This River

by James Brown

  “Hold it like this and run it straight through. If you can see the hook, so can the fish, and they won’t bite.”

  I cast the line out for Nate, as my father did for me the first time. It lands in white water curling over a rock.

  I expect him to snag.

  I expect him to lose his line often, as I did at his age, and so we’ll fish together this camping trip, sharing the one pole.

  “Keep your line taut,” I say. “When you get a nibble, pull back just a little bit. Tease it, and when it bites hard, jerk up on it.”

  “What’s a bite feel like?”

  “You’ll know when it happens.”

  He’s wearing my Yankees baseball cap. Occasionally it slips down his forehead, covering his eyes, and he nudges it back up. I smile. He’s a little guy, one of the smallest in his classes with brown hair and round eyes that remind me of his mother. For junior wrestling this year, he weighed in at a whopping fifty-two pounds. I notice the tip of his pole dip.

  “That’s a nibble,” I say.

  “Should I pull up?”

  “When it strikes again,” I say. “Be ready.”

  He crouches down.

  “I’m ready,” he says, and he says it very seriously. His eyes narrow. He stares intently at the tip of his pole, all focus and concentration, and sure enough, a few seconds later, when the fish strikes again, he pulls up and hooks it.

  “I got it,” he says. “I got it. I got it.”

  It’s a classic moment for any father—watching your child excited, reeling in his first fish. Unfortunately this one is the size of a minnow, and while it’s flipping around on the rocks, fighting to free itself, Logan feels compelled to point out the obvious. It is the job of all older brothers to squelch the joy of younger siblings, the quicker the better. My oldest son Andy, who could not make this trip, did the same to Logan, who is simply upholding tradition.

  “Yeah,” he says, “you caught a sardine.”

  “Shut up,” Nate says.

  “You shut up.”

  “At least I caught something.”

  I am, at this point, struggling to remove the hook from the fish’s tiny mouth without killing it, and I don’t need any distractions. In the minute this process takes, I’ve worked up a sweat, and it is with considerable relief that I toss the baby trout back into the river, only to watch it float belly up.

  “Shit,” I say.

  “We should’ve kept it,” Nate says.

  “You wasted a life,” Logan says.

  “I didn’t. Dad did.”

  The current catches the baby trout, pulls it under and away, so that soon it’s out of sight, out of mind. But there are more where this came from, plenty more, and larger. Inside of an hour they’ve caught their limit and we’re headed back to camp, all smiles, the boys eager for their first fresh trout dinner.

  This is not at the Chetco River. This is in a run-down house my father rented after he got back on his feet, a few years after we moved out of Aileen’s place. This is at the kitchen table. Today we finished roofing a home; it’s evening, and we’re drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon. My father is old school, believing if I’m man enough to put in a full day pounding nails and hanging shingles, I’m man enough to have a couple beers. I’m sixteen.

  When he drinks, he likes to reminisce, and he often talks about the Chetco, the years of his youth spent there, camping and fishing and swimming. He talks of one day building a home along its banks to bring his children together. To surround himself with us. But his words are empty. He is a poor man after our mother bankrupts him, and too old by then, too worn-out, to recover his losses. Still he talks.

  I’m not sure what gets into me. I’m not even sure why the subject crosses my mind, but I’m light-headed with alcohol, and it’s emboldened me. I’m young and my mouth works too easily.

  “Are you ever scared of dying?”

  “What brought that up?”

  I don’t say anything.

  He smiles at me and chuckles.

  “Death is nothing to be afraid of.”

  He grew up around the Cherokee, and though baptized Methodist, he rarely spoke of Christ and didn’t care for organized religion.

  “What comes of the earth,” he says, “returns to the earth. Your spirit goes into a pool of deep water where it mixes with the spirits of all God’s creatures. The bear. The mountain lion. The squirrel. The deer. Who are we to think we’re any better?” He puts his hand on top of mine resting on the table. He smiles again, knowing, I believe, that my question implies the child’s fear of losing his parent. “There’s nothing to worry about. The calm water feeds into the rapids and carries you on. The spirit never dies,” he says. “It just follows the river.”

  A decade later, I’ll return to the Chetco for my father. I bring Andy, my oldest at twelve, and Logan, just six. Nate has yet to be born. The lessons learned, on that first trip, run deeper than showing my sons how to pitch a tent, to shoot a rifle, to string tackle, and bait a hook. It’s the experience itself. It’s the wedding of the past with the present, the time we spend together, and the time we’ll never have again. It’s about the loved and beloved and the memories that survive us.

  This rifle is a Winchester .22 pump with a smooth wooden stock and bluing that has yet to wear. This rifle that my sons shoot in the evenings, before the sun sets, first belonged to my father. Then he passed it on to Barry, his oldest son, who eventually passed it down to me, and sometimes when I hold it, if only for a moment, I think of the other gun. The .38 he put in his mouth. One haunts. Another lays claim to memories of tracking through the forest with my brother, taking turns shooting rocks and rusted cans, just kids, when alcohol played no role in our lives.

  Learning to use and respect firearms is a rite of passage on my father’s side of the family, hunters raised in the backwoods of Oregon. If they didn’t hunt, they didn’t eat, and what little meat for sale in the nearest town’s market would’ve been too expensive.

  “You always double-check the chamber when you start and when you finish. You walk with the barrel skyward or aimed at the ground. Guns,” my father says, “are designed for one thing, and that’s to kill. The smallest mistake can cost you or someone else their life.” He pumps the rifle, throwing a shell into the chamber, places it on safety, and hands it to me. “Cradle the stock to your cheek and sight down to the bead at the end of the barrel. You want that bead square in the middle of that can on the rock. Never put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to fire.”

  I listen carefully, proud that he trusts me with such great responsibility.

  Now I pass this rifle on to my sons, along with the same lessons in safety. Though this is a fine gun for hunting small game—rabbit, say, or squirrel—I’ve never used it for anything except target practice. Fishing excluded, I have trouble with the idea of killing for sport. And my father, in his later years, tells me he’d prefer to shoot a deer with a camera than a gun.

  “I don’t think I could pull the trigger. It just isn’t in me anymore. They’re so beautiful,” he says.

  The boys find an old wooden pallet along the side of the narrow dirt road. They drag it to the campsite, each holding one end, and set it up across the river, facing the mountainside. This way the bullets that pass through the targets, in this case tin cans they salvaged from our trash, will travel no further than the mountain, boring safely into rock and dirt. Logan is already an excellent shot, knowing the proper postures to assume for the steadiest aim, and at fifty yards or better he hits all four cans in as many tries. He clears the chamber, leaving the bolt open and pointing the barrel toward the ground as I’ve taught him. As my father taught me.

  “Go set them up,” he says to Nate.

  “Why me? You knocked them down.”

  “Because that’s how it works.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say.”

  It’s time for me to intervene.

  “Nate,” I say, “he’ll have to do it next t
ime. I’ll make sure.”

  “Snap-snap,” Logan says. “Get running.”

  Nate gives him a dirty look and then hurries to set up the cans. Where Nate with his brown, round eyes resembles his mother, Logan takes after my Sicilian mother, the black hair and olive complexion. In some ways, when his face is turned just the right way, he reminds me of my brother, who also looked a lot like our mother. My oldest came out fairskinned with blue-grey eyes, a throwback to both his grandfathers.

  When Nate is back behind the firing line, Logan pumps a shell into the chamber, takes aim and misses. But the next shots find their mark, and now it’s his brother’s turn to shoot. After Logan sets the cans up, when he’s behind the firing line, I give Nate the safety lesson I’ve given him several times before, once at a shooting range, the others at home. The gun is too big for him, so the stock has to go under his arm instead of against his shoulder, and because of this disadvantage I show him how to sit with it, balancing the barrel on his knee for a steadier aim—what is called a three-point stance. He already knows how to sight down on his target. In his first three shots, he knocks down one can. In the next five, he takes down the others.

  He looks at me.

  He smiles, and in that moment I see a part of me, at his age, driven by the need to prove myself to my father and brother. I remember it well. I remember wanting nothing more than to please them. To shoot as good. To catch as many fish and just as big. To keep up with them on hikes without whining even though I’m thirsty and exhausted. Complaining, if I want their respect, is not an option.

  Then Nate turns his smile onto Logan, only it’s suddenly a smug one.

  “Snap-snap,” he says. “Get running.”

  This is the third and last afternoon that we spend on the Chetco River. Logan is taking a nap in the tent he shares with his brother. Nate is at the river’s edge stacking rocks in a circle, building a prison for the brown salamanders he catches. At last count he had twenty-nine, but they keep escaping, either under or over the rocks. While he is reinforcing the walls of his salamander prison, I go to the truck for the box containing my brother’s ashes. Taped to one side is an envelope, which I remove and split open. In it I find a legal document, a “Permit for Disposition of Human Remains,” with the decedent listed as Donald Barry Brown, his race, dates of death and birth. Age: 27. Beneath that is the signature of the local Registrar issuing the permit, a name I can’t quite make out, followed by the signature of the Funeral Director at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in neatly written script. At the bottom is our father’s signature, acknowledging receipt of this document, and I wonder what it was like for him to sign off on his son’s remains. I still see him at that same kitchen table where he talked of this river, only the table is in a different house, and he and Aileen are married. Just hours before, in the early morning, two police officers came to the door with news of his son, and now he sits with his head in his hands and a fifth of Canadian Club in front of him. He’s crying silently. I go to his side. I put my arm around him, and when he looks up I see the anguish and pain in the bloodshot eyes of a broken man.

  “Why?” he says. “Why?”

  In the coming months, grief will age him years.

  Of course I did not file a permit for the disposition of my brother’s remains with the Oregon Department of Health and Safety. Of course I did not file a permit for the disposition of my father’s remains with the Oregon Department of Health and Safety when I scattered them here twelve years ago. This river belongs to them as much as anyone else, even more in my father’s case, for to him this is the river of dreams. The river of stories. The river of his childhood.

  I walk to the water’s edge and remove my shoes. The rocks beneath my feet are smooth. The river pushes against the back of my legs as I move toward a deep pool of calm water that slowly empties out into the rapids ahead. Soon I am up to my waist, and the river bed has become soft with sand.

  I close my eyes.

  I pray, as I prayed for our father. I do not know who or what I am praying to, but I pray nonetheless. I pray with gratitude for the time Barry and I had together, however brief, and I tell him I love him, as I told my father. That I never stopped loving them. I pray for my sister, too, and that she passed quickly, mercifully. I pray that they are free of all pain and suffering. I pray for the ability to forgive. Then I open my eyes. I open the box.

  Cancer took our father at seventy-six, and for Barry, depressed and alcoholic, it came by his own hand, a single shot to the head. I’ve waited years to scatter these ashes because I had hoped my sister would join me, that we could all make this trip together, my boys and her daughter. She loved my kids, and when she was sober she sometimes had them over for the weekend. She rented scary movies. She made bowls and bowls of buttery popcorn. Once she took them to a nearby circus and Andy won a goldfish. But she always found some excuse, some reason to postpone this trip, and now she’s gone, too, another suicide. I would like to spread her ashes and Barry’s together, but my niece has them and we are on uncertain terms. I know her answer without asking.

  The river is cold.

  The ash and bone are a dull white. I wade further into the pool and spread this ash, this bone, a handful at a time across the waters. The heavier particles float to the bottom and the lighter slowly ride the surface toward the rapids. In letting go I feel, oddly, that I am strengthening my hold on everyone dearest to me, both the living and the dead. I am and am not alone. The Chetco remains, always running and going, joining my brother with my father, my father with my brother, and I trust that one day I will follow this river with them.

  This winter the salmon will travel thousands of miles across the ocean to reach the freshwater breeding grounds of their birth. They are guided, my father told me, by the sun, the stars, and the magnetic pull of the earth. As a boy, he fished here with his father, at the mouth of the river, when the salmon came. Like the Chetco Indians hundreds of years before, my father and his father used spears to stab them, fat thirty-pounders, and snatch them out of the water. They ran so thick, he said, you could almost walk across them. Once he speared one too big and strong for him, and if not for his father grabbing his arm, it would’ve pulled him in.

  Someday I’d like to spear salmon.

  Someday, when we take this trip again, maybe my niece will allow me to spread her mother’s ashes. These are my thoughts as we’re packing to leave, rolling up the sleeping bags, taking down the tents. It’s early in the morning and a light rain has begun to fall.

  On the ride back, I will stop at The Trees of Mystery, a wonderful tourist trap off Highway 101, where my father stopped for us. I will snap a picture of my kids, as he did for his, standing together in front of the fifty-foot statue of Paul Bunyan and his thirty-five foot sidekick, Babe the Blue Ox.

  Then I will pay the price of admission and show them the largest living things on earth. The Sequoia named by the Cherokee. The Dawn and Coastal Redwood. Some are taller than the Statue of Liberty and bigger around than a tractortrailer. They have survived floods, violent storms, and earthquakes, and when one dies and falls, the limbs and roots feed from the trunk and become many trees. As we wander this forest, I will search for the awe in their eyes as I’m sure our father searched for the awe in ours.

  Later, back in the car, I will tell my sons stories about the grandfather they never met, the uncle they never knew, the aunt who left them too few memories. I will talk about their mother as well, especially their mother, and how she loved them, how that love now resides in the heart. I need for them to remember. I need for all of us to remember, even if it’s only a story, and I hope to return to the Chetco with all three of my boys. I hope, someday, for us all to stand on the banks of this river, spears in hand, poised to throw, as the rush of salmon make their final way home.

  DIRTY MOVES

  At 4:30 on a Sunday morning, I roust my boys out of bed and tell them to use the bathroom. When they’re done, each takes his turn stepping onto the scale beside the tub
. They’re groggy, of course. They’re slow to react but they don’t protest. My older son understands the importance of a single ounce and the younger is quickly learning. The slightest difference in weight can mean having to compete in the next division, potentially giving away nearly five precious pounds to your opponent. That might not sound like much, but it is, when you’re already little more than muscle and bone. This is about real wrestling, not the theater you see on TV with heavilymuscled men flinging each other around a ring.

  Stripped to his boxers, Logan tops the scale at 111 pounds. He’s one pound and an ounce over for the division in which he prefers to wrestle, where he’s strongest, between 105 and 109.

  “Fuck,” he says.

  “Don’t cuss,” I say.

  He steps off the scale.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that banana last night.”

  “You might still make it.”

  “How?”

  “By the time we get there,” I say, “you’ll probably have to use the bathroom again. That’s another three, maybe four ounces. And you can always run around the gym a couple times.”

  At eleven, Logan has been wrestling competitively for five years, and he does not like to come in disadvantaged in the least. Little Nate, on the other hand, is only five and weighs in at thirty-four and one-half pounds, close to the limit for his class. I pat him on the head as he steps off the scale.

  “Good going,” I say.

  “What?”

  “You’re on weight.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Is that good?”