This thing I’m telling about happened on a Saturday. My father gave me a whole list of chores to do, including some that would have been Dan’s, if he’d still been alive. He was my only brother, and he’d died of a bee sting. A year had gone by, and still my mother wouldn’t hear that. She said it was something else, had to have been, that no one ever died of being stung be a bee. When Mama Sweet, the oldest lady in the Methodist Ladies’ Aid, tried to tell her–at the church supper the previous winter, this was–that the same thing had happened to her favorite uncle back in ‘73, my mother clapped her hanks over her ears, got up, and walked out of the church basement. She’d never been back since, and nothing my father could say to her would change her mind. She claimed she was done with church, and that if she ever had to see Helen Robichaud again (that was Mama Sweet’s real name) she would slap her eyes out. She wouldn’t be able to help herself, she said.
That day Dad wanted me to lug wood for the cookstove, weed the beans and the cukes, pitch hay out of the loft, get two jugs of water to put in the cold pantry, and scrape as much old paint off the cellar bulkhead as I could. Then, he said, I could go fishing, if I didn’t mind going by myself–he had to go over and see Bill Eversham about some cows. I said I sure didn’t mind going by myself, and my dad smiled as if that didn’t surprise him so very much. He’d given me a bamboo pole the week before–not because it was my birthday or anything but just because he liked to give me
things sometimes–and I was wild to try it in Castle Stream, which was by far the troutiest brook I’d ever fished.
“But don’t you go too far in the woods,” he told me. “Not beyond were the water splits.”
No, sir.”
“Promise me.”
“Yessir, I promise.”
“Now promise your mother.”
We were standing on the back stoop; I had been bound for the springhouse with the water jugs when my dad stopped me. Now he turned me around to face my mother, who was standing at the marble counter in a flood of strong morning sunshine falling through the double windows over the sink. There was a curl of hair lying across the side of her forehead and touching her eyebrow–
you see how well I remember it all? The bright light turned that little curl to filaments of gold and that instant I saw her as a woman, saw her as my father must have seen her. She was wearing a housedress with little red roses all over it, I remember, and she was kneading bread. Candy Bill, out little black Scottie dog, was standing alertly beside her feet, looking up, waiting for anything that might drop. My mother was looking at me.
“I promise,” I said.
She smiled, but it was the worried kind of smile she always seemed to make since my father brought Dan back from the west field in his arms. My father had come sobbing and barechested. He had taken off his shirt and draped it over Dan’s face, which had swelled and turned color. My boy! he had been crying. Oh, look at my boy! Jesus, look at my boy! I remember that as if it were yesterday. It was the only time I ever heard my dad take the Saviour’s name in vain.
“What do you promise, Gary?” she asked.
“Promise not to go no further than where the stream forks, Ma’am.”
“Any further.”
“Any.”
She gave me a patient look, saying nothing as her hands went on working in the dough, which now had a smooth, silky look.
“I promise not to go any further than where the stream forks, Ma’am”
“Thank you, Gary,” she said. “And try to remember that grammar is for the world as well as for school.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Candy Bill followed me as I did my chores, and sat between my feet as I bolted my lunch, looking up at me with the same attentiveness he had shown my mother while she was kneading her bread, but when I got my new bamboo pole and my old, splintery creel and started out of the dooryard, he stopped and only stood in the dust by an old roll of snow fence, watching. I called him but he wouldn’t come. He yapped a time or two, as if telling me to come back, but that was all.
“Stay, then,” I said, trying to sound as if I didn’t care. I did, though, at least a little. Candy Bill always went fishing with me.
My mother came to the door and looked out at me with her left hand held up to shade her eyes. I can see her that way still, and it’s like looking at a photograph of someone who later became unhappy, or died suddenly. “You mind your dad now, Gary!”
“Yes Ma’am, I will.”
She waved. I waved too. Then I turned my back on her and walked away.
The sun beat down on my neck, hard and hot, for the first quarter-mile or so, but then I entered the woods, where double shadow fell over the road and it was cool and fir-smelling and you could hear the wind hissing through the deep, needled groves. I walked with my pole on my shoulder the way boys did back then, holding my creel in my other hand like a valise along a road that was really nothing but a double rut with a grassy strip growing up the center hump, I began to hear the hurried, eager gossip of Castle Stream. I thought of trout with bright speckled backs and pure-white bellies, and my heart went up in my chest.
The stream flowed under a little wooden bridge, and the banks leading down to the water were steep and brushy. I worked my way down carefully, holding on where I could and digging my heels in. I went down out of summer and back into mid-spring, or so it felt. The cool rose gently off the water, and there was a green smell like moss. When I got to the edge of the water I only stood there for a little while, breathing deep of that mossy smell and watching the dragonflies circle and the skitterbugs skate. Then, further down, I saw a trout leap at a butterfly–a good big brookie, maybe fourteen inches long–and remembered I hadn’t come here just to sightsee.
I walked along the bank, following the current, and wet my line for the first time, with the bridge still in sight upstream. Something jerked the tip of my pole down once or twice and ate half my worm, but whatever it was was too sly for my nine-year old hands-
-or maybe just not hungry enough to be careless–so I quit that place.
I stopped at two or three other places before I got to the place where Castle Stream forks, going southwest into Castle Rock and southeast into Kashwakamak Township, and at one of them I caught the biggest trout I have ever caught in my life, a beauty that
measured nineteen inches from tip to tail on the little ruler I kept in my creel. That was a monster of a brook, even for those days.
If I had accepted this as gift enough for one day and gone back, I would not be writing now (and this is going to turn out longer that I thought it would, I see that already), but I didn’t. Instead I saw to my catch right then and there as my father had shown me–cleaning it, placing it on dry grass at the bottom of the creel, then laying damp grass on top of it–and went on. I did not, at age nine, think that catching a nineteen-inch brook trout was particularly remarkable, although I do remember being amazed that my line had not broken when I, netless as well as artless, had hauled it out and swung it toward me in a clumsy tail-flapping arc.
Ten minutes late, I came to the place where the stream split in those days (it is long gone now; there is a settlement of duplex homes where Castle Stream once went its course, and a district grammar school as well, and if there is a stream it goes in darkness), dividing around a huge gray rock nearly the size of our outhouse. There was a pleasant flat space here, grassy and soft, overlooking what my dad and I called South Branch. I squatted on my heels, dropped my line into the water, and almost immediately snagged a fine rainbow trout. He wasn’t the size of my brookie–
only a foot or so–but a good fish, just the same. I had it cleaned out before the gills had stopped flexing, stored it in my creel, and dropped my line back into the water.