Authors: John Langan
As far as these things go, it was a pleasant visit. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed our conversation. Trading stories with Sadie about what we’d caught, and how, and where, it was as if I’d found my way back to the part of my life that had been closed off since that distant Saturday—to speaking about it, anyway. I don’t know if this’ll sound odd, but it was almost like what happened to me after Marie died. For the longest time, talking about her—thinking about her—was an exercise in agony, because I couldn’t separate my wife from the fact of her death. Then, gradually, that stopped being the case. My memory relaxed its grip on Marie’s death; although it felt more as if her dying loosened its hold on me. The myriad of experiences that had composed our time together became available as more than prompts to grief. Her mouth still full of a generous bite of her mother’s cookie, Sadie asked me what kind of catfish swam the waters around here. She intended to catch a catfish in every state in the union, if she could, and since she was living in New York, now, she supposed she should start finding out about its catfish population. Well, I said, the trout was my fish, but I’d pulled my fair share of bullhead and even one or two channel cats out of the Rondout and the Svartkil—and that was that; I was off; I had raced across ice I wasn’t sure would take my weight and it had held.
If I was caught off guard at how easy it had been for me to return to talking about fishing, I was astonished at how simple it proved for me to take it up, again. I didn’t see Sadie or either of her parents the next day, or the one after that, or the one after that, which was Friday. I wasn’t expecting to see any of them, not specifically, but I guess I was waiting to find out what result, if any, our visit would have. Having spoken about fishing once, I found I wanted to do so a second time. When the doorbell rang on Saturday morning, I’ll confess, my pulse gave a jump at the prospect of another chat with Sadie and Rhona.
Instead, I opened the door to Oliver, dressed in his weekend jeans and sweatshirt. He was sorry to bother me at such an earlier hour, he said, but he had promised Sadie he would take her fishing, this morning, and she had asked if they could extend an invitation for me to join them. He’d already warned her I would probably have plans, so there was no problem about me refusing their last-minute request.
I’m pretty sure he was startled by how quickly I said, “Sure—I’d be happy to come along with you.” I know I was, startled but also kind of giddy. The gear I’d bought for my previous try at fishing was in the guest room closet, aside from a little dust as ready to use as it had been seven years earlier. My weekend clothes weren’t any different from those I wore during the week, jeans, a flannel shirt, and work boots. All I needed was a hat, to replace the Yankees cap that had been another casualty of my last trip. After I’d retired, Frank Block and a couple of the other fellows I’d worked with had chipped in to buy me a nice cowboy hat, on account, they said, of how much I loved country music. It was a ridiculous thing, white as toothpaste, that might’ve sat on John Wayne’s head in one of his early westerns. There was nothing else to hand, though, so I grabbed it. Oliver did his best not to laugh at the sight of it, but Sadie declared it cool.
That first trip, I suggested we drive over to the same spot on the Svartkil I’d wound up at when I started fishing. My reasons were more practical than sentimental. That stretch of the river is just downstream from Huguenot’s waste-treatment plant, which in my experience had drawn the catfish on which Sadie had set her sights. I warned her to watch for the trees whose limbs stretched over the water, but she’d noted them and succeeded in staying mostly clear of them, unlike her father, who sacrificed three hooks and a good length of line to the branches above him. I gave most of my attention to helping him work his line from the trees, and to keeping an eye on Sadie, who, as we were preparing to pack up, caught a decent-sized bullhead that I netted for her, almost sliding into the brown water in my haste. I wasn’t overeager to pick up my rod, but there were a couple of times Sadie and Oliver were occupied watching their lines, and I felt conspicuous standing around watching them. While I was aware of the length of years that had passed since I’d last cast a lure, the rod was comfortable in my hand. Before I could overthink it, I snapped my wrist; though I kept my cast short, to where the water wasn’t too deep. Nothing so much as looked at my lure, but that was all right.
Like that, I was back fishing. For the next couple of years, whenever Sadie and Oliver went out in search of fish, they took me with them. Mostly, this was on the weekends, for two or three hours at a time, which was never enough for Sadie. I spent as much of these trips chatting with Oliver as I did with my line in. Oddly enough, he was an IBM’er, and we passed a few hours comparing the company as it was with the company as it had become. I did what I could to broaden their musical horizons, playing Hank Sr. and Johnny Cash for them, but their tastes remained sadly limited. After a couple of seconds, Sadie announced that she had no interest in hillbilly music. Oliver said that his dad used to listen to these guys. When I joined him and Sadie fishing, I let my casts fall close to shore. On more than one occasion, Sadie reproached me for this. “You should cast farther,” she said. “That’s where the big fish are.”
“If I catch all the big ones,” I said, “there won’t be any left for you.”
The snort she gave showed her opinion of that likelihood.
Around us, the twentieth century emptied into the twenty-first, one millennium flowing into another. I’d kept abreast of the news. On the international front, the actors kept replaying the bloody melodrama of genocide, from Bosnia to Rwanda to Kosovo. At home, the dot.com bubble was backdrop for the mad fury of the Oklahoma City bombing and the farce of the Monica Lewinsky affair. I waited up to watch 1999 tick over into 2000, reasonably confident in Oliver’s reassurances concerning the Y2K threat. Eleven months later, the debacle of the 2000 presidential election took over the news, and I found myself reflecting that the aughts were off with more of a whimper than a bang.
The following fall, that changed, the new decade showing its true face in fire and ruin with the destruction of the Twin Towers, the attack on the Pentagon, the crashing of Flight 93. Sadie was twelve, old enough that shielding her from the horrors of that morning was impossible. Her mom taught ninth-grade history at Huguenot High, so I figured she’d have a handle on how to explain the geopolitics that underlay the attacks. The why of it was a bit trickier. Sadie asked me about it the next Saturday, when we walked to the stream behind our houses. Her mom, Sadie told me, said that the terrorists believed they were doing God’s work and would earn themselves a place in heaven. Her dad said they were evil, hateful. From what she could tell, they had to be insane. How about me? she said. What did I think?
I didn’t know, I said. I wasn’t sure I understood enough of all that was involved to speak with any kind of authority about it. But from what I knew at the moment, the best I could tell was, if the men responsible for this carnage intended it for some greater purpose, then their means had hopelessly defiled their ends.
I half-expected Sadie to ask what that meant, but she did not.
The years that followed the attacks, which seemed to echo and amplify their violence, were marked by changes in the weather. The very atmosphere seemed more turbulent, prone to storms that dumped record-setting amounts of rain on us on a regular basis, swelling our neighborhood stream up and over its banks. Could be, the rough weather was part of a larger cycle. If that was the case, then we’d entered the next phase of it, because every few months, it felt like, the local streams and rivers flooded. The Svartkil spread over the fields to the west of Huguenot, forming a great lake which required anyone on its opposite shore who needed to drive to Huguenot to take a considerable detour, turning what should have been a ten- or fifteen-minute trip into an hour-plus trek. My house was situated high enough above the flood plain for me not to be too nervous about the water rolling over it. The principle threat to me came from my little stream, which upon occasion burbled across the field separating it from my place and surrounded me with a good six inches of water. This was how I discovered that my basement had been only partially water-sealed. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of value down there, and Oliver had a wet-vac he loaned me. Sadie suggested I should have left the water in the basement and stocked it with fish. I feigned exasperation with her, but the image of that water remaining under my floorboards made my palms sweat.
What the meteorologists would designate a hundred-year flood occurred three years after my return to fishing. It was mid-October, that point when the warmth that summer lent to autumn is nearing its end. The husk of what had swelled to a Category 4 hurricane as it roared through the Caribbean, but which had worn itself down to a tropical storm as it trudged north through the Carolinas and Virginia, limped into the sky, bringing with it a day and a half of torrential rain and gusting winds that cleaned what leaves remained on the trees from their branches.
Sadie and her family were out of town, driving through the Midwest on a tour of prospective colleges for her older sister. I had assured Oliver and Rhona I’d keep an eye on their place for the eight days they were away, which, since they owned no pets save a goldfish whose tank Sadie had transferred to my kitchen counter, was an easy promise to keep. I collected their mail, and was on hand in case any packages required signing for. (None did.) In the hours prior to the storm’s arrival, I toured their yard, picking up anything that seemed prone to blowing or floating away and carrying it into their garage. I’d already done the same for my place, but after I was finished with theirs, I gave it one last circuit before retiring inside.
I was reasonably well-prepared for what I assumed would be the inevitable loss of power the storm would cause. I had candles in candle-holders stationed in the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom, with a box of matches set beside each candle. My cupboards were stocked with plenty of non-perishable foodstuffs. There was a stack of library books next to the living room couch and another beside the bed. My transistor radio was running on fresh batteries and I had several unopened packages in reserve. There was nothing to do but wait.
To my surprise, I didn’t lose power at all during the storm. From late Wednesday, throughout the night, until Thursday afternoon, waves of gray clouds, bulled across the sky by the wind, emptied their cargo of rain. The Svartkil climbed its margins and sprawled across the farmland west of Huguenot, submerging the portion of 299 that traversed it, as well as the southern reach of Springvale Road. Water swirled around the farm stand on 299, lifting the pumpkins waiting to be bought for jack-o-lanterns and floating them off in the direction of Wiltwyck. Trees that had been swept into the Svartkil upstream jammed under and then against the bridge out of Huguenot. Closer to home, the stream behind my house spread into a vast shallow lake from which my house and those of my neighbors rose like blocky islands. Between my place and Sadie’s family’s, the water ran a foot deep, except for a dip on my side of their driveway that plunged me to my thighs when I waded over to check their house for flooding. The water was muddy, flowing against and around our houses, spinning the leaves and branches riding its surface off in wide whirlpools. Every so often, an object I hadn’t seen before—a white plastic barrel, a red and gold dragon-kite wrapped around a log, the carcass of a deer, legs stiff and turning up to show its belly bloated and white—floated in front of the living room window, and I watched as it bobbed along, heading east to where the lake that had emerged behind my house slid down a long incline to join the Svartkil. Had Sadie been present, she would have been at my door, her rod and tacklebox in hand, ready to cast off my back porch and see what our luck and the storm brought us. I left my rod undisturbed, preferring the classic western marathon on TCM. I watched John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper deal justice in an arid land, and did what I could to steer my thoughts from what might be swimming the waters outside.
I have to admit, once the rain tapered off, and the wind fell away, and the sun appeared, and my lights were still on, my TV still broadcasting, I sighed with relief. Yes, it would be a good two or three days until the water started to recede; in fact, the chances were, it would rise higher, first, as the flooding upstream pushed its way here. But there was nowhere I had to be, and as long as I had electricity, I could ride out my temporary isolation in comfort.
Which, needless to say, was the exact moment the lights flickered, dimmed, brightened, and went out entirely. I sighed again. At least there was sufficient daylight left for me to make my way through the house, lighting candles. And at least I had my transistor radio, and the college station was playing its bluegrass show. It was the retreating sun, I told myself, that made the water encircling the house appear dark, in places, black.
As a distraction, I started to prepare dinner. At the back door, the portable propane stove I’d purchased for an Adirondack fishing trip that had never happened leaned against the wall. I carried it out onto the porch and opened it on the picnic table. The evening air was tropical. I screwed in the new gas canister I’d picked up the day before yesterday, turned the valves, pressed the starter button, and was rewarded with a puff of blue flame around the burner ring. Leaving the back door open but the screen door closed, I returned inside for the frying pan, the can of cooking spray, and the eggs I planned to scramble. The frying pan was on the stove where I’d left it. I picked it up and set it on the kitchen table. I unsealed the refrigerator long enough to snatch a quartet of eggs from the door and hurried it shut. The eggs I set in the pan. A little cheese would go nicely melted on top of the scrambled eggs, so I reopened the refrigerator door and grabbed a couple of slices of American. The screen door slapped in its frame; the wind, I guessed, shoving it. The cheese slices joined the eggs. All I needed was the cooking spray, but it was not in its usual place, next to the olive oil and the canola oil. The candles glowing on the table rendered the interior of the kitchen almost fuzzy, like in a Rembrandt painting. There was a group of cylinders gathered on the countertop on the other side of the table, cans of spray paint I’d set there in preparation for a touch-up job on the porch I hadn’t found my way to, yet. I crossed the room, and there was the cooking spray, ranked among them. I had no idea what it was doing there.