“Her mother warned her. ‘It won’t be easy.’
“But she was steady in her mind. She wanted to learn how to fish for trout. Maybe she would be the only girl who ever did, the first in world history.”
* * *
“And three years later, now when she was fifteen, she was still the only girl she knew about who fished. She hardly knew her schoolmates; her situation at home prevented an active social life and, anyway, she preferred to go fishing. Her mother pretended despair, saying that she was bringing up a daughter whose only ambition was to be like old man Worley, a crazy old coot nobody could get along with. ‘You used to be a nice young lady, but you’ve gone sadly downhill.’
“There was a melancholy tone in her mother’s teasing, though. Jimmy Devoe had disappeared; he had run away from Pleasant Acres and the police could not locate him. Nobody could. To Earlene, it was as if her father had fulfilled his strongest ambition: He had always been lost in almost every way and now his body had wandered off like the rest of him. She knew better than to hope he would return, but sometimes she imagined that he did—that he came in late at night and sat silent, full of whiskey and sorrow, on the foot of her bed while she kept her eyes shut, pretending to sleep. Just the way it used to be.
“Yet she was not deceived. She was a sensible girl and thrashing the creeks and rivers every Saturday in fishing season had toughened her. That’s what her mother said, but Earlene thought it wasn’t the waterfalls and thickets, the rocks and brambles that had made her wiry in spirit and body. It was keeping company with Mr. Worley, whose temperament was as barbed as blackberry vines and gnarly as willow roots. If she could take what he dished out, the trout streams would be the easy part. In fact, the man himself was a headlong stream and everybody who knew him had to toil against his current.
“He was impatient of everything but Earlene and fishing. These days in midsummer the mountain streams were overloaded with tourist anglers, plump, red-faced Floridians who smoked cigars and carried expensive rods and Swedish lures. Mr. Worley detested their fancy equipment, their big new cars, their blowhard talk, their tastes in fashion, and, above all, their manners on the streams. When he drove his clatterbang old Ford pickup over the gravel roads to his favorite spots, he and Earlene would pass troops of outlanders casting in the easy lower stretches. He noted one of them wearing a soft tweed hat decorated with dry flies. ‘That feller had better hope he don’t fall in,’ Mr. Worley said. ‘The fish will gnaw his head off.’
“Earlene had learned to get along with him. He went easy on her for the most part, though he never tired of calling her ‘a child of her time.’ He had an unbounded contempt for the present time. According to Mr. Worley, all the strong men and beautiful, brave women had died out, all the tall, sound trees had been cut down, and all the champion fish had been taken by scoundrels or smothered by pollution.
“‘Just look at this guy,’ he said, indicating the oversized camper lumbering slowly in front of them on the tortuous mountain road. ‘If this son of a bitch went any slower, he’d roll backwards on top of us. Couldn’t decide what he ought to bring along with him, so he brought his whole goddamn house.’ He stepped on the accelerator and swung around the obstacle, taking the outside of a blind curve. ‘Goddamn things are a menace to life and limb,’ he said.
“Earlene let out her breath. She had tried to resign herself to the notion she was going to meet her doom in this clankety pickup when Mr. Worley plowed it head-on into a church bus or spun it over a cliff edge. But her stoicism faltered as the wobbling side of the camper came within inches of her window. ‘You’re right,’ she conceded. ‘They’re dangerous.’
“He gave her a quick foxy glance. ‘I don’t let ’em buffalo me. A man would die of old age before he got to the fishing place.’ He pushed his crooked wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. A month ago he had decided his eyesight was weakening, so he’d rummaged in the tool chest behind the truck seat until he found a pair of spectacles in an old steel case. He had no idea how they’d got there but claimed they improved his vision one hundred percent. ‘Better than a hundred percent. I can see a mite on a flea on a tick on a hilltop three miles off. I’d be ashamed to tell you what they’re doing to one another.’
“His sentences were well seasoned with words like hell and goddamn and son of a bitch, but those were generally his strongest oaths and he wouldn’t tolerate even these in Earlene. ‘If you took to cussing while we was out here, we’d just have to turn around and head back. Fish can’t stand to hear a woman cuss. They hide under the goddamn rocks.’
“‘Well, you cuss.’
“‘They’re used to my ways. When they hear me coming, they say, Damn if it ain’t that old low-life Worley again, and when is he ever going to get tired of whipping this water to death? That’s what they say.’
“‘Maybe they could get used to me cussing.’
“‘No. Don’t nobody get used to a woman cussing or mining coal. But I reckon they’ve done just about everything else.’
“‘What about trout fishing?’ she asked. ‘You don’t see women trout fishing.’
“‘That’s so.’ He appeared to study the problem. ‘I knew maybe five or six I’d call real fishermen. One of them I was married to.’
“‘What happened?’
“‘Well, we found out we liked each other right well, so we went to a preacher and he said, “Do you?” And we said, “We sure do.” And that was that.’
“‘I mean, what happened to Mrs. Worley?’
“‘She give up on me,’ he said. His face went solemn and the wrinkles around his eyes smoothed out, but this only made him look older. ‘All three of them did.’
“‘Did what?’
“‘Give up,’ he said, and she knew that was all he was going to say and that whatever other information she found out would have to come from someone else.
“They pulled around a curve and Mr. Worley pointed to another gaudy angler standing hip-deep in a pool. ‘Look at that one,’ he said. ‘He don’t want no fish. He only come so they could admire his shirt.’
“She smiled, having got used to his humor, cornball and waspish. She understood now how he used it to deflect irritation and tedium. She discovered, too, that she was picking up the habit, along with others of his, making little jokes to ease tensions with her mother.
“They were headed up the river to a spot so troublesome to reach that it was almost never fished. To get to this three-mile stretch of water, they had to go straight down the mountainside through shale and blackberry vines. The stream was choked with boulders and flood-piled timber, but there they could take the long, lean, pink-fleshed rainbows the old man described as having gone native, and not the pasty, fat Park Service stock. It was thrilling to tumble down through the riprap and copperheads but not thrilling to climb back up after a day on the water.
“But this was where they came now that he’d taught her how to fish, because it was the best place. The rocks and low bushes were obstacles she overcame now, placing her fly almost anywhere she desired, settling it on the surface as gently as a blown thistle seed. It had taken a while, but she had learned.
“Mr. Worley used to counsel patience. ‘That’s what you need and you ought to learn some. I’m the one that ought to lose patience, what with one foot in the grave up to the knee joint. Slow down. You can’t have a good time if you go too fast.’
“He spoke of death so often and so cheerfully that she became assured he could never die. Maybe men didn’t die, but only disappeared—like her father. He and Mr. Worley were the only two she had ever known; she had no uncles and no boyfriend and at that time her mother had no boyfriend, either. Even last year Maidy was still in love with Jimmy Devoe, wherever he was, alive or dead. So Mr. Worley was Earlene’s one man and he talked as if he might expire at any moment.
“‘I don’t see how you’re in any great danger,’ she said.
“‘At my age, every breath is a mortal danger.’
> “‘But I hear you’re only as old as you feel.’
“‘Don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘If I was as old as I feel, I’d’ve done outrun Methuselah by a generation.’
“Yet his strength and endurance were extraordinary. He suffered a shortness of breath and a slight palsy, though this latter affliction did not hinder his tying a Royal Coachman to a nearly invisible nylon leader with a deft twiddle. He traveled the streams with enviable alacrity, careful not to outdistance Earlene, who was surely no weakling.
“And no tenderfoot. He had taught her patiently and thoroughly how to read the streams, how to approach the fish, how to use her rod and line. These nights she dreamed of taking a huge brown trout on a leader as slender as a horsehair. He had told her about horsehair.
“‘That’s what we used to use,’ he said. ‘They’re stronger than you’d think, but hard to handle. But I found me a method. They’re brittle, you know, so I soaked them in Johnson’s baby oil. You might want to remember that.’
“‘This is the modern age,’ Earlene said. ‘We’ve got nylon leaders nowadays.’
“‘But what are you going to do when the nylon factories break down? This modern age of yours is just a passing fancy.’
“‘When do you think the factories will break down, Mr. Worley?’
“‘Be a while, I reckon,’ he said glumly. ‘There’s still a few streams they ain’t poisoned yet.’ He pulled the truck into a wide-out under a tall walnut and cut the ignition and gave Earlene a sly wink. ‘Let’s you and me go down,’ he said, ‘and engage in the hopeless cause.’
“‘You say that every time.’
“‘Bad luck not to. Ain’t nobody but a goddamn tourist will think he can actually catch trout.’
“‘Well, you catch them. A lot of them.’
“‘They feel sorry for me,’ he declared. ‘So will you when the time comes.’
“They got down from the truck, both a little stiff from the early ride, and paced about to loosen up. Then they stood silent, side by side, looking into the gorge through the treetops below and listening to the river.
“They made a pair. Mr. Worley was age-bent now to the same height as Earlene, but she still felt that she looked up into his face. She was a pretty girl with freckles and green eyes and dark red hair she had learned to pile on top of her head and tuck under her hat brim. She had a deep contralto voice, startling in its masculine timbre, and she wore jeans and an old corduroy jacket and she imitated the old man with a beat-up felt hat jammed down. She envied his bandanna but hadn’t the nerve to wear one.
“Their friendship was in the nature of a religious confraternity, bound not by the fish but by fishing, by the stony peaks, the shadowy hollers, the deep pools and the shallow white water, and the urge of the discipline. Never just the fish—they could have gathered those with live bait or even, as Mr. Worley said, ‘with a big goddamn truckload of dynamite.’ Tourists might do something like that; they were missing the point. ‘Because they don’t understand how God did not put us on His green earth to blow up trout or bash them with baseball bats. He put us here to test us against a smart creature that lives in the water and He wanted us to use a lure that looks like a piece of lint you found under the bed.’
“‘Why does He want us to do that?’
“‘For the same reason He give Job boils and Adam a wife. To learn us some patience. Just like I’ve been trying to learn you some patience.’
“‘I have learned patience,’ Earlene said. ‘You just don’t know.’
“‘I know better’n you do. One of these first days some big old no-good trifling boy will come along and look at you sideways and off you’ll go. You won’t half think. You won’t remember patience or nothing else. Off you’ll trot like a bird dog that’s been whistled for.’
“She sighed. ‘I don’t know. No boys have been looking at me sideways or frontways or behindways. No telling what I might do.’
“‘You’ll go running after him like a bloodhound.’
“‘Well,’ she said, ‘if he’s good-looking. Real, real good-looking.’
“Because she wasn’t going to say, I’ll never do that, like the silly girls in my high school. Like my mama these days. At first her mother had been guarded and secret after Jimmy Devoe was lost and gone, but that had lasted only two years. Now she was all moony-goony about a man who might as well have had LIAR spelled on his forehead in green paint. He called himself Kyle Kelvin, and Earlene kept all the distance from him she could. If she’d been a praying girl, she would have entreated the Lord for her mother’s sanity to be restored.
“‘Are you about ready?’ Mr. Worley asked.
“‘I reckon,’ she said, thinking that boyfriends could come later, after she had caught the big fish she dreamed about. And then Earlene and the old man stepped off the level gravel road into the steep mountainside and went down as awkward as new-foaled colts.”
* * *
“They fussed about together at the river edge, getting their feet wet and their tackle ready, and in a few minutes Earlene struck off upstream, leaving Mr. Worley to follow after her in a while. She found a dim trail above and followed it to a picturesque waterfall about twenty feet high. The fall had a spindly stream on either side of its one powerful pour-off into the deep onyx pool below. She decided to try her luck here; she could tell no one had fished it that day.
“It looked good. The boil of the waterfall spread into a calm water fanning outward, black in the middle but with sunken logs and rocks beneath, all furred with cocoa-colored tannin.
“There would be a trout in there. She smiled, thinking how Mr. Worley would sniff the air, saying he smelt a good un. She debated about a choice of flies and decided to stay with the female Adams she had already tied on.
“She knew where she wanted to place it, at the point where the pour-off smoothed out into ripples that would bob the fly up and down. She took her time stripping line off and cast easily, almost casually, and put it where she aimed. The fly rode silkily down the current, gathering speed as it neared the outlet of the pool.
“She had decided to take it up for another cast when she felt the strike—a hard one. For a moment she felt nothing, and then a powerful steady pull as the fish made a run for the rocks at the pool head. She groped with her feet for balance and made sure the hook was set. Then she took four breaths to the bottom of her lungs and began to think with the fish, just the way the old man had taught her to do. She could tell it wasn’t the fish of her dreams, but it was big enough, the biggest either of them had caught in three years.
“It must have been an epic battle with that fish,” my mother said, and she told me, too, how sometimes she liked to think of her cousin as a young girl, there among the boulders of the Upper North Mills, struggling to land the trout that would earn old man Worley’s admiration and maybe his envy. “It took her a good half-hour, but land it she did, fighting for every inch of line, then scooping it up at last with the net that was looped around her belt with elastic cord.
“The part Earlene always hated was knocking the head of a fish against a rock to give it a quick death, but she did this, too, and sat down on a mossy boulder to gut her catch with her little Boker pocketknife. She was wet and chilled to the waist, but all above she was hot and sweaty. It had been a little like a wrestling match; at the end she’d felt her forearms tiring, but she’d outlasted the trout and made it her trophy.
“She rinsed her knife and closed it and slipped it into her pocket. She washed her hands. Thirsty, she removed her hat and got down on all fours and sucked from the river. It tasted of rocks and leaves and moss and she imagined it flavored with fish guts, too, fresh and raw. She put her hat on and stood and held her trout up. Pretending she was another person, a stranger to the fish, she whistled in amazement. It was too big to go into her little homemade creel, so she dropped it into the net and slung it over her shoulder and started back downstream.
“She hadn’t realized she’d come so far; it
was a good twenty minutes before she spotted Mr. Worley. He was sitting in the sand with his back against a rock. When he saw her, he waved his hat and she knew something was wrong. She hurried the best she could, the big fish flopping against her spine.
“‘What’s the matter?’ she said. His strained face frightened her, pale and tight. ‘What happened?’
“‘Turned my goddamn ankle,’ he said. ‘I took me a little tumble over there while my foot was wedged in between them rocks.’ His voice was stretched thin.
“‘Does it hurt bad?’
“‘It’s broke,’ he said, and tried to make a joke. ‘So it don’t feel as good as it looks.’
“‘Let me see.’
“‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste your time. You’re going to have to go for help because we won’t be able to get out of here, just you and me.’
“‘Where do I go?’
“‘Head out toward the ranger station. You’re bound to run into somebody before too long. Tell them to come and get me. You know where we are, don’t you?’
“‘I think so.’
“‘You’ll have to hurry along. If it was to rain up a flash flood, I’d be a goner down in here.’
“She glanced at the sky. ‘I don’t think it’ll rain for a while yet.’
Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You Page 9