in the morning I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to feel the hot sun on the back of my neck and watch Grandpa driving the tractor across the field and listen to Grandma practice the organ in the cool, empty church and have her wash my hair in the kitchen sink.
You could see farther there. The sun was always out.
Stay
At the end of the summer, one night after supper, Dad and I drove to a state park named Bennett Spring. We checked into a little cabin and then walked to the edge of the big blue spring itself. The air smelled like cold rain, and suspended in the water were the dark-backed trout that had drawn us here. We’d never caught a trout, and not for lack of trying.
The air by the spring was cool, but as we walked away, the smothering heat of the day returned. Dad wiped his brow with a blue handkerchief.
“When I was your age,” he said, “there was a drought so bad the grasshoppers ate the bark off the fence posts.”
In the morning we were up early. Outside, the river was already lined with men holding long fly rods and wearing waders and fishing vests. What did they carry in all those pockets? Dad and I walked downstream with our beat-up spinning rods, our rubber farm boots clunking as we went, our lures rattling in Dad’s big metal tackle box. Some of the fishermen watched us as we passed.
Along certain stretches of water, the fishermen were standing within arm’s reach of each other. Beyond them, in the water, I could see the fish, all facing upstream, nearly motionless despite the current. In the middle of the night, hundreds of trout had been released into the stream: two trout for every tag that was bought yesterday. That meant there were two trout out there waiting for me.
Finally we found a place to stand. We waited, then the opening horn sounded, and the fishing began. Immediately, everywhere, fish were being caught. The dumb fish bit first. They’d never seen a lure in their lives. They’d lived in concrete tanks until today.
But the fish were not dumb enough. Or we were dumber than they were, because though over the next few hours we saw fisherman after fisherman leave with stringers of fish, we didn’t have a solitary nibble. It was maddening because we could see the trout so clearly, we could put lures right in front of their noses, but they either ignored the lure or darted away. At home, on our pond, the bluegills would fight over our lures!
The stream grew less and less crowded, both with fish and men. We persisted, moving from spot to spot, casting, reeling in, casting, reeling in.
It started to rain.
I gave up on fishing and amused myself by teasing the small sculpins in the shallows with my lure. I dropped my jig near them and watched them dart out and try to bite the lure that was nearly the same size as they were.
After a while, I saw Dad talking to an older man. I went over.
“I’d stay if I had a slicker,” the man was saying. “Good fishing in the rain.”
“That so?”
“Puts them into a feeding mood. Plus they can’t see you because the surface of the water is disturbed. So they’re not as skittish.” He smiled kindly at me. He looked at my lure. “I tell you, though,” he said, “you might have better luck with this.” He opened his palm-sized tackle box and took out a little brown lure with a silver blade. He handed it to Dad. “This is a fine spinner for trout.”
We thanked him, and he went on his way. As Dad tied the new lure on his line, we decided to stay fifteen more minutes. Dad fished from the end of a concrete jetty. I went back to harassing the sculpins.
Pretty soon, Dad called my name. I reeled in my jig. It was time to go. I didn’t want to leave, but I was also tired of staying. The return to the activity of not-fishing was essentially equivalent to the current activity of not-catching-fish. And I was soaked, and it was raining harder than before.
Dad called again. I looked. He was still at the end of the little jetty, and his fishing rod was bent down. At first it didn’t even make sense—his fishing rod was bent, but why? What did that mean? And then I got it: fish!
A trout!
I ran over and arrived as he pulled a trout out of the water. It was a rainbow trout, which was like a piece of sky that swims and lives. We both looked at it in awe. He slipped it onto the stringer and held it up.
“I thought my hook was caught on a rock!” Dad exclaimed.
We went to the park store and bought another lure like the one Dad had. By the time we got back to the river, it was raining so hard we could barely see across the water. As far as we could tell, everyone else was gone. The rain was ours, the river was ours. Dad caught another fish. It flopped around in the shallow water, but he managed to get it onto the stringer. Then I hooked one, a nice one. Dad strung it before we took the hook out. We were grinning with excitement. Soon Dad landed another fish, but it slid from his hand and back into the water just as he unhooked it. He said, “Shoot!” and slipped on a rock and dropped his reel into the water. He pulled it out, dripping. At that moment I felt a quivering jolt on my line, and soon I’d pulled another trout into the shallow water. Dad lunged at the fish, but it wriggled out of his hands and flopped and flipped across the rocks, making slapping sounds. It was free of the hook. “Dammit!” Dad said as it slipped through his hands again. We chased it, but it finally shot off into the deeper water. The rain was a downpour. We were kneeling on the concrete jetty.
“I’m sorry, Jeremy,” Dad said.
I shrugged. I wouldn’t cry.
We had to leave anyway. We drove out of the valley. We were so wet, the car windows fogged up. I kept thinking about that last fish, having him right there but feeling him slip away. Then chasing him. Then having him again. Then slipping away . . .
By the time we got home, the skies were clear, and the temperature was back into the nineties.
Just two days later: school. Dew on the grass. Rambling tomato plants in the garden. The last bowl of cold cereal until May. Brushing my teeth in a hurry. Carrying a notebook fat with paper. Elizabeth, Susan, and I posed for a picture. Teddy sat at our feet, facing away from the camera. Elizabeth and I wore similar dark T-shirts, jeans, and white sneakers. Our hair was sun bleached, our arms tan.
“I guess this is the last first-day-of-school picture for Elizabeth,” Dad said from behind the camera.
“Good,” she said through her clenched-jaw smile.
Click.
We piled into the pickup and Elizabeth drove us to school—the route, as always, being more or less a tour past different cattle pastures. By the time we got to Russellville, it was warm. Inside the school, wading through crowds of kids we hadn’t seen all summer, it was warmer. The heat was increasing. It was like we were migrating toward a volcano.
My new fifth grade classroom was tiny, no bigger than my bedroom. It had been the teachers’ lounge last year. There were fourteen kids in my classroom. There were twenty-seven in the other fifth grade classroom. The grade school principal came by to say hello and explain that we were special because of our small room and that he, frankly, envied us. He didn’t explain why. He was sweating through his suit. He clapped his hands together and repeated the thing about us being special, then he left. Our teacher, Mrs. Davis—young, pretty, a new teacher—watched him leave, then faced us. Just because we had a small room, she told us, didn’t mean we couldn’t have a more exciting, rewarding, and fun year than ever before.
I liked her.
Because our room had no storage space, we were each allowed to pick a locker in the hallway, just like the high schoolers. I picked locker 214—since fourteen was the number of Elizabeth’s basketball jersey—and then Toni Renken casually picked a locker next to the locker that was next to my locker. In other words, the second locker to the left. Toni, whom I adored above all others. That Toni and I were in the same classroom for the third