By some coincidence, Walter Fayerwether ambled through the arbor from the rose garden just as she settled into the passenger compartment. He wore a strange look on his craggy, scholarly face, a look that might have signified … amusement! It rather confused Maggie, but in her exhaustion this morning everything seemed a little off.
“Oh, Mr. Fayerwether,” she said, unnerved by both his sudden appearance and his demeanor. “I’m going away for the weekend.”
“That’s nice,” he said, grinning it seemed.
“Anything we need to talk about before I go?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, then. Everything in hand?”
“You have a good time and don’t worry about anything here,” he assured her. It was only then that she realized Fayerwether was grinning at Harold, who was beaming incandescently back at him, as though he’d won a trophy in some athletic contest. It didn’t occur to Maggie that the prize might be herself, but the visual exchange between the two of them smacked of some recondite male glandular process and seemed potentially hazardous to bystanders. To put an end to it, she formally introduced the two men to each other. They shook hands in the guarded manner of males who recognize their mutual types and who had encountered those same types in many settings many times before in preparatory schools, college fraternities, country clubs, and corporate offices. Maggie couldn’t help noticing that the Morgan’s beige leather seats gave off a wonderful scent of commanding British masculinity. She buttoned a cotton sweater over her sleeveless dress as the men exchanged meaningless pleasantries about the beauty of the weather and the excellent condition of Harold’s vintage car.
“You take good care of her,” Fayerwether said as Harold swung into position behind the wheel. Maggie rather liked the sound of that and the way Fayerwether gazed after her as the agile little car swung around the parking circle. Harold seemed very eager to get under way and the wheels kicked up little rooster tails of loose gravel as they turned out of the drive.
3
Enchantment
The combination of extraordinary fatigue, warm spring sun, and the drone of the engine put Maggie to sleep just south of Hartford as they motored north up Interstate 91, and she didn’t wake up until they pulled off the highway at Windsor, Vermont.
“Where are we?” she said, stretching up into the gorgeous afternoon sunshine.
“We’re nearly there.”
“How long have I been dozing?”
“A couple of hours.”
“Oh dear! I hope you weren’t bored stiff.”
“I have an active fantasy life, thank you,” he said, cutting a humorous glance her way.
“Well, it was sweet of you to let me sleep.”
They picked up eggs, butter, lemons, potatoes, coffee, and other common larder items at a battered little country store in the crossroads hamlet of New Caliban. A short way down the county road they turned down a gravel lane, which soon joined the course of a rugged brook.
“Catamount Creek,” Harold explained. “It’s a little feeder that runs into the Otterkill River. Full of wild brookies.”
“How marvelous,” Maggie said.
“I think you’re going to like it here.”
They motored another mile, passing only one human artifact, an abandoned and decayed Federal period farmhouse once surrounded by tillage and pastures but now nearly swallowed up in second-growth hardwoods. Where the lane finally dead-ended stood a handsome wooden building of weathered gray board and batten with Gothic windows to each side of a bright red door. The sashes, shutters, and trim were also red.
“Here we are,” Harold said.
Maggie pronounced it adorable.
“It was a schoolhouse long ago,” Harold said. “Odd now, isn’t it, to think there were ever enough children living around here?”
“What a different people we were then,” Maggie said. “My God …”
Harold fussed with two locks and threw open the door. Downstairs, a sort of kitchen and sitting area flowed into each other. Against the wall opposite the spartan galley stood a fieldstone fireplace flanked by shelves of books from floor to ceiling. A stuffed owl that uncannily resembled Harold perched on the mantel.
“Somebody else did it over back in 1970,” Harold explained. “Unspeakable materials. Dropped ceilings. Fake pine paneling. Shag carpets. The downstairs was all chopped up into dreary little cells. Dismal doesn’t come close to describing it. It was like a provincial police barracks in Romania. But we saw the glimmering potential and we gutted it down to the timber frame.”
A set of French doors now occupied the rear wall and led out to a deck that overlooked the Otterkill. A long wooden farmhouse table was deployed at the room’s center with a fly-tying station set up at the end nearest the afternoon light.
Toward the front of the house, stairs raked so steeply as to appear ladderlike rose up to a couple of small bedrooms with a bath sandwiched between them. Harold climbed up behind Maggie, toting her bag and admiring her rear. The guest room, painted stark white, was furnished with nothing more than an iron frame bed, an oak nightstand with a kerosene lamp, and an edition of William Bartram’s Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773–74. The extreme simplicity appealed to Maggie. Here was a wonderfully clarifying place, she thought, a place to reorganize and reenergize the battered spirit. Here was a room in which one might actually be able to think!
“So peaceful and lovely,” she observed.
“We’ve got mice,” Harold said.
“I’m not afraid of mice.”
The modest bathroom contained an ancient claw-footed tub. Harold had rigged a five-gallon military jerrican lengthwise from the rafters. Six inches beneath it he’d hung an old two-burner propane camping stove. There was a long copper supply pipe soldered into the top of the can. The pipe terminated in a showerhead cobbled out of the spout of an ancient watering can, and there was a brass petcock valve just behind the showerhead for turning it on and off. Light for the whole room was supplied by twin kerosene wall sconces above a chipped and ancient pedestal sink.
“If you want a shower, you have to light the fire twenty minutes beforehand,” Harold explained. “Any longer and you’re liable to get a scalding. It’s primitive but effective.”
“Enchanting,” Maggie sighed. “I may never go back to the real world.”
“Yeah,” he agreed with a sardonic gleam in his eye. “Let’s you and me chuck it all and stay here forever.”
4
At the Vise
Maggie overcame the restlessness of arrival by organizing the food supplies and acquainting herself with the kitchen. The equipment was barely adequate—a pitiful assortment of cast-off pans and cheap aluminum pots picked from tag sales, she supposed. Tableware ranged from pewter to Lucite. She was overcome by a desire to bake cornbread and scared up the necessary implements and ingredients while Harold settled in at the end of the great table and commenced tying trout flies.
She kept an eye on him as she prepared the simple batter. It looked like surgery. He secured the tiny fishhooks in a little vise, wrapped bits of fur around the shanks, and wound feather hackles over the fur. When the batter was in the oven Maggie settled into a chair beside him to watch.
“Hope I don’t make you nervous,” she said.
“Not at all.”
“Is it hard to learn?”
“Takes quite a bit of practice. Like cooking well or sewing well, I’d imagine.”
“Would you teach me how?”
“No,” Harold said. “There are only so many things in the world a person should be good at. I feel a professional obligation to protect you from spreading yourself too thin. You can be the cook and everything else. Let me be the flytier in here.”
“Oh, all right. But will you show me how to handle the rod and all?”
“You betcha.”
“If I were a trout I’d go after that little morsel you’re making there.”
“Would you?”
“Then you’d be caught, you know.”
“And I’d die in a panful of bubbling sweet butter,” she said. “Pure heaven.”
“Of course, I’d have to eat you, then,” Harold said and hastened to add, “Say, would you mind fetching me a Scotch? I’ve literally got my hands full here.”
5
The One-Rod Method
When Harold had tied about a dozen flies and they’d both knocked back two Scotches, it was time to fish.
“We take one rod tonight,” Harold said as he donned a very complicated-looking vest with dozens of bulging pockets. “It’s too prime out there tonight for instruction. Just pay attention to what I’m doing. Tomorrow morning you’ll get a rod too.”
Maggie put on the decrepit pair of sneakers Harold gave her for wading in the river. She felt like a clown. He also insisted that she put on a sweater, though it was a warm evening. The sun had dipped into the treetops and a gold-tinted twilight was under way that would persist for a good hour.
They waded through some emerald bracken along the riverbank to the water’s edge and Maggie followed Harold into the stream. It was like leaving one world behind and plunging into an entirely different one. The water was shockingly cold, though not much more than calf deep. When she’d caught her breath, Maggie was glad Harold had made her wear a sweater. The footing was good on the stream’s gravel bottom. The current made a slight burbling sound and left a trail of bubbles where it swirled around her bare legs. The golden air was full of bobbing motes. Among them but less numerous were the large, fluffy mayflies winging up into the forest canopy.
“The green drakes are out,” Harold said.
Cedar waxwings swooped across the tunnel-like stream corridor picking them delicately out of the air. Sometimes they’d hang suspended in place for a moment like large hummingbirds, feeding on more than one bug at a swoop.
“Beautiful,” Maggie said, goggling at the spectacle of it all. The Scotch in her bloodstream was casting an additional patina over the scene.
“Stay on my left,” Harold whispered.
She followed him upstream.
He halted at the tail of a riffled pool and began manually stripping line off his reel, very businesslike. The reel emitted an insectile screech with every pull. Then, he was whipping the supple rod back and forth until the heavy line was in the air in a big loop, going forward and back, rhythmically. At every back-cast he yanked more line off the reel until the loop was flying out a good fifteen yards. Finally, he hurled the loop forward until all the line paid out. The leader unrolled like a red carpet and deposited the fly at the head of the pool like a little foreign dignitary landing in a new country. The fly bobbled swiftly downstream in the surface tension, its cream-colored hackle and light deer-hair wings making it easy to track against the dark water. A liquid hump swelled behind it and then there was a little splash, like a mousetrap springing just under the surface. The rod tip jerked visibly.
“Got one?”
“Yeah.”
He stripped in the line with his left hand dragging the fish closer until, with a deft motion, he reached down into the water and brought up a smallish trout, holding its lower jaw between his thumb and forefinger.
“A tiddler,” he remarked.
“A what?”
“We throw back anything under twelve inches.”
“Well, of course,” Maggie said.
“Did you watch what I was doing.”
“Oh, yes. It looks rather difficult.”
“It is. You’ll find out tomorrow.”
Harold tossed the little trout back into the stream and it streaked under a rock. They moved forward skirting the edge of the pool to get to the next riffle ahead. There Harold laid out a cast just to the side of a piano-size rock. In fact, the fly bounced off the rock’s face before it landed in the water with a little plop.
“Did you do that on purpose?” Maggie asked.
“Of course.”
The fly jiggered gaily down the current for a few seconds. Then the water exploded under it and the reel whined as a much larger trout ran off upstream with the fly. Harold slowed down the run by palming the spool until the line stopped paying out. The rod tip darted at the water as the fish chugged around. When it broke water about thirty feet away trying to throw the hook, it looked like an airborne wriggling gold ingot. Then the line went slack for a while as the fish drifted with the current. Harold appeared to anticipate the move and took in the slack until the rod tip was darting again. The fish ran upstream twice more, and the third time it floated down on the current, exhausted, Harold slipped the fatal net under it.
“Now, this is a fish,” he said, fastidiously extracting the hook with a surgical hemostat.
The fish had jewel-like red spots on its side and a bright yellow belly. It gasped and tried futilely to wriggle free from Harold’s grip. When the hook was out, he took the trout up in both hands and, in a motion that seemed well practiced, bent back the trout’s head until its spine snapped. Maggie recoiled.
“What did you just do?”
“I killed it quickly and mercifully,” he said.
“Good Lord …”
“You understand we intend to catch our supper?”
“Yes, but …”
“Therefore, we have to kill them.”
“I know, but …”
“It’s either this or they suffocate slowly in the creel. Which would you prefer?”
“Quick and merciful,” Maggie glumly agreed.
“It’s not as though you were a vegetarian.”
“No.”
“Nature is red in fang and claw, my dear.”
“Sure. I’ll be okay.”
Harold seemed satisfied. He nodded slightly and made a barely audible harrumphing sound. Then he swiftly had a knife out and slit the trout’s belly from its anal vent to its throat. He tore out the gills and tossed them aside, pulled the viscera loose from the body cavity, and squeezed the trout’s fibrous stomach so that a paste of partly digested insects came out of it like black toothpaste from a tube.
“What in God’s name are you doing now?”
“I’m examining the stomach contents to see what kind of bugs it’s been eating.”
“Oh.”
“It’s been feasting on these drakes, all right. Ants, too. I try to get the guts and the gills out as soon as possible. Spoils the meat otherwise.”
He pulled some ferns off the nearby bank, lined the bottom of his wicker creel with them like bedding in a casket, and slipped in the gutted fish. He appeared to admire it a moment before closing the lid. Then he took a silver flask from one of the innumerable pockets of his fishing vest and presented it to Maggie.
“Drink?”
“Yes. I think so.” She unscrewed the top and took a stiff slug.
“Nature red in fang and claw,” he repeated jovially and took a swallow himself.
Harold lost a trout in the next pool and threw back another tiddler in the one after. By now Maggie had recovered her emotions and, influenced by the slug of Scotch, regained an interest in what Harold was doing.
“Can I try a cast?”
“I told you, tomorrow.”
“Aw come on. Don’t be so rigid.”
“All right,” Harold said. “Go ahead and try.” He handed Maggie the rod.
“I’ve been watching you very carefully.”
“Uh-huh. And what if you actually hook a fish?”
“I’ll, uh … take care of it.”
Harold gestured toward the riffle ahead and said, “Have at her, pal.” He moved gingerly around to Maggie’s left to get out of the way of her casting arm.
“Gosh, this rod’s light as a feather,” she noted.
“You’re holding a thousand bucks worth of graphite.”
“Golly!”
“And if you break it, you have to buy me a new one.”
She shot him a worried glance.
�
�Just kidding. It’s practically indestructible.”
Maggie prepared to imitate what she’d seen Harold do. The rod felt altogether alien in her grip, though Harold had made the procedure seem so simple and straightforward. It is fair to say that she did not come close to approximating the correct method of casting. She immediately snagged the fly in an overhanging willow branch some twenty feet behind her.
“Oops,” she said.
“Not as easy as you thought, is it?”
“No. You were right. It’s rather difficult.”
“Takes practice.”
She sheepishly handed the rod back to Harold. He had to break off the leader and reattach all the terminal tackle—tappet, blood knot, and everything. It took a good ten minutes, during which Maggie sat on a rock, like a wood nymph being punished by the river god. On his second cast to the riffle ahead, just above a downed log, Harold hooked on to a fourteen-incher. And that was all they needed for supper.
6
A Long Trip to a Strange Land
They set a table on the deck overlooking the river. Maggie fried some green tomatoes to accompany the two trout, which she sautéed in olive oil with shreds of prosciutto. A creamy red pepper and cabbage slaw completed the picture. By the time she brought their plates outside, a few mauve streaks of underlit cloud lurking in the treetops were all that remained of the eventful day. A warm darkness enveloped the river. The green lights of fireflies flickered festively above the bracken. Harold lit a kerosene lantern for the table, pulled the cork from the Pouilly-Fuissé, and filled their glasses. They were both so ravenous that they ate silently in sheer animal introspection for several minutes.
“Sorry if I was tough on you down there,” Harold said at length, as he spread butter thickly over a square of cornbread, wielding his knife as though he meant to physically subdue it. “I get into this ridiculous he-man mode around woods and water.”
Maggie Darling Page 21
