Читать книгу Always October - C. E. Edmonson - Страница 11

Life goes on. That line’s been poppin’ into my aged brain this morning. I know it’s a cliché, of course, something people say to make themselves feel better. I also know it’s true. The world keeps turning whether you like it or not. The sun goes up and the sun goes down, and the grocer expects to be paid. Ditto for the bankers and the tax collector. This was true for me as it was true for the whole county, the whole nation, and the whole world. No matter if the grieving wasn’t over. No matter if the grieving would never be over. You buried your dead and continued on with the process of living.

But living was hard. I missed my momma and my sister Annie to such an extent I can’t name the pain their passing caused me. I won’t dwell anymore on this particular subject except to say the hurting goes on, as it should. Time allows you to live with hurt, but in my opinion closure is a word dreamed up by folks who don’t know a thing about grieving.

After Momma and Annie died, the little wilderness of Swede Lake became my retreat. Call it my escape if you want. Surely there were troubles enough to justify an occasional escape. Just as surely I never shirked my duties at my dad’s shop or at home—in fact I worked harder than ever.

Times were getting slim. I can vividly remember dismantling the old chicken coop to salvage enough lumber to repair the house. At one point, when the window frames in the kitchen loosened up, I tightened them with homemade wedges and plugged the gaps with newspaper.

Swede Lake was about three miles north of the town of Louristan. But every chance I had, I’d take my Raleigh two-wheeler and pedal over to Swede Lake, usually early in the morning. When I got there, I’d lean the bicycle against a tree and set off on one of the trails leading into the woods. Within a minute or so, the forest would swallow me up, old-growth trees rising high above my head, the streams crystal clear and teeming with fish.

I came to know almost every deep pool in every stream in the forest as, over time, I marked the movements of the game. I especially followed the deer so that in the fall, during hunting season, I rarely came back without meat for the table. And that’s another point I mean to make: we ate everything I caught or killed. That’s not to say food was the primary reason for my trips to Swede Lake, at least not for me. But nothing was wasted, not in those years.

As a boy, I wasn’t given to analyzing myself the way so many are now. I was all about doing. But looking back through the years, I think what I mainly felt, as the shadows closed around me, was relief. As if I’d just unleashed a breath I’d been holding for hours. Would the trout rise? What bait should I use? These were questions I much preferred to questions about how Dad and I could raise enough cash to hold our creditors at bay. No, whenever I watched a rainbow trout tail-dancing across the water, those practical matters were entirely forgotten.

Of course I didn’t always succeed—I’m not pretendin’ to be a great fisherman or a mighty hunter. There were days I came home empty-handed, days when the fish wouldn’t bite no matter how I tried to tempt them. I don’t think I really minded all that much. See I’d usually arrive a little after sunrise, when the light cut through the tops of the trees and the shadows ran deep. Then I’d watch the dancing shadows as they gradually shortened, until the sun grew high enough to find the running waters of the narrow creeks, where it did a little dance of its own. Still…

One of the problems with telling a story as long as mine, especially when your aging brain’s forgotten how to focus, is that past and present tend to get confused. See people naturally think their memories trace a straight line, from minute to minute and year to year, like they were drawn with a ruler. But when you look a little closer, when you take an honest look, you can’t be sure. Am I seein’ Swede Lake through the eyes of a young boy? A young man? Or through the eyes of the old man I am now? I can’t be sure, and I’m not gonna linger on this topic any longer. What I can say is I took up fishing and hunting early in life, and while I gave up hunting early on, I didn’t stop fishing until I was too weak to hold a fishing rod.