the River Tweed in 1850. It is a salmon fly designed for overcast days, with the brightness of its colours—silver tinsel shank, magenta and light blue hackle feathers—being attractive to the fish in the low light.

  In her long career, Megan Boyd had requests from all over the world to make flies that could be framed, often for generous sums of money, but she chose instead to make salmon flies for the fishermen who lived nearby or came up to Brora to fish the rivers during the salmon runs. She was not interested in tying flies to be works of art. She made her flies to be used.

  Megan’s preferred flies to tie were “attracter” flies. Unlike “imitator” flies, which are designed to imitate insects, the “attracter” isn’t made in the image of anything, but it still appeals to a fish’s curiosity.

  It’s an act of translation, taking something that exists and recreating the elements of it to entice the salmon; remaking an insect, or forming a lure that appeals to the memory of the fish.

  Megan Boyd also invented a fly, called, of course, the Megan Boyd. It is a small, low-water fly, known as a “shrimper,” that is able to attract salmon at the height of summer, when they aren’t taking any other flies. Many fishermen called it their fly of last resort. The predominant aspect of the fly is the lovely golden pheasant feathers that form the “topping.” They look like butterfly wings and have a rich orangey colour with black stripes near their tips. Underneath them, on the shank of the hook, and as the “hackle,” are blue seal fur and blue junglecock feathers. The blue colour is reminiscent of the blue in the first salmon fly that Megan Boyd ever saw, the Blue Charm, given to her by her father.

  24.

  WHAT OF THE PACE OF THE STORY, THE SPEED at which it is told?

  Pacing in a novel is both natural and deliberate. On a basic level, the rhythms of the author’s body influence the way a story is told. Where a sentence pauses is often where the writer takes a breath, and this alignment of language with the body operates beneath the layers of story, in the syntax of the words themselves, and in the placement of the punctuation.

  But on top of that is the pacing of the story that the writer has put in play. It is wholly deliberate and corresponds to the events taking place within the narrative. When a scene is lingered over, it is because it is important to the characters or the development of the plot. When moments are rushed, it is because they can be. This is the writer telling the reader that while the sequence of events matters, none are important enough to the story to examine in detail.

  Because Megan’s life wasn’t packed with incident or travel or scandal, the drama will have to be helped by giving the whole story an extremely fast pace, having it race along, thus making it seem more dramatic than it actually is.

  There is another question to ask yourself when you set about writing a novel, perhaps the most important question of all: Why? Why do it? The world does not really care that you tell this particular story. There are always plenty of other stories that can be told, ones that are more interesting, more politically or socially relevant. Stories that address the moment of time that we stand on and therefore have greater imperative.

  It is hard to write a novel, to make something out of nothing. And it gets increasingly harder, not easier, the longer I do it. I find more challenges with writing now than I faced when I was younger.

  So why do it? Why tell the story of Megan Boyd? She had her measure of fame, has gone down in the history of fly fishing as one of the great salmon-fly dressers. So, I am not rescuing her from obscurity. In fact, my version of her story might be a distortion of her life rather than an unveiling. I have only the scantest of facts to go on and I have made decisions based on these facts, which may or may not be correct. It could be that I am actually doing her memory a disservice in my treatment of it.

  But this is what I know about death: It reduces the most complex of human beings to the lowest common denominator. All the particularities of a person, all their rough edges, are smoothed over after they have died. All is forgiven and all is forgotten. The living really have no time for the dead, and it is easier to file them away with a couple of clichés than it is to continue to engage with their intricacies when they are no longer there to participate actively in this engagement, to push back against your version of them.

  Megan Boyd’s manner of dress, her motorcycle riding, her living alone in a bare-bones cottage have been reduced to the adjective eccentric. Because she never married or had children, it is assumed she never had a relationship. Her life has been whittled down to the facts of her work, to her accomplishments in this arena.

  But what of how she felt? What of her thoughts? What of her experiences in her own skin?

  It may be that I get most things wrong in this novel, but if just one scene, one line of dialogue, moves the reader to consider Megan Boyd not merely as an oddity but as a fully realized human being, then I have done my job as a novelist. Because to really understand someone, we have to be moved by them. And to be moved by someone is to feel empathy for them, and this is what joins us to the rest of humanity. Feeling that we belong to humanity and behaving with compassion towards our fellows is perhaps the most important responsibility of being human today. So, it matters to be able to relate to anyone whom we consider to be “other.”

  All of my recent deaths have made me think a lot about life, about what makes up a life and how it is judged. Are the living merely trudging through a succession of days—the “petty pace” as Shakespeare called it—made up of routine and ritual? Is the worth of a human life determined from the quality of relationships or the usefulness of work? When we look back on our own lives, what do we see? Does the endless procession of days shrink to the handful of moments when we have felt the strongest emotions?

  I am telling this story for these reasons and also because it is a story I feel able to tell. All writers need to feel equal to their material before they are able to render it effectively, and all writers are limited by themselves in this regard—by their own histories, likes and dislikes, personalities, prejudices and their abilities as a writer. Just because you are a writer doesn’t mean you can write about anything. It won’t be convincing if you don’t have points of connection with your subject matter. I feel able to tell this story because I have several points of connection between myself and the character, and because the small canvas of the subject matter is suited to my natural abilities as a writer. I am not the teller of huge sagas that span centuries. I am someone who does best when writing about a closed world.

  When I think about Megan Boyd now, I am thinking about her sitting in her tin-roofed shed, tying salmon flies from sunrise to sunset. I think of her working. I think of her being happy in her work, the way that I am mostly happy in mine. At the end of the
day, as she walks from the shed to her cottage, I imagine she feels the satisfying exhaustion that comes from spending oneself at the work one was designed to do.

  When I have been writing well, productively, I reach the end of the day having run out of words, having been wrung out of words, having used them all up. This often makes me a terrible companion in the evening, as I literally have nothing to say, or nothing left to say. But instead of rendering me empty, this lack of language, this feeling that I have used all the words I had in me that day, makes me whole again.

  I have reached the place where I can begin. I know enough about Megan Boyd now to start writing her story. This note-taking can come to an end.

  To avoid upsetting any of her relatives or friends who might still be alive, I will change Megan’s name.

  All the things that kept me company during this part of the process have to fade into the background now, or be folded, delicately, into the mix of the story, so delicately that they will be invisible to the reader. Aspects of my dog can become aspects of her dog, thoughts about my dead can double as her thoughts, but it must be done so subtly as to be unnoticeable. I need to become Megan Boyd, and in doing so, I need to leave myself and my world behind. Whatever is preoccupying me at the moment needs to be synthesized into fuel for the narrative, but it has no place in the actual narrative. This is the sleight of hand that comes with writing a novel. It is all about making yourself disappear.

  The weather has broken, for a day at least. It has cooled and the sky is grey. There is a breeze and the smell of rain in the air. I woke in the night to hear its whispers on the roof. It is just a matter of time before it begins again.

  Part Two

  Blue Charm

  THE CURTAINS DRIFT ON THE BREEZE FROM the open window, listing over Ruth’s crib. She raises her hand towards the movement, trying to catch the shadows of the birds lifting and lowering from the branches of the oak beside the house.