by James Dodson
“Oh, absolutely,” I said, and then told her about the sensational wedding party we’d thrown in the salt marsh north of Boston. My southern redneck buddies came bearing cowbells, bourbon, and barbecue. Her Maine and Harvard friends came wearing dark wool and bemused expressions. A Sicilian baker from Gloucester who spoke no English made the cake; Amos ate five pieces. We held the reception under a tent during a real Atlantic gale. The orchestra bravely played “Pennies from Heaven” while the wooden dance floor sank half a foot in the yard muck. Local ladies from the village served the food and one of them told me I’d married the most beautiful woman on earth. She also told me that rain on your wedding day was a good omen because it meant you would someday be rich—rich in love, rich in babies.
“She was right.”
“Do you still love Mommy?”
“Of course. I’ll always love your mother. She’s a wonderful woman.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said this, I thought, as I said it. This might give her false hope. Or me.
“Could I, like, hold your wedding ring?”
I nodded and put down her fly rod. The ring took some work to get off.
My finger had grown. She sat down on the bank holding the ring and looking closely at it, squinting to see the tiny date inscribed inside the narrow gold band, forgetting the pike entirely. I picked up my rod and sent the silver minnow arching far out into the river. I began reeling slowly, occasionally jigging the rod tip to make the minnow dance.
Those who want the fewest things, Socrates said, are closest to the gods. What I really wanted most at that moment was probably impossible to obtain—simply for us all to be safely beyond this unexpected sadness. I wouldn’t have minded landing a nice fat pike, too, so I moved off down the sandbar a bit, working my line against the currents, trying to focus my mind back on fishing and wondering if we could make a state park campground at Bay City, as planned, by nightfall.
I was pleased to see Maggie eventually pick up her rod and begin making casts. The casts looked halfhearted, though, and it was clear to me that the heat and adventures of the day had taken the shine off fishing. The pike weren’t happening. Maggie walked slowly down the bar and asked if she could go sit in the truck with Amos and listen to her book on tape. I said yes and reminded her there was a fresh supply of Wild Blue Raspberry Gatorade on ice in the cooler. I asked if she would give Amos a drink of water and she said she would.
“Take your time,” she said, and I watched her cross back through the shallows and climb the weedy bank. She had her rod in one hand and my ring on one of her fingers and God knows what thoughts going round in her head.
—
She gave me back the ring just before we crossed the border back into the United States at Port Huron.
“Thanks. It’s a pretty ring.”
“Yes. It is.”
I slipped it into my shirt pocket and fastened the button, thinking as I did that maybe I’d someday have a necklace made out of it and give it to her. Would she consider that a touching gesture or an unspeakably cruel one? At that moment, I honestly didn’t know. I turned on the radio to see if I could find a weather forecast for the evening and learned that provincial authorities planned to forgive the phone bill of a ninety-six-year-old man who’d run up $90,000 in charges with a phone sex company.
Then we crossed a blue bridge back into America and I happened to glance at my hand on the steering wheel and the finger on my hand, unringed for the first time in a decade, a telltale pale line where the band had been. It looked strange, I thought, eerily exposed and even a bit accusatory. As jewelry wasn’t my thing, it had taken me a year or two to get accustomed to wearing the ring. Now I wondered how long it would take me to get used to its being gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
Touching a Trout
WE MADE WALLOON Lake in Michigan early and in tranquil sunshine, a relief after having endured a wild night of howling winds and thunderstorms off Lake Huron that buckled our tent and caused a comic moment of confusion in the darkness as man fell over dog who fell over girl who woke with a yelp of terror. Heaving the saturated tent and our gear into the cargo hold of Old Blue, we fled the state park at Bay City before dawn and pushed on toward Grand Traverse Bay. Maggie shivered beneath a damp blanket and quickly fell back asleep. Amos lay on the backseat smelling like a wet dog and staring at me as if I’d stoop to any cheap stunt to keep us moving. I drove listening to the tail end of a Strauss waltz, dearly wishing I had a fresh-brewed cup of Starbucks Sumatra premium octane, and suddenly remembered I had friends in the Grand Traverse area, which has become something of a top-drawer golf destination of late. But then I remembered we didn’t have golf clubs or reservations and weren’t on that sort of expedition anyway.
We drove straight through and headed up Highway 31 to lovely Charlevoix, a charming place hemmed in by lake waters and full of geranium blooms, then on to Petoskey, where Victorian summer houses sat on pretty bluffs above the surprisingly calm surface of Lake Michigan and a few sails were already out like canvas hands folded in prayer. A bell knelled softly as we rolled into town. People were walking in shirtsleeves and summer dresses toward the Catholic church, where morning mass was about to begin, and we thought of going but stopped in the restored downtown district for breakfast instead. I bought the Grand Rapids paper and ordered scrambled eggs and black coffee and Maggie ordered her usual plain bagel and chocolate milk, which might have discouraged her mother but her mother was thousands of miles away and we were on vacation, damp and rumpled and faintly redolent of Canis familiaris, so I ordered a chocolate milk myself and opened the paper.
I was surprised to read that Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter Margaux had been found dead in a one-room apartment in Santa Monica. Suicide was suspected. She was about my age, with a steeply declining career in low-budget films behind her. Suffering from bulimia and alcoholism, she’d recently been at the Betty Ford Clinic and a mental hospital in Blackfoot, Idaho, the report said, and had sought spiritual guidance from the Dalai Lama. She’d been hearing voices and was unable, according to a source close to the family, “to separate fantasy from reality. I’m afraid she never really found her own identity.” There was wide speculation that the approaching thirty-fifth anniversary of her grandfather’s suicide had played a part in the tragedy. I sipped my coffee, shaking my head. It seemed almost too ironic.
Maggie was giving me a funny look over her Pocahontas journal, which she sometimes wrote in at breakfast. I explained the story to her. She’d never heard of suicide and an hour before she’d never heard of Ernest Hemingway. I told her he was a writer who probably influenced more writers than anybody else in the past hundred years and she asked if he wrote about golf and I said no, he wrote about…what exactly?…and had to stop and think how to tell her. “He wrote a lot about hunting and fishing. This is where he spent his boyhood summers, though. He got to be very famous and traveled all over the world but no place ever meant more to him.”
“You mean here?” Kids are so literal. She looked a bit wonderingly around the coffee shop.
“Well, in this area. His family had a summer cottage on Walloon Lake. There’s a state park near here. I thought we’d make camp there and then go fish the lake. See if the trout are interested.”
“Cool.”
Once upon a time I’d been extremely taken with Ernest Hemingway. My father was to blame. I was about fourteen when he suggested I read the Nick Adams stories for a school book report, so I did, saw in them what I imagined was a spiritual brother, and kept reading. I read and reread everything he wrote and never quit reading Hemingway until my friend Kristen was murdered, at which point I quit reading him because I realized I wanted to lead his life, not mine. It wasn’t until I ran away to Vermont and took up fly-fishing that I could read his works again with the necessary detachment. I was changed. And, luckily, his stories no longer had their hypnotic hold over me. I no longer wanted to be Ernest Hemingway.
Earlier that morning, follo
wing my finger across the road map, I’d come across the name Walloon Lake and the name had jumped out at me like a water siren calling, opening up a host of old feelings and curiosities. If it’s true that geography makes poets of its sons and daughters, this place had made Hemingway as surely as any café on the Left Bank or bullring in Spain. In fact probably more so. He wasted an inordinate amount of oxygen denying the Nick Adams stories were autobiographical, but he idealized this lake and the towns around it in some of his best writing and spent the balance of his life, according to his many biographers, either trying to outrun the life he had here or restlessly attempting to find Walloon Lake’s spiritual match, a familiar grounding place, a safe and uncomplicated shore. He became, in the process, impossibly famous and a miserable sod who abused alcohol and four wives, betrayed most of his best friends in print, hated Harvard men, won the Pulitzer Prize, was extremely vain about his hair, and blew his brains out at age sixty-two when he could no longer bear up under the weight of his own mythology. America never produced a more perfect literary icon than Papa Ernest Hemingway. He haunts American manhood and leans over American letters the way a weathered hemlock shades a summer lawn.
But I wasn’t on a search for Papa Hemingway, and my daughter probably couldn’t have cared less. We were on no sacred literary pilgrimage here. Leave Papa to the package tours shuffling among the six-toed cats at the late great man’s hacienda at Key West; we were just sympathetic strangers passing through town and pausing to say hello and sample the food. It was Nick Adams or maybe fifteen-year-old Ernie Hemingway who shot the blue heron and touched the trout in the current and rowed out in the lake with best girl Marjorie and later, by the fire on the shore, broke her heart and was unable to tell her how much he loved her and foolishly let her row that boat out of his life—that was the fellow it might be nice to find traces of, I thought idly, flipping through the rest of the Sunday paper.
—
We raised the big Bean tent at Petoskey State Park, a beautiful park fringed with hemlocks and mature hardwoods. While Maggie took Amos for a brief constitutional, I fell into conversation with an interesting couple just cleaning up their breakfast dishes in the adjacent campsite. They were traveling in a small wooden wagon that looked like something from which a nineteenth-century medicine man might have peddled miraculous tonics, elixirs that cured everything from crabgrass to plantar warts.
In fact, Jerry and Toni Bowman were Canadians and practicing Mormons taking a year off from their computer jobs in Toronto to join up with a wagon train re-creating Brigham Young’s great Mormon exodus West. Their horse was stabled at a farm a few miles away. I admitted that I was impressed by the scope of their undertaking. Jerry explained that three travelers (counting the horse) was small potatoes compared with what other Mormon families were doing at that very moment, crossing America as their forebears had in search of a New Jerusalem, inching toward the high desert country around the mother church, mothers and children and grannies and dogs hoofing along after covered wagons, heading out of Illinois and Missouri with the aid of motorized support vehicles, but essentially performing a real pilgrimage, a hard walk of faith. The Bowmans’ tidy little wagon, at least, had Monroe shock absorbers. Jerry told me this with a smile; he’d built it himself.
“How old is your daughter?” Toni, folding towels, wanted to know. I saw a Bible on the table, where they’d obviously been reading it.
“Seven going on fourteen.” I explained that yesterday my daughter asked out of the blue to purchase rum raisin fingernail polish, claiming her mother had given her permission to paint her toenails. I’d said no.
“Well, you better get used to it,” Toni said with a laugh. “Seven or eight is about where it starts with girls. Is your wife with you?”
“Not this trip,” I said, looking at her. “She couldn’t get away.”
—
In Big Two-Hearted River, following a big flapjack breakfast with apple butter, Nick Adams tidies up his camp and heads into the river with his eight-dollar fly rod. He places a live grasshopper on the hook and makes his first cast, stripping enough line from the reel to allow the fly to drift almost out of sight in the current. He feels a strike and reels in a nice brown trout, wets his hand and holds the wiggling trout, gently unhooks the fly, and drops the fish back into the stream.
He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a stone. Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under water. The trout was steady in the moving stream, resting on the gravel, beside a stone. As Nick’s fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream.
He’s all right, Nick thought. He was only tired.
For years, I thought that was one of the most hypnotic passages in all literature, better than just about anything I’d ever read. I was thinking of this passage as Maggie and I gathered our gear and went off to find a spot to put in the canoe.
Unable to find a public access to Walloon Lake, we drove back to fish Lake Charlevoix and put in near the small town of Horton Bay, another tramping ground of young Ernie Hemingway, then paddled down to a promising cove overhung by large trees. The afternoon breeze was rising, turning the surface of the lake gray with small waves, making fishing out on the lake in a drifting canoe difficult, but the cove was slightly sheltered and someone had a nice weekend house sitting in the hardwoods up a three-tiered flight of wooden steps leading down to a dock. We pulled the canoe on shore onto the rocks next to the dock and I looked up to see if somebody might object but nobody seemed to be home.
I put on my waders and went into the lake. Maggie walked to the end of the dock to fish.
“Why do you think that girl killed herself?” she called over after we’d been fishing a while.
“I don’t know, Mugs. Life can be tough sometimes. Her grandfather had the same difficulty. I guess they ran out of hope that things would get better. Whatever happens, you gotta hold tight to hope.”
“I hope we catch a big fish.”
“Me too.”
I realized this might be an opportune moment to expand a bit on Aunt Emma’s tragedy but then thought better of it. The family secret had kept nicely for sixty years; it could keep another five or six. Yesterday, my daughter had never even heard of suicide or Ernest Hemingway. Tomorrow she might forget them, though I rather doubted it.
I told her, instead, how Indians used to live in a settlement near here—a collection of shanties, really—in the woods near Horton Bay, and often appeared at the Hemingway summer cottage bearing buckets of just-picked blackberries to sell. They made a huge impression on Ernie Hemingway, leaving as silently as they arrived.
Making a longer and slower cast from the thigh-deep water, I suddenly caught my first decent trout. He took the fly and headed for deeper water, a good-sized fish to judge by the fight. The rod tip bowed and I lowered it nearly to the water’s surface and flipped on the drag to let the fish run a bit, then remembered that the lake’s deeper currents would only help him. I lifted the rod and maintained the tension and reeled in my stripped line and soon had the fish working toward shore. Maggie came down from the dock and within a minute or two had him in the net, a two-pound lake trout with black markings. He was large enough to keep and I briefly considered having him for supper. Then I wet my hands and took out the hook and told her about the trout-touching passage from Big Two-Hearted River.
“Do you think he really did it?”
“I don’t know. May have just been a story. Want to try it?”
“Sure.” She gave me a little grin.
I held the trout in the water for a few seconds, waiting for him to breathe again, then released my fingers. He hovered a second or two more but didn’t sink. His caudal fin moved slightly. Before I could even move my right hand toward him, though, he was gone.
“They must have gotten a lot swifter since Hemingway tried this,” I said with a laugh.
Maggie laughed,
too. At least we had fresh hamburger on ice.
—
After supper, I washed up the dinner plates and put on water to scald them, then fed Amos his aspirins in cheese. A screen door slapped up at the lighted shower building and the Mormon couple came back from having their evening showers. I introduced them to Maggie, who was headed to the showers with her towel, soap, and toothbrush. When she was gone, Toni Bowman brought over fresh-made coffee and an extra cup. Jerry followed his wife, buttoning up a flannel shirt. The night was surprisingly cool off Lake Michigan.
“We made too much and hate to pour it out,” she explained.
We chatted for a while about their trip and ours and I admitted to them that Maggie’s mother wasn’t with us because she and I were getting divorced. I suppose part of me thought of this confession as a little test. I wanted to see how they would react, how a Mormon who didn’t accept the idea of divorce would take this news, how any stranger would. Perhaps I’d not yet stated the words aloud because part of me clung to the belief that they simply weren’t true. Just the prospect of going through a divorce makes you feel so unclean, so anxious to try and explain that you’re really not an awful person. Everybody’s got a casserole for the widow, Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton has written. But nobody wants to stand too near someone going through a divorce. I half expected them to whip out their Bible and lecture me in that cheerfully pious manner some Mormons have about God and family values. But the Bowmans were either too considerate or maybe just didn’t know what to say. They only offered hot coffee and a bit of sympathy, for which I was grateful on both counts. Jerry said they were fetching their horse and rolling out in the morning, too, hoping to make Holland by the weekend. “The town,” he said with a pleasant wink at Toni. “Not the country.”