A North Country Life

by Sydney Lea

  The mind makes its own monsters. I hadn't drunk in years. Now I half-wondered where I'd find a drink. Happily, the general store in this town of fewer than a hundred souls was closed up tight, and the town had never had a bar. These days, I couldn't wake up some old-timer, either, with whom on occasion I'd shared vanilla extract, the grandparent generation's booze of choice when the place was legally dry. Many of them continued to drink it even after the town went wet in the '70s, the vanilla habit decades in the making.

  The annual Independence Day dance in the schoolhouse, the so-called Fisherman's Frolic, from which liquor was officially banned, smelled for all the world like a pastry shop, soused as it was in the sweet odor of Baker's best 80 proof. And back then there was a second store, which people called Baker's Tavern, most of its dusty shelves taken up by those small brown bottles, each of which fit handily into the back pocket of a buyer's pants.

  Though it's been gone some forty years, I can see Baker's Tavern now, the wizened baloney under its scratched glass case, the outdated Wonder Bread by the register, the naked bulb that hung by a wire from the ceiling, just enough to light one's way to the juice. Right or wrong— mostly wrong, of course—I felt closer to my mentors whenever I slid some Baker's into my own hip pocket.

  But my romancing alcohol for a spell that night wouldn't have gone anywhere. You hadn't approved once, and you certainly wouldn't now. I would hear your shouts of "Don't!" from within your magical cavern. You were one I'd take orders from. There haven't been that many.

  The God I believe in will answer prayers, and sometimes the answer is No. Thank God. Hadn't I begged Him or Her or It for your release from this earth? And yet when we drove back to the clinic next day, you were more than merely revived; you were transformed, your color true, your precious gift of talk come back as well.

  I ran into your doctor when I left the bedside for a moment to find the men's room. About to ask for an explanation, I saw him shrug. "Don't ask me," he said.

  Jake and I sat and listened, in love as always with your retelling of tales you'd heard from your mother, father, grandparents, and all their friends. Once again, I marveled at the privilege of being with an older person as she remembered older persons remembering older persons as they remembered. If ever I've felt a sense of human continuity and perpetuity, it's been in circumstances like those. I'd remember the memories of the memories of the memories; I could pass them on to daughters and sons.

  Stories must be saved if they're to save us. That is, if there's something that can save us, a race as benighted and headstrong as we seem to be. Like anyone, I can sometimes tend to pessimism, but sometimes too, I wonder whether some of us have been saved right along without knowing it.

  On that day, you spoke of your own experiences as well, recalling your first married summer. Bill worked all day, while you fished and gathered and waited table or clerked in Paul's store. At night, you and he would sleep in bedrolls under the eaves of some camp uplake, no other place to call home, or often enough in the hull of a canoe, driven from shore by insects. This went on until autumn strode in.

  And when it did, the pair of you went off to pick up potatoes in Aroostook County, where the hissing gales and the fields' rime-coated stones chopped your fingers. Still, you told us, you never starved; you'd cull a few spuds and cook them over an outdoor fire. You said they tasted like heaven at the end of a cold day.

  You even remembered a period that you were usually less inclined to speak about: some years of factory work down in Massachusetts. In an era when such things were exquisitely rare, you were soon promoted over most of the men in your shop. Yet you knew you wouldn't and couldn't stay, good pay or not. You weren't bred for it, you claimed, and neither was your husband, who had a job in a rivet factory. But even down there, you recalled, "I thought of all the thousands He might've chosen to put on earth one day in 1920, and still the Lord picked me out. So I didn't fuss about things down to Waltham either."

  As so often, you insisted that every day was a treasure.

  I had to ask, "Even yesterday?"

  You nodded. "Even that one." A pause. "Now that it's over and done."

  Then I heard that belly laugh, which I've always wanted somehow to package or bottle, sure as I am that it could rescue the world. "Even that one," you repeated.

  A nurse brought in a tray of food, all of it some hue of white: a scrap of haddock, mashed potatoes, milk, rice pudding. Your brow dropped slightly as you picked at it, you who could take the most unlikely stuff and cook up a banquet. Poking at the wretched excuse for a fish, you recounted how you and Bill came home sometimes and dumped a mess of brook trout into the washtub, cleaned them together, dredged them in flour, and fried them in bacon fat. "If there's heaven," you whispered, "there'll be a trout for dinner."

  I hope you are eating trout.

  As we sat there, I knew that murderers and crooks, monsters of public office and corporate boardroom and academic faculty, were plying their trades, telling lie after lie, drunk on their own greed or lust for dominion. I was happy you stood—sometimes, it seemed, all by yourself—against that sort of appetite.

  You're gone, though never, to drag in one last hackneyed locution, from the hearts of those you touched and taught. I think of you each day, but now, recording all this, I suddenly have it in mind to catch a fish somewhere, if only in my imagination. I'll find a brook trout, the lovely creature that used to swim our streams in their plenty. I never keep a game fish of any sort nowadays. I release everything, but in this case I mean to make an exception. I'll net that trout and fetch it home and dress it. Then, that radio cook's recipe long forgotten, I'll stir the wood fire, frazzle some bacon, lay the fish in the cast-iron pan.

  That open North lives on, my queen, my goddess. The river's call is as constant as constant can be. I'll eat what I cook. I'll finish it all. With gusto. Flake by flake.

  Annie Fitch, everyone's Good Mother, with a spread of her renowned pies.

  Summer

  The Crossing

  Last night's dream surprised me, including as it did the crossing of the Morris Road and a dirt track on the farm next to my uncle's. I hadn't seen that plot of ground in fifty years. It's likely nothing but houses there in any case today.

  About half a mile down the road from the crossing, my friend Jackie and I had once stolen a stuffed owl, which we discovered in an outbuilding of another farm, moribund, down-at-heel. The place belonged to a preacher turned stumbling drunk after leaving his ministry—or being forced from it. Who cared?

  We peeked through a parlor window at the old wreck, passed out in a bizarre chair with a movable lectern attached to one arm, some magazine he'd been reading sprawled open before him. Then we made for his shed and his owl.

  We'd make good use of the bird. We always camped in our crow blind nights before a hunt, so it struck me as strange that, although the blind appeared in the dream, Jackie didn't. After a shoot, however successful— or more often otherwise, before we got our fabulous decoy—we'd linger, sweet bacon-and bean-smoke rising from our fire through a thick maple's leaves, a crow's corpse or two in the weeds if we'd been lucky. To dream up that maple and to smell our primitive cooking was to wake with a throb in my soul.

  A black-and-white sign at the crossing read Stop Look + Listen, as of course we didn't. There was only one train a day, and it made its way at a rate so sluggish we liked to amble our ponies in front of it, just so we could bring on the fat engineer's mute scream through the glass of his lumbering diesel's cab.

  So we flirted with death, or pretended to flirt with it anyway.

  This morning in bed, I found myself wondering, What if we'd paid more attention to the wider world in those summers, the way the adult sorrows and joys of anyone's life will cause him to do? Where did we think we were going? I recall no debate, not even a conversation about such a matter. Neither one of us imagined a destination. The point was to keep on moving, whatever the day's pursuit—unless we were hiding in rapt stillness,
in the blind.

  At length we stole the sign. The railroads were dying even in those days, so it was never replaced, which annoyed us a little. We stashed the thing beneath the maple, face-up within the walls of brush and vine we used for camouflage.

  So Stop Look + Listen became our table in that last summer. We felt proud of our contrivance, proud to be clever thieves, or smart alecks, as my uncle's hired man called us, "smart" something different to us from what he meant. To us it signified young, superior to others, whether we traveled horseback or hunkered under our tree, motionless, except when we blew on our crow calls, then cupped ears to hear a response from some farther field.

  A response was sure to come. All that we wanted would come.

  I hadn't missed Jackie so much in decades as when I woke.

  The engineer's furious expression was a constant in those few years, whenever we moseyed the ponies before his train. Why should his helpless rage have delighted us so? Why did we love to see him shoot up both his middle fingers in their idiot thick striped gloves? Of course we'd answer him double, four digits to his paltry two.

  We didn't care where those trains were headed, where they were coming from. Did the driver have a wife? If so, did he and she have children? We never guessed at these things either, I'm certain.

  What if a pony had stumbled? Disaster. But the pony wouldn't; such a thing was impossible.

  Not so many years later, Jackie did die, his Harley careening wildly through another intersection in another time. But in the time I summon here, we must have imagined that no one could come to harm at the crossing. We couldn't picture a future less hospitable than the present we savored. No child is cursed with that sort of foresight.

  Intoxicated by our own ingenuity, we rigged a string from our stuffed owl back to the blind. We could pull that cord so the owl bowed. The effect was clumsy, unnatural, but for all the crows' fabled intelligence, we could shoot our barrels hot at them, at least for long minutes. We could play at annihilation.

  No, I'd never have dreamed Jackie gone, or any other misfortune. No dead loved ones. No heartsickness for the sorrows, great and small, in wife or child of my own. We were merely keeping our own lives lively, oblivious of others. We were dodging mothers and fathers, importunate brothers and sisters, the tedious school-day year, the standstill culture of the suburbs, which encroached on the farm and devoured it for good shortly after I left for upper New England.

  The only adult we respected was my fiery uncle himself, though that respect was as self-serving as all our other values. He called the crows corn-thieving bastards, which gave us a rationale for our witless destructions.

  We jeered the engineer with his upthrust fingers. We jeered that judgmental hired man, nuts as he was for religion. He couldn't string ten words together without folding in some snippet of Holy Writ, which seemed to make his talk a patchwork of contradiction. Don't hide your light under a bushel, he'd advise us, quickly following up with The first shall be last, which he took to mean—or which we took him to mean—that we were no better than anyone else, and if we thought we were, time was coming when we'd learn the truth.

  But then wasn't the truth supposed to make us free? Didn't he say that too?

  Old folks, we thought, were more than mixed up; they were endlessly repetitious. They were always insisting that Jackie and I be humble, that we stop and look things over. They were always so damned cautious. Why would we bother to listen?

  Now Jackie's long dead, and here I am, having ridden up to the old folks' ages, and past.

  Brown, Gilbey's, Happy Ending

  I recall a time when, like many another hyper-hormonal young man, and in fact like too many anglers even now, I yearned to smack a big trout over the head on every outing. You can take a picture with your cell phone today, though I hope that you leave such a contraption home when you head for the river, but in those days you released the little ones and kept the whoppers, because what peer would credit your conquests on the strength of your lying word alone?

  Ego, as will be shown, is this story's anti-hero.

  It was 1970. I'd traveled to the Green River in Wyoming, precisely to gather some bragging rights, even if all I'd have on return would be, precisely, my word about some titan stretched halfway along my rod. I didn't own a camera, still don't.

  I'd scheduled six days on the water, and almost before I knew it, five had vanished. I'd caught a fair number of fish in that span, some perhaps in the two-pound range, but none that answered to the fantasies I'd concocted back in New England. On this final day, I felt as desperate as determined, though the urgency had very likely been there from the start of the trip. It was a character flaw of mine never to be quite satisfied; I've striven to check that defect in later life, though old habits die hard.

  If as aspirant author I took some reassurance from Paul Valéry's assertion that poems are never finished, only abandoned, still deep inside me I longed to compose an epic. A couple two-pounders had been fine . . . well, no they hadn't. I was working on some fishing epic, and four decades ago I persuaded myself that my visionary Green River trout would bring it to completion, at least for a time.

  That final September morning broke into bone-numbing cold. It was snowing—not a lot, but surely snowing—and the north wind blew hard enough to sweep away such blue wings and midges as hatched at all.

  Like most people who use a fly rod, I take my greater pleasure in fishing to a rise, but I've never been some dry fly purist. And so, long johns under my waders, a coarse wool sweater under my vest, I set out to swing a streamer or drift a nymph, or rather to throw all manner of each until I'd exhausted my supply and my zeal. Before that point came, I hoped I'd lay into my monster, preferably a brown, the fish that was for me, as now, a paragon. Hell, I rationalized, he was likely too big to bother with some piddling surface bug anyhow.

  The water in my chosen stretch looked placid, but it had the authority of massive, slow-moving things. Elephant. Ox. Draft horse. I leaned upstream and tied on a streamer. Careful not to give any fly short shrift, I made scores of casts with each in my wallet—Muddler, Matuka, Ranger, various leech patterns, even a wretched Hornberg, in which I'd never had faith and still don't. On and on and on, and each a loser. I even tossed an Atlantic salmon fly or two, just to say I'd tried everything.

  Out came the nymph box, or boxes: Prince, Copper John, Hare's Ear, Art Flick's deadly Stone Creeper, and more lethal still, at least in the east, a thing that I and the postmaster of Peru, Vermont, the best trout fisherman I knew in those days, had thrown together from tying remnants in the prior spring. He called it the White-Ass Baboon: mallard quill thorax ribbed in gold wire ahead of roughened white hare dubbing, no wing. Nada.

  After four hours of such nada, I staggered up to the local eatery to warm myself and grab a bite. The counterman suggested what he called an Eye-talian sandwich, its foam-like roll soggy with tomato ooze and oil. It tasted delicious somehow, even if in my lust to go back wading I all but inhaled the thing. I decided to pick up a quart of Gilbey's gin too, for celebration of the big fish I'd be lugging to camp. I had no way to cook such a catch or freeze it, but I'd worry about that when the time came.

  Wind and snow had not abated during my mealtime layoff. At one point, having gone back to streamers in the gale, I managed to stick a number 10 hook through my cheek. It didn't hurt at first. In fact I imagined I'd snagged some part of my clothing, and only after running my hand up the leader did I find the trouble. There was pain enough, all right, when I pushed the barb through and twisted at it with my nippers until the steel at last fell apart.

  Blood from the wound dribbled onto my vest and ratty sweater. It struck me how surprisingly little of it I'd parted with. Anyhow, my principal soreness lay in losing half an hour of fishing to that crude doctoring.

  I ran the alpha to omega of the fly assortment all over again, astounded that nothing better than 13 inches could be the result. Rather than my best day, this one was rapidly proving my worst of
the trip. I'd waded up and down that vast run for a quarter mile or more in each direction, even venturing into scarily heavy water at its tail, where my fly raced through a full swing almost the moment I dropped it. I wasn't settling for halfway effort.

  I sensed the invisible sun bleakly sinking behind me. Time for something radical. I remembered the Batten Kill on chilly autumn mornings in Vermont, when the spawning browns of that blessed era would sometimes rise to a spider if we skittered it over the surface. Nine out of ten times, a fish would merely slap its tail near the fly—and once only. He'd never come again after that first whack. Yet every so often, in a flurry of froth, a decent one would gulp the spider. Then the contest, usually in the brown's favor, would be on.

  I tapered my tippet to 6x, blew on my fingertips, tied on a cinnamon spider, then flung it onto the river just anyhow. Twitching it a few times, I gasped as a gigantic head showed behind it. The trout did not slap at the fly like those New England browns; he merely rose in all his pomp, then sank easily back.

  My heart sped and lagged in the same moment. My lunker had presented himself, but that would be the last I'd see of him if past experience were a gauge. Nonetheless, wind behind me, I made a roll cast, flicked the spider back and forth to dry, and set it down right where I had.

  The brown sipped the fly like a Trico. Then, in the manner of real trophy fish, rather than roaring off, he sulked in the streambed, shaking his head for what seemed a long time. Next he made a brutal but very short run, gave a few more shakes, and swam deliberately upstream.

  Then he took off like a bullet train.

  Oh Lord, let me have him! I prayed, even though I was a more godless young man than I am an old.

  I'm surely not the only fishermen who can testify to feeling mixed excitement and dread when a truly big fish takes. Thrilled to have a trophy on your line, you know it's at least even odds that the trophy will overmatch you. The brown leapt once like a rainbow, tail-walked a couple of times along the surface, then tore off in whatever direction he chose, one breathtaking run taking him almost halfway across the vast reach.