by Annie Proulx
There is a snug sense of shelter under the trees. Rivers sets up the tent, a silent apology to Sauvage for pushing ahead in bad weather. “We can stay here a few days if the fishing’s good, wait for the weather to break,” he says. “We’re in pretty deep now, anyway.”
Sauvage quickly makes a solid fireplace with a double ring of stones. “Think we’re on an island?”
“Don’t know. Dumb to go any farther in this fog. It’s got to lift sometime, and while we wait we can try the water.”
Sauvage looks into his cheap plastic fly case while Rivers looks over the characterless spread of water, flattened and smoothed by the heavy mist like a bolt of satin by a warm iron. Then they hear it. Somewhere out on the flat water behind the cape of muffling fog a ponderous weight plunges down, a vast splash like a granite monument falling into the Bogs.
“What the hell was that?” says Sauvage.
“One of the big ones.” It is only what Rivers has expected.
“No, no,” says Sauvage, “they don’t come that big. Had to be a beaver. A big buck beaver telling us to get the hell out of his territory. Slap his tail, you know?” Then another crashing plunge, nearer in the mist. Not the sharp crack of a flat beaver tail on the smooth water, but the rushing collapse of a wall of water into a monstrous cavity. Rivers can easily imagine a tremendous trout the size of a gun case, but the splash is followed by a thick, coughing cry that dies away in the reeds.
“Sweet Jesus,” says Sauvage.
“What the hell, let’s fish,” says Rivers.
“Maybe stick together, though,” says Sauvage.
In a flash of intuition Rivers knows Sauvage is afraid of what he cannot see, maybe haunted by the mysterious behavior of his wife, or by the French-Canadian grandfather stories of loupgarou, of windigo, evil forests, and swamp demons, of all the dark riddles of superstition.
He looks at the water. Strange water, not the dead onyx mirror of a bog pond, but the swollen overflow of a dammed river. The main current pulses faintly eastward. He has felt it against his paddle all morning. Before him lies a deep, eddying pool out of the current’s main thrust. He thinks he sees moving shadows near the bottom. Onshore the blackflies are bad. Rivers takes a tiny number twenty-two black midge nymph from his case irresolutely; the grey mist and bad light—maybe something flashier. But he lies at on anyway. Sauvage, seventy feet above him, gives a cry and Rivers turn to see his arm curved in a familiar arch, the rod tip down and an orange-bellied brookie the size of a young bass boring into the water. Sauvage is deft but not delicate. He tends to haul in the trout, cutting short the sweet struggle.
“Nice one!” he congratulates himself, giving Rivers a triumphant smirk. Rivers sees that Sauvage is a competitor; an aggressive, posturing contest winner, not someone who can understand self-made solitude.
Rivers turns away and thinks himself deep for the trout, casts the tiny weighted midge and watches the line, waiting for the halt or the trembling leap forward. Nothing. He starts it back to him in tiny jerks, lets it rest, again the miniature, tender twitch and a trout takes it just under the surface, smashing the water, tail walking, rearing up like a sea serpent, and writhing its muscular body in the fluid river like a corkscrew. Then it is over. The fish comes down on the fine tippet and breaks it, running for the bottom with Rivers’s little black nymph. Sauvage, who has been watching, whinnies.
“You smart-ass bastard,” says Rivers to the spreading ring on the water. “I’m going to get you.”
At two o’clock Rivers starts the first bottle. He sits on a stump, taking good swallows from it and watching Sauvage cook his trout. He has skewered the thick, limp bodies on peeled willow sticks and set them over a circle of coals. The delicate membrane of ash is disturbed by smoking drops that fall from the fish. The trout twist in a semicircle as though they are trying to bite their own flanks, like dogs after fleas. Sauvage peels the cooked flesh from the laddered backbones in steaming orange chucks. Rivers refuses to eat.
“I didn’t catch any yet. I’ll wait.”
“That’s funny, you didn’t catch anything? I thought you was the Great Fisherman. Me, I caught what, five, six? Big ones, too. By god, they taste good. What you using?”
“Dry flies,” lies Rivers.
“Look, you oughta try wets or try some of them nymphs. Here, sometimes the real little ones are good. I used this one to get these here.” Patronizingly he stretches out his hand to Rivers.
“Where’d you get this?” says Rivers, sure that he recognizes the too-big head and the off-kilter wings of the number twenty-two black midge nymph he lost a few hours earlier.
“Had it a long time,” answers Sauvage, eating a trout as he would a slice of watermelon.
In an hour Rivers is halfway down the bottle and sets off through the woods looking for private water. His steps seem cushioned on thick, matted grass, but there is only spruce duff and an occasional etiolated fern clump underfoot. It is the whiskey that makes the ground so yielding. The trees seem to shift away from him slyly on both sides, but he marches in a straight line through the swampy hummocks and wet, slapping branches until he finds the water again, hung with opaque shawls of wooly grey, a solitary place, pungent with decay, and far away from Sauvage. The bottle is his companion.
His waders and hat are in the tent. He takes his clothes off except for his boots and walks into the water to escape the knotted alders, pulling the Yellow Bogs around him like a cold sheet. His shirt is wound about his head against the blackflies. For the next hours he makes a superb series of casts, running through everything in his repertoire and his monogrammed leather fly case, for the water is changeable, shaping itself before his eyes, first into glassy pools, then frothy falls, rapid snaking currents, yellow ribbons of crumpled silk over sandbars, deep onyx mines of still water bent under sunless vaults of alder, milky absinthe cloud runs of chalk stream, and the stump-pocked moon face of a beaver pond. The trout torment him with their wavering outlines. He sees the elliptical underwater silver of trout rooting in the gravel, big browns lying like corpses on their own shadows, nymph-feeding rainbows bulging the water into hilly landscapes, fly takers sucking holes in the fragile tissue of the surface film, leaping brookies trying for flying morsels on the wing like cats after sparrows. He catches nothing, a white-haired, shivering fool with a tired arm and an empty whiskey bottle. He dresses again and wanders back through light evening rain to the wet tent and Sauvage.
Sauvage has an enormous fire burning and sits within the circle of light peering out at the crawling shadows under the black spruce. “Jesus, where the hell you been! I been waiting here for a couple of hours. I thought you might a fell in and drowned.” Sauvage fussily unwraps a silver cigar of aluminum foil, disclosing the baked bodies of two large brook trout.
One of them, a good fifteen inches long, wounds Rivers’s heart that someone other than he should have caught it. He goes into the tent and gets the second bottle. “I don’t want any fish. You eat them.” he says.
Sauvage pouts like a spurned bride while the rain falls on the hot trout, diluting the juices. Sauvage begins to eat mournfully, with every mouthful looking up at Rivers on the stump, the rain dripping off the underside of his upraised bottle.
“There’s somebody else here in the Bogs,” Sauvage says suddenly. “I seen him.”
“Yeah? Who is it, the fish cop?”
“No. I don’t think so. He looks like he’s crazy, a crazy fisherman. He’s fishing over there across the channel. First I see only this shape, this human shape, casting and casting. Then the fog lifts a little and I can see the guy pretty good. He’s buck naked, standing there in that cold water up to his knees, no waders, no vest, and over his head he’s got some kind of cloth so I don’t see his face. Casts—roll casts, S-casts, bow-and-arrow, double-hauls—everything, just like at an exhibition. So I yell at him, ‘Any luck?’ but he don’t answer. Then the mist comes down heavy again, and the way it comes in, see, it makes it look like the guy starts wa
lking out into the deep water, looks like he goes right down under the water.”
“Sauvage, we got real trouble now,” says Rivers from behind his bottle. “What you saw was the Wer-Trout, the Wer-Trout of Yellow Bogs.”
“Hey, come on, Rivers, don’t make jokes about that kind of stuff.”
“No joke, Sauvage, that’s what you saw. The body of a man, the head of a trout. That’s why he covered up his face, so you couldn’t see those big, flat eyes and no chin and ugly teeth. Don’t worry, though, he only goes for you if you kill his women. You didn’t catch any girl trouts, did you?”
Sauvage’s grease-dappled chin shines at Rivers in the firelight. “I think you’re drunk, Rivers,” he says.
Rivers laughs stagily. He feels his words falling as precise as snowflakes, as luminous as sunlight. “Yeah? Remember that big splash we heard? That you said was a beaver? That was the Wer-Trout. Thank god I didn’t catch any of his pals. And what was that you said to him? ‘Any luck?’! Christ, he’ll really be after you now. Also, Sauvage, that’s how come our wives are gone. In the daytime when we weren’t there the Wer-Trout came around, showed his face in the window, and scared them away. That’s why the little ladies always go.”
“Knock it off, Rivers. We come out here to do some fishing, get away from our troubles, and you go off half the day, get drunk, start this kind of talk. I think we head back in the morning.”
“Caw, caw, caw,” says Rivers, showing his teeth and winking both eyes. Sauvage, insulted, crawls into the tent. Rivers stays up, blowing across the neck of his bottle, making a sound like a coyote in a cider barrel. After a while he notices a tiny scurrying shape at the morsels of fish Sauvage has let drop on the ground. He stalks the mouse with his bottle for a weapon, his thumb thrust into the neck against spillage, and mashes it dead with temporary dexterity. He places it in the center of Sauvage’s frying pan, where it sticks in the congealing grease, then goes back to his stump.
He comes to, lying in the pricking rain near the stump, his body convulsed with shivers, his teeth clacking. He feels wizened and cold to the heart. The fire is a stinking black circle of muddy ash as he crawls over it toward the tent, hoping he won’t throw up in the sleeping bag. It hurts to breathe, to move, to live. Just beyond the stump his knee comes down on something like a slender twig. The sound is only a small, dry crack, but Rivers knows at once what it is. He has been dreading that inevitable sound for more than twenty years, and it is as sharp as an embroidery needle thrust into his eardrum. He has broken his Garrison bamboo. He picks it up in the dark, the upper half dangling uselessly like his snapped apple tree. He thinks he can feel its spirit dribbling out of the crushed hexagonal heart like a string of hardening wax. His apple tree is dead, his lawn ruined, his wife gone, his Garrison broken, and he has caught no fish nor will catch any now. Yet he tells himself these transitory ills are like duckweed on the water. There is no mouse on his plate.
Inside the tent he lights a candle and unwraps the last bottle from his wife’s blue satin nightgown. In the shining curve of glass he sees his reflection: the chinless throat, the pale snout, the vacant rusted eyes of the Wer-Trout.
Electric Arrows
1
“YOU tell me,” says Reba, wrapped up in her blue sweater with the metal buttons. She’s wearing the grey sweatpants again. Her head is tipped back steeply on the long neck column as she looks up at me, her narrow rouged mouth like a red wire. “Tell me why anybody in his right mind would sit in The Chicken swilling beer, watching fat men wrestle until midnight, why?”
I think, so they don’t have to sit around in the kitchen and look at moldy pictures.
Aunt pulls one out as thick as a box lid. I see milkweed blowing, the house set square on a knob of lawn, each nailhead hard, the shadows of the clapboards like black rules.
There is a colorless, coiled hair on Reba’s sweater sleeve.
“I couldn’t believe it, open the door of that place and there you are,” she says.
Aunt’s finger traces along the side of the picture, over the steep maples, over a woman with two children standing in the white road. Aunt smells of lemon lotion and clothes worn two days to save on laundry detergent. The faces in the photograph are round plates above dark shoulders, smiles like fern fronds. The woman holds a blurred baby, she holds him forever. The other child is unsmiling, short and stocky, a slap of black hair across his forehead. He died of cholera a few weeks after they took the photograph.
Aunt points to the baby and says, “That’s your father.” He is unfocused, leached by the far sunlight. She clasps her thick, hard old palms together.
“I’m grateful I was there, Reba, when you come along needing your flat tire changed.” I say.
“That part was good,” she murmurs, as if giving me something I’d long coveted.
We are at the kitchen table inside the house of the photograph, waiting for the pie to cool. The camera belonged to Leonard Prittle, the hired man, who lived in this house once. We don’t have a hired man now, we don’t have a farm, we live in the house ourselves. Reba encourages Aunt with the photographs. And the Moon-Azures, hey, the damn Moon-Azures think the past belongs to them.
“Want me to whip the cream to go on the pie?” I ask Reba.
I do go down to The Chicken sometimes.
The maples in the photograph are all gone, cut when they widened the road. There is Aunt at the wheel of a Reo truck with her hair bobbed. The knuckles are smooth in the pliant hand. They widened the road, but they didn’t straighten it.
Aunt takes another picture and another, she can’t stop. She lifts them, the heavy-knuckled fingers precise and careful, her narrow Clew head bent and the pale Clew eyes roving over the images of black suits and ruched sleeves, dead children, horses with braided manes, a storm cloud over the barn. She says, “Leonard Prittle could of been something if he’d of had a chance.”
Reba cuts the pie into seeping crimson triangles. Back when she worked she gave kitchen parties to show farm women how to get the most out of their freezers and mixers. Now it’s all microwaves and the farm women live in apartments in Concord.
I pretend to look at the picture. The weathervanes point at an east wind. There are picket fences, elm trees, a rooster in the weeds. Hey, I’ve seen that rooster picture a hundred times.
Time has scraped away the picket fences, and you should hear the snowplow throw its dirty spoutings against the clapboards; it sounds like the plow is coming through the kitchen. The leftover Pugleys, Clews and the Cuckhorns live in these worn-out houses. Reba was a Cuckhorn.
“Properties break apart,” says Aunt, sighing and nipping off the pie point with her fork. We know how quarreling sons sell sections of the place to Boston schoolteachers, those believers that country life makes you good. When they find it does not, they spitefully sell the land again, to Venezuelan millionaires, Raytheon engineers, cocaine dealers and cold-handed developers.
Reba mumbles, “The more you expect from something, the more you turn on it when it disappoints you.”
I suppose she means me.
Aunt and I still own a few acres of the place—the hired man’s house, where we live, and the barn. Atlantic Ocean Farm is painted on the barn door because my father, standing on the height of land as a young man full of hopeful imagination, thought he saw a shining furrow of sea far to the east between a crack in the mountains.
Reba puts plastic wrap over the uneaten pie, turns up the television sound. I go walk in the driveway before the light’s gone. Through the barn window I can see empty cardboard appliance boxes stacked inside, soft and shapeless from years of damp.
You can see how nothing has changed in the barn. A knotted length of baling twine, furry with dust, still stretches from the top of the ladder to a beam. The kite’s wooden skeleton, a fragile cross, is still up there.
I could take it down.
There is the thick snoring of a car turning in the driveway. It’s not dark enough for the headlights, just the
fog lights, set wide apart, yellow. The Moon-Azures. They don’t see me by the barn. Mrs. Moon-Azure opens the car door and sticks out her legs as straight as celery stalks.
I go back in the house, let the cat in. Moon-Azure says, “Nice evening, Mason.” His eyeglasses reflect like the fog lights. “Thought I’d see if you could give me a hand tomorrow. The old willow went down, and it looks like we need a tug with the tractor.”
More like half a day’s work.
When I look out the window I can see Yogetsky’s trailer with the crossed snowshoes mounted over the door, the black mesh satellite dish in front of the picture window. Yogetsky is an old bachelor. His cranky, shining kitchen is full of saved tin cans, folded plastic bags, magazines piled in four-color pyramids. He sets bread dough to rise on top of the television set.
Across the road from his trailer there’s the Beaubiens’ place. The oldest son’s log truck is parked in the driveway, bigger than the house. A black truck with the word Scorpion in curly script. The Beaubiens are invisible, maybe behind the truck, maybe inside the house, eating baked beans out of a can, sharing the fork. They eat quick, afraid of losing time that could he put into work. King Olaf sardines, jelly roll showing the crimson spiral inside the plastic wrap. Habitant pea soup.
Yogetsky moved up from Massachusetts about ten years ago and got two jobs, one to live on, the other to pay his property taxes, he says His thick nose sticks out of his face like a cork. He says, “This trailer, this land.” pointing at the shaved jowl of lawn, “is a investment. Way people are coming in, it’ll be worth plenty, year or two.”
He owns two acres of Pugley’s old cow pasture.