Abbeville

by Jack Fuller

  “What’s that?” my father said.

  “It’s time for George to make the acquaintance of a proper river,” Grampa said. “And I know just the one.”

  • • •

  IN THE CRAMPED CAR seat on the long trip north Karl felt every minute of his age. Brendan did the driving; Karl was relegated to reading the map. George sat in the back seat with his comics.

  When they reached the river, Karl revived. He helped Brendan pull the canoe off the roof of the car and drag it to the water. Then he taught son-in-law and grandson the rudiments of paddling.

  Once under way, they glided past snaggy, fallen timber, over gravel riffles that scraped the bottom of the canoe, and into the flat, dark water of sand holes that big brown trout sounded upon the appearance of the sun. Karl had seated himself at the rear of the canoe so he could handle the steering.

  “This is a good spot to get started,” he said, turning the oar until the current pushed back against it with a familiar thrum. They drifted toward a low, sandy bank where a little high grass might grab your fly but would always give it back.

  Karl had to take Brendan’s hand to be able to get out of the canoe. The trouble with age was that you thought about everything too much. You thought about the rocking canoe. You thought about whether you could time your movement to it. You thought about cracking your hip or banging your head. Karl took a step, and his right foot landed in sand on the shallow side. It was awkward to get the left foot over the gunwale, but Brendan helped, and there he was, immersed in his element again.

  Betty had thought the whole expedition was crazy.

  “I want you to bring him home whole, Brendan,” she had said, “not in a box.”

  “Or if it is a box,” said Karl, “at least one also packed with ice and decent trout.”

  He stayed close to the bank, pulling his waders out of the sucking sand with every step. In the canoe he had rigged up the rod with an elk-hair caddis, which was fairly easy to see on the water. His fingers had trembled a bit, but the eye of the hook was mercifully large. Now, as he flipped a backcast, the timing came right back to him. Even a man in his eighties could cast a fly because the power was in knowing how to use the flex of the rod, not the withered muscles of the arm.

  He showed Brendan and George the motion: Accelerate and stop. Accelerate and stop. Ten o’clock and 2 o’clock.

  “Now you try,” he said.

  Brendan was not a natural athlete, but he controlled the line and kept his casts short and manageable, never overextending himself, never getting into trouble. Betty had married well.

  “Now George,” said Karl.

  “It’s okay,” said the boy.

  “Aw, give it a go,” said Karl. “Hear that gurgling? That’s the sound of a fish calling your name.”

  George took the rod and attempted a cast, but after the line died in a messy clump in front of him a few times, he was ready to give up.

  Karl took his grandson’s arm to lead him through the stroke. George perked up when he felt Karl’s old hands upon him. On one cast, a little rainbow trout actually took the fly in the riffles.

  “Good work,” Karl said as George reeled it in. “Now you are a man.”

  Karl popped the hook from the fish’s mouth and let the trout dart away. It was not too long before they got another. Brendan had the luck this time. But it really did not require much. The river was bountiful. Karl sidearmed a shot deep under an overhanging tree and hooked a big brown. He handed the rod to Brendan to land it.

  When it was George’s turn again, the boy put the fly into the grass and deadfall as often as he put it into the stream. Karl had Brendan retrieve it when he could, tied on a new caddis when he couldn’t.

  “I learned to fish from a fellow who said there are only two rules,” said Karl, recalling Hoekstra’s voice from long ago. “Rule number one: You have to fish where the fish are. Rule number two: The fish are in the water.”

  As George and his father traded off the rod, Karl concentrated on the current, feeling connected with all Creation through the drift of the fly and the eyes of fish and fisherman fixed on it, below and above.

  “If you cast just a little more slack,” Karl advised Brendan, “I think you’ll reach that fish before the fly starts to drag.”

  On the next cast George’s father did what Karl had suggested, and a nice fish finished the lesson.

  Karl could have stayed there until nightfall. He could have been content simply watching the water slide past in an endless sheet. But they weren’t outfitted for camping overnight.

  “We’d better go,” he said. “It’s a longer paddle than you’d think from the map.”

  “I just want to try that one spot over there,” said Brendan. “I’ve been saving it till the end. Come on, George. Let’s see if we’ve learned anything.”

  They moved downriver around the bend until Karl could no longer see them. He stood in the current, thinking about all that had been swept away and all that had drifted to him unearned. He took several steps until the force of the water was about as much as he dared.

  When he was younger, he had liked to wade in after dark, lusting for the big fish that only then came out to feed. In truth he was also attracted by the black pull of the current. It had been at this place, surrounded by the wasteland left by logging, that he had first felt the darkness at the center of things. He had felt it again in France. Then in prison. Then with Fritz. Now it came to him once more as he stood up to his fragile old knees in the black, flowing water. He closed his eyes and felt a great, perpetual movement drawing him. He barely had strength to resist. Nor did he want to. Eyes closed, he knew this would be his last time in the river. But he did not feel the least sense of loss. He accepted darkness as part of the cycle of light, and he was ready. The recognition of this came to him mysteriously from the depths, like the grace of a fish to a well-presented fly.

  24

  ON THE DAY THAT WAS TO BE HIS LAST AS postman Grampa took me in tow and pushed the handcart up to every door, even when there wasn’t any mail to put in the box. Everywhere there were handshakes, hugs, and farewells. But when we got to Henry Mueller’s place, there was something more.

  “Are you sure you really want this, Karl?” Mueller said.

  “Betty’s got to do what she thinks is best,” Grampa said.

  “With all due respect, it don’t say on that deed to your house that she owns you and Cristina, too,” said Mueller.

  Grampa let the cart down on its stubby back legs.

  “ ’Tisn’t the house, Henry. ’Tisn’t a piece of paper and whose name is on it. With Cristina slowing down so, well, at some point I know I won’t be able to handle it anymore.”

  “Betty is awfully quick to take charge,” said Mueller.

  “It brought us through the bad times,” Grampa said.

  “What about Cristina?”

  I leaned back against the cart, listening, though I thought maybe I shouldn’t be.

  “Deep down she knows Betty’s right,” Grampa said.

  “She stuck with you, Karl, didn’t she?” said Mueller. “She loved you richer and poorer.”

  “Funny,” Grampa said, “turned out easier poorer.”

  “Well, I haven’t filled your jobs yet, just in case,” said Mueller. “Because poorer ain’t so great.”

  When we finished the rounds, we returned the cart to its place under the eaves of the old bank, put the outgoing mail we had collected into the empty leather sack, and dragged it inside until the late-afternoon train.

  “What’s in that old safe back there?” I asked.

  “Dead mice and ideas,” Grampa said.

  “Can I see?”

  “The ideas are invisible,” Grampa said, “like ghosts. You want to lock them up tight so they don’t haunt you.”

  We left the bank building and walked past the grain elevator toward the tracks. Along the way we had to step over a concrete foundation overgrown with weeds. I had used it a hundred times t
o set cans on for pinging with my rifle.

  “What was here before?” I asked.

  “Power,” Grampa said and kept on walking.

  “Once I thought I’d build a fort on it to conquer the Indians,” I said.

  “And I thought I was going to conquer the night,” Grampa said. “Let’s pick up the pace a little, George. Some of the work we’ve got to get done needs sunlight.”

  The schoolhouse stood so tall, perched atop a high cellar, that you might have expected four rooms rather than only two. To get the mower out Grampa had to hop it up a number of steps, which were well worn from years of this practice.

  He had no intention of having me do any real work. He never did, which was one of the many things that endeared him to me. I sat on a stump and watched him push the old hand mower back and forth, back and forth, lapping by no more than an inch, lost to the world the way he had been on the river casting a fly.

  “Got to remember to leave a note listing all the chores that have to be done here regular,” he said when he finished.

  He pulled the cellar door shut behind him, sliding the hasp of the bolt lock to.

  “Got to put the key back in old Henry’s hands,” he said. “There’s lots to think about still, George. Lots to do.”

  The schoolhouse was empty. Inside it smelled of lunches with milk. Grampa went to the closet and pulled out a big, long-brushed broom and an enormous tin dustpan. In the closet stood a barrel. He slid off the top, reached down, and came up with a Hills Bros. coffee can full of sawdust that had the aroma of oil and candle wax.

  “You take command of the spreading and I’ll do the pushing,” said Grampa. “First, though, we’ve got to make ourselves a space.”

  Together we moved all the little desks and chairs in the north room to one side, leaving a broad, scuffed expanse of varnished pine.

  “I need you to stay a little ahead of me,” said Grampa. “Pretend you are sowing oats.”

  “I don’t know how,” I said.

  “I’ll show you.”

  Grampa laid down the sawdust in a quarter moon with a broad, sweeping motion of his right arm. The first time I tried, the sawdust landed in a clump.

  “I thought we might need a bit more of it there, where the marks are the worst,” I explained.

  “Spreading it evenly straight through the swing will do just fine, George.”

  Once I got the hang of it, we needed just three passes to finish the part we had cleared of desks and chairs. The used cleaning compound lay in a neat line at the near end of the floor. I leaned over the dustpan as Grampa swept it in.

  “You can throw it in the trash can over there,” Grampa said. “We’ll burn it later. The wax makes for a pretty flame.”

  When I looked back, the floor glowed in the setting sun.

  “Now the other half,” Grampa said. “This time we’ll have to lift the desks and stay on our tiptoes so that we don’t scrape a heel.”

  When we were finished with both rooms and the hall, the floors in every direction were as void of human imprint as a beach smoothed by waves. Grampa tilted his head to make sure that the job was right from every angle. Of course, in the morning the kids would obliterate our work. But for that moment when the children arrived, the school would shine.

  I don’t know whether or not he thought of it as the last time he would be able to look back on gainful labor. But the way he talked, he seemed content that others would follow—other caretakers, other postmen, other generations of the family, other rivers down to the end of time when the purpose of all would reveal itself, or would not.

  We went out and put the trash and sawdust in the circle of blackened rocks at the back of the lawn. Grampa pulled out a kitchen match, struck it against the sole of his shoe, and tossed it on the pile, which whumped into flame. As it burned, we sat silently nearby, like ancient Indians raising prayers at a sacred spot on the endless plains.

  WHEN EVERYONE ELSE had gone to bed, Karl and Cristina sat together in the kitchen.

  “I guess we won’t be warming milk on this cookstove many more times,” said Karl.

  “Well, you’ve got prices marked on everything we might warm it in,” said Cristina.

  “Did I go too high, do you think?” said Karl. “I don’t want anybody to feel I’m gouging.”

  “Do you still have a bottle of schnapps?” asked Cristina.

  She could still surprise him even after all the years.

  “Why, I do believe there’s some in the cellar,” he said.

  “No price tag on it for the sale?”

  “Nope.”

  “How long have you had it down there for a secret nip?” she said.

  “Every man needs something to hide,” Karl said.

  When he brought it up, it had a heavy coating of dust.

  “See,” he said. “Hardly touched.”

  “Blow it off outside, please,” she said.

  Karl went to the back steps and rubbed the glass down with his hands. Cristina took out two glasses that she had promised to a cousin. They were heavy crystal. She had bought them in Chicago just before their wedding. All six in the set had survived, largely because they had always been too good to use.

  Karl poured, the bottle’s neck tapping the lip of the glass like code. She let him pour a fair amount, more than he ever remembered her taking, and this emboldened him to give himself as much as he pleased.

  “It’s going to be a lot different,” Cristina said.

  Karl lifted his glass and said, “To the next fifty years.”

  Cristina lifted her glass, too, a little more slowly, and let it be touched.

  “I’m not sure how many more years I have,” she said.

  “At Betty’s,” he said, “whatever happens, somebody will be there.”

  “I won’t be cooking for you anymore,” Cristina said.

  “You deserve someone to do for you for a change,” he said.

  “She’ll keep me out of her kitchen,” Cristina said, “just like I always kept her out of mine.”

  Karl put his hand around his glass and left it there.

  “I noticed you didn’t put a price on Fritz’s revolver,” Cristina said.

  “We should have buried it with him,” he said.

  Cristina reached across the table and touched his hand.

  “You could still, you know,” she said. “I would go with you.”

  “It’s a walk,” he said.

  “I’ll survive,” she said. “Get the shovel and lantern. I’ll carry the pistol.”

  “I’d better make sure it isn’t loaded,” he said.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said. “I’ve done that every day since you brought it into this house.”

  They sneaked out the back door, passed the summer kitchen, feeling their way along the wall of the chicken coop and outhouse. Once they got beyond them, Karl fired up the lantern.

  Because he did not have a free arm to support Cristina, she grasped his belt and shuffled behind him. When they reached the blacktop road, they stayed well away from the shoulder, where there were ruts and holes that could have tripped them.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve taken a stroll together,” Cristina said.

  “A stroll to the cemetery in the middle of the night,” he said. “I think it may be a first.”

  “For me,” she said. “But not for you.”

  “I have liked it there at sunrise or sunset,” Karl said. “It always gave me a sense of things coming back around.”

  “Are you afraid?” she asked.

  “I like my independence, just like you do,” he said. “I like making my own mistakes.”

  “Well,” she said, “you’ve got a little experience there.”

  They reached the dirt road. At the end of it, beyond the lantern light, stretched the moonshadow of the big old tree near her grandparents’ graves. They made their way forward, Karl using the spade like a blind man’s cane.

  “Tell me again why are we doing t
his?” he asked.

  “My grandmother always said, ‘Der Weg ist das Ziel.’”

  The way Cristina voiced the old saying made it sound like Lieder, the song a person would sing only when he finally had the distance to realize that the destination at journey’s end had all along been the journey itself.

  “You have always favored your grandmother, you know,” he said.

  “Am I really that old?” she said.

  Once inside the cemetery grounds Karl stopped and put down the lantern and spade, then turned to take both of her hands in his. As he did, he felt the icy hardness of the pistol.

  “You’re not pointing that, I hope,” he said. “I guess I should have been more careful what I said.”

  “You did fine,” she said.

  “We’ve got to choose a place to dig,” he said.

  “Why not between Fritz and Edna?” she said.

  “Maybe back there under the fence line, with the barrel pointing out,” said Karl.

  He left the lantern with Cristina and moved forward to the edge of the light. At first he wasn’t sure which fence post it was that he was looking for, the one Fritz had dropped on his shin in another century, before the logging, before Cristina, before the dynamo, before the darkness of Verdun and the Crash, the shame of Stateville, the suicides, his penitence, the letting go. Above him he could see the lights of a high-flying airliner wink a few times before disappearing into a cloud. Before modern life as they had come to know it had begun, and certainly before death. As he stood there, it all came back to him, his father’s orders—where he should begin, exactly how many feet he should put between the posts, how much area to enclose. Not a square foot more than he had promised.

  “I found it,” he called out in the darkness. Cristina probably had no idea what he had been looking for. Many times in their life she hadn’t.

  He stuck the spade into the ground, then returned to her.

  “Come to me,” he said. “Careful. The grass is wet, but I want you near.”

  He picked up the lantern and took her hand. In the dark they were both unlined by time.

  When they reached the spot, he left the lantern with her, then outlined with the spade a circle about a foot in diameter. Carefully, he slid the blade under the sod and lifted it in one piece like the lid of a barrel.