Lucien’s mother cried and hugged him and with her small body pulled him into the house. The place looked the same, but it appeared quieter. His mother was a strong woman, a fighter, so the house was still alive, she would never let the house die, but it was quiet. The house was special to Eva, and now it was hers, just hers; her husband was dead but she had her home. Lucien liked the way it felt. He was surprised that he could not feel the presence of his father and more surprised that he wanted to. He knew that if he raised the issue with his mother she would tell him in no uncertain terms that his father was everywhere, breathing in each room, stuck like cobwebs in each corner. So he didn’t mention it.
“Food, you need food, don’t you?”
“Actually, I’m starving.”
“It won’t take a minute.” She was off to the kitchen; her son trailed behind her. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.” Turning to see him again, she said, “You look well. Fit. You look fit.”
“I suppose I am fit. But look at you. You look terrific, Ma. Have you been working out, some aerobics or something? Playing a little basketball?”
“I walk. I walk everywhere these days. Except to the grocery store. That’s too far away, at least for carrying sacks.”
Lucien sat at the table and watched his mother gather food from the refrigerator and cupboards and drop pans on the stove with noise that wasn’t noise. “Pancakes, eggs, and sausage. I know it’s lunch time, but that’s what you need.” She hesitated for a moment, twisting her small face. “No eggs. There are eggs in the pancakes. We’ve got to watch our cholesterol.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He watched as she broke eggs into a bowl with flour and milk. “You do look really good, Ma.”
Without turning to face him, she said, “I feel good. I miss your father, but people die. You live with it.” Then quickly, “Tell me about Honduras.”
“Nothing to report really. It wasn’t much different from Espanola, to tell the truth. Mostly we just sat around the base.” He recalled the rocking motion of the soldiers he knew, leaning at sills while reading letters from home, rocking back and forth on their heels, just waiting, waiting to go home, waiting to be told to do something, waiting to be told not to wait any longer. “It was pretty boring. A lot of waiting.”
“Your room is all ready for you. It’s not exactly how you left it.”
“You mean it’s clean.”
“It’s very clean. And let’s try to keep it that way.” She poured batter onto the skillet.
Lucien listened to the hiss of the frying cakes as he thought about sleeping in the house. He didn’t want to stay there, didn’t want to shower where his father showered, sit on the same toilet. He realized for the first time that he was afraid of missing the man, afraid of finally facing the loss. Until now it had been convenient to blame his father for his own death, thinking that if he had taken better care, if he had slowed down, if.… “I’m not staying here.”
Spatula in hand, she turned. “What?”
“I need to find a place of my own,” was the best he could come up with.
“Well, I can understand that, but you just got here.”
“I’m going to find something as soon as I can. Today maybe.” He felt like a kid caught in a stupid lie that was snowballing.
There were no tears from Eva’s eyes, no sounds of crying. “That’s stupid. And mean.” She turned, examined the pancakes, and tossed one into the garbage.
She was right. He didn’t want to hurt his mother. “Ma, I’ve been sleeping in a bunk under a fat guy with gas for five months. I need room.”
“You’ll have the room to yourself.”
“I know.” He paused. “It was a long drive. Of course I’ll stay here.”
She stepped to him and touched his face.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” He looked about the kitchen. “I’m scared of missing Dad, I guess.”
She turned to the cooking and he knew that she was crying. His father was certainly dead. His tying room, the small room at the back of the house where he had fashioned his flies for fishing, was neat. All of his tools, his vise, his bobbins, bodkins, and scissors were there, but everything was orderly. The feathers that he used were packed away in clear plastic boxes with mothballs, as were the squares of fur: rabbit, deer, elk, bear, muskrat. Lucien sat at the desk, loosened and tightened the vise, and looked at the hooks sitting in plastic cups, smallest to largest, left to right. So much order would have driven his father crazy. When his father was alive, the desk was a mess. There were pieces of feathers floating and clinging to the sleeves of his sweater, the debris of trimmed deer hair everywhere, snippets of thread and floss and tinsel littering the floor. Now it was all neat, arranged as death must be because it is so simple.
He grew up confused by his father’s belief in simple and precise answers; one answer in particular, that one can move away and live without the world. Now, Lucien understood all too well why his father moved to the high desert. It was a matter of leaving the world and its problems with his race behind. So he left black people and hopefully white people as well, but “of course there was no escaping them.” Lucien resented his father protecting him from the world. He allowed himself to be herded off to college and directed toward his father’s profession until finally he “lost his mind” and joined the army. Lucien could not shake the look on his father’s face when he received the news of Lucien’s enlistment.
Lucien took the cover off of a box of hackle feathers and pulled out a cape of grizzly. He admired the dark and white pattern and imagined the wings of an Adams sticking straight up. It was a good cape, the feathers stiff, varying greatly in size. He put a size 14 hook into the vise and secured it. He threaded black thread through the tube of a bobbin, and made the first turns around the shank. He already felt the tension leaving him. He chose two small grizzly hackle feathers for the wings and tied them perpendicularly to the shank, the motions feeling easier than he imagined they would. It had been so long. He found some brown hackle in the box, tied in a feather of it and another feather of grizzly. He cut a few barbules of brown and grizzly for the tail and tied them down. With each step of building the fly he felt better and he could hear his father’s voice, the voice that he loved, not the voice that his aching heart had concocted. From a patch of muskrat hide he teased some hairs and rolled them onto the waxed thread, wrapped the hook, and formed the body. He remembered fighting with his fingers as a young boy trying to do this, these motions that now seemed so simple. He remembered his father behind him, watching, laughing, instructing. Finally he had the last hackle feather gripped in the pliers and was turning it round the fly; the feather was fanning out and pointing in every direction. The lure began to breathe. He had sweet memories of doing this through the winter in anticipation of spring fishing. When he did find a place to live he would take the things that had been his father’s and use them, keep them alive.