Authors: William G. Tapply
I was on Route 2. I passed the exit to Fitchburg, where, some fifteen years earlier, Sam Farina had taken me to a baseball game at the State College to introduce me to Eddie Donagan. I had drawn up his first contract, I had negotiated deals for him, I had befriended him and his family. And now, I knew, I should mourn his loss.
Now he had really bought the farm.
The phrase repeated itself in my brain, and as I thought back over those times I remembered Jake and Mary Grabowski. They lived on a farm. Eddie had written Jake Grabowski’s phone number on his wall. Eddie had loved them, back then at the beginning. They were old folks, even fifteen years ago. When I first met Eddie they were the only family he knew. He had endowed a scholarship in the name of their son at Fitchburg State, and then, as far as I knew, he had forgotten them.
I had been to their place once, that first winter I knew Eddie. He was just beginning his marriage to Jan then, and I hadn’t yet terminated mine with Gloria. The four of us had driven through the snow-covered Massachusetts hills to the Grabowski farm in Lanesborough over this same Route 2. In his pocket Eddie carried round-trip plane tickets to Florida, along with a four-week reservation at a Hilton hotel, a package that included meals, sight-seeing tours, a deep-sea fishing trip, and passes to Disney World and several shows. Eddie had been very pleased with himself, and when Jake quietly refused the gift, anger glittered from Eddie’s eyes.
“We can’t leave the cows,” the old man explained. His face, tough as cowhide and eroded into deep gullies from a lifetime outdoors, attempted to smile, to dispel the disappointment he read into Eddie’s silence. “We ain’t had a vacation in sixty years. We’re happy here. This is where we belong. I don’t reckon Mary and me’d know what to do with ourselves in Florida.”
We were sitting in the kitchen of the big old farmhouse. Mary stood at the stove basting the roasting chickens, whose rich aroma filled the room. Jake reached over to touch Eddie’s arm. “You’re a good boy, son. You just keep on being a good boy. That’s the only present we want.”
Eddie pulled back from the old man and stood up. He walked over to the window, and I could see the tears in his eyes. I realized they were tears of frustration, and even fury. It was the first time Eddie had shown me that side of himself.
On the way home in the car Eddie had railed at Jake and Mary. “Goddam old fools,” he said. “It’s not fair that they won’t let me pay them back. Brady, you gotta make them go.”
“They don’t want to go,” I said. “You’re being selfish.”
“Oh, fuck you,” he muttered. “Fuck them, too.”
After that, Eddie never mentioned Jake and Mary Grabowski to me.
The road climbed up through the foothills of the Berkshires. I flipped the Julian Bream tape over. Lanesborough was only an hour or so beyond the Deerfield. I could visit Jake and Mary and still be on the river for the best fishing in the afternoon. It was a futile hope, and I refused to invest any optimism in it, but it was possible that Jake and Mary Grabowski could help. Even with a disconnected phone, perhaps somehow they had heard from Eddie. At least I knew that Eddie had patched things up with them. I was glad. Anyway, it would be nice to see the old folks.
The section of Route 2 that runs due west across the Connecticut Valley and into the mountains is called the Mohawk Trail. It’s a winding, two-lane highway that climbs the hills and cuts through the valleys, past old paper mills and working farms, through worn-out little villages like Erving and Turner’s Falls. After it crosses the Connecticut River it rises into the Berkshires and picks up the Deerfield River, which it parallels for several miles. The Deerfield is a classic trout river, big by Massachusetts standards, deep and swift, its waters kept frigid year-round by the hydroelectric dams that feed it. It boils around the great boulders that are scattered in its bed, and the trout like to lie in the eddies and suck in the insects that are funneled to them.
I stopped in Charlemont and carried my two peanut butter sandwiches to the bank of the river. I sat with my back against the trunk of an old oak. The water was high, surging over the tops of the boulders that normally lay exposed. That meant the Fife Brook Dam, a few miles upstream from where I sat, was releasing water into the river. Those of us who fished the Deerfield for trout did so cautiously, because we knew that when they let water go from the bottom of the dam, the level could rise two or three feet in a matter of minutes. We learned to listen for change in the pitch of the water’s melody. It comes rumbling, like a distant train, and it warns us to get off the river fast.
As I munched my sandwiches and watched the river rush by, I remembered the one time I had failed to heed the warning. It was near sunset of a June evening several years earlier. I was wading the Yankee Flats, only a few hundred yards downstream from the dam. Charlie McDevitt was working a pool a little downstream from me and around the bend. Down in that deep gorge where the river flowed, the sun had not touched the water for hours. It had already become too dark to tie on a new fly, so I heard the rising trout before I was able to see him. Glug, it went. A big fish swirling at the surface, sucking in insects, a solid, heavy, no-nonsense noise. I’d heard such sounds before, and this one made my pulse race as I remembered the size of the other fish. It was no ordinary trout. I imagined one of the eight-or ten-pound brown trout I knew fishermen occasionally took from the river—fish as long as a man’s arm.
I flicked the fly dry with a couple of false casts, then with a strong thrust of wrist and forearm I cast toward the place where the fish had risen. The fly fell short. I stripped more line from the reel and cast again, striving to combine just the right proportions of delicate timing and sheer strength necessary to cast long distances with a fly rod. But I was still short. I needed to get a little closer to the fish.
I reached with my left foot, probing with my toe for the river bottom. I already stood waist deep, and I knew somewhere ahead of me the river bottom dropped off abruptly, but I was still surprised when my foot came down nearly a foot deeper than where I had been standing. I remained there, poised, left foot ahead of right, with most of my weight still on my rear foot. Slowly I shifted my weight and edged my right foot forward beside my left. Later I remembered hearing the grumble of heavy water moving toward me, but at the time my brain was focused on the big trout, and the warning didn’t register.
The rising water arrived at the moment my right toe struck against a submerged rock. I felt my upper body begin to fall forward. My left foot slid sideways on the slippery gravel on the riverbed. My right foot bumped the boulder again, and in that instant of imbalance the full force of the rising river struck me at the waist, hip and knee. I waved my arms awkwardly, seeking equilibrium, my fly rod a useless balancing staff. My body twisted so that I found myself facing directly upstream. The top half of my body began to topple backwards so that it seemed I would end up lying on the water, my face to the dark sky overhead, and shoot downstream headfirst.
I struggled to remain upright. My feet bounced on the bottom as the growing force of the water began to carry me downstream. Water roared around my shoulders and splashed against my face. Then I went under. My mouth and nose filled, and I felt a surge of panic. I found myself twisted around facing downstream, out of control, the river surging against my shoulders. I strained to find the bottom with my toes. The dark riverbank seemed to race past. It appeared to be so close that I thought I could touch it, grab a root, hang on, and I tried to maneuver toward it. But I could reach nothing. My toes kept scraping river bottom, but I couldn’t stop. My waders filled with water, pulling me down. My legs grew heavy. I thrust my head back in an effort to keep my face above water. I went under again, and the roar of water filled my ears. Avoid tipping over, I thought. Remain upright. Above all, don’t tip. Then I would be totally at the whim of the river. Then I’d tumble against the bottom. I’d lose track of where the top was. I’d be crushed against underwater rocks.
I bobbed downstream, moving faster and faster, still instinctively gripping my fly rod. Sometimes I’d touch bottom with one of my feet, but then the river would pick me up and sweep me along. I willed the panic from my brain. I dropped my rod and tried to use both arms to maintain my balance by laying them flat on the surface and finning. I found I could steer a little and keep my head up that way. I tried to move away from the middle of the river, hoping to find shallower, less swift water. I kept circling and probing with my feet, reaching for the bottom. But my waders had filled, and the weight of the water in them seemed to pull me lower and lower into the river. My arms were underwater. I treaded desperately. My heavy legs moved reluctantly. The water felt as thick as mud around them. I tipped my head back to breathe. I was spinning, now facing upstream, now twisted around by the relentless force of the water. Two, three times my head went under. My toes reached nothing. I had lost the river bottom.
Suddenly, with the force of a speeding automobile colliding with a tree, I felt myself smash against a boulder. A white flash of pain surged across my hip and shoulder. I clawed frantically at the rock, but the river yanked me away. Then I was tumbling. I could no longer distinguish the surface of the river from its bottom. I bounced, shoulder and knee and head scraping and banging against gravel and rock. I was a wet rag in the mouth of a bull mastiff, at the complete mercy of the driving power of the river.
I groped wildly with my hands for the river bottom that raced under me. With a desperate heave I pushed myself upward. My head broke the surface, and I gulped a breath of sweet air before I was wrenched under again. Then something hammered the side of my head. A great sinking blackness sucked away the last of my strength.
Charlie’s voice came to me from miles away. “How’re they bitin?” he was saying.
I opened one eye. Charlie’s face was a shadow above mine.
“Hey, Brady, drink this,” he said.
I opened both eyes. I pushed myself up onto one elbow and accepted the flask that Charlie held toward me. The undiluted liquor burned my tongue and throat.
“Excuse me,” I mumbled, and, propping myself on my hands and knees, I belched, gagged, then vomited gloriously, seemingly endless stomachfuls of water, mixed with undigested bits of the ham and cheese sandwich I had gobbled before wading into the river. “I gotta learn to chew my food better,” I observed.
“Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Fine.” I touched my right cheek. A jolt of pain stabbed through my head. My hand came away bloody. I sat up and flexed each limb, one at a time, and twisted my torso gingerly. “Nothing broken. Except my spirit. Damn big trout rising back there.”
Charlie stared solemnly at me. My teeth began to chatter. I hugged myself.
“Try some more of this.” Charlie gave me his flask. This time the bourbon stayed down, searing its way into my stomach where it created a glowing center of warmth that quickly diffused through my limbs. Charlie left, and a moment later returned with a brown Army blanket, which he wrapped around my shoulders.
“I thought you were a goner,” he said. “Lucky you washed up at my feet. When I saw your rod floating at me I knew you couldn’t be far behind.”
“Did you get my rod?”
“Aye-yuh,” he drawled. “Figured you’d want me to save it first. Then you.”
I nodded. “It’s my favorite rod.”
“I told you to listen for the dam,” said Charlie, his face, for once, serious. “You can’t fool around with this river.”
“Jeez, Charlie. There was a huge trout rising up there. I wasn’t paying attention.”
He touched my arm. “You gotta pay attention to the Deerfield,” he said.
I finished my peanut butter sandwiches and heaved myself to my feet, the memory of that unplanned float trip down the Deerfield vivid in my mind. In the years since that evening when Charlie McDevitt dragged me from the river, I had fished it many times. I did so respectfully, ever alert for the rumble of heavy water surging from the bottom of the dam.
There was a big trout there I still had a grudge against.
“I’ll be back later,” I said aloud to the river.
I climbed the steep bank and slid into my car. I could visit Jake and Mary Grabowski and be back in time for the best fishing. The water would have returned to its normal level by then.
Beyond the Deerfield, the Mohawk Trail climbed through steep mountains. In several places the roadside fell away into deep, rock-strewn gorges, at the bottom of which thin ribbons of water flowed, small tributaries to the greater Deerfield. I executed the hairpin turn high on the sheer western face of the mountains, from which I could see the broad valley beyond the Berkshires stretch toward the next range of mountains. North Adams lay below, and beyond it Williamstown, where I would turn south to Lanesborough and the Grabowski farm.
It was a little after two in the afternoon when I pulled into the farmyard. Gray sheets flapped on the clothesline beside the peeling and flaking white farmhouse. The carcass of a rusted tractor huddled in the high weeds beside the barn, and out back lay a rocky pasture where a dozen or so black and white cows grazed lazily. In the distance I could hear the chug of farm machinery.
I mounted the steps to the front of the house and rapped on the door, waited, and knocked again. When I received no answer I walked over to the barn. Through the open door I could see only darkness inside. I stood outside and called, “Hello! Anybody home?”
Again, I got no answer. I stepped to the open door. I could smell the ripe mixture of aromas—newly cut hay and fresh manure. A trapezoid of sunlight fell from the doorway where I stood onto the rough wood floor. Inside, the barn lay in shadows.
Again I called into the darkness, “Hello?”
I moved into the barn. I stood just inside the doorway, squinting to adjust my eyes to the dimness. I sensed a faint movement behind my right shoulder, a whisper of air in motion, no more, and I started to spin my head around to confront it. My mind registered in an instant a man’s figure, teeth clenched white in the shadow, and the long object he held like a baseball bat slashing toward my right cheek. I had time only to tuck my chin into my hunched shoulder before the blow struck. It glanced off the point of my shoulder and ricocheted high off my skull. Strobes of white light flickered in my brain. I felt a piercing pain, a spike being driven into my ear, and then I felt myself melt onto the floor.