amongst the more interesting clutter on the heavy pine coffee table sitting in front of the fireplace. The table contained its usual sort of mess—several books, an open fly box containing a variety of different flies, an ashtray, and assorted shreds of material Keefe sometimes used for tying flies. Today there were two crow feathers, one striped belly feather from a wild turkey, and three desiccated squirrel tails. Stink was most intrigued by the squirrel tails. Sandy set the water bowl on the kitchenette floor and walked back into the main living area to get her gear out.
“And stay off the sofa,” she said. Stink looked up at her, wagged his tail a few strokes, took one of the squirrel tails on the coffee table into his teeth, and promptly tugged himself up onto the sofa, where he lay down with a huff and began to lick the dried fur, holding the tail between his front paws. “Such a good, obedient boy. You make me so proud.”
Sandy stepped into her waders and slipped on her fishing vest. The room wrapped around her as she got her gear ready. While the other areas of the bungalow were slight and spare, this room was cluttered and densely packed. At its center sat the coffee table, along with the sofa where Stink now lay and an armchair, both of dark brown leather, both equally cracked and well worn. On the shelves that covered the walls from floor to ceiling all round, books were stuffed with little concern for organization: some set askew, some upright and spine out, others in careless stacks, and all well coated with a layer of dust. What space remained in the room was filled with fishing gear—old waders and fishing vests; an assortment of fly rods, some old, some newer; an old wicker creel hung from a small set of discarded deer antlers mounted on the wall near the front door. In the back corner of the room sat Keefe’s fly-tying bench with a straight-backed chair in front of it. The workbench was in fact an old desk, with a magnifying lamp attached to the left side and a brace of small drawers rising up from its back side. On the desktop and spilling from the drawers, the tools of the craft Keefe plied here—hooks of many sizes, a vise, scissors and pliers, bobbins, spools of various colors of thread, and shocks of feathers and fur in an array of textures, types, and colors, both drab and vibrant. Keefe was a skillful artisan, deftly producing all the standard fly patterns effective on the fish in the waters of the Ripshin River, patterns intended to imitate specific insects at various stages of development as well as those designed simply to attract and excite the eye of a hungry trout. But to Sandy he was also an artist, occasionally creating fly patterns defined more by their fanciful beauty than by any practical application in the catching of fish. He’d made the earrings that now dangled from Sandy’s ears—a fairly conventional woolly bugger pattern, with the hooks clipped off but with strands of aquamarine peacock herl woven through the black fluff. Each time she stood in the midst of the bungalow’s clutter, she felt what she could only explain as an embrace, one infused with a warmth she still craved after these past five years.
Keefe had never been overly forthcoming with details of his past. He had not, at first, even been inclined to permit Sandy much in the way of admittance to his little hermitage. Only as a result of the random happenstance of two anglers along the same river occasionally intersecting did their two very separate lives begin to become intertwined. Though they had grown comfortable and intimate with one another over the years, their relationship remained one very much situated in the present, shaped by a shared love and respect for the waters of the Ripshin and the fish in those waters. About all Sandy knew of Keefe’s past was that he had been for many years a professor at the community college in Sherwood. His credentials could have landed him a more prestigious, higher-paid academic position, but he had chosen Sherwood to be close to the trout waters of the Ripshin Valley. Eventually, Sherwood had not been close enough and he and his wife, Alice, had moved into the little bungalow nestled in the midst of national forest land here along the headwaters of the Ripshin. When his wife died in an auto accident only three months after the move, Keefe retreated into a private world of guilt and grief along the banks of the waters he loved still more. They each had traded a past life, at great cost, for a life along the Ripshin. And this had been a fair trade and enough for each of them. Their lives together thus far were of this place and this time, and neither clamored for more.
Sandy strung her rod and tied on the last yellow stonefly pattern in the fly box she carried in her vest. This one fly would likely be all she required for the evening’s fishing, but if she’d made it in time for the hatch and the brook trout were hitting, it would only be foolish not to have a few extras of this deadly fly pattern. She had a few yellow stoneflies in the emergency case in her purse, but it was simpler to step to Keefe’s tying bench and grab a couple. She knew he’d been tying this pattern in preparation for the season.
On Keefe’s tying bench she found an ample supply of newly tied yellow stoneflies, hooked in neat rows into a square of tattered foam board, at least a dozen of them. Sandy pinched one from the foam board, placed it in her fly box, and reached for one more. The second fly was tied with the same degree of expertise and identical to the first. But it was tied backward. The yellow dubbing was wrapped around the wrong end of the hook shank, making it impossible to thread the tippet through the hook’s eye, and the tinted squirrel-hair hackle swept away from, not over, the hook itself.
Sandy examined the small placard of flies more closely. Three neat rows of yellow stonefly patterns. At first glance they all seemed tied with Keefe’s usual precision. On closer inspection she found one more, perfect, except that it also was backward. Sandy set the card of flies back on the bench and dropped onto the chair. Keefe had always been prone to moments of reverie and distraction. And he’d certainly tied this particular pattern so often that he could do it almost automatically. That, combined with one of those moments of distraction, could easily be responsible for the faulty flies. After all, it was only a couple of them. Then again, it could signal something more. Sandy, scrolling back through her memory, couldn’t think of any other signs that might, with this incident, begin to shape a pattern. This was simply a fluke, something that could be reasonably explained. Then again, so much of their time was spent apart, when a telling moment would be unnoticed by her. And there was that one time. She had tried to push it to the back of her mind, but it pushed its way forward nonetheless. About a month or so ago, as she was getting ready to leave Keefe’s place, he’d offered her the key to the fire-road gate, so she could let herself through. The entrance to the fire road was barricaded by a pipe-rail gate. To pass onto the fire road required a key to the huge, rusting padlock that held the gate closed. Aside from forest service personnel and game wardens, the only ones with a key were Keefe and whoever owned the other house along the fire road, a weathered, crumbling structure of brown-painted cinder block and plywood a half mile downstream from Keefe’s. “Some fellow from down in North Carolina, I think,” Keefe had told her. “Never seen him.”
That time a month past, Keefe had dug the key out of the clutter on the coffee table and held it up for her. She’d had her own key to the gate for nearly four years by then.
When, with some uncertainty in her voice, she had reminded Keefe of this, he shook his head, chuckled, and tossed the key back onto the coffee table.
“Of course. Wasn’t thinking, I guess. What do they call it? A senior moment?”
They’d both laughed it off and thought no more of it. It could be nothing. Nothing at all. A moment of distraction. Could happen to anyone of Keefe’s age. Anyone of any age, for that matter. But she’d keep a closer eye on him now, watch for the signs.
Sandy put the defective flies in her fly box, along with one more of the good ones. Stink continued to lick the squirrel tail as she gave his ruff a quick scratch, picked up her rod, and left the bungalow. She crossed the clearing to the streamside footpath and turned upstream, in search of the yellow stonefly hatch, brook trout, and Keefe, in that order.
Keefe at His Workbench: Yellow Stonefly
Unwinding from the spool, each turn of the yellow drubbing thread tight and contiguous with the turn it follows. Turn after turn along the shank, beginning to hint at a body, accumulating into a simulation of the thorax of Suwallia pallidula, so favored by Salvelinus fontinalis.
