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.