obligatory attempt to protect the floor. Kyle and the hardware store owner’s son, Harold, talked to each other about baseball, and continued their perennial discussion on whether the Yankees or Red Sox would prevail in the East, that is they did until Cyrus McGovern moved in on them, hooking his thumbs into the slits of his overalls, and, sucking air through his teeth, signaled he intended diverting the conversation. Directing it the way he preferred it to go, he extended a chubby finger the wrong way, pointing not to the newly threaded nipples but to the chainsaw.
“I wish I hadn’t cut all my alfalfa week before last,” he said, crinkling his face up into a hundred interconnecting wrinkles. Apparently mistaking the source of the odor, he fixed his gaze as well as his finger disapprovingly on the disemboweled chainsaw. “Now I’ll just have to find some other way to get that smell from my nose.”
Harold wiped his hands on a hemmed red cotton rag as he gave Kyle a quick look, and smiled. “What can I get you, Cyrus?”
“Well, see, I need about a dozen of these here things.” Cyrus fished his pointer finger into the chest pocket of his bib overalls and pulled out a rusted half-foot long carriage bolt. “And I need as many square nuts and washers to match.”
Harold nodded going past the upraised bolt and walked down the narrow corridor towards slanted metal bins containing assorted screws, nuts, and bolts—carriage and machine type both—with Cyrus following right close behind him and talking continuously about something or other Harold probably couldn’t have cared less about hearing. It was then that the new guy, still in his teens, came up to Kyle and asked if he could be of any help.
“Well, yes,” Kyle said, realizing he was just another customer now. “I would like a new one of these v-belts.” Helpfully, he held out the old one, folded into thirds. The teenage clerk took the belt and unfolded it to read and consider the information contained on the little oblong impression on the backside.
“Hmmm,” he said, detecting a little problem. “We only carry Gates. But I’m sure we’ve got a replacement.” And so, with Kyle following to the check-out counter, he cross-referenced the information from the old belt while consulting a book, writing the information down on a slip of paper, continuing then to the other side of the store. He snagged a new belt from the wall, bringing it down swinging on a hook attached to the end of a ten foot long pole, a replacement the new guy was sure would do the trick as good as or better than the original.
Going home by the river road, Kyle took note of the alfalfa fields along the way. The green crop stubble, already turning yellow, seemed somehow delicate, exposed to the sun. In one place, where the imprint of wheels had stimulated new growth, parallel green tire marks swerved across a field. Dust swirled up from the cabin floor because both the driver side and passenger windows of the truck were rolled down, but Baron was happy poking his nose to the wind and Kyle enjoyed feeling the breeze on his bare arm as well, so he figured a little dust didn’t matter to either of them. When he drove by the Ray farm he slowed just a little, hoping to encounter or think of some reason to stop. But there wasn’t a soul around, unless you counted the horse in the back pasture and the little black and white dog that followed along on Baron’s side barking until, tiring of the chase, it gave up and returned home.
Back at the farm, Kyle replaced the belt on the mower deck, which ended up being easier than he’d imagined. It wasn’t hard to figure out how to go about the job once he pulled all the cotter pins and let the deck release free from the pivot arms and fall to the floor. The hardest part was getting the spring that supplied tension to the belt reconnected to the tractor frame. The trick, he discovered, lay in angling the hooked end of the spring with a large pair of pliers and simply pulling back as hard as he could until it slipped into place. Even so, it was easier thought of than done and after a dozen attempts he ended up lying sideways on the concrete floor, collecting straw in his hair, and catching his breath. He had to laugh, imagining what Whitey would say if he could see him now. Damn fool pitchers, was probably pretty close.
After dinner he mowed nearly until dark, racing the shadow of the barn across the back yard, staying just ahead of its advance on each slightly smaller circumference. Finally the air turned chill enough that if not for the heat of the mower engine flowing back on his arms and legs he might have quit rather than finish. Finally finished, he pulled into the lean-to at the back of the barn and let the engine idle, but even so it gave off a back-pressure pop as it died. Only then did Baron reappear for a quick walk around the fresh mown lawn. Across the valley pinpoints of light were already appearing on the far ridge, as if that part of the world were a paper curtain blocking out the sun underneath. Atop the barn the flat metal cow swung to the north, and immediately the air seemed thinner and cooler than before.
“You sure it’s allowed?”
“Until the last of November, yes.”
“No, I mean me holding the rod. What if the game warden comes along?”
“Then I’ll pretend I don’t know you. Or, alternatively, you can say you were just tending it while I helped your nephew, plead ignorance, and hope the warden takes pity on you for being a country bumpkin and not knowing the law.”
Kyle cast sideways from his side of the dock and the bobber bent the line as it flew, plunking down in the wavering reflection of the red and green trees on the hill lying just shy of the near reeds. With a half crank of the handle he set the drag and handed the rod over to Alison’s nephew who received it, like an acolyte accepting a chalice, with both hands.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been bass fishing before.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing it now.”
“You like it?”
“Yes, until I catch something.”
“Well, at least you’re optimistic.”
“No I’m not. I’m pessimistic enough to think it might happen.”
“That’s the fun part.”
“But what if I don’t want to gut it?”
“You mean clean it?”
“Yes, clean it.”
“Then just throw it back. The law cares only that you’re fishing; it don’t give a hoot if you decide not to keep what you catch.”
Kyle laughed then—at the improbability of the moment. Here, higher up in the Adirondacks, the trees on the far hills were ablaze and yet it seemed there was more time left in the year now than on his first morning home, when, retrieving the mail, he’d picked from the grassy driveway meridian a maple leaf spiked with small dark eruptions on its shiny streaked green and red face.
“You know,” he said, trying to explain how he felt, “I might not have talked to you last Sunday except for Nellie Griswold.” He felt he could talk freely about it now. Enjoying the day—the warm air and clear water and sunshine—he allowed himself to become uncharacteristically voluble and vulnerable. “Do you know I was in the balcony watching? Before I could slip out, she caught me by the arm in the foyer after the service, and held me tight. She told me: It seems so good to have you back where you belong. And at that moment I knew I did belong.”
He meant to say he knew where he belonged, but having related the episode he didn’t want to go back and amend it. Consequently he didn’t add that he’d known where he belonged for some time now, and that he had felt it even more intensely while walking through a cornfield just prior to making the decision he would attend church the following Sunday with the sole intention of meeting her afterwards. The dry corn stalks, looming overhead as he walked through them that day, chafed against one another in a soft breeze otherwise undetectable in the late afternoon calm. But actually, it wasn’t the feeling of belonging he had felt most recognizably that day but the perception of time slipping inexorably away. And also, a wanting he expressed to himself as a desire to be with her, whatever that meant.
He looked at her now, wondering why it had taken him so long to figure it out.
She lifted the tip of the rod reeling a plug across the water; it gurgled and sloshed on the surface as
it came lumbering near, only to be lifted into the air and flung once again, in a long loop, across the mirroring water. She seemed happy and content. The nephew seemed happy and content too, intently watching his bobber jerk up and down, apparently not caring at all that the fish underneath would soon nibble away at the worm until, if anything, only a tiny bit remained impaled on the shank of the hook.
Watching the boy, Kyle remembered himself at the same age, brought to this same place by his father. Eventually expanding the thought, he began to indulge the conceit that he and Alison were already married. When another young couple with a boy eager to fish stopped briefly to talk it only reinforced the illusion because it seemed to him they would likely presume he and Alison and the nephew were a family too.
The other young couple had a story to tell about a black bear glimpsed crossing the road as they descended the hill just before making the turn for the lake.
“It was coming this way,” solemnly warned the young man.
“I keep hoping we might see it again,” added the young woman standing beside him. She seemed concerned not at all and talked from the shoreline, toeing the gravelly edge, until the boy started kicking stones in the water. Finally the man said they had only a week yet of vacation before having to pack up and head