Authors: Mary Alice Monroe
“I don’t know what to do out there.”
“Oh, yes you do. You learned all the basics at the retreat. Now you just need practice, patience, and confidence. And the only way to get them is to get out on the water. Get yourself a local guide if you want to explore other rivers and streams.”
“I don’t want another guide,” Mia said petulantly. “You’re the best.”
“Well, thank you, but there are some really good ones right close. And you don’t have to rely on a guide, you know. The main thing is to get off the couch and get out on the water.” Belle hugged her, then gave her a sisterly shake. “You’ll be fine. And Mia? Have fun.”
Mia went back to the cabin, removed her fishing gear, and carefully put it in a closet. Her waders hung with the feet attached like a dress form. She’d heard some folks just took to fly-fishing and others never did. She feared she was in the latter category.
“Maybe I’m just not cut out for this,” she said with disappointment as she closed the door on her gear.
She quietly and perfunctorily went through the motions of preparing a meal in the little kitchen, thinking about what it meant to be up here in the mountains without Belle in shouting distance. The thought that it was a good thing she didn’t buy more supplies formed in her mind as the concept of going home took root. The rotisserie chicken looked like a skeleton in the plastic container. She sliced bits of dry chicken, a tomato, the last of an onion. She put a piece of bread into the new toaster oven she’d bought in town, then pushed down the lever. The silence was rent by a loud, snapping spark. Then the lights went dead.
Mia’s mouth dropped open as she stared at a thin curl of smoke at the outlet. A sooty stain blackened the wall. This couldn’t be happening, she thought as she opened the fridge. It, too, was dead. Cursing, her mind whirled with questions. She didn’t have a clue what to do. On a whim she looked out the window, but Belle was long gone. Mia stood in the middle of the room feeling utterly helpless.
She was an intelligent woman. But nowhere in college did she take Fix It 101. She figured that she blew a fuse, but she didn’t know how to change it. She didn’t even know where the damn fuse box was.
Night was falling fast. Mia felt panic compounding her fears as an owl hooted from a nearby tree. She hurried from window to window, slamming them shut and locking them. Soon after she finished, the cabin was plunged in blackness. She grappled in the dark, searching for the flashlight, and released a ragged sigh when the narrow beam of light pierced the black. She hurriedly lit a fire with the last of the wood, feeling her panic subside with the soft glow of the firelight. She pulled one of the rocking chairs closer to the light and rocked, back and forth, while she ate a dinner of melting chocolate ice cream.
Staring into the flames, Mia couldn’t remember ever feeling so desolate. She wanted to weep. She’d endured so much in the past year, only to be defeated by a toaster oven. Someday, she would tell this story at a party and everyone would laugh, including her. At the moment, though, it was really too pitiful. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t learned how to do common household repairs. She didn’t think she could name one friend who could. She suddenly realized that she couldn’t take care of herself. Out in the wilderness—even in the city—she’d come to rely on others to take care of her. Up here in the mountains, her independence needed to be redefined.
She set the ice cream aside and went to the library shelf. Books had always been a source of comfort. The narrow beam of her flashlight traveled across the titles. She’d read
The Awakening
and
A Room of One’s Own
hoping to be inspired by these great feminist authors. She’d had no great awakening up here, and the only inspiration she had from Woolf was to fill her pockets with rocks and walk into the deepest point of the river.
She moved her beam of light to another shelf. It was filled with books on fly-fishing. A safer topic, she thought, given her frame of mind. She pulled out six books. They were very heavy and coated with a thick layer of dust. Wrinkling her nose, she balanced the weight of them against her chest to get a good grip. As she hoisted them up, her flashlight slipped. She twisted to catch it. The stream of light illuminated the back of the bookshelf.
The dust on the shelf was streaked where the six volumes had sat, but in the open space on the left she spied a single volume covered in dust, lying flat against the back. Curious, she set the stack of fly-fishing books on the table and returned to the bookshelf and brought the light close for a better look. The slender, leather volume was wedged behind the row of books. Wiggling it, she found it was also stuck in the shelf. She pushed aside the other books and gently tugged, easing it out, careful not to tear it. Once free she brought it closer to the light of the fire. The navy leather was soft and lustrous in the rosy light. She brushed a layer of dust from the cover with her palm. In gilt lettering, surrounded by a circlet of gilt acanthus leaves, were the initials
KW.
“Kate Watkins,” Mia whispered.
She eased back in the rocker and laid the book on her lap. The pages seemed pressed tightly together, probably from so many years wedged in the bookcase. With great care, she opened it.
The pages were as thin as butterfly wings. Mia drew her breath and studied the neat, careful script written on the lines of blue. It was the penmanship of a child.
June 12, 1912
Dear Diary,
Mia’s breath caught in her throat. This was the diary of young Kate Watkins.
She sat back in her chair and stared at the thin volume in her hand. She was hesitant to read it. These were just the innocent writings of a child, true. Almost a hundred years old. What harm could there be? Didn’t libraries treasure such historical pieces? Yet she had come to feel the presence of Kate Watkins in this cabin. Would it be a transgression as her guest? A diary was someone’s private thoughts.
A gust of wind fluttered the thin pages. Mia felt goose bumps spring up along her arms, knowing the windows were shut. She told herself she was acting as childlike as the girl who wrote these words, but remembering the gossip that the cabin was haunted, she scooted her chair a few inches closer to the fire. Looking again at the diary she spied something in the middle. Skimming the pages, she found a photograph. The sepia-toned photo showed a man and a young girl. They were standing outdoors by a river. On closer inspection, it looked like the very pool outside this cabin. The man wore a tweedy three-piece suit and was carrying a fishing rod, a wooden net, and an impressive string of large fish. A wicker creel hung from his shoulder on a wide leather strap. His posture was relaxed, as was his smile. He appeared a man who was quite pleased with the day.
Mia shifted her attention to the girl standing beside him. She looked to be on the precipice between girlhood and teens. She wore an old-fashioned dark skirt over high-buttoned boots and a white blouse with a wide collar that fell over her shoulders. Her long, lustrous dark hair was drawn up at the sides and gathered in the back with an enormous bow, typical of young girls at the turn of the century. The girl stood straight, proudly holding a fishing rod that was taller than she was. She was a beautiful girl, unusually so. But it was something in her eyes—intelligence—that gave her the aura of not a child but a young woman. She seemed to be looking straight at Mia from the photo—from another time—with a small smile playing at her lips as though she were thinking, I know who you are and what you want.
The minx, Mia thought as she turned the photo over to see if there was writing on the back. In faded pencil she could barely read
WW and KW, 1912.
This was young Kate Watkins. WW, she assumed, was her father. They looked rather alike in the long forehead and the dark eyes. He was a gentleman. That much was obvious in the style of his clothes and his posture. So, she thought with a small smile of discovery, ol’ mountain woman Kate Watkins was a gentleman’s daughter. Interesting, she thought as she set the picture aside.
She would read the diary, she decided. She sensed that there was something in these pages she was meant to read. Perhaps one of the answers she was searching for. Leaning back in her rocker and raising the flashlight into position, she opened the diary to the first page and began to read.
June 12, 1912
Dear Diary,
I am alone in my room. Mrs. Hodges thinks to punish me and told me to write in this diary. It will teach me not to draw on the walls. She was very angry and said I was not the lady my mother was. That was very hurtful of her to say. I don’t remember my mother.
I don’t see what the fuss was all about. After all, it is my room isn’t it? And my drawings are quite lovely. I spent a very long time on the Turk’s cap lily. It is a very difficult shade of red-orange to get right. There are so many different kinds of wildflowers. Lowrance knows the names of all of them. I hope that by knowing the names and habits of things wild, I shall feel a little less afraid of the woods. I do not wish to be afraid.
Daddy says that fear is our greatest enemy. He also tells me that we are most afraid of what we do not know. I believe this, too.
So that is why I painted wildflowers on the walls. Not to be headstrong or selfish, like Mrs. Hodges said. Not at all! I thought if I painted the flowers on the wall, I would see them each morning when I awoke and each evening before I fell asleep and I would learn their names.
I do hope Daddy won’t be angry at me. My Daddy is the handsomest man in the county, everybody thinks so. People tell me we both have the Watkins dark eyes. His eyes have so much love in them that seeing them makes me want to try harder to be a good girl. I don’t think Daddy ever sins like I do. I wonder, can ministers sin?
I won’t write any more in this silly diary. I shall lie in bed and read
Wind in the Willows.
I wish I could escape from this stuffy old house and live with Rat and Mole at Toad Hall. When I grow up I shall live deep in the woods and fish and hunt and do whatever I want to do—even if I am a girl.
So, this is good-bye Diary!
Kate Watkins
Mia finished the entry and stared into the fire. What a precocious girl, she thought. Mia could almost hear her voice. She reached over to pick up the picture and looked once more into the girl’s face. She saw the challenge in the lift of her chin. There was a maturity to her writing—even wit. Most certainly, there was stubborn will. She smiled ruefully as she set the photograph aside. Wasn’t it amusing that both she and Kate were afraid of the woods, Mia thought, feeling a bond with the young girl.
And what a lovely idea of hers to paint the wildflowers on the wall. She had once read how Whistler had painted the walls of Lillie Langtry’s drawing room with gold fans because she’d found the room so dull. Mia thought that Kate’s choice of indigenous wildflowers was much more clever. Her mind went to the china she’d discovered in the armoire. Each plate was hand-painted with a wildflower. Mia smiled, making one more link.
Eager for more, she tucked a leg beneath her and turned again to the diary.
June 13
Dear Diary,
It is because of Daddy that I have decided to write again in this diary. I would do anything for him. He is more than just my father. He is my teacher. My fly-fishing companion. My best friend.
Last night he walked slowly along the wall, hands behind his back, studying my paintings. Then he stopped before my painting of the Turk’s cap lily. “A very good rendition,” he told me. “But there should be six segments, not five.” He told me if I was going to be a serious student of nature, then I had to pay attention to the details. He said, “Nature is nothing if not a miracle of details.”
When Daddy asked me why I had painted on the walls I told him about my plan to learn the names of all things that live in the woods. He liked that idea a lot. I could tell by the look he got in his eyes. It was the same look he gets when he catches a fish. Then he called me his own little naturalist. Me! I’ve never heard him call Lowrance a naturalist. He went to his room and brought back his fishing diary. Its binding looked like the heavy tweed of his outdoors suit. There were neat black lines that were filled with my father’s tidy script and pencil drawings of trout and the flies he used to catch them.
I never even knew there was such a thing as a fishing diary! But I knew at that very moment that someday I was going to make a fishing diary of my very own. I looked up at Daddy and he laughed and said I looked like a trout on a hook! Daddy told me to take pains to be accurate with my entries. He said it is better to write one entry carefully than to write a dozen willy-nilly. In life, he said, I should trust my own eye and not rely on what others tell me.
This is my plan. I will begin with wildflowers. Then I will move on to trees. Then critters. By the end of summer I will know as much as Lowrance. Maybe more. Most of all, I will not be afraid. I will make the woods my own!
Very truly yours,
Kate, the Brave
Mia leaned back and rocked for a long time. Gazing at the fire, she thought of the words she read and the spirit behind them. Even though just a girl, Kate had confronted her fears. Children were innocent of their own mortality and it made them fearless. Yet Mia felt that spirit still lived in all women’s souls. Don’t we all need to go bravely into the woods? she thought.
As she rocked, Mia stared into the flames and saw herself lying on the gurney, waiting to be rolled into surgery. She was pale and thin, looking up into the fluorescent lighting, trying to be brave knowing that in a short while her body would be cut in a battle to save her life. She was offering her breast as a sacrifice to the gods with hope they would be appeased and let her live. Mia remembered the fear she felt when the oxygen mask was placed over her mouth, wondering for one black moment if she would ever wake up.