Crow Fair (15 page)

Edward was a renowned fisherman, much admired by my father, and me, but given his present frailty, it was surprising that he thought he could still wade our rocky streams. He had a set rule of no wading staff before the first heart attack, and as he had yet to suffer one, he continued picking his way along, peering for rises, and if he ran into speedy water in a narrow place, he’d find a stick on the shore to help him through it. My father, by contrast, had always used a staff, an elegant blackthorn with a silver head that was supposed to have belonged to Calvin Coolidge.

Emily had been an avid golfer and considered fishing to be an inferior pursuit, with no score and thus no accountability. Therefore, she never followed Edward along the stream, instead taking up a place among the cottonwoods, where, with her binoculars, she quietly waited for something to happen in the canopy, hopeful of seeing a new bird for the list she kept in her head. She had done this for so many years that she felt empowered to report the rise and fall of entire species, extrapolating from her observations in the cottonwoods. This year she announced the decline of tanagers; last year, it was the rise of Audubon’s warblers. Lately, she would too often describe her sighting of Kirtland’s warbler, which occurred thirty years ago on Great Abaco. Not a good sign. At the last iteration, I must have looked blankly, because she said “wood warbler” in a sharp tone. Still, her birding represented mainly an accommodation of Edward, enabling her to stay close by while he fished, though he had never made a secret of his disdain for golf, golfers, and golf courses.

I fished with Edward for an hour or so, just to be sure that he could manage. He lovingly strung up his little straw-colored Paul Young rod, pulling line from the noisy old pewter-colored Hardy reel. Holding the rod at arm’s length, sighting down the length of it, he announced, “Not a set after forty years.” But I could see the leftward set from where I stood ten feet away. His casts, on the other hand, were straight as ever: tight, probing expressions of a tidy stream craft, such simplicity and precision. They took me all the way back to my boyhood, when from a high bank on the Pere Marquette, at my father’s urging, I had first observed Edward with utter rapture at seeing it all done so well. Now watching him hook an aerial cutthroat from a seam along cottonwood roots, I concluded he would be just fine on his
own. He gave me a wink and cupped the fish in his hand, vital as a spark, before he let it go. I could see the fish dart around in the clear water, trying to find its direction before racing to mid-stream and disappearing. Edward held the barbless fly up to the light, blew it dry, and shot out a new cast. “I’m sorry your father isn’t here to enjoy this,” he said, keeping an eye on his fly as it bobbed down the current.

“So am I.”

“We had quite a river list. He was the last of the old gang, except for me and the wives.” Edward laughed. “The Big Fellow is starting to get the range.”

“My dad was a great fisherman, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, not really, but nobody loved it more.” My father and I hadn’t gotten along, so I was surprised to find myself feeling defensive about his prowess as a fisherman. But it was true: his style of aggression was ill suited to field sports. He had played football in college, and I could recall feeling that baseball, my sport, was a little too subtle for him. And slow.

Edward promised that when the sun got far enough to the west to put glare on the water, he’d head back up to the house, and meanwhile he hoped that I would be patient with Emily. She had begun to slip further, something that I had noticed but not much worried about, because she could still be talked out of the most peculiar of her fixations. I had seen the very old—my aunt Margaret, for example—slide into dementia good-naturedly, even enjoying some of its comic effects or treating the misapprehensions as amusing curiosities. But Emily demanded to be believed, and so perhaps her progression had not been so pleasant. Edward did say that they’d had to light the flower beds at home when she began to see things there that frightened her.

Edward said, “Well, I’m going to keep moving. I want to get to the logjam while there’s still good light.” He looked down at the bright water curling around his legs. “Amazing this all finds its way to the sea.”

Edward wasn’t seen again. That’s not quite accurate: his body turned up, what was left of it, in a city park in Billings, on the banks of the Yellowstone. It had gone down the West Fork of the Boulder; down the Boulder to the Yellowstone, past the town Captain Clark had named Big Timber for the cottonwoods on the banks; down the Yellowstone through sheep towns, cow towns, refinery towns; and finally to Two Moon Park in Billings, where it was found by a homeless man, Eldon Pomfret of Magnolia Springs, Alabama. In a sense, Edward had gotten off easy.

At sundown, Emily came out of her birding lair and asked, “Have you seen Edward?” She had binoculars in one hand and a birding book in the other, and her eyes were wide. I was still in the studio, and her inquiry startled me.

“Maybe he stayed for the evening rise or—”

“I wonder if you should go look for him. He doesn’t see well in the dark. It will be dark soon, won’t it? What time is it, anyway?”

“I don’t have my watch, but I’ll walk up and see how he’s getting along.”

“Don’t bother him if there are bugs on the water. He gets furious. What time did you say it was?”

“I left my watch on the dresser.”

“What difference does it make? We can tell by the sun.”

“Okay, here I go.”

“And if he’s intent, please don’t disturb him.”

“I won’t.”

“He gets furious.”

When I got back, I sat with Emily on the sun porch waiting for the sheriff. She was weeping. “He’s with that woman.”

“What woman, Emily?”

“The one with those huge hats. Francine. I thought that was over.”

I refrained from noting that Edward would have had no means of conveyance to “Francine.” Perhaps, she knew more than I thought and was escaping into this story. As time went on, “Francine” came to seem something portentous. Emily hung on to the idea even after the sheriff arrived, who seemed to us old folks an overgrown child, bursting out of his uniform. He listened patiently as Emily explained all about Francine. He nodded and blinked throughout.

“She met him in the lobby of the Alexis Hotel in Seattle and lured him to her room. That was back in the Reagan years, and she has turned up several times since.”

“Ma’am,” said the sheriff—and I remember thinking that this big, pink, kindly, bland child of an officer was the right person to say “ma’am” as slowly as he did—“Ma’am, I can’t really comment on that other lady, but this creek comes straight off the mountain, and we’re a long way from town.” Emily watched him closely as he made his case. She was quiet for a moment.

“He’s dead, isn’t he. I knew this would happen.” Emily turned to me. “I suppose that settles it.” I couldn’t think of one thing to do except wrinkle my brow in affected consternation. “Well,” said Emily. “I hope she’s happy now.”

When the old brothel—known as the Butt Hut—closed down, years ago, the house it had occupied was advertised in the paper: “Home on the river: eight bedrooms, eight baths, no kitchen. Changing times force sale.” The madam, Miriam Lawler, an overweight elder in the wash dresses of a ranch wife, beloved by her many friends, and famous for having crashed into the drive-up window of the bank with her old Cadillac, died and was buried at an exuberant funeral, and all but one of the girls dispersed. Throughout the long years that the institution had persevered, the girls had been a constantly changing guard in our lively old cow town. Who were they? Some were professionals from as far away as New Orleans and St. Louis. A surprising number were country schoolteachers, off for the summer. Some, from around the state, worked a day or two a week but were otherwise embedded in conventional lives. When one of them married a local, the couple usually moved away, and over time our town lost a good many useful men—cowboys, carpenters, electricians. This pattern seemed to land most heavily on our tradespeople and worked a subtle hardship on the community. But it was supposed by the pious to be a sacrifice for the greater good.

Mary Elizabeth Foley was the one girl who stayed on after the Butt Hut closed. She retained a pew at the Lutheran church, just as she had while working for Miriam. No one sat with her at first, but gradually people moved over, with expressions of extraordinary virtue. The worldly old pastor must have cited some Christian duty. It fell to Mrs. Gladstone Gander—not her real name but a moniker bestowed by others with less money—to ask the aggressive but traditional local question: “Where are you from?”

Mary Elizabeth replied, “What business is it of yours?”

Where was the meekness appropriate to a woman with her past? It was outrageous. From then on, the energy that ought to have been spent on listening to the service was dedicated to beaming malice at Mary Elizabeth Foley. Even the men joined in, though it was unlikely that they had entirely relinquished their lewd fantasies. Soon she had the pew to herself all over again and greeted it each Sunday with happy surprise, like someone finding an empty parking spot right in front of the entrance to Walmart.

The rest of the town was suspicious of Lutherans, anyway, and would have been more so if Gladstone Gander—not his real name—hadn’t been president of the bank that was the only lending institution in town, and if his wife had not been the recognized power behind the throne. Mary Elizabeth was a depositor at the bank and would have enjoyed modest deference on that basis, but everything changed when she eloped with Arnold, the son and only child of the banker and his wife, whose actual names were Paul and Meredith Tanner.

Since it was a small town, and functioned reliably as a Greek chorus, the Tanners had never been free of the pressure of being the parents of Arnold, a gay man. Now that Arnold had married,
appearances were much improved, or would be once time had burnished Mary Elizabeth’s history. In town, there were two explanations for the marriage. The first held that Mary Elizabeth Foley had converted Arnold by using tricks she had learned at the Butt Hut. The second was that she intended to take over the bank. Only the second was true, and the poor Tanners never saw it coming. But it wouldn’t have worked if Arnold and Mary Elizabeth hadn’t been in love.

Mary Elizabeth was an ambitious woman, but she was not cynical. In Arnold she saw an educated lost soul. She had great sympathy for lost souls, since she thought of herself as one, too. She lacked Arnold’s fatalism, however, and briefly thought that she could bring him around with her many skills. Once she realized the futility of that, she found new ways to love him and was uplifted to discover their power. She delighted in watching him arrange the clothes hanging in his closet and guessing at his system. He had ways with soft-boiled eggs, picture hanging, checkbook balancing, and envelope slitting that she found adorable. She could watch him stalking around the house with his fly-swatter in a state of absorbed rapture. He brushed her hair every morning and played intelligent music on the radio. He had the better newspapers mailed in. Mary Elizabeth was not a social climber, but she did appreciate her ascent from vulgarity and survival. They slept together like two spoons in a drawer, and if she put her hands on him suggestively and he seemed to like it, she didn’t care what he was imagining. She had been trained to accept the privacy of every dream world.

When they returned from their elopement, in Searchlight, Nevada, the Tanners welcomed them warmly. After a preamble
of Polonian blather, Paul Tanner said, “Mrs. Tanner and I are both pleased and cautiously optimistic going forward. But, Mary, wouldn’t your father have preferred to give you a big, beautiful wedding?”

“Possibly.”

“I don’t mean to pry, but who, exactly, is your father?”

“What business is it of yours?”

This could have been a nasty moment, but the Tanners’ eagerness to sweep Junior’s proclivities under the rug resulted in their pulling their punches, which was much harder on Mrs. Tanner, who was bellicose by nature, than on her husband. At times like this, she gave out a look that suggested that she was simply awaiting a better day.

The luxury of sleeping with someone threatened Arnold’s punctilious habits. It was his first experience of sustained intimacy, and it had its consequences, which weren’t necessarily bad but were quite disruptive. Arnold was a homely man, and one local view had it that his homeliness was what had driven him into the arms of men. He had big ears and curly hair that seemed to gather at the very top of his head. He had rather darty eyes except when he was with Mary Elizabeth or when he was issuing instructions at the bank. His previous love had been the only lawyer in town who had much of a standing outside of town, and whatever went on between them did so with fastidious discretion. Their circumstances made it certain that they would never have any fun.

“Where is he now?” Mary asked.

“San Juan Capistrano.”

“And that was the end of your affair?”

“Here.”