He was clearly confused. He held the tube in his hand for a while, not knowing quite what to do. I prodded him gently to open it, laughing all the while. Alice came in and watched us. We both teased him until he fumbled with the strings and ties. Finally, standing there with the tube unsheathed and all the wrappings strewn about his feet, he had the look of a man who was defusing a bomb.
He opened the tube and peered down the long black hole. Then slowly he extracted the new fly rod. At the bottom of the tube, he found a small box full of the finest hand-tied German trout flies. The way he held it and looked at it—all red and flustered and making little yip-ping sounds—was more reward then we’d ever dared to hope for. Alice and I just stood there and had ourselves a jolly good laugh.
“Have you ever used one of these?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No.”
“Well, that’s yours, then, and I’ll show you how to use it.”
He appeared to be on the verge of speech, but nothing came. Rather than let him struggle any further for words of gratitude, I picked up his new rod and his box of flies, grasped him firmly under the arm and led him out the kitchen door to the drive, where the car was already waiting.
We spent the afternoon up at a stream far back in the woods. You could drive up a dirt road to within a mile of it. From there on, you had to track out through the woods.
It was a beautiful day. The forest, full of new foliage, was just beginning to warm up. There was a concert of peepers and crows yawping through the branches and you could smell the earth turning green all over.
Richard walked several paces ahead, carrying most of the equipment. There was something about the way he walked through a track of wilderness. He didn’t walk so much as he loped, and he gave the impression that he’d been in those woods all his life and knew every inch of them. Although to the best of my knowledge he’d never been through this particular tract, he seemed to know just where he was, and exactly where we were going. It was very much like the day we walked out to the cave. He was in his own element. He owned the land.
When we reached the stream, I demonstrated for him once the most elementary principles of fly-casting, then turned him loose on his own. At first it was odd and rather amusing watching his arm go up stiffly, and then the awkwardness as he paid out the line. But the awkwardness lasted only a short while. After an hour or so, he held the rod as if he’d been holding it for years. And when he cast, the rod moved as if it were apart of his body.
I was astonished by his facility. “You’re sure you’ve never done this before?”
“Just with a string and hook,” he said laconically. “Never with one of these.” He looked at the rod worshipfully, still not willing to believe that it was actually his own.
We had a wonderful afternoon. At one point while we stood thigh-high in long rubber boots, a stiff, icy current churning the water white all around us, I shouted to him above the roar, “Who’s the man in the photograph?”
He looked up as if he hadn’t heard me.
“The photograph in your wallet,” I went on.
“What about it?”
“Who is it?”
“My father.” He flicked his rod and the line arched out in a graceful curve across the stream.
His answer surprised me. It was hard to think of Richard Atlee as having a father.
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.”
“And your mother?”
“Dead I think.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“No.”
“Ever try to find out?”
“No.”
“You don’t care to?”
“No.”
All that conversation was conducted at a shout in order to carry our voices above the roar of the flood. But there had been an awful detachment about it, too. Awful, I say, when you consider the nature of the information being divulged. For a moment I thought, “How insensitive.” But that wasn’t it at all. It wasn’t insensitivity. It was something else. Something else completely, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.
He caught three superb rainbow trout that afternoon compared to my one scraggly specimen that I begrudgingly put back in. There was in him an almost unerring instant for laying down a fly precisely where a fish would rise for it. And most pleasing of all was the fact that he was totally unaware of how good he was.
But in spite of his uncanny success, it was clear that he felt only the most tepid kind of enthusiasm for the activity. And that enthusiasm, I’m sure, was simply an attempt to please me.
I can still see that rod of his bending thrillingly beneath the weight of a fish, the red-white bobber skimming frantically along the top of the froth, then going under. The line paying out father and farther—then suddenly, thirty yards down stream, a sleek, silver knifelike shape breaching water poised in mid-air; then the majestic weight of it, flopping back down with a loud, gorgeous splash—
I was wild with excitement, shouting him instructions he really didn’t need. Then when he had it heavy and heaving in his net and had clapped the creel cover over the great whomping weight of it, he seemed to be standing outside of his triumph, aloof and remote. It was as if someone else had caught the fish. I looked at him a little strangely.
When we were ready to go, I asked him what he wanted to do with his trout. He handed them all to me, strung on a line.
“Give them to Missus.”
“You caught them. You give them to her.”
“I can’t.”
“Go ahead. Don’t be foolish.” I thrust them back at him, and in that moment I saw something very close to terror in his eyes. I took back the fish and put them into my creel. “All right, Richard, I’ll give them to her. We’ll have them for supper tonight.”
Several times in the days that followed, Richard asked me if Petrie had refunded my money. I couldn’t report that he had. Then suddenly, I think it was three days after the affair, he wasn’t around the house any more. I don’t mean that he vanished. He still slept in his room each night, but he was no longer nearby in the daytime, nor did he take his supper with us. He continued to do his chores, working in the early morning long before we woke. Then he was gone for the rest of the day, until quite late at night, when he’d let himself in the front door, after we had gone to sleep.
Alice and I began to feel some concern about his prolonged absences. I suppose that we missed seeing him and were concerned about what he was up to.
One afternoon I sat with Alice in the kitchen and watched her go about the business of making a cake. At one point she looked up from whipping a batter and said, “You don’t think he’s getting ready to go?”
“Go where?”
“Away. I mean now that the weather is getting warm and everything. You think he’s got a job, Albert. Maybe it’s a job.”
“Maybe,” I said. I was tying some trout flies. “I don’t think so.”
“He acts awfully funny.” She paused from her whipping. “Strange.”
“Well, he is that,” I laughed a little. “I suppose that’s why we like him.”
“But I mean stranger than average.” She went on and started to whip the batter again. “He’s very secretive. Have you noticed that?”
“Yes. I suppose I have.”
“You don’t think he’s getting ready to leave us, do you, Albert?”
“I don’t know. Hand me those scissors, will you?”
She leaned over and passed me the scissors. When I took them I looked up at her. She was miserably upset.
“Well, he’s going to leave us some day, Alice. You might just as well face the fact. It could be today or tomorrow or anytime. He’s not tied to us.”
She stared into her batter, as if she were reading an augury there. Then after a moment she said, “I think you’re wrong, Albert.” Her arm swept round the bowl in a circle. “I think he is tied to us. I think he’s very attached. I don’t think he could bear to leave us any more.” I don’t know why, but a curious anger rose within me. “I wish you wouldn’t say that, Alice.”
“Why?” From the way she said it, I sensed disaster coming. But I was powerless to avert it. I started as reasonably as I could. “Well—for one thing, our whole purpose in this from the start has been to put the boy back on his feet. We agreed to set no time limits, but to let the boy go out under his own power in his own good time.”
She was about to protest.
“Didn’t we agree to that, Alice?”
She shook her head vehemently, then turned—wheeled, rather—back to the batter.
“You haven’t answered me, Alice.”
“Answered you what?”
“Didn’t we agree to—”
“To what?” she snapped. “Agree to what?”
I felt a rush of heat at the back of my neck and suddenly I could hear my voice, very far outside myself, talking with a quiet fierce emphasis. “To let the boy go at a time when he himself feels he is ready.”
“Well, that time is not here, Albert.”
“Perhaps it is,” I said very softly.
She placed her hands squarely on her hips and faced me directly. “You’d like to see him go now, wouldn’t you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. It’s all over your face. It started with Wylie, didn’t it?”
“Wylie has nothing to do with it.” My fists clenched. “I was about to suggest that we send him to a good trade school.”
“A trade school?” She looked at me skeptically.
“Yes. That’s what the boy wants. He wants to be his own man, and I can’t say that it’s a bad idea to—”
“Trade school?” Her eyes widened enormously behind her glasses. Then suddenly she was laughing mockingly. “Oh, honestly, Albert. You’re so transparent. That’s just an excuse to get him out of here—”
“You’ve had just about enough of playing father now. You’ve enjoyed it for a couple of months and now you’d like to go back to those easy days of just going about and pleasing yourself.”
“Oh, stop it, Alice.”
“Gratifying all your whims. Doing just what you want to do and letting the rest of the world go to hell!”
“We were having a simple conversation about his future,” I said, trying to control the quaver in my voice. “Why do you always have to put things on a personal level?”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”
“What’s true?”
“What I said about your wanting to see him go.”
“No!” I barely smothered a shout. “I don’t want to see him go. But I also realize that you can’t tie him down. I know him a little better than you do. He enjoys his freedom. He needs it.”
She laughed scornfully. “You’re talking about yourself, Albert. When you talk about freedom, you’re confusing him with you. This boy’s been starved for a home and a family. Now he’s got one—”
“And you’d like to keep him in a state of prolonged infancy—”
“Infancy—” She flung the word back at me, her eyes blazing. “What do you mean, infancy?”
“You know very well what I mean.”
“For the life of me, Albert, I think you must be mad.” She turned back to the batter and resumed her whipping motion, but the mixing spoon clattered off onto the aluminum counter. “What do you mean, infancy?”
“Cooking for him. Knitting for him. Sewing. Doing laundry. Getting all excited when he’s out a bit too late, or when his nose runs.”
Her face grew red. She talked across the kitchen to where I sat. “I do very little for him in comparison to what he does for us. And I worry about him because I care for him.”
“I care for him, too,” I said. “Perhaps more than you do. But I realize that some day he’ll have to go. There’s a family—”
“Family?” Her jaw dropped. The word seemed to stun her. She grew defensive. “What family?”
“There’s a father.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw a picture in his wallet.”
“And the mother?” She seemed almost to cringe as she said the word.
“The mother’s dead. But I’m sure there are other kin.” If she had a spell of fright, it lasted only a moment. In the next instant she folded her arms and was again staring at me as belligerently as ever. “Well, I don’t know what kind of kin they are that’d let a boy that age run loose all over the land.”
“Well, whether you like it or not,” I went on, “those are the facts. So don’t get your hopes too high. I grant the boy does seem fond of us—”
“Fond?” she said and laughed in that irritating way. “Haven’t you noticed?”
Something in her voice upset me. “Noticed what?”
“It’s much more than fondness. Much, much more.”
That afternoon we drove into town to take care of some chores, and while Alice was in doing the marketing, I drove over to Mr. Washburn’s to get gas and have the car serviced.
But it wasn’t Washburn who came out of the garage when I rolled up to the pumps. To my delight and surprise it was Richard Atlee. It made an incongruous and striking picture, this tall, Biblical-looking creature with his thick tangled beard and his mane of shoulder-length hair, cranking a gasoline pump. He looked a bit like a demented prophet.
At first glance he didn’t recognize the car. Then a moment later he was peering at my face through the windshield. Mild surprise fluttered momentarily across his features, then was gone.
“Hello, Richard.”
“Hello,” he said, and from the cold perfunctory clip to his voice, I realized I was to be treated like any other customer.
“Fill it up, please,” I said. “And check the oil and water.”
He went about his business without uttering a word. When I paid “him, he said, “Thank you.” He seemed awkward and unhappy to be caught there—as if he were embarrassed by the job and by having to wear the uniform of a hired public servant.
Just as I was getting ready to drive off, I caught a glimpse of Washburn in the mechanic’s shed. It was mild weather and he’d taken off his mackinaw. But he still wore his peaked cap with the ear laps.
He was stooped beneath the hood of a car as I rolled slowly past. For a moment he looked up and gazed at me with all of that majestic contempt with which he regarded the world around him—particularly people of my ilk. I confess my affection for the man rose even higher that day. Of all the people in that little town, with the exception of ourselves, Washburn was the only other person willing to acknowledge Richard Atlee’s existence. And even more than that, to entrust him with a job.