Abbeville (23 page)

Then, a week after Pearl Harbor, Brendan left for California bound for the South Pacific. Betty took a civilian train and followed him. She stayed the whole Christmas break in San Francisco while he waited in the Cow Palace with thousands of others. Cristina worried when Betty returned without a ring.

Then a ring came in the mail. Heaven only knew where Brendan had gotten it or with what. It was small, but to Betty it was the Hope diamond. And she needed all the hope she could muster when she
learned that he had shipped out from Hawaii to places the censors did not even let him name. Eventually he reached Okinawa. Then Truman dropped the bomb, and he came home.

They held the wedding in the Evangelical and Reformed Church, catered by the ladies of the town, who would not let Cristina make so much as a pie. It was the only time Karl had ever seen her lose control of a kitchen.

Brendan found a job in radio. Soon he started substituting on the farm report—on the strength, he said, of his agricultural cultivation. When he and Betty came to visit, the town met the train as if they were celebrities.

He was as outgoing as Betty was reserved, with a beefy, smoky laugh, which came from him often, especially after a taste or two of the schnapps.

Karl sensed something dark behind it. One day as they walked along Otter Creek, he decided to ask.

“You still think about it?”

“What's that, sir?” said Brendan, addressing Karl as if he were an officer.

“What you saw and did,” said Karl.

“It's over now,” said Brendan.

“I still think about Verdun,” said Karl.

“That was a bad one,” said Brendan.

They kept walking, and Karl did not know whether he had crossed a line he should not have. They reached the shack and sat down on the open porch.

“If you ever want to talk,” Karl said.

“This is a real peaceful spot,” said Brendan.

O
VER THE YEARS MY FATHER AND GRAND
father spent a lot of time together at Otter Creek. When I was old enough, they started to bring me with them. It was not very exciting watching them sit there looking down at the crick.

“You ever dip a line?” asked my father.

“Nothing in there but catfish and moccasin,” Grampa said.

I wandered down the high bank, hoping to see a poisonous snake. The water smelled as if something terrible lay rotting on the bottom. When I climbed back up, I saw that I had gone about a hundred yards downstream from the shack. The two men had their backs to me, smoke rising in puffs in the windless air. I crept up behind them.

“Has Betty cleared her plans for us with you?” Grampa asked.

“I grew up with seven brothers and sisters. Then there was the barracks. We'll get along fine.”

My father pulled out his pack of Camels, tapped one out, and lit it.

“What does Mrs. Schumpeter think?” he asked.

“She knows it is going to be Betty's house,” said Grampa, “Betty's kitchen.”

My father stood up.

“It must have been hard on her,” he said, “having her daughter take over things.”

“It was hard on Betty, too,” Grampa said. “She never had a chance to be young.”

My father lit a cigarette and flicked a fly away from his face.

“You've done damned well all on your own so far,” he said.

“Wouldn't even have a house if it wasn't for Betty,” said Grampa.

“Is that the reason? That you owe her?” my father said.

“One of them,” said Grampa. “She worries about us so.”

“When you think on it,” said my father, “don't think about Betty or me or the boy. Do what's right for the two of you for once. Nobody else.”

As I heard them talking, I didn't really appreciate what Grandma and Grampa moving in with us might mean to me. Mostly I guess I liked the idea of not having to leave my friends to go to Abbeville in order to be around Grampa.

He and my father sat in silence long enough that I thought about going back down to Otter Creek to see if any snakes had shown up. I may even have started backing away from them when Grampa started to speak in that tone of his that seemed to have a smile in it.

“Before we do anything, there's something I've been thinking about for a long while,” he said.

“What's that?” my father said.

“It's time for George to make the acquaintance of a proper river,” Grampa said. “And I know just the one.”

• • •

I
N THE CRAMPED CAR
seat on the long trip north Karl felt every minute of his age. Brendan did the driving; Karl was relegated to reading the map. George sat in the back seat with his comics.

When they reached the river, Karl revived. He helped Brendan pull the canoe off the roof of the car and drag it to the water. Then he taught son-in-law and grandson the rudiments of paddling.

Once under way, they glided past snaggy, fallen timber, over gravel riffles that scraped the bottom of the canoe, and into the flat, dark water of sand holes that big brown trout sounded upon the appearance of the sun. Karl had seated himself at the rear of the canoe so he could handle the steering.

“This is a good spot to get started,” he said, turning the oar until the current pushed back against it with a familiar thrum. They drifted toward a low, sandy bank where a little high grass might grab your fly but would always give it back.

Karl had to take Brendan's hand to be able to get out of the canoe. The trouble with age was that you thought about everything too much. You thought about the rocking canoe. You thought about whether you could time your movement to it. You thought about cracking your hip or banging your head. Karl took a step, and his right foot landed in sand on the shallow side. It was awkward to get the left foot over the gunwale, but Brendan helped, and there he was, immersed in his element again.

Betty had thought the whole expedition was crazy.

“I want you to bring him home whole, Brendan,” she had said, “not in a box.”

“Or if it is a box,” said Karl, “at least one also packed with ice and decent trout.”

He stayed close to the bank, pulling his waders out of the sucking sand with every step. In the canoe he had rigged up the rod with an elk-hair caddis, which was fairly easy to see on the water. His fingers
had trembled a bit, but the eye of the hook was mercifully large. Now, as he flipped a backcast, the timing came right back to him. Even a man in his eighties could cast a fly because the power was in knowing how to use the flex of the rod, not the withered muscles of the arm.

He showed Brendan and George the motion: Accelerate and stop. Accelerate and stop. Ten o'clock and 2 o'clock.

“Now you try,” he said.

Brendan was not a natural athlete, but he controlled the line and kept his casts short and manageable, never overextending himself, never getting into trouble. Betty had married well.

“Now George,” said Karl.

“It's okay,” said the boy.

“Aw, give it a go,” said Karl. “Hear that gurgling? That's the sound of a fish calling your name.”

George took the rod and attempted a cast, but after the line died in a messy clump in front of him a few times, he was ready to give up.

Karl took his grandson's arm to lead him through the stroke. George perked up when he felt Karl's old hands upon him. On one cast, a little rainbow trout actually took the fly in the riffles.

“Good work,” Karl said as George reeled it in. “Now you are a man.”

Karl popped the hook from the fish's mouth and let the trout dart away. It was not too long before they got another. Brendan had the luck this time. But it really did not require much. The river was bountiful. Karl sidearmed a shot deep under an overhanging tree and hooked a big brown. He handed the rod to Brendan to land it.

When it was George's turn again, the boy put the fly into the grass and deadfall as often as he put it into the stream. Karl had Brendan retrieve it when he could, tied on a new caddis when he couldn't.

“I learned to fish from a fellow who said there are only two rules,” said Karl, recalling Hoekstra's voice from long ago. “Rule number one:
You have to fish where the fish are. Rule number two: The fish are in the water.”

As George and his father traded off the rod, Karl concentrated on the current, feeling connected with all Creation through the drift of the fly and the eyes of fish and fisherman fixed on it, below and above.

“If you cast just a little more slack,” Karl advised Brendan, “I think you'll reach that fish before the fly starts to drag.”

On the next cast George's father did what Karl had suggested, and a nice fish finished the lesson.

Karl could have stayed there until nightfall. He could have been content simply watching the water slide past in an endless sheet. But they weren't outfitted for camping overnight.

“We'd better go,” he said. “It's a longer paddle than you'd think from the map.”

“I just want to try that one spot over there,” said Brendan. “I've been saving it till the end. Come on, George. Let's see if we've learned anything.”

They moved downriver around the bend until Karl could no longer see them. He stood in the current, thinking about all that had been swept away and all that had drifted to him unearned. He took several steps until the force of the water was about as much as he dared.

When he was younger, he had liked to wade in after dark, lusting for the big fish that only then came out to feed. In truth he was also attracted by the black pull of the current. It had been at this place, surrounded by the wasteland left by logging, that he had first felt the darkness at the center of things. He had felt it again in France. Then in prison. Then with Fritz. Now it came to him once more as he stood up to his fragile old knees in the black, flowing water. He closed his eyes and felt a great, perpetual movement drawing him. He barely had
strength to resist. Nor did he want to. Eyes closed, he knew this would be his last time in the river. But he did not feel the least sense of loss. He accepted darkness as part of the cycle of light, and he was ready. The recognition of this came to him mysteriously from the depths, like the grace of a fish to a well-presented fly.

O
N THE DAY THAT WAS TO BE HIS LAST AS
postman Grampa took me in tow and pushed the handcart up to every door, even when there wasn't any mail to put in the box. Everywhere there were handshakes, hugs, and farewells. But when we got to Henry Mueller's place, there was something more.

“Are you sure you really want this, Karl?” Mueller said.

“Betty's got to do what she thinks is best,” Grampa said.

“With all due respect, it don't say on that deed to your house that she owns you and Cristina, too,” said Mueller.

Grampa let the cart down on its stubby back legs.

“ 'Tisn't the house, Henry. 'Tisn't a piece of paper and whose name is on it. With Cristina slowing down so, well, at some point I know I won't be able to handle it anymore.”

“Betty is awfully quick to take charge,” said Mueller.

“It brought us through the bad times,” Grampa said.

“What about Cristina?”

I leaned back against the cart, listening, though I thought maybe I shouldn't be.

“Deep down she knows Betty's right,” Grampa said.

“She stuck with you, Karl, didn't she?” said Mueller. “She loved you richer and poorer.”

“Funny,” Grampa said, “turned out easier poorer.”

“Well, I haven't filled your jobs yet, just in case,” said Mueller. “Because poorer ain't so great.”

When we finished the rounds, we returned the cart to its place under the eaves of the old bank, put the outgoing mail we had collected into the empty leather sack, and dragged it inside until the late-afternoon train.

“What's in that old safe back there?” I asked.

“Dead mice and ideas,” Grampa said.

“Can I see?”

“The ideas are invisible,” Grampa said, “like ghosts. You want to lock them up tight so they don't haunt you.”

We left the bank building and walked past the grain elevator toward the tracks. Along the way we had to step over a concrete foundation overgrown with weeds. I had used it a hundred times to set cans on for pinging with my rifle.

“What was here before?” I asked.

“Power,” Grampa said and kept on walking.

“Once I thought I'd build a fort on it to conquer the Indians,” I said.

“And I thought I was going to conquer the night,” Grampa said. “Let's pick up the pace a little, George. Some of the work we've got to get done needs sunlight.”

The schoolhouse stood so tall, perched atop a high cellar, that you might have expected four rooms rather than only two. To get the mower out Grampa had to hop it up a number of steps, which were well worn from years of this practice.

He had no intention of having me do any real work. He never did, which was one of the many things that endeared him to me. I sat on a stump and watched him push the old hand mower back and forth, back and forth, lapping by no more than an inch, lost to the world the way he had been on the river casting a fly.

“Got to remember to leave a note listing all the chores that have to be done here regular,” he said when he finished.

He pulled the cellar door shut behind him, sliding the hasp of the bolt lock to.

“Got to put the key back in old Henry's hands,” he said. “There's lots to think about still, George. Lots to do.”

The schoolhouse was empty. Inside it smelled of lunches with milk. Grampa went to the closet and pulled out a big, long-brushed broom and an enormous tin dustpan. In the closet stood a barrel. He slid off the top, reached down, and came up with a Hills Bros. coffee can full of sawdust that had the aroma of oil and candle wax.

“You take command of the spreading and I'll do the pushing,” said Grampa. “First, though, we've got to make ourselves a space.”