Conflagration | Hatch Magazine – Fly Fishing, etc.

Thayer is an old man’s name, and the man wore it well. Once tall and lithe, he now walked with a slight crook in his shoulders, but his gray eyes were still fierce and focused. He passed the brand-new, tarped tractor that his son Lonnie had bought with his enlistment bonus. When Thayer asked why he needed it, Lonnie had said “So you have more time.”

“To do what?”

“To go fishing when I get back.”

But Lonnie never came back. Thayer didn’t need a tractor; he needed his son. Now, he had the one and not the other. Why his child, the artist with the sensitive hands, had to go halfway around the world to die made no sense to Thayer. His world wasn’t better for it and he wondered whose was. In a way, that war took three people. His wife Martha did not survive Lonnie’s death, and while he was still dirt side, some would debate whether Thayer was truly alive.

In the barn, he harnessed the draft team to hay the field down by the road to Merritt. The field where they were going to build Lonnie’s house. The field where he buried Martha. Because of Lonnie’s death benefit, he had no need to work the farm any longer. But by long habit, he didn’t know what else to do. No sense letting the place go to brambles and sagging rooflines. As he was heading out of the barn, he grabbed his beloved bamboo rod and lambskin fly wallet from the shelf by the door. He followed the horses down to the field, where the sickle bar mower waited for them.

Three hundred years of clearing the fields and stacking rocks into walls made the haying easy. The horses knew what to do, and Thayer rode behind them, his mind as empty as theirs. They finished before the shadows of the surrounding wood lot were fully off the field. He hobbled the horses near a patch of blackberries for a well-deserved treat and took the path down to the stream.

The path exited the field through a break in the stone wall. That’s where he buried Martha, with the wild roses she loved so much. He could finally go near the grave without tears streaming down his face, which meant he could finally return to the stream. Now when he stopped to caress the stone, he was filled with memories. I should plant some lilacs; she would like that.

When some smartly dressed young man told him Lonnie died in a pointless war across the globe and told him all that was left was the dog tag which he dropped into Thayer’s hand, Thayer closed his hand over it and closed the door on the young man mid-sentence. He had no use for the platitudes of strangers. There comes a time when a parent’s hopes and dreams are only those they have for their children. In a moment, his and Martha’s future, everything they had built and planned, vanished like a spooked trout you wasted a morning stalking, and then there is nothing but the empty gravel and the water rushing by like he was never there.

They each retreated into their private grief. No more flowers planted in spring. No more summer evenings on the porch. No more pies baked in the fall. No more Christmas cards handwritten by the fire. Until there was no more Martha. All that was left was the now, each day the same, no foreseeable changes until he too was dust. Sometimes he thought he should’ve done more, but he hadn’t the imagination for what that would be. He would shake those times off and go to work.

He took the rod out of the case and lined it up. Then, he sat on a stump, letting a sunbeam warm his face. He could smell the first crisp breath of fall, even as the bees swarmed the wildflowers along the wood’s edge. He unwrapped a cheddar cheese and raspberry jam sandwich and ate it slowly. When he was done, he took a beat-up old steel cup from beside the stump and filled it at the stream, drinking it empty. Here, by the water, he could feel Martha. Even talk to her. He would talk about the weather and the harvest. How the horses were doing. Never about Lonnie. In his mind he could see Lonnie, but always standing at a distance with his back turned, and he never came to talk. Maybe that’s because his body never came home.

The stream wasn’t wide, it wasn’t deep, but it was spring-fed and bone-cold, even in the dog days of summer. Because of the cold water, the stream was bountiful with larger-than-average small-stream fish. It ran ignored under the road through a granite culvert and came through the wood lot where it lived under the shade of oaks and maples, the occasional ash and elm. The maples were all tapped for syrup season, another chore he did without thinking. People still came for miles for the syrup he sold at the roadside stand. He could walk the stream all the way home to the bottom of the orchard in front of the house, catching brook trout along the way. But even though he was lined up, he didn’t manage to wet a fly. After a while, he folded the wax paper, put it in his pocket to reuse tomorrow, broke the rod down, and went back to the team.

He hooked the horses to the mower and walked them back to the farm. As he was grooming them and putting them up, he looked over at the stacked wood he and Lonnie had milled to build a small house on the hay field for Lonnie and his fiancé Hedy, now long gone to the city. It gave him an idea, and he left the barn in the evening’s quiet, content in a day of hard work. He cooked a panful of cabbage and bacon with onions, then settled in for the night.

The next day, he loaded the wagon with wood from the stack and topped it with some tools. He hitched it to his team and returned to the field. There, on the trail to the stream, he stopped when the sun first hit his face and buried Lonnie’s dog tag. It was as good a place as any. Then he began to build a small structure over it, the horses grazing around him. He wasn’t by nature introspective, but working with his hands always made him feel better. The scent of the sawdust, the repetitive motions of the hand tools, the slow evolution from idea to structure. The pride in a perfect cut, a good joint. Even though the building of it was just to pass the time, he took pride in his skill.

The building only took a week. First, he built a little alcove to house his tools during the project, then he framed in the walls and the roof. He sided it with clapboards and roofed it in cedar. It was slightly larger than a garden shed. Even though he wasn’t religious, he’d built a small steeple on the end away from the door above the alcove. The whole thing wasn’t ten feet tall. On the last day, he painted it gloss white and stepped back to admire his work. It wasn’t that he didn’t think about Lonnie, but that he hadn’t been able to. Now, every time he went by the little chapel built on Lonnie’s grave, he had something positive that came from his grief. The next day, he decided to keep his promise. He dug two lilac bushes out of Martha’s neglected garden, put them in the wagon, and went to the field. He carefully planted them on either side of her headstone.

One day, as he was passing the chapel, he noticed somebody had planted flowers on either side of the door. A colorful array of black-eyed Susans, asters, and sneezeweeds. He stood looking at them for a long time, his head cocked to one side. He loved flowers and Martha always had a garden. But these flowers were bothering him. He finally figured it out. Flowers were Martha’s domain, and these weren’t her flowers. Somebody had come along and appended their will to his chapel. After a time, he walked over and ripped them out. He carried them to the stream and tossed them in one-by-one, letting them float away, his rage dissipating a little with each blossom floating through the downstream riffle and around the bend. He didn’t feel like fishing anymore, so he walked back across the field to the road and went home.

He had nearly forgotten about the flowers, until one day passing the chapel he noticed the door was slightly ajar. He walked up and opened it, realizing he hadn’t been inside since he’d built it. Somebody had hung a cross and a tacky print of a painting of Christ. He walked up to them and tore them both down. Despite not being religious, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them out, but instead put them in the tool alcove.

As time went on, he had to bring a box to put all the icons and images people left. He never saw them, but people were obviously using his chapel. Eventually, he put a lock on the door. As with most problems solved, he forgot all about it.

And so it went. He kept the farm running. He went to the stream. He policed the religious paraphernalia in the chapel. If you asked him, he would say the fishing was good, but if you pressed him for specifics, he wouldn’t be able to actually remember the last time he wet a line. He passed his time in harmony with the seasons. Winter came and he hunkered down. Spring came and he resumed his chores.

One spring day, there was a wintry rain, nearly sleet. It looked and felt like drops of mercury. He was puttering in the barn when a car pulled up. Reverend Thornhill got out, an insipid man whom Thayer could not see inspiring faith.

“Thayer.” Thayer gave the briefest nod.

With him were two biddies, identical in their faded calico dresses, drab overcoats, and graying hair. He thought he should know their names, but nothing came to mind. They were fiddling with umbrellas when a cruiser pulled in. Thayer stood under the rain shadow of the eaves and watched, arms crossed.

“Thayer.” This from Barnstead, the cop. Thayer did not bother to respond to him either.

The biddies were chattering in hushed tones. “It’s about the chapel, Thayer.” Thayer cocked his head at the priest still silent. “Well see, it’s like this, we’d like you to stop defacing our religious symbols.”

“That’s easy. Stop trespassing.” He looked to the cop. “Now that I know who’s doing it, I’d like to lodge a complaint.”

“Now, Thayer. Let’s not escalate the situation.”

Thayer snorted.

Barnstead shot him a look, but continued. “The Good Father and his flock have filed an injunction against you.”

Thayer’s eyebrows went up. “For?”

Barnstead looked down and read from a paper in his hand, trying vainly to keep it dry. “They say that they have a prescriptive easement on your property, as you have been letting the public have access to the chapel, and they want you to cease and desist destroying the church’s property, and to remove and not replace the locks.”

“So, the trespassers are now the trespassed?”

“Good Lord man, why did you build it if not to share it?” whined the priest. “As soon as you put a steeple on it, it belonged to everybody.”

Thayer looked briefly at the priest, the way you would warning a misbehaving dog, then back to Barnstead. “Or?”

“Or, I’m going to have to take you in for defacing church property.” He coughed. “There is also the issue of an illegal cemetery on your property. The town passed an ordinance against those. So, you will have to answer for that.”

Thayer went back into the barn and returned with a Remington over-under 12-gauge. The biddies shrieked. The priest froze. The cop took a step back and put a hand on the gun at his hip.

“Now Thayer…”

Thayer held the gun low. “Do you have a warrant?”

“Not yet, but if you want to force the issue…”

“Then you,” he kept the gun low but waved it to include the priest and the biddies, “are all trespassing. It’s best you move along and leave me what privacy I still have.”

“Now Thayer…” Barnstead repeated.

“You want to de-escalate, then just leave an old man alone,” said Thayer. Then he looked at the priest. “And stay the hell off my property, the way I stay the hell off yours.”

“Be reasonable,” said the priest.

“Reasonable would be giving you a count of three. One.”

The priest looked from the cop to Thayer and then over to the biddies. Then he bolted for the car, and an instant later, the biddies followed. For a moment, Barnstead and Thayer locked eyes, then, hand still on his gun, Barnstead backed to the cruiser and opened the door. “This is not over.”

Thayer did not dignify that with an answer. Barnstead, deciding this was not a fight he could win without back up, got into his car, and spun gravel off the tires as he left. Thayer walked into the barn and put the shotgun back on its rack above the work bench. Then, pondering it, reached inside a drawer and took out some shells, loading the gun for the first time in thirty years. He tucked it under his arm and walked to the house, placing it just inside the door.

Thayer was in a tumult unlike any he’d ever experienced. The whole idiotic injustice of it bounced around inside him like a dry fly in whitewater, first this way, and then that, slowly drowning. Rich men sending his son to die in a country Thayer had never heard of before the war. Strangers co-opting his grief, taking away the only thing he had left. He was mad at the world, he was mad at Martha, and finally – he realized – he was mad at himself.

His consternation kept him away from the chapel in the August doldrums, working another hay field, tending the orchard, repairing an outbuilding. One day when there was thunder in the air promising a gusher to break the heat, he got a summons from the court for Martha’s grave. Insult to injury. He crumpled it into his pocket. Taking his rod case, he tromped down to the field, seeking solace in the stream’s cool green shadows.

During his short absence, they must have had the whole congregation out. There was a sign with an arrow on the main road:

Pause
Rest
Worship

They’d erected a new picket fence around his chapel, with the grass mowed short inside it. There was a gravel parking area, ruining the hay field. They’d butchered his walls to install stained glass. Worst of all, they’d defiled Martha’s grave –the lilacs pruned to within an inch of their lives, the wild roses replaced by a few anemic pansies. Like a forest fire that starts underground, hidden in the roots, smoldering until it erupts, Thayer was suddenly consumed by white hot wrath that boiled his tears before they could streak his face. He marched up to the chapel and began breaking the fence apart with his bare hands, throwing the pieces in the chapel until it was almost full. Taking a box of matches and the summons from his pocket, he lit the document and tossed it in. It caught just as people arrived for morning mass. In a moment, the roof was smoking. As it burst into flames, he heard sirens in the distance. Add having a fire without a permit to my many crimes. He smiled grimly.

Thayer picked up his rod case and headed for the creek, stopping only to kneel and rip out the pansies at Martha’s grave. He sobbed, “I’m so sorry.” He wanted to say more, but as was so often the case between them, could not find the words. He used the stone to hoist himself up and continued to the stream.

Against the cacophony behind him, he lined up his rod and tied on a grasshopper fly. Thunder cracked as the first drops of a proper deluge began to fall. He cast under a cutbank, where he rolled a twelve-inch brook trout. The fight was brief, but all-consuming. The noise and the conflagration behind him throwing shadows across the rain-darkened wood faded from his mind. When at last the fish came to hand, he wiped the rain from his eyes and marveled at it, the white-fringed orange belly fading into the yellow-spotted indigo body, like a balefire throwing sparks into the starry sky. When he deftly unhooked it and let it go, it disappeared into the shallow water, a lightning strike at midnight.

He could feel a presence then, over his shoulder, the way it used to be. Lonnie, finally, had come home.