The Snowfly

by Joseph Heywood

  “Doing any good?”

  “I never philosophize when I fish,” he said. “Doing is enough.”

  “Might do better here with worms,” I said.

  He laughed silently. “Using worms isn’t trout fishing, but I’m no snob about it. Nah, that’s not it at all. I had plenty of catching in my day. We all did back then, I guess. Now we’re paying for it. You can’t keep taking just because it’s easy. I used to count every word I wrote. Precisely. Last thing I did every day. Wrong headed, I think. Too much emphasis on progress, too much on the future. Life is about now. We forget that sometimes. No fish today, but I still have good days. You count your fish?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good for you, pal. Anything you’ve got to count usually isn’t worth it.”

  The fly was freed and when he resumed casting, I left him alone. But before I had taken too many steps I heard him shout, “Get away from me!”

  He had a fish on.

  One of his helpers had a long-handled net and was down on one knee on the embankment, but Papa kicked awkwardly at the man as he scuttled back. Still the rugged individualist after all. He was old and not well, but he wanted to do it on his own. I felt growing affection for the man.

  I couldn’t believe the transformation. The old man with the barrel body and stick limbs, the old man who, minutes before, had stood like a statue, was now rippling with life. Maybe Raina was right, that fish were about hope. The fly rod was bowed. The line ripped nervously across the surface of the river. Hemingway’s arms held strong, his elbows in, braced against his ribs. He glanced over his shoulder at me, squinting and grinning, and returned his attention to the fish.

  It was an extended struggle. I squatted to watch. Hemingway said nothing, but grunted steadily under the strain, keeping the line taut. Others drifted down to the river and stood quietly.

  His arms were flabby and jiggling like Jell-O, his spindly legs bent for balance and set wide.

  The fish vigorously surged upstream, then reversed course.

  I looked around. The whole company seemed to have assembled. The sun was large and hot. Some of the men stripped off their shirts. Their ribs showed like winter-starved deer. The only sounds were Hemingway’s labored breathing and the line cutting the water.

  At some point Raina and Val joined me.

  The old man stood his ground grunting, awkwardly shuffling his feet, raising dust. His arms were wet, angled, silhouetted. I could see that his elbows were beginning to fan out. The fish was sapping him, getting the upper hand.

  “Hold him, Papa!” a man shouted. “You can do it!”

  A towering man with a red beard went to the man and hushed him.

  Hemingway fell, landing on his behind, but kept the rod high and tried to get up.

  A high-pitched crack told us it was over. The line had broken.

  He held the rod overhead, stared at the reel and threw the rig away in disgust.

  Nobody moved.

  He lay back, spread out his arms, and said with a pained smile, “That should do it.”

  Then his chest was still.

  •••

  We gathered in the communal building. One of the men bathed the body. Hemingway looked asleep.

  Valoretev stood stiffly near the body as it was wrapped in cloth. He was weeping. I smelled kerosene. Harkie-who-was-Yorkie was there, filthy and giving off a loathsome stench, his back bent and tears running freely down his cheeks.

  There was no sign of the wolf.

  Raina was beside me.

  We took the body into the forest and put it on a platform of sticks. Wood was piled neatly under the platform. A pyre.

  Valoretev said, “A great man rarely owns his own life. To die doing what you love most is to have a glorious death.”

  Then the fire was lit.

  I watched Raina Chickerman stare rapturously at the dancing flames.

  •••

  We were back in her shack. There was no light inside, no moon outside. We could hear the wind chattering in the trees as a storm built. Raina had a cigarette. The ember glowed brighter when she drew on it, a tiny beacon of life on the other side of the room.

  “It was a good death,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “You were there when my parents died.”

  “Afterward.”

  “They were together,” she said. “I was glad for that. They both had cancers, terminal.”

  This was news. “I expected to see you. I tried to get in touch with you, but Eubanks blocked my way.”

  “It couldn’t be helped,” she said.

  What couldn’t be helped—her absence, their deaths, both? I asked her, “Do you know how the fire started?”

  “It was what they wanted. It was time for them to go,” was all she said, and the words gave me a chill.

  Was she suggesting they set the fire themselves? Or worse? I couldn’t get the possibilities out of my mind. I fell asleep listening to a battering wind and awoke with a start at morning twilight to hear the steady gush of rain on the roof. It was leaking through in many places. My first thoughts upon waking were of Hemingway’s pyre and of Raina’s face illuminated by the flame. Had Raina set the fire that took her parents? It was too horrible to contemplate.

  “It won’t be here,” Raina said from the doorway. “Not this year.”

  She was dressed, her pack high on her back, and she wore a black rain slicker and boonie hat. She also had her shotgun in hand.

  “What won’t be here?”

  “Did we ever make love?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I thought we must have.”

  “No.”

  “I guess it wasn’t meant to be,” she said. “Are you certain?”

  “Yes.” I would have remembered this. I had fantasized enough about it during our high school days.

  She smiled. “Some things aren’t meant to be,” she said again. She looked back at me and adjusted her pack frame.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I always know when it’s time.”

  “Because Hemingway’s dead?”

  She smiled darkly at me. “Some things and some people never die. Ideas count, my dear Bowie, not names and personalities.”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Though there is no longer any need. You know about Key and the snowfly. You should be satisfied now.”

  I was suspicious as I watched her walk briskly through the rain, which was letting up. She did not look back and I had a strange feeling that she had deflected me again. From what, I was not at all certain.

  My gear was piled neatly on her bed. I grabbed everything and went out into the camp. The crude huts and dwellings were empty, abandoned. Only Valoretev remained and looked ready to go.

  “They’re gone?” I said.

  “Exile is change,” he said. “The woman says this isn’t the place and not the time.”

  “For what?”

  “Snowfly,” the Russian said. “The search continues.”

  “You’re all here after the snowfly?”

  He smiled. “It is our life,” he said. “It is heroic, da?”

  “You do what Key tells you to do?”

  “Of course,” Val said. “She is the one who knows.”

  It was crazy. “Where will you go?”

  He held up his hands. “Ah,” he said. “Names are unimportant. We’re all searching for the same thing, each in our own way. All that matters is to know when you’ve found it.”

  The Russian held out his massive hand. We shook and then we embraced.

  He started to walk away, but stopped. “We took Brezhnev’s trout,” he said.

  “Brezhnev’s trout?”

  “Da, we poached his private preserve! No matter what else,
we have that. God go with you, my friend.”

  Valoretev jogged into the thick haze clinging to the forest and disappeared.

  I was almost to the river when Raina appeared briefly on the far bank. She did not wave and it seemed to me that she was looking at me for the last time. My instinct was to follow, and I took a step toward her but heard a sound behind me and, when I turned around, Ingrid was sprinting toward me and there were men trailing behind her. She leaped the final distance and wrapped herself around me, smothering me with kisses and just as quickly backed away and began pounding my chest with her fists.

  •••

  We were in the graveyard in the forest.

  Sheriff Donal Hammill stared at the blackened, exhumed remains of Ernest Hemingway.

  “What the hell do we have here?” he asked me.

  “Nothing to worry about now.”

  “I’ll decide that,” he said.

  The body was never identified and is buried near Grand Marais.

  •••

  Ingrid and I were in our house in Grand Marais. I stood in the shower until my skin wrinkled.

  “How did you know where to look for me?” I asked her.

  “Buzz,” she said. “He thought you might have hiked toward the headwaters of the No Trout.”

  He hadn’t told her about Raina.

  I would deal with him later. But first I had to make amends to her and I began by apologizing.

  “What happened out there, Bowie? Why were you there?”

  Our reunion had been hot, then cold. She was angry, hurt, and confused, and I couldn’t blame her. I had not only been stupid; I had been a selfish asshole.

  “I’m not really sure,” I told her. And then I told her everything, leaving nothing out, and she listened until I was finished.

  “None of that makes sense,” she said when I had finished.

  “To us,” I said.

  She appraised me for a long time, then walked toward me, shaking her finger. “I was so worried, Rhodes. Scared to death.” She poked me in the chest with her finger. “You’re never leaving me again, Rhodes. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, dear.” It never occurred to me that I could be the one left alone.

  •••

  Buzz was in the sacristy of his makeshift church. “The prodigal returneth,” he said. He opened a cabinet, took out a bottle of red wine and two glasses, and filled them up. “The sacredotal grape. To your safe return,” he said, lifting a glass. I did not reach for mine.

  “You were their connection,” I said.

  “They’re harmless.”

  “They’re psychos. Gentry tried to kill me.”

  The priest nodded. “I’m sorry. I went to see them, told them that if they ever let anything like that happen again, I would not only no longer help them but also bring the wrath of the law down on them.”

  “Why did you help them?”

  Buzz sighed. “It’s what I do. Besides, God most loves fools and fanatics.”

  “Even if the devil breeds them?”

  “That’s one side of the argument. You played dumb with the sheriff.”

  “Maybe I’ve spent too much time around you,” I said, reaching for my glass.

  “Better with me than with souls lost to obsession.”

  PART III

  Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself.

  —William Blake

  23

  Trout are classified taxonomically in the family Salmonidae. The oldest fossils go back fifty million years or so, though some experts estimate one hundred million as closer to year zero. There is a line of scientific opinion that in our millennia, Homo sapiens has not mutated as much or as effectively as might be expected, which may suggest the difficulty the so-called superior species faces in quest of its piscine elders.

  Base genes persist. Males are built for sex with our females on all fours in front of us and we are programmed to perform quickly, a question of guards dropped and readiness for collective defense. We continue to be attracted to fire, though we have little need for the raw form anymore. The modern concept of romantic love is thought to have the strength needed to override our baser urges; but it is modern marriage that is the glue, as couples find themselves enmeshed in matrixes of obligations and expectations. Man was not made to be alone, though by and large, we have no choice in the matter, one way or the other.

  •••

  Ingrid and I were married by Father Buzz in early October. We did not honeymoon. Our home became our refuge. We wove ourselves into the fabric of Grand Marais and it into ours. Sports Afield offered me a monthly column and I accepted. We were happy and life was full and I was certain that this would go on forever. We hardly noticed the winter.

  In May we had fine spring weather. The trees were blooming, ferns were eagerly peeking from the forest floor, and early wildflowers were radiant. Ingrid was in East Lansing for a weeklong seminar at the Michigan State Police Training Center. She was supposed to return late Friday afternoon. I filled vases with forget-me-nots and cooked spaghetti sauce all day. I ­couldn’t wait for her to get back, but evening came and there was no sign of her and no word. Cops lived peripatetic lives and I was getting accustomed to it. Sooner or later I knew she would slip into the house in darkness, float into bed, and cover me with her love.

  There was a knock on the back door just before eleven p.m. Sheriff Donal Hammill and Father Buzz were outside. I remembered when two lawmen came to my sister, Lilly’s, door to tell her Roger was dead. My blood went cold, my brain numb. I smiled like an idiot.

  “It’s Ingrid,” the sheriff said. “I’m sorry.”

  People can talk about death with specificity in the abstract or when it applies to strangers, but when it refers to people close to us we can rarely say the word. The more personal it is, the more circuitous the language. We expect our parents to die before us, not our spouses.

  “It was instantaneous,” Hammill said.

  Wasn’t all death instantaneous? One second you were among the living and the next you were somewhere else. I felt strange, more confused than shocked. I wondered if Ingrid had a map for where she was. She loved maps. I walked back to the bedroom to see if she was there. I even said her name. Buzz followed me. She loved hide-and-seek.

  “She stopped at an accident near Topinabee. She tried to direct traffic around the mess, but a truck lost its brakes.” Hammill mercifully skipped the remaining details.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and patted the covers. Not there. I went to my closet, then her closet. I needed her scent close to me.

  Buzz added. “Do you want me to stay?”

  “Sure, we can have spaghetti. Ingrid will be here any minute.”

  I heard Father Buzz say, “Donal.”

  The house filled with people, Karla and Van, Janey, Fred Ciz, others. “The pasta’s for Ingrid,” I told them.

  Somebody gave me pills.

  If Ingrid wore clothes at all around the house, she wore a ratty gray sweatshirt. I had bought it for her in Key West. I found it, rolled it up, lay with it under my head, and wondered how long it would be before she came home.

  We buried her west of Grand Marais, in a remote area where voyageurs had allegedly buried their dead in unmarked graves three centuries before. It was one of her favorite places to picnic and make love. Hemingway was close to her.

  When the funeral was over, I took my gear and hiked up the No Trout from the mouth. I did not bathe or shave and hardly slept. I did not want to remember the past or think about the future.

  Buzz, Fred Ciz, and Janey came out to the river after I had been there nearly two weeks.

  “Fish biting?” the priest asked.

  I had no idea if I had been catching or not.

  “We couldn’t find your camp,” Fred said.

 
There was no camp. When I was exhausted I simply got out of the water and slept, a hyperactive animal lacking purpose. I was covered with blackfly and mosquito bites.

  “It’s time for you to come home,” Buzz said. “Grief is natural. Grief heals. This doesn’t. You need to be with people.” Fred nodded agreement and he and Janey took my arms.

  I did not argue with them.

  •••

  I spent the summer in the house. Janey stopped in every day to bring food. On Independence Day there were fireworks over the harbor and Janey came with fried chicken and slaw and three-bean salad and cold Strohs. I ate in the dark while she sat across from me and the windows flashed spectacular colors. Sometime that night I crawled into bed and Janey took off her clothes and slid in next to me, whispering, “You can call me her name if that helps.” I couldn’t do it.

  My editor at Sports Afield was named Vairo. He was in his early sixties and nearing retirement. He loved scatterguns and dogs, wingshooting and people who wrote crisp sentences. He was an artful blend of patience and insistence. In August I started writing again. On Labor Day I had dinner at Staley’s. Donal Hammill and his wife drove up from Newberry and Janey’s kids and Karla and Van and their children joined in. I had little to contribute to the lively conversation, but the company gave me strength and when Lilly and her kids made a surprise appearance, I sobbed, not for what I had lost, but for what I still had. Buzz called this progress, adding, “About damn time.”

  Janey continued to hover close by and I was glad to have her there. She slept with me occasionally. In bed she said, “ Maybe if you make your body happy it will help your mind.” The motto of animal trainers and behaviorists. Therapeutic sex. But I could not do it. Janey was an affectionate and caring woman, and I suspected she was curious about Ingrid and me, but she did not ask and I did not volunteer.

  I led a mostly solitary life. I fished and I wrote. In October Buzz went to Wyoming for a month’s retreat and vacation. Snow came the day he left and it kept coming and the air turned frigid and the ground froze six feet down and winter settled on Grand Marais six weeks earlier than customary, and some weeks before the Farmer’s Almanac had predicted it. I taped plastic over windows to seal them and spent days in the woods sawing deadwood and hauling it back until I had enough for two winters.