A year after his friend’s death, Rainer will be retired from his job, forced to do so by the dramatic decline in his faculties that’s been showing early symptoms for longer than he’s wanted to admit. His short-term memory’s crumbling. He loses the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. He forgets the name of the person he’s talking to. He can’t remember the date. Worse, he’s started to slip from English to German unawares, then to become annoyed if whoever he’s speaking with doesn’t understand him. He resists accepting what’s happening to him, which is the cause of several bitter arguments between him and Clara. In the end, his boss will deliver an ultimatum: either Rainer retires, or he’ll be forced to fire him. Protesting the injustice of it all, Rainer opts to tender his resignation. Once he leaves his job, his condition falls off steeply, until he’s little more than an oversized infant. There are moments, when she’s spooning chicken soup past his quivering lips, that Clara will recall the pale light she saw washing over Rainer’s features when he was engrossed in his books, trying to sort out the mess with the Fisherman. She’ll remember the way it blurred her husband’s face, and how she had to fight back the fear that clawed at her at the sight of him. Wiping his chin with a napkin, she’ll think that it’s as if that dead light sunk inside him, bleaching away whatever of him it fell on. When he’s breathed his last, Clara, her eyes dry, will turn to Lottie and tell her that she lost her husband long before this. She lost him to light the color of the full moon, of the froth on top of a wave, of a burial shroud.
XXXI
Before his retirement and death, though, there’s one more matter with which Rainer Schmidt concerns himself, and that’s Dutchman’s Creek. If you go back to older maps of the area, you’ll find sections of streams and creeks that appear to follow some of the same route, but nothing substantial enough to count as a match. At first, the fishermen who come to try its waters assume it is one of those other streams, and that whatever map they’ve consulted is off, or their memories of the place mistaken. Over the course of a couple of years, those fellows talk to one another, compare notes, and gradually, it becomes clear to everyone that this in a new creek. Such things happen, of course: heavy flooding can carry away part of a stream’s bank, open a fresh path for it; a rockslide can push its waters in another direction. This creek runs all the way to the Hudson, through banks steep and thickly forested. Not a few of the men who trade their impressions of it agree that the stream looks as if it’s been there for a goodly number of years. It’s as if the land has unfolded a little extra of itself. No one can remember noticing it, previously, but no one can recall not noticing it, either.
What brings Rainer to it is the notice the creek draws from the Water Authority. A few men have tried, but no one has been able to pinpoint the location of the stream’s headwaters. As you trace it back, the creek appears to be headed directly towards the Reservoir. However, its upper reaches snake through dense woods that seem to confound anyone who ventures too far into them. A couple of fellows were lost for a day and a night amidst the evergreens, and one old man spent upwards of three days wandering the area, as the pines and spruce gave way to tall trees unlike any he’d seen. Through their trunks, he claims to have seen a distant body of water, what he thought was the Reservoir, except the water looked dark. Everyone who hears his story dismisses it as a hallucination brought on by combined exposure and lack of proper nourishment. Concerned about a possible leak, the higher-ups at the Water Authority have had the Reservoir inspected, from dam to weir to bed. Nothing has been found amiss.
This is when Rainer arrives. At first, he hadn’t paid much attention to the talk about the new creek. You might imagine, he isn’t much on fishing. As the talk of the stream has continued, though, his interest has been stirred. The more he’s heard of it, the less Rainer has liked what he’s hearing. It would be easy enough to dismiss the reports of enormous fish whose like no fisherman has seen — and which conveniently snap whatever line has them as they’re on the verge of being landed — as the usual exaggerations of men who’ve used their trip to the woods to sneak a little moonshine. Had Rainer not been through the events at the camp, he might discount the other stories he hears as further evidence of that liquor’s potency. A pair of boys playing hooky is gone much longer than they’d planned when they become lost trying to follow a pale figure they glimpse in the woods upstream. An old man returns to the same spot every day for two weeks, not to fish, but to listen to a voice he swears is that of his son, killed in the War. One member of a fishing party falls into the creek and would likely have drowned were his companions not excellent swimmers; the man insists he saw his brother, dead these many years from pneumonia, staring up at him from beneath the water’s surface. When Clara and Lottie ask him what’s happening, Rainer gives his usual answer — he isn’t sure — but this time around, he doesn’t wait for things to grow worse before he acts. He convinces whoever requires it that his position patrolling the aqueduct makes him perfectly suited for getting to the bottom of this matter, then tells Jacob he’ll have need of him the following Sunday, after church.
It’s a hot, humid afternoon when Jacob parks his car on one side of Tashtego Lane and sets off with his father-in-law in search of the stream. You can be sure, he’s thinking about the last excursion he accompanied Rainer on. They don’t have axes, don’t have any tools, at all, which Jacob hopes is a good sign. They walk a few hundred yards across a meadow to a low ridge. Rainer and Jacob climb the ridge, then half-slide down its far side to the modest valley it forms with the ridge behind it. This second ridge is steeper, taller, an earth and stone wall, but it’s heavily forested with evergreens the men use as handholds to help themselves up it. Just past the top of the hill, he looks down through the spruce and pine and sees a creek white and foaming below. Digging their heels into the soil, zigzagging from tree to tree, he and Rainer descend the hillside, until they’re on the narrow shelf that borders this side of the stream. Maybe a dozen yards over the turbulent water, the other shore is a mirror of theirs, a slender strip of land at the foot of a ridge heavy with trees. On the left, the creek foams down an incline halfway to a waterfall; ahead and on the right, it runs level for ten or fifteen yards before plunging down another set of rapids. Jacob glances at Rainer, who’s staring at the water’s surface. Afraid that his father-in-law is having another of his spells — the name his wife and mother-in-law have given to his moments of blankness — Jacob touches Rainer’s shoulder, whereupon the older man starts, shakes his head, and turns left. “This way,” he says, heading upstream. Over his shoulder, he adds, “You remember from before. If you hear someone, do not listen to them. If you see someone, do not look at them.” Jacob wants to ask how exactly he’s supposed to avoid looking at someone he’s seeing, but he understands the gist of Rainer’s instruction, and hurries to keep up with him.
They don’t travel far, for which Jacob is grateful. As the bank they’re walking slants upwards, the mossy earth that covered it gives way to rock made slick by the water’s spray. Although Jacob is aware of something in the creek’s tumult, he’s too busy concentrating on where to plant his next footstep to pay it much notice. (Later, he’ll tell Lottie he had the impression the water was full of white bodies. “Like fish?” she’ll ask. He’ll shake his head.) But even as he leans forward to maintain his balance, all the while watching Rainer above him, pinwheeling his arms to keep from toppling backwards, Jacob hears a voice speaking to him.