Machine Without Horses
Page 16
She practises tying flies with her eyes closed and can do it just fine, but it will be a slow production if that is how she has to manage when she is completely blind. And how will she read the orders that come through the post?
She finds a care home nearby in Golspie that will take her when the time comes, and then she waits for Percy to die, because she can’t bear to give him up. When he finally does get cancer, at the age of twelve, and has to be put down, she weeps over his little body at the vet’s, and then drives back home and immediately packs her bags. By this time, she has already given much of her fly-tying equipment to a friend who dresses flies in Helmsdale, including her vise, bobbins and tinsel, and bird skins. The rest of the materials and her table full of orders, she just leaves in the shed, turning the key in the lock and stepping away from the building, and the life, in which she has lived wholly and intimately for the past fifty-five years.
Ruth drives her car to a friend’s house, and her friend, in turn, drives her to the care home in Golspie. The car is to be given to another friend. Her cottage has just been abandoned. Lady Drummond is long dead, but the cottage still belongs to the estate and will be absorbed back into it.
Ruth is given a south-facing room in the care home and she appreciates the light that fills the window most of the day, but her eyesight is almost gone at this point and so it is difficult to navigate the passageways of the home. She never knows where she is and sometimes forgets that she isn’t in her cottage anymore, feeling along the hallways for the right texture of wallpaper to tell her what room she’s entered. Sometimes, she is so lost that she has to stop and cry out until someone comes along to rescue her.
Friends still visit. She is loved and not abandoned by those who know her. But she cannot help the fishermen anymore and this upsets Ruth. She cannot help anyone. In the fullness of her life, she was always ready to drive a friend to a medical appointment, take a lonely widow on a day out to the countryside, or help another friend to set mousetraps. Now she cannot even help herself. She cannot even find her way around the place where she now lives. Her surroundings are all suddenly mysterious and frightening.
She misses Percy. There was such personality packed into his little body and she feels empty without his fierce company. She wishes she’d given him all the nuggets of cheese and scraps of toast he had begged for.
One day, Ruth is sitting by the window, enjoying the feeling of the sun on her face, when the door to her room clicks softly open. She hears the pad of feet over carpet.
“Hello. Who’s there?”
There’s the sound of a chair being dragged closer to the window, and then a hand lightly touches her shoulder.
“It’s me, Ruth.”
The voice is the same, even after all these years. Ruth reaches over and finds Evelyn’s hand.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“I went to the cottage. Someone has put a notice on the door saying you are here in Golspie. For the fishermen, I suppose. To stop them from coming.”
“They show up anyway from time to time,” says Ruth. “I still tie the odd fly. Fishermen, it turns out, are as hard to stop in their habits as salmon.” She pauses. “I’m blind now.”
Evelyn squeezes her hand. “I know that,” she says.
“If this is a dream, it’s a very nice one,” says Ruth.
“It’s not a dream.”
“Am I dying?”
“I think you might be,” Evelyn says.
“I waited for so long.”
“I know.”
“And you’re only here now?”
“I couldn’t come before. I had to wait for Dan to die.” Evelyn leans closer to Ruth. “It was impossible otherwise. It was so hard for me to come to you at all, but you have to understand that I did whenever I could.”
Ruth puts her hand up and touches Evelyn’s face. The skin is soft with age.
“Do you remember the castle?” Ruth says.
“Of course.”
“I think that was when I was the most happy.”
“I was going to say the same.”
They sit quietly. Ruth can feel the warmth of the sun through the window. In her mind, she is tying flies, marrying feather to hook, seeing herself sitting at her stool in the little shed overlooking the North Sea, everything she needs exactly to hand. And now, walking down the castle steps with Evelyn, the lawn dark as water before them. The drift of rosemary from the terrace.
And when death comes then for Ruth, it comes as one of her salmon flies, arcing through the darkness towards her. She shudders her body up to meet it, opens her mouth. Swallows it whole.
The fish move together up the river, their bodies churning through the water.
“Where are they going?” asks Ruth.
“To spawn and die,” says Arthur.
“But I don’t want them to die.”
Arthur bends down so that his head is level with his daughter’s.
“Look at them, Ruthie,” he says. “They are so full of themselves. They are doing exactly what they want to be doing. No one is their master.”
His face is so close to Ruth’s that she can feel his words on her skin when he speaks them. He gives her shoulders a squeeze.
“They are so full of life,” he says, “that they won’t even notice they have died.”
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my agent, Clare Alexander, and my editor, Jennifer Lambert, for their care and wisdom during the writing of this book.
Thanks also to Mary Louise Adams, Tama Baldwin, Nancy Jo Cullen, Eleanor MacDonald, Kirsteen MacLeod, Marco Reiter, Ray and Lori Vos, Jane Warren and Noelle Zitzer.
Special thanks to the esteemed and beloved members of the BDL.
My gratitude to Anne Hardcastle, for leading me to Megan Boyd.
Thanks to the National Water Centre in Saint John, New Brunswick, for a residency in 2016, during which some of this book was written.
Further information on Megan Boyd can be found in the book Megan Boyd: The Story of a Salmon Flydresser (2016), by Derek Mills and Jimmy Younger, and the documentary film Kiss the Water (2013), directed by Eric Steel.
The book’s epigraph is from the poetry collection Ariel (1965), by Sylvia Plath, and is used with permission from Faber & Faber Ltd. The poems quoted in the chapter “Blue Charm” are “Afton Water” (Sweet Afton) and “A Red, Red Rose,” both by Robert Burns. The poem quoted in the chapter “Thunder and Lightning” is “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold.
About the Author
HELEN HUMPHREYS is the author of eleven previous books. Her most recent acclaimed work of non-fiction is The Ghost Orchard. Her most recent novel, The Evening Chorus, was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award and was a national bestseller. Her memoir, Nocturne, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award. Previous novels include Coventry, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the Trillium Book Award; Afterimage, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; Leaving Earth, which won the Toronto Book Award; and The Lost Garden, which was a Canada Reads selection. The recipient of the Harbourfront Festival Prize for literary excellence, Humphreys lives in Kingston, Ontario.
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Also by Helen Humphreys
FICTION
Leaving Earth
Afterimage
The Lost Garden
Wild Dogs
Coventry
The Reinvention of Love
The Evening Chorus
NON-FICTION
The Frozen Thames
Nocturne
The River
The Ghost Orchard
Copyright
Machine Without Horses
Copyright © 2018 by Helen Humphreys.
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EPub Edition: SEPTEMBER 2018 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-3251-1
Version 08082018
Print ISBN: 978-1-44343-249-8
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