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 year in a row was a stroke of gorgeous luck. And that she picked a locker near mine . . . maybe she liked me—or still liked me? Anyway, there was something thrilling about it. We would build from the ground up.
The second day of school we were sent home with slips of paper announcing that for the first time ever students would be allowed to wear shorts to school. Until the weather cooled off. And only if the shorts reached all the way to the knees.
So come, September. Hold us in suspension. The glow of the summer becoming the gold of fall. The equinox. The equal nights. The harvest moon. The nests are abandoned. There is one nest lined with orange hairs from the horses’ tails. Come, September. Suggest winter, but keep it at bay.
It was an evening to wish for, this first day of September, and after dinner Grandma and Grandpa went for a walk. The day’s breeze was gone, and that along with the mild temperature accounted for the way they felt the air only while moving through it. It was refreshing. August was yesterday.
They walked south down the gravel road. The gravel on the road was white, with two smooth wheel tracks. There was corn to the left—taller than Grandpa—and pasture to the right. The sky was stretched wide and cloudless. There were crickets in the ditches.
Their footsteps made sounds on the crushed limestone road. They talked of moving the cattle to the southwest twenty. Of the likely shortage of forage this fall. They talked of how the choir would be visiting another church on Sunday.
They walked, talked, under the bluest of skies, past several blackbirds sitting on the power line.
Then, up ahead in the road, walking toward them, Grandma and Grandpa saw the Smiths, their neighbors. It was the kind of evening that drew couples out of their houses. The Jacksons and the Smiths waved to each other. And as Grandma raised her arm over her head, she felt—and remembered—two things at once: first, the hungry kind of hollowness in her stomach despite having just eaten, which had been pestering her recently, and which seemed related to the indigestion she’d been having for weeks; and second, the twinge of pain in her shoulder and neck—like arthritis, but sharper, denser.
The sun was down, but the light was holding.
So stay, September. Dwell. Stands of goldenrod listing in the sunlight. Sumac tinged with rust. The kingdom of apples. The realm of marigolds. Potatoes in the ground. Racks of onions drying on the front lawn. Walnuts fallen in the gravel road. A snakeskin, one piece, at the base
