Bream fishing with a fly rod is God’s way of making up for lack of funds.
The old man wheezed as he made his way up the bank from the boat. Had to sit awhile on a stump to get his breath and reorganize his lungs. He wished he really could reorganize them. There’d been too many cigarettes for too many years. Bad choices catching up to him, eating the life out of him one breath at a time.
Breath’s gettin’ shorter as life’s gettin’ longer. I’ll die hard, he thought.
More than likely hard and slow. And then he remembered the bodies floating in the surf. Those pictures only came back rarely anymore. He did notice they still came back, though, and knew they always would. Could have been worse. Could have been much worse. I’ll take this way over that any day. He’d made some good choices too, you see, and Fortune had smiled her fickle smile on occasion.
The younger man stood with his feet almost in the water, and eased the boat back out into the lake to where it was free of the bank again and then suddenly shoved the nose over hard so that the little boat swung around in a nice clean arc and came right back around so to make it easier to take the outboard off. He lifted the johnboat and slid it into the back of the pickup and turned to look at the Ozarks he loved.
Didn’t grow up here, he thought, but this is really where I should have come from. Now that I’m here there’s no way on God’s good green Earth I’m ever leaving.
The water lay still now, calm and quiet, like a mirror reflecting time. Time was all they had. Some folks said it was getting short, but neither one of them believed that. You never run out of time when you have memories. Memories are not bound by that particular physical measurement. Simpler humans may think so and, perhaps, because that is their perception it ends up being their reality. The earth turns. It goes around the sun. We rush to mark it all off. Divide it up so we can run after it like it’s going to leave us behind or something. Fret if we lose it, and what in the world is it that is actually really there for us to lose?
He thought of ants and the old parable. Didn’t seem to apply much anymore. Why are we rushing headlong to the end? Most of us probably won’t like what we find there anyway. Why not ease back on the throttle a little and cruise through easy like. People seem incapable of certain things, he thought. Simply incapable. No matter. Eventually, it all comes back to exactly where we started, so what is this stuff that you have misplaced and find missing? How does one replace it? If you have spent it all, can’t you just work hard and buy more? They do sell it, don’t they?
The older man must have been confused. The Depression had a chokehold on life, squeezing the hope out of everybody. Yet there were bright moments. Hunger does funny stuff to people’s sensibilities and there’s only so many rabbits a rock throwing kid can kill anyway. The city fathers had cut a deal with him. The loan of a dog or two and, of all things, a bona fide Auto-5 and enough shells to make it interesting. They got the lion’s share of the birds though. Didn’t bother him none. He got the getting. As far as he was concerned, his was the best end of the bargain. Not a bad deal. He realized later he was improving his swing at somebody else’s expense. And we ain’t talking golf here either. No sir, it was a good deal all said and done. Fried quail, biscuits and gravy ain’t a bad way to starve to death. Years later he had seen where some enterprising entrepreneur had sold bumper stickers, “Will bird hunt for food.” Don’t guess the fool knew that was old stuff by then.
The younger man turned his gaze away from the water up the bank. The old man looked different. Must be the fading light. He held a slightly used but good-as-new .410 shotgun. After all, it was October and the squirrels would drive you crazy if you let them get away with it. They needed teaching a lesson on manners anyway, so you laid them out in a neat row on the table just off the back porch and always complained that it was easier to clean a deer than a squirrel. Little more meat on one, too, but squirrel was how you started off on this journey and most likely squirrel would be how you would end it. Unless, of course, it was doves.
By then, the older man was doing well enough to pass along the 16-gauge Remington 870 and grab his automatic. Light little loads to use, but they still looked like a puffball when you occasionally connected. That fancy new Model 1100 didn’t kick nearly as much, and he could shoot it all day long without discoloring his shoulder one little bit.
He liked that because he wasn’t a large man. Actually, he was rather slight. He might have topped out at 140 pounds sopping wet. When the ramp dropped on the Higgins boat and he waded ashore at which island was it? All those dead fish floating in the water also seemed like a huge waste. That’s a lot of good eating that nobody can spare the time, just now, to take advantage of. When it comes around to having time, the fish won’t be good anymore. Not only won’t they be good anymore, they won’t even be there anymore and here we are stuck with these lousy K- rations. Promises were made in the heat of battle. Promises that he fully intended to keep. Japanese lead had a tendency toward making a body contemplative. At least for the survivors. He wasn’t looking for an atheist in his foxhole. He was looking for a frying pan.
When he finally found the frying pan it was on the stove back home. Had to go all total, he figured, somewhere upward of 27,000 miles, twice across one continent, back and forth several times across the biggest ocean—anybody with a lick of sense would never have even dreamed up, and past the hula girls on Broadway. Or was it Park Place? Might have even been Waikiki, but he didn’t pass Go and he didn’t collect the $200, but he did go directly into the waiting arms of half a dozen separate reception committees formed by certain rather determined Asian gentlemen who seemed keen on denying him the fish dinner that he rightly considered he’d earned by then. The hard way.
It certainly was the hard way, and Lord in Heaven was this the only way to do this? He and a friend had ridden the bus westward out of Memphis that Sunday morning, took their shotguns with them, and boarded the bus big as life to shoot swamp rabbits grown fat and sassy on rice and soybeans. The delta gumbo wore ’em down a bit, but late that afternoon, after the bus slowed to a stop to fetch ’em home, their boots were semi-presentable. The guns were encased again, the tote sack was full of rabbits and the talk was of war. Right then, he’d make an even swap or maybe even throw in a little extra for some of that mud in exchange for the white sands of this latest tropical paradise. Except that one of them had that awful black sand with that brooding naked hill in the background. Always there. Always malevolent. Always in his nightmares.
Neglect is usually considered a bad thing. In this case, however, the fish had thrived on his neglect. His blushing bride hadn’t, though. She’d had to content herself with thriving on motherhood because that was all she’d had of him for two years. So, the whirlwind reunion reenacted 14 million times over and every time the first time, especially for him, and then the awkward introduction to the living, breathing human being, flesh of his flesh, who walked and talked and did all the proper things that the young of this particular species do. This was a little much to take in all at once. It demanded sober reflection on his part as to the role he would henceforth play on this planet, and that required immediate attention to the details that meant a choice must be made between crickets or worms.
She didn’t understand. She would never really understand. She would live with it. She would deal with it. She would, herself, enjoy the fruits of it. She would, however, never really understand it. Fishing was something you did once, maybe twice, in your lifetime and she’d be so glad when he got all that foolishness worked out of his system and things got back to normal. Bless her heart, she never did figure out that he’d never get all that foolishness worked out of his system and if he had ever been guilty of full disclosure, she would have discovered, to her horror, that he really didn’t understand it either. It was just there. Like the moon. You didn’t have a single dadblamed thing to do with it being put there but it’s there all right, no denying it, so you might as well enjoy it. And, so, he did.
Leaning on the truck bed, looking across the top of the boat uphill at the form by the stump, the younger man wondered just exactly how many fish the older man had thrown in the bottom of this boat in his lifetime. He’d love to see all of them in one big pile. He had come home one day with a $5 fiberglass fly rod fully equipped with an 85-cent reel. He’d already, by the advanced old age of 14, mastered the use of cane pole and crickets, some claiming, although he knew better, that he was more accomplished at it than the master himself. It was rank heresy to him, but he did appreciate the confidence folks exhibited. What he was interested in knowing now, this in the days before Ford 289s, miniskirts and 8-track tapes, was how this contraption worked.
Condescendingly, smoke curling up from between squinted eyes on a shaking head, the master sent him to fetch another outfit and to be so kind, sir, as to bring along some line, too, so that he could show him a thing or two. And so, a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the two young boys took up fly-fishing and the alcoholic in the brewery came in a far distant third.
They weren’t exactly stupid, and they surely weren’t inexperienced in the fine art of knowing fish, but a novice is a novice, so it took a trip or two to get the hang of things. Or maybe it would be better put to say it took a trip or two not to get the hang of things. They both were familiar with the classic picture. If they were real fly-fishermen they would be standing thigh deep in the middle of the Wind River, snowcapped range filling the background, intent on the rise of cutthroat or short lining a brook trout along a clear Wisconsin stream with a rod about the size of a pencil lead or maybe manhandling salmon on a 14-foot Tonkin Spey up on Canada’s east coast.
Sounds nice and, if you work hard, eat right, save your money and live to be 132 years old, you might be able to afford a trip like that someday. But, for now, a poor boy is a poor boy and the bream don’t care what you’re wearing. This certainly wasn’t the “bourgeois, hip boot, tying vest, tapered line, sinking fly” style of fishing. No ballet to this at all. Just timing, and time never runs out when you’re fishing. You never run out of time when you have memories.
No, this was the far more proletarian— “sitting on each end of a 14-foot johnboat with yellow popping bugs rolled in under the trees next to the bank at Island 40 late on a June afternoon where catch-and-release meant the fish got off the hook before you got him in the icebox” style of fishing. And the younger man had learned some very important lessons through the years. This kind of fishing was just as legitimate, just as honorable, just as bound up in tradition.
Didn’t bother him at all to let a big brown go over on the White River or catch a hundred rainbows and put ’em all back—except maybe for enough to stink up a skillet. That’s fine. It didn’t bother him any more to do that than it did to throw a fat bluegill in the icebox alongside 49 of his big brothers. Three or four hours on a late spring afternoon, gently rolling that line in just under the overhanging branches. Green and green again, and blue above and the sun coming and going in and out and fierce hot when the white fluffy canopy disappeared sometimes. And pulling out the hills and the water and the sky and the sun was all wrapped up in that 12-ounce package of ferocious energy known as a bluegill.
Sartorial splendor notwithstanding, if they’re in a mood to bite you better hang on to your rod because they’re your bitter, implacable foe, and if they grew ’em much bigger than they do, it’d be suicide to get into the same water with them. He remembered a shellcracker actually breaking his cane pole off about six inches above his hand once, so he took the older man’s warnings seriously. Bream fishing with a cane pole is serious business.
Bream fishing with a fly rodis God’s way of making up for lack of funds. The older man had never been able to swing it, but vicariously the younger had eventually made distant trips and others. He had supplanted the old man in that cold Rocky Mountain river. He’d landed steelhead for him on up in the Northwest. And through the years he had also moved from cane to bamboo. Not really that far to go if you slow down enough to think about it.
His wife, too, joining in the true spirit of things, had not only delivered three healthy children with all the requisite body parts present, more importantly, she had delivered into his hands one fine day a 3-weight bamboo ultralight. He still considers it to be the single most unselfish act of true love he has ever experienced. Unless, of course, it was all those fishing trips the older man had taken him on. He learned how to love life from him. And now he was attempting, in his feeble, puny, human, almost futile way, to repay that massive debt. Each and every fish had been a tutorial in microcosm. A lesson on life. A lesson on death. Neither make much sense without the other.
Leaving the truck, the younger man slowly made his way up the bank. When he got close, he noticed the smile and, when he saw that the old man had laid aside his fly rod and was back along that oxbow in east Arkansas with his cane pole and crickets catching bream. He knelt beside the body and, gently lifting, cradling, enveloped his father in one final embrace.