A Pool Around the Bend a short story by Bruce Guernsey
It had been a good day, a memorable one, in fact. It was Memorial Day, after all, but for Luke Burchard, this day set aside for the nation to remember had always been one he'd rather forget. Today had been different, however, and with his feet up on the porch railing, he was having a night-cap and thinking back over the day's events. Nothing grand had happened that would shake the world, like war, or peace. No, it was something infinitely smaller when measured against the eternity of stars above him tonight, but something that nonetheless seemed to change his life just a little: a woman's laughter, the sorrow in her eyes, and a white tee shirt like a promise of the future.
Luke had spent the morning planting his garden, one of the rituals of this last Monday in May in northern New England. The weather had cooperated, and the sun was high and warm on his back as he worked his trowel in the damp soil. Carefully cupping a fledgling tomato plant, he tucked it in and firmed its bed with his hands. Six of them were certainly enough for a single guy. The other half of the twelve-pack he bought were for her, his new neighbor up the hill. "I hope this works," he thought, nervously checking his watch. "She's probably still at the parade."
In the distance he could hear the drums of the high school band and intermittent sirens from the local fire trucks. They were almost at the commons, he figured, where some old vet will make a speech and the latest widow get a folded flag; not long after, a kid with a trumpet would be playing taps.
"A planting," he said aloud, his father's word for a funeral, one of the many odd-ball expressions his old man used all the time. It made a grim kind of sense for Memorial Day. So did black flies, which were thick this year.
"A pain in the ass," he grumbled, swatting at them, but then corrected himself. "I mean 'keester.' You're a pain in the keester." He could hear his father's voice again. As a boy, he would follow him through the brush to get to some pool in the river ahead of the out-of-staters downstream. Inevitably, Luke would get his net caught on a branch and just as the elastic was about to snap back at him, he'd hear, "Don't let it kick you in the keester."
It was amazing that his father wouldn't even say "ass." His father never cussed at all, in fact, but "f-this" and "f-that" were all Luke ever heard the months he was in Vietnam. "F-everything," as if there was nothing at all that had meaning. "Nothing?" he'd wondered, and had written the word dozens of times in the journal he kept over there and kept up with still. "Write stuff down." Pop had said, "I learned to in Belgium. Helps keep you sane."
Luke finally figured out that his old man didn't swear for the same reason that he would stop and pick up trash along the road. To keep things clean. "Like a trout stream," his father believed. "The way a good cast is. You know, a tight loop, pure form. Fly fishing, son-it's all that war isn't."
He could hear the high-pitch of the microphone from the commons. She'd be home by noon. That gave him an hour to get off his keester and get those seeds in the ground.
Luke set down his scotch and flexed his fingers. He'd worked hard today and could feel it in his hands. They had that good ache to them that they had after a full day on the river, casting his six-weight. For him, a new garden had all the promise of opening day on the Newfound, and Luke took pride in the rows he made, running strings from stake to stake, mending them taut like fly line. Gardening was a kind of fishing, only on land. Like a roll cast, it was wonderfully simple when done right.
Fly fishing was not just a pastime for Luke Burchard. It was his language to explain most everything, and even people on occasion. Like "Dolly," his new neighbor, for example.
It was early in the month when he first saw her on his way to work, she and the guy who delivers propane talking outside the old Johnson house that had been for sale forever. "Finally sold," Luke said to himself as he slowed down to see who was moving in, then slowed even more when he saw her. The yard was full of dandelions, and she was standing among them smiling, pointing at this and that as she talked, the morning sun in her hair.
Warm. Luke felt suddenly warm, and as much as he joked that it must have been his propane bill-"that would heat anybody up"-he couldn't get the dandelions and sunlight and whoever-she-is out of his mind.
Heading home a couple of days later, there she was again, unloading boxes from a U-Haul with a tall young kid who looked twice her size. He was as blond as a goldfinch, but her hair was surprisingly darker in the afternoon light. A rich, auburn color, long and full down her back.
Luke had snooped around to learn that she'd moved up from Nashua to take a new job, but nobody in town knew much else, just the last name, Hammond. "Early-forties," Luke guessed, trying not to be noticed as he went by. "Ten years younger than me, but so? With my luck she must be married anyway," but someone at the diner said she'd lost her husband a few years back. No one seemed to know her first name, however, so Luke had made one up.
It happened when he saw her at the IGA. Pretending to look for a can of peas on the shelf, he watched her move down the aisle: slender in a skirt, taller than he thought she was, her back and long legs in one smooth motion. All he could think of was the trout he loved to watch from the bridge in town, how they held in the current, so steady, with just a little sway. Lovely.
So he named her "Dolly," after "Dolly Varden," which seemed appropriate enough, though Luke had never seen one, except in pictures. He'd read somewhere that they were named for a beautiful woman by a fisherman in Alaska and that the name itself had come from a novel.
"That's perfect," Luke thought. "She's gorgeous, and probably not real."
Not real, until he turned around one morning after paying for gas at the new Irving outside of town and bumped right into her.
Hello, Dolly.
Hi, but that's not my name.
Not her name?!-of course it wasn't, but all Luke could manage to say at the time was "sorry," then disappeared into the morning hurry, his face as red as the fruit on those plants would be, those tomatoes he'd just set out, and the other six, her house-warming gift.
Bristol, New Hampshire, wasn't exactly a hot spot for singles. True, there was some pretty good fishing in the Newfound, and Atlantics stocked now in the Pemi, but even these weren't reasons enough for Luke himself to return after his mother passed away. The old house was now his, and he needed it like a wading staff in the white water his life had become in the war.
He'd been unsure about college or what to do after high school, so Uncle Sam made the decision for him, and Luke soon found himself in Vietnam. His father had fought for his country years before, and for Luke to serve seemed the right thing to do.
He'd learned a lot from his old man, especially about the outdoors and especially about fishing. About fly fishing, that is. "Everything else is like throwing lead," his father told him. "This is an art, putting that fly right where you want. Let me show you how."
And he did, patiently, season after season, with a lazy old bamboo rod his father had found in a Herter's catalogue, and from the local hardware, a fiber-glass Wright-McGill, stiff and brittle though it was. "One's kinda slow and the other kinda fast. That's why I want you to learn on both. So let's switch and see how you do."
There were no free-stone streams in the jungle, of course, but there was the sea and that's where Luke would go with that faster rod every chance he could. Somehow his mother got it to him after his father had died suddenly, a heart attack when Luke was on patrol. "Could feel it happen, I swear I could," he wrote in his journal. "Right there in all that sticky air, I was freezing my butt off like we were fishing just after ice-out last year, the two of us. That's when he broke the old bamboo. I should have known."
He called to his father as if he were just downstream the whole time he was in Nah Trang, waist-deep in a blue-water bay. "You won't believe the size of this one, Pop. Look at this funny little fish. A pretty thing, all orange and white. About the size of those five-inch natives you used to bring home."
But his father didn't yell back, except at night when Luke would wake up, shivering in sweat. Hey, halt, don't step there, Jesus, and there would be the prongs of a mine, those little wires coming out of the ground, shadowy as trout. About to hit the surface, too. All of it so fast. Then he'd lie there, his heart racing, and remember what his father taught him as they looked down into the clear, fast water of the Newfound from the bridge in town. "Study the shadows," Pop said. "The small details, the slightest motion. You'll see them. The trout are there"
Paying attention to those small details had helped keep him alive, physically anyway. But like so many returning soldiers, he'd had trouble staying focused on anything, whether a person or a job. On anything, that is, but fishing. Fly fishing. It made Luke feel whole, out there casting: the roll of the line, its sweep across water, that ritual of rod and river.
Other than seasons of colorful brookies and acrobatic landlocks, his life had been a blur of odd jobs that ranged from hawking clothes at JC Penney's to punching in at factories off 128 around Boston. And his love life was pretty much the same: more entanglements than romances, especially one.
"BOOM," he'd written in caps in his journal after he and Stacia split up. They'd been together about a year since she first pulled into the used-car lot where he was working. She was just back from Alaska, where she'd driven by herself and ruined her car in the process. Luke was doing an estimate on her beat-up Nova when he saw some pictures of her on the front seat and a big fish she was holding up.
"Man, that's some king salmon you've got there," he said, and it was a whopper with lots of silver on it, too. "Fresh from the ocean, huh? Must have given you some fight."
"You know your fish. How come?" she asked, and they spent the next hour talking trout, not cars.
They'd stayed together because they fished together, and Stacia could lay a line out as well as he could. Luke loved looking at her, too, waist-deep down river from him, her arms raised and breasts up as she was casting, her blond hair pulled back tight and tucked under her cap with just a little pony tail curling out. She was cute, all right, but then she'd start screaming about something-mosquitoes or the wind or whatever-and out in the fast water, hearing her yell like that, Luke could feel his heart race the way he would at night, waking up with the sheets twisted around him and out of breath.
"I guess she's as much a mess as me," he'd written. "Passionate?-yeah, maybe. Explosive is more like it. Pots and pans, bang, bang, with her screaming at me, no telling when. Makes me feel like hitting the floor, like it's happening all over again, the dirt and bits of metal flying around and that kid Tommy who got hit right next to me, thrashing about like he was in my net and me trying to get him back in the water. Then he just stopped. Tommy, hey, hold on. And he was just a kid. Like me when I had pimples. Remember that, Pop?"
The dark pools he and Stacia shared weren't only in rivers but inside them both, and when they finally broke up, Luke didn't want to go fishing for the first time in his life. All summer and into a beautiful fall, he'd come home from work just at the evening rise and see his vest waiting there on a hook like it was wondering what was going on. But spring did come again, and the smells and sounds were too much to resist. He could hear the redwing blackbirds calling from the alders along the beaver ponds, the males anyway because their girlfriends hadn't yet shown up, and Luke figured he'd better join them before they all started jawing at one another over this spot or that. "Must be nice to have it that simple," he thought to himself, feeding his line through the guides. "I don't care if I see a fish. I just want to cast and cast and think about nothing else," but as he hiked off through the bushes towards the river, he felt the tug of his net stuck, like the past, in some branches behind him.
And here it was, spring again: the morning air freighted with lilac, and the evening, a chorus of whippoorwills and owls. On this same evening in May two years ago, he was sitting where he was now-in the same rocker, surrounded by the same screens-going through some photographs with his mother. Frail as she was, her memory was still sharp. Like mother, like son, they both held on to the past too long and tended to make everyday a memorial one.
"Look at him here," she said, and there was his old man with a big grin on his face, standing in some rubble by an Army tank. He was holding a bottle in one hand and what looked like a bust of Hitler in the other. "Me and Hitler at the Rhine," his father had written on the back of the photo.
"He might have been laughing then, but your father never slept real well after the war. Yes, nights were the worst, the poor man. He had some horrible dreams, and they never ever went away."
She was shivering now, and Luke went to get an extra blanket even though the evening was summer-like. He knew how cold she got when she'd talk about Pop, his being gone. And about the war that took him from her to start with.
"I told your father after you were born how frightened I was to have a son. I knew you'd have to serve, too, someday, and feared what it might do to you, Luther."
"I'm doing fine, Mom. Maybe it's best we put these pictures away."
"It was like a net he was caught in, those dreams he was having. That's the way he put it, your Pop did. All knotted up in a net. I guess he would, thinking how much he loved fishing. 'Sure there're wars, but fishing, that's peace,' he always said. "I know that's why he wanted you to learn to fish like him." Everything else is like throwing lead. Just why he was remembering this as his mother was speaking was not something Luke could understand, and he had written about it several times in his journal. Perhaps it was just his father's voice that was so present then, but why this particular thing his father had said? Throwing lead. Throwing lead.
"But casting a tiny plug isn't like throwing lead," Luke had written. "Lead is heavy, gets hot and kills." And then, when he spontaneously wrote the word, "shrapnel," he understood what his father meant. Hey, Tommy, Tommy, hold on. Hey, hold on.
But enough. It had been too good a day, especially for this day of memories. Not only was the garden in, but something had happened up the road that Luke couldn't quite understand. Something inside him. It was like he'd fought through some pretty bad rapids and found a new pool around the bend. "Here's to Elizabeth," he said aloud from the porch, lifting his glass to the night sky. "And her sense of humor. Hello, Dolly!"
She hadn't been mad about the name thing, hadn't popped her cork or anything. She even thought it funny that he'd called her that, though she thought at first he was talking about the country and western singer, Dolly Parton, instead of a fish.
And then there was what she said when she answered the door.
"Why, it's Louis Armstrong."
Luke had to pause for a moment on that one-huh? Louis Armstrong-but then, started to laugh. "Well, you're close-I did play the trumpet in high school."
Yes, she appreciated the plants-"I hadn't even thought about a garden"-and they had gotten along fine. She seems so at ease, this Elizabeth Hammond person, Luke thought, sipping his Scotch. He was amazed at how she had the place looking neat and cozy already, like she'd lived there for a while, but there was a sadness in her eyes that he couldn't help noticing. "I wonder what happened to her husband?"
"And Jared, what a big-shouldered kid he is and only fourteen. He looked so clean in that white tee shirt. Not a hair on his face. What's it like to be like that? I wonder if I ever was. Some crappy war will come along, it always does. But I'm tired of thinking like that."
Luke got up to fix another drink and stepped off the porch. In the cool, thin air, the stars were fiercely bright. "Wow. Look at them, what a gorgeous night," he said, looking up at Orion and the Dipper; and then Polaris, where it always is.
"There should be a fly fishing constellation," he thought, and started looking for a new pattern among the old ones above him. "I'm on a roll with names lately, so let's call it 'Sir Izaak' or 'Wulff.'"
Then he paused for a moment and shook his head. "No, 'Jared.' I'm going to name it after her kid. 'Jared.' Why's everything have to get its name from the past anyway? So what if he's never been fly fishing before. That makes it even better: all potential, a new garden. Besides, he wants to give it a shot. I'll take him to the Newfound. Yeah, 'Jared'-that's from the future."
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