Fathers & Sons & Sports (21 page)

Well, until man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod too far back, just as natural man always overswings with an ax or golf club and loses all his power somewhere in the air; only with a rod it’s worse, because the fly often comes so far back it gets caught behind in a bush or rock. When my father said it was an art that ended at two o’clock, he often added, “closer to twelve than to two,” meaning that the rod should be taken back only slightly farther than overhead (straight overhead being twelve o’clock).

Then, since it is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace, he whips the line back and forth making it whistle each way, and sometimes even snapping off the fly from the leader, but the power that was going to transport the little fly across the river somehow gets diverted into building a bird’s nest of line, leader, and fly that falls out of the air into the water about ten feet in front of the fisherman. If, though, he pictures the round trip of the line, transparent leader, and fly from the time they leave the water until their return, they are easier in cast. They naturally come off the water heavy line first and in front, and light
transparent leader and fly trailing behind. But, as they pass overhead, they have to have a little beat of time so the light, transparent leader and fly from the time the leave the water until their return, they are easier to cast. They naturally come off the water heavy line first and in front, and light transparent leader and fly trailing behind. But, as they pass overhead, they have to have a little beat of time so the light, transparent leader and fly can catch up to the heavy line now starting forward and again fall behind it; otherwise, the line starting on its return trip will collide with the leader and fly still on their way up, and the mess will be the bird’s nest that splashes into the water ten feel in front of the fisherman.

Almost the moment, however, that the forward order of line, leader, and fly is reestablished, it has to be reversed, because the fly and transparent leader must be ahead of the heavy line when they settle on the water. If what the fish sees is highly visible line, what the fisherman will see are departing black darts, and he might as well start for the next hole. High overhead, then, on the forward cast (at about ten o’clock) the fisherman checks again.

The four-count rhythm, of course, is functional. The one count takes the line, leader, and fly off the water; the two count tosses them seemingly straight into the sky: the three count was my father’s way of saying that at the top the leader and fly have to be given a little beat of time to get behind the line as it is starting forward; the four count means put on the power and throw the line into the rod until you reach ten o’clock—then check-cast, let the fly and leader get ahead of the line, and coast
to a soft and perfect landing. Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on. “Remember,” as my father kept saying, “it is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock.”

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

So my brother and I learned to cast Presbyterian-style, on a metronome. It was mother’s metronome, which father had taken from the top of the piano in town. She would occasionally peer down to the dock from the front porch of the cabin, wondering nervously whether her metronome could float if it had to. When she became so overwrought that she thumped down the dock to reclaim it, my father would clap out the four-count rhythm with his cupped hands.

Eventually, he introduced us to literature on the subject. He tried always to say something stylish as he buttoned the glove on his casting hand. “Izaak Walton,” he told us when my brother was thirteen or fourteen, “is not a respectable writer. He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman.” Although Paul was three years younger than I was, he was already far ahead of me in anything relating to fishing, and it was he who first found a copy of
The Compleat Angler
and reported back to me. “The bastard doesn’t even know how to spell ‘complete.’ Besides, he has songs to sing to dairymaids.” I borrowed his copy, and reported back to
him, “Some of those songs are pretty good.” He said, “Whoever saw a dairymaid on the Big Blackfoot River?”

My father and mother were in retirement now, and neither one liked “being out of things,” especially my mother, who was younger than my father and was used to “running the church.” To them, Paul was the reporter, their chief contact with reality, the recorder of the world that was leaving them and that they had never known very well anyway. He had to tell them story after story, even though they did not approve of some of them. We sat around the table a long time. As we started to get up. I said to Father, “We’d appreciate it if you would go fishing with us tomorrow.”

“Oh,” my father said and sat down again, automatically unfolded his napkin, and asked, “Are you sure, Paul, that you want me? I can’t fish some of those big holes anymore. I can’t wade anymore.”

Paul said, “Sure I want you. Whenever you can get near fish, you can catch them.”

To my father, the highest commandment was to do whatever his sons wanted him to do, especially if it meant to go fishing. The minister looked as if his congregation had just asked him to come back and preach his farewell sermon over again.

It was getting to be after their bedtime, and it had been a long day for Paul and me. So I thought I’d help Mother with the dishes and then we’d turn in for the night. But I really knew that things weren’t going to be that simple, and they knew it, too. Paul gave himself a stretch as soon as it was not immediately
after dinner, and said, “I think I’ll run over town and see some old pals. I’ll be back before long, but don’t wait up for me.”

I helped my mother with the dishes. Although only one had left, all the voices had gone. He had stayed long enough after dinner for us to think he would be happy spending an evening at home. Each of us knew some of his friends, and all of us knew his favorite pal, who was big and easy and nice to us, especially to Mother. He had just got out of prison. His second stretch.

From the time my mother stood looking at the closed doors until she went to bed, she said only. “Goodnight.” She said it over her shoulder near the head of the stairs to both my father and me.

I never could tell how much my father knew about my brother. I generally assumed that he knew a good deal because there is a substantial minority in every church congregation who regard it as their Christian duty to keep the preacher informed about the preacher’s kids. Also, at times, my father would start to talk to me about Paul as if he were going to open up a new subject and then he would suddenly put a lid on it before the subject spilled out.

“Did you hear what Paul did lately?” he asked.

I told him, “I don’t understand you. I hear all kinds of things about Paul. Mostly, I hear he’s a fine reporter and a fine fisherman.”

“No, no,” my father said. “But haven’t you heard what he does afterwards?”

I shook my head.

Then I think he had another thought about what he was thinking, and swerved from what he was going to say. “Haven’t you heard,” he asked me, “that he has changed his spelling of our name from Maclean to MacLean. Now he spells it with a capital L.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I knew all about that. He told me he got tired of nobody spelling his name right. They even wrote his paychecks with a capital L, so he finally decided to give up and spell his name the way others do.”

My father shook his head at my explanation, its truth being irrelevant. He murmured both to himself and to me, “It’s a terrible thing to spell our name with a capital L. Now somebody will think we are Scottish Lowlanders and not Islanders.”

He went to the door and looked out and when he came back he didn’t ask me any questions. He tried to tell me. He spoke in the abstract, but he had spent his life fitting abstractions to listeners so that listeners would have no trouble fitting his abstractions to the particulars of their lives.

“You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,” he said. “By help I don’t mean a courtesy like serving choke-cherry jelly or giving money.

“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

“So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give
or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.’”

I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn’t have to be anything that big.”

He asked me, “Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?”

“She might,” I told him. “In fact, yes, I think she does.”

“Do you think you help him?” he asked me.

“I try to,” I said. “My trouble is I don’t know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don’t even know whether he needs help. I don’t know, that’s my trouble.”

“That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed?

“I still know how to fish,” he concluded. “Tomorrow we will go fishing with him.”

I lay waiting a long time before finally falling asleep. I felt the rest of the upstairs was also waiting.

Usually, I get up early to observe the commandment observed by only some of us—to arise early to see as much of the Lord’s daylight as is given to us. I several times heard my brother open my door, study my covers, and then close my door. I began waking up by remembering that my brother, no matter what, was never late for work or fishing. One step closer to waking and I remembered
that this was the trip when my brother was taking care of me. Now it began to seep into me that he was making my breakfast, and, when this became a matter of knowledge, I got up and dressed. All three were sitting at the table, drinking tea and waiting.

Mother said, as if she had wakened to find herself Queen for a Day. “Paul made breakfast for us.” This made him feel good enough to smile early in the morning, but when he was serving me I looked closely and could see the blood vessels in his eyes. A fisherman, though, takes a hangover as a matter of course—after a couple of hours of fishing, it goes away, all except the dehydration, but then he is standing all day in water.

We somehow couldn’t get started that morning. After Paul and I had left home. Father put away his fishing tackle, probably thinking he was putting it away for good, so now he couldn’t remember where. Mother had to find most of the things for him. She knew nothing about fishing or fishing tackle, but she knew how to find things, even when she did not know what they looked like.

Paul, who usually got everyone nervous by being impatient to be on the stream, kept telling Father, “Take it easy. It’s turned cooler. We’ll make a killing today. Take it easy” But my father, from whom my brother had inherited his impatience to have his flies on water, would look at me visibly loathing himself for being old and not able to collect himself.

My mother had to go from basement to attic and to most closets in between looking for a fishing basket while she made
lunches for three men, each of whom wanted a different kind of sandwich. After she got us in the car, she checked each car door to see that none of her men would fall out. Then she dried her hands in her apron, although her hands were not wet, and said, “Thank goodness,” as we drove away.

I was at the wheel, and I knew before we started just where we were going. It couldn’t be far up the Blackfoot, because we were starting late, and it had to be a stretch of water of two or three deep holes for Paul and me and one good hole with no bank too steep for Father to crawl down. Also, since he couldn’t wade, the good fishing water had to be on his side of the river. They argued while I drove, although they knew just as well as I did where we had to go, but each one in our family considered himself the leading authority on how to fish the Blackfoot River. When we came to the side road going to the river above the mouth of Belmont Creek, they spoke in unison for the first time. “Turn here,” they said, and, as if I were following their directions, I turned to where I was going anyway.

The side road brought us down to a flat covered with ground boulders and cheat grass. No livestock grazed on it, and grasshoppers took off like birds and flew great distances, because on this flat it is a long way between feeding grounds, even for grasshoppers. The flat itself and its crop of boulders are the roughly ground remains of one of geology’s great disasters. The flat may well have been the end of the ice-age lake, half as big as Lake Michigan, that in places was two thousand feet deep until
the glacial dam broke and this hydraulic monster of the hills charged out onto the plains of eastern Washington. High on the mountains above where we stopped to fish are horizontal scars slashed by passing icebergs.

I had to be careful driving toward the river so I wouldn’t high-center the car on a boulder and break the crankcase. The flat ended suddenly and the river was down a steep bank, blinking silver through the trees and then turning to blue by comparing itself to a red and green cliff. It was another world to see and feel, and another world of rocks. The boulders on the flat were shaped by the last ice age only eighteen or twenty thousand years ago, but the red and green precambrian rocks beside the blue water were almost from the basement of the world and time.

We stopped and peered down the bank. I asked my father, “Do you remember when we picked a lot of red and green rocks down there to build our fireplace? Some were red mudstones with ripples on them.”

“Some had raindrops on them,” he said. His imagination was always stirred by the thought that he was standing in ancient rain spattering on mud before it became rocks.

“Nearly a billion years ago,” I said, knowing what he was thinking.