It is the same this May morning. Rivers is driving down to his shop, The March Brown. She is driving up from the mailbox. As he lifts his hand, she turns her head away. He makes a certain gesture, an angry bunch of fingers from the days when his father’s name was Riverso—Misfortune, Reverse, Wrong Side. He smooths his thick, white hair, looking into the rearview mirror. He is not an old fool yet. Calm, calm, he thinks, and recites an ancient Chinese poem:
On the southern slopes flocks of crows make their home,
On the northern slopes people set nets to catch them.
But when they fly, inaccessible on the winds,
Of what use then are nets and bird traps?
Bitch, he thinks, Mrs. Crow Bitch dressed in black wool and living on the south slope of the mountain, evading the traps of neighbors’ pleasantries. Has she seen that gesture? His wife calls her bitch, too. His wife’s hands are serious, with tapered fingers as smooth as white jade. She embroiders birds on linen. A museum has published a book of her designs with lists of matching silk colors The American Bittern—celadon, pearl, medium dove, tête de Nègre, fawn, faded meadow grass. She calls herself a needlecrafter and poses by the window in a brocade slipper chair. Her spare needles lie on the mahogany sewing table like a school of minnows. In her fingers a metallic shiver trails thread as fine as child’s hair, but there is a curious sense of dreary labor in the finished work.
She phones him at the shop later that morning. He leaves a blue dun poised in the vise. Outside the south wind cracks the glossy end branches of the trees like whips.
“That goddamn woman—” He knows who she means. “That crazy, rat-haired bitch, she drove right across the yard, smashed the little apple tree, went through the garden, then back onto the road and up the mountain.”
This is the first year of bloom for the Golden Russet. White blossoms are loosely scattered in its crown like a drifting cloud of mayflies. His wife says the top half of the tree now hangs upside down nearly touching the lawn, held to the main trunk only by a strip of bark. She can see the bull’s-eye center of its heartwood. There are four great curved furrows in the earth from the Jeep’s tires.
“A great little couple,” she says, her voice twanging hard as a knotted linen cord. “Her and that husband that’s never around. Got your eye on her too, haven’t you? Our neighbors. A great place you picked to live, here. A fishing alky who can’t make a living and crazy neighbors, that’s what I end up with.” She slams down the receiver. He can hear finality. She has had enough for a long time and says so, often.
At noon she calls again. There is a sound like lightning in the wire. Here it comes, he thinks. She says she is going back to the city, taking her bird designs, her sewing box, her watercolors of wild mushrooms, and the bottles of vitamin pills. He can have the rest. He knows this speech, has heard it before, how he lured her away from her city friends to live on a back road where tongue-tied, hostile natives squat in claptrap trailers. She names his faults and bad habits, then says she is not getting any younger. He has what he wants, but she has nothing. Her voice rings plangent with self-pity. He feels angry, but what she says is true. He has his own pleasure in The March Brown, with its custom-tied flies, antique rods, imported English creels and old fishing prints, his books of Chinese poetry. He likes the snugness of the shop in winter with the stove kicking out breakers of heat, the glint of a fallen piece of peacock herl, the stacked boxes of moose mane, wild-turkey wing, hare masks, and grizzly necks. The March Brown, steadily losing the retirement money, silently eating up his golden-age coin, and the sad, subtle poems about autumn mist, fallen leaves, and flowing water putting out his last sparks of ambition. He doesn’t know if this is contentment or deadly inertia. Let her go embroider her goddamn birds. One can live cheaper than two.
He comes home at dusk. Her car is gone, and already the house has assumed a different aspect, an angular flatness. The lawn is plowed and scored not with four, but with hundreds of deep grooves. The apple tree is a flattened knot of broken branches. Is this his wife’s goodbye, or Sauvage’s wife’s hello? Will he find, inside his door, Mrs. Bitch, her black skirts bunched and pulled up behind, wagging them at him like the quivering tail display of a lustful female crow? He notices that the sky fits like a dove’s breast between the bud-swollen branches of maple. There is no one inside the house, nor a letter of goodbye. The vitamin pills and Dr. Bronner’s Breakfast Tonic are gone. The living room seems to have arched its ceiling higher, the chair legs are more graceful, the window glass brilliantly clear, holding the dulling light for long minutes before the dark. Red taillights go up the mountain—Sauvage homeward bound. The familiar fragrance of his wife is still in the room, will be for a long time. Li Bo, he thinks.
… though the scent remains
In person she’ll not come again
A love that is something, something falling
Or white dew wet on the something moss
He tries a stiff sob, but it is for Li Bo, not his gone wife. Sauvage’s headlights are coming back down the mountain, yellow torches flaring through the hardwoods, first to east, then to west on the switchbacks, then along the straight and into the driveway. He will apologize for the multiple tire trenches in the lawn or perhaps bear a last message from the vanished embroiderer.
Sauvage has a French-Canadian face, long and narrow with skin the color of neutral shoe polish, a nose made for the nasalities of joual. There are circles around his eyes like bruises. He is twenty years younger than Rivers. He folds a card in his small fingers and folds again.
“I got trouble up home. Hey, I got to use your phone?” He has on a black-and-red checked wool cap of the type favored by old deer hunters, brown cotton twill work pants, and felt-lined pacboots. There is a draggled Dark Cahill in his hat. “I got to use your phone,” he says again. “I come home, my wife’s eating a mouse. She don’t talk, just eating it there with the skin on—” He gags, recovers.
Rivers thinks of that pale mouth reddened. A piece of wet gravel falls from the edge of Sauvage’s boot onto the floor with an infinitesimal tick.
“She put the phone in the sink, it’s full of hot water. I got to call her doctor. She has these troubles.” There is an upward rock to the rhythm of his sentences.
Rivers points to his wall phone and goes into the living room out of courtesy, closing the door behind him. He hears a murmur, coughing, then the outside kitchen door closing. The red taillights go steadily back up the mountain.
Later the ambulance rushes up, a bonfire flying through the trees. Rivers leans against the cold window, his breath clouding the glass and obscuring the reflection of his aging face. It has begun to rain, spring rain, good for young apple trees, good for young trout. The ambulance descends, its headlights shining on the curved lakes that fill the wheel ruts in his ruined lawn. Sauvage trails behind in his truck, solitary mourner in a cortege.
Rivers has a sense of narrow escape from disaster, like the victim of an earthquake who sees the houses on each side in dust-plumed rubble while his own is untouched. He feels that some powerful divine force has summoned away the two women who lived on the south side of the mountain. Well, they had to take their turns at misery; he has had his, he thinks, years before, the drinker stuttering into the glass caverns of bottles, so wounded by the circumstances of his wretched life that it seemed the knots of his heart could never be unpicked, even with an awl. He has found a way to cure himself of all suffering and worry by memorizing ancient Chinese poems and casting artificial flies in moving water. He is solaced by the faint parallels between his own perception of events and those of the stringy-bearded scholars of the Tang, enjoying, as he does, a sad peace at the sight of feathered ephemera balanced on the dark-flowing river.
In bed he reads the paper. A woman has found god through a car accident, saying, “What happened to me brought out my religion like crazy.” Below this is a one-line filler: “Some say to dream of doves means happiness.” Rivers has heard his wife say this different
ly—“Bird dreams mean sunbeams.” But in fact how many people do dream of doves? Ornithologists? Hawkish politicians who wake in hot sweats of resentment rather than happiness? “Dream of trout,” says Rivers in his bed.
He dreams of a crow. A malignant crow with a red eye like a rock bass. Human fat glistens on its beak, as cruelly curved as secateurs. A glint of light burns on the steely edge and becomes a flashing needle, the crow itself an embroidered bird worked by the erratic electric impulses of his sleeping brain. He wakes, his heart flailing like a netted trout. The window is a grey rectangle in the blackness of the wall. He hears an engine laboring up the mountain. Sauvage going back to his trailer.
It is still raining in the morning when he goes to The March Brown. The black locust trees lean against the stained sky, the water on the road hisses. There arc no customers all morning.
In the afternoon he is reading how Yuan Mei’s cook falls ill with hallucinations and thinks sunlight is snow, when Sauvage comes in. He is bigger than he was in the kitchen. He says he has stopped by to thank Rivers for the use of his phone last night. He looks around the shop. The rain still beats against the window, but inside it is warm, scented with fine oils and dry feathers, with burning beech, seasoned bamboo, and the thin, intoxicating odor of head cement. Certain emanations come from the shelf of Chinese poets—the returning boat, moon water, and river weeds. Sauvage seems calm, as calm as Rivers. He looks beyond the streaming window, deciding some private matter.
“You know, the Yellow Bogs?” Sauvage asks, leaning on the counter and cocking his right leg comfortably. Neither wants to talk about vanished needlecrafters or mad rodent appetites. “Yellow Bogs is up in the north.” There are stoic folds at the corners of his mouth. He knows of the place because of his grandfather’s stories. The old man worked up in the north-country swamps in the early twenties, cutting timber and pulp. Sauvage has never been there himself, but he knows the fables of the country and can salt his sentences with Quebecois expletives.
The Logger Brook, the Yellow Branch, and the Black Branch come thrashing down the steep mountains through a tangle of deadfalls and slash, in company with fifty nameless streams and brooks. All this water flattens out in the Bogs in random sloughs and ponds. Black fountains well up like the fuming outlets of an underground river flowing in secret torrents through cavities under the mountains. Sauvage murmurs, drawing invisible lines across the counter with his yellow fingers. Rivers feels the floor of The March Brown shift under his feet like flooding sand.
Yes, says Sauvage, that Yellow Bogs is bad country. Bear hunters lose their dogs in there. Once a team of horses went down in a bottomless pool, dragging the driver with them below the stinking black mud. It is cold in the Bogs, shrouded in thick mists and rain, and August snow stings the swamp maples. The drops of moisture on the tips of the spruce branches never dry before rain falls again. Rivers can hear the northern rain stored in the empty woods, hear it falling on the humped boulders at the water’s edge.
Sauvage leans closer, his finger taps, and he says that in the cold, rain-stippled rivers, in the deep sinkholes of Yellow Bogs, there are native brook trout. Old trout. Giants of the water. Some of them, says Sauvage, go over eight pounds. In his inner eye Rivers sees the Yellow Bogs shaped like a huge black bottle, and himself, smaller than a mote of dust, drawn into the neck by an invisible current of desire.
Sauvage and Rivers jounce on the front seat of the truck. The logging road marked on the topographical map has fallen back to wilderness in the decades since the last survey. Twice they prize the truck out of mudholes with a cut poplar for a lever, Sauvage lunging, Rivers rocking the wallowing vehicle as the wheels spin out gouts of cold mud. Thick snow still lies in the northern hollows. The road vanishes before they reach the Bogs.
“Shank’s mare!” cries Rivers in a new, high-pitched voice. It is late afternoon, the air chilly and raw after the snug truck cab. Sauvage takes up the small canoe like a cross.
Rivers walks in front with a heavy pack, an adversary that tries to pull him to the ground. Sauvage’s right to go first is stronger because of his grandfather’s presence sixty years earlier on this same trail, but Rivers burns with hotter lust to penetrate the Bogs. He has brought his old Garrison bamboo rod, his favorite when he was a young man, a rod with memories. Sauvage’s rod is a cheap, discount-store bargain.
After half a mile they rest. Sauvage smokes a cigarette. Rivers sucks the smell of leaf mold and wet ferns into his nose. There is a burning spot between his shoulder blades coming from the whiskey bottles carefully wrapped and buried in the depths of the pack. They send out a feeling like a hot-water bottle and he feels safe in their company, although he has not had a drink for six years and has taught himself to think of alcohol as a corrosive lye that will burn out his liver and lights. The embroiderer made him take an oath never to drink again. He remembers the fluttering candle, himself naked on his knees on the pine floor, his right hand held high, his fervent swearing never, never to take another drink of alcohol, not sherry, not rum, not beer, and certainly never whiskey, while the woman in the ice-blue satin nightgown embroidered all around the hem with stooping falcons smiled down on him with wet and gleaming teeth.
The light seeps from the sky as they go along the faint trail. Swamp chill comes up from the ground and mosquitoes whine. A pale strip of water glimmers through the trees, and Rivers has a sense of pleasant loneliness, of being at the edge of a cliff. It is Yellow Bogs. The light bleeds away and a dark angle of shadow spreads over the water. The waterweeds go a deep, sinking black.
Rivers struggles to put up the tent. In the west a heavy roll of clouds holds a deep bronze patina. A mosquito hawk rows through the lake of sky like a feathered boat, his wings trailing a stuttering sound. The yellow flames of Sauvage’s fire leap, and Rivers frames words with his lips: “How about a drink?” He does not say them. It is all for himself, and he can still wait a little longer.
Sauvage cries, “Tomorrow, big trout watch out! I hope I brought a frying pan big enough to hold one of them big ones. Hey, Rivers, how you like this place?”
“Feels like home,” says Rivers.
“Gives me the creeps in the dark,” answers Sauvage. A few drops of rain fall, each a spit in the fire. The silence has a heavy weight. Rivers thinks a little of the Five-bottle Scholar, Wang Chi, who died from overindulgence in wine. There are worse ways.
This habit of his of sinking backward into the past sets him outside the events of the present. Everything has happened before: the deaths of children, the house burning in the night, the barred shadows of poplars lying across the road in late autumn, sharp-toothed illness biting into soft bones, loneliness, the village scourged by bearded invaders, the people cruelly tortured, a drunken reveler singing a half-forgotten verse in the dusk, the scent of bruised grass, the emptied cup, the slow wingbeat of a dying crow. He recognizes himself as a struggling spentwing floating briefly on time’s river. Before he falls asleep in the faintly musty tent, he touches some of his shining bottles. The rain comes across the Bogs and onto the tent like an iron threshing machine in a prairie wheat field.
His watch says 5:20. Fine cold points of mist touch his face, then dissolve in the heat from his body. He crawls out into the dim morning. Larch branches like severed arms writhe and float in the fog. Yellow Bogs is hidden behind opaque layers of mist, and the drenched earth runs in streams and rivulets.
There is Sauvage, kneeling in front of a neat pyramid of shaved dead spruce branches, their dry hearts exposed, curls of birch bark bunched underneath. In a second the flames catch. A wavering globe of orange light hangs in the mist around him, his long face still creased with the lines of sleep. Rivers is contrary this morning; he does not want fire and breakfast, he wants to find the secret pools in Yellow Bogs where the giant trout lie waiting, their fins gently strumming the water.
But Sauvage wants to stay on the margin, fishing the edge of the Bogs. “How about keep this camp until the fog burns off?” he
says. “I seen this thick stuff hang in most of the day. Look at it, you don’t see thirty feet.”
“This is only the edge. We get any trout in here, they’ll be fleas,” mutters Rivers. The lunkers—he says—will be deep in the coiled entrail of the Bogs, maybe a two-day journey in. “We got to make some time,” he says. “No point in coming two hundred miles up here to catch midget trout.”
They paddle in silence, the wet tent bunched between them. The water narrows, broadens, narrows again. Sauvage looks left and right, over each shoulder. Spruce, larch and cedar, monotonously similar, loom from unsuspected shores, then fall away.
“Islands,” says Sauvage. Then, mournfully, “Jesus, in here less than a day and I bet we’re lost.”
“Not lost,” lies Rivers. “I got the direction all lined out. Been following the main current. Got my compass.” He has the reckless feeling that nothing matters except going forward. A willow leaf curves away from them and they can hear the muffled rushing of stream water into the Bogs away to their right. They drag the canoe over barriers of wedged and woven sticks and branches in stout beaver dams. Channels twist and curve, dozens of tiny streams and rivulets tinkle and splash into the grass-choked marshy perimeter of the Bogs. The water is brown and deep. Once Rivers sees a submerged log move, a trick of the cloudy water or the ponderous drift of a big fish. Trout are here. He can smell them. Nymphs, he thinks, maybe where the streams run in, maybe go up some of the bigger brooks a little way. Wet flies, black gnats, spentwings, everything drowning, wet, underwater, and lost in tail-churned mud or shroudlike fog. But there is enmity in Sauvage’s paddling, and Rivers thinks it is too early for that. Rivers guides them to a small sandbar under the cracked arm of a cedar.