A Gift of Flies
David Motes
The funeral was upbeat. Uncle Rick had cheated the Reaper three years beyond the textbook allowance for his particular version of the Big C. He had suffered a minimum of surgical and chemical indignities and we’d all visited enough to make a good farewell. Rick had parked his second-best truck in an employee spot at the Boise airport, permit courtesy one of his former students, so we'd come and gone at will. His daughter moved back in and transferred her kids to Jericho Area Elementary School, where Rick had been principal for 16 years.
I’d spent four weeks over half a dozen visits in those three years. Considering the distance from Raleigh that was pretty good. Considering the distance between my father and my uncle, that was very good. I didn't understand what estranged them, and I’d quit trying. I went when I could and didn’t bring it up.
So Dad was absent in the slant-light September dinnertime when we bumbled out of the church into the green relief of Jericho Town. The high plains heat sucked the moisture from our faces and everybody stood stunned, with that eye-and jaw-ache that comes from lots of crying and laughing. Friends moved about and shook hands and spoke. There were maybe 300 people there including the Marine honor guard. The town claimed 266 residents.
Everybody seemed comfortable within the well-wishes and “anything I can do’s”. Uncle Carl was there, straight and direct; Melinda too, broad and happy mother of none, grandmother of all. The only one unconnected was David, Rick’s youngest, who jarred the edge of the group with his underdressed, crooked-jaw discord. His hair was long and forward into his face. He kept himself turned toward the open space on the lawn. In the three days I’d been there I hadn’t seen him straight-on once. He was fifteen.
I put my pleasantry in with Rick’s wife and his daughters. We all stood in coordinated moment of silence then I broke away for my rental car and my private grief, but before I got away I felt a touch on my arm. It was Clay Morrow, Rick’s lawyer.
“Say, Alex, we have that appointment tomorrow, but let’s manage this business tonight over dinner. We’re having some people. Why don’t you come out, let’s get it done, we’ll check you out and you can stay the night, I’ll run you back for your car in the morning.”
So we went. Morrow drove the typical Idaho big pickup the typical Idaho very fast along two-lanes and then a string-straight gravel road. We passed circular bright-green fields surrounded by bronze scrub.
“Your uncle Rick really liked you,” he said.
“He’s the first person, you know, I’ve ever really lost,” I said after a moment.
“Rick used to laugh about you guys.”
“I know, I know. We’re not the most close-knit family,” I said.
“Not that. Well, some of that. I mean about before, when you were a kid, at your grandfather’s place in Colorado.”
“The good old days,” I said.
“Talk about it,” Morrow said. His face was paled and halved by the flat orange sun.
We passed over a small bridge, both glanced automatically at the muddy ditch.
I paused a moment more. “Well, my Grandpa was a cross-grained old coot. Stubborn. He knew how to work. I guess that’s why they sent me out, teach me some values. Or maybe they were just tired of me.”
“You send your own kids off for the summer?” he said.
“Theoretically I was working for him, helping him around the place. Mainly I was goofing off, swimming and fishing.”
“You were what, 13?”
“Yeah. 13.”
Morrow drove on. The hills ahead developed themselves in the edging light.
“Rick was there, just out of the service. He seemed happy. He loved to work, paint the outbuildings, repair stuff, just for fun. I guess it beat Vietnam. At first I liked having him around because he did what I was supposed to do, freed me up to do nothing.”
Morrow nodded and drove on into the sunset.
“I was always interested in fishing, not trout though. Bluegills, bass, you know. North Carolina fish. Rick got me going with the flyrod. He gave me stuff, called it the ‘lend to own program.’ Taught me to use it, watched while I caught my first trout on a fly. Royal Coachman. I wasn’t a very good student but after a while it started to work on me.”
“That was, what, ‘70?” Morrow asked.
“’‘69? I guess, yeah, ’69, I was thirteen.”
We rolled on in silence a moment. The land began to angle gently in all directions. The road got worse, improved, got worse again. There were trees in the draws.
“Look at the pronghorns,” Morrow said, pointing with a nod. It took me a moment to see them on the ridge, amber blobs that glowed in the late light.
The road began to switch gently back and over, courting steeper hills, with the shadow sense of high mountains beyond. When we came over the first real ridge the sun pressed our faces with fading force.
“I guess I’m in for some surprises,” I said into the silence.
“You figure?” he said with a smile.
“I figure at least two,” I said.
He looked at me. “What two?”
“What the problem was between Dad and Rick. I’d like to know that. And what he left me. Knowing Rick he probably left me something.”
He nodded. “Not bad. Two out of three.”
I nodded myself. “I guess I’m ready to get to the bottom of it.”
“You had thirty years to get to the bottom of it.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m not much of an asker. My father isn’t much of a teller.”
"Rick thought it was your dad's job to tell it."
I absorbed that, didn't move.
Morrow didn’t look at me this time. “I never met your dad. But Rick was a real good teller,” he said.
He turned off the road and across a cattle guard and up a steep slope of long prairie grass, more trees. The ridgetop was sharper than the others and the next little valley carried water, heavy grass, denser trees.
“Serious, huh?” he said as the road curved sharply downward into cottonwood shade. We battered out on a plank bridge, lugged to a stop. It was a typical western private bridge, no railings, just big timbers bridging the creek from abutments poured onto the living rock.
I didn’t want to look at him. Twelve feet below me a trout rose in the dark seam along the angled concrete, a pale comma in the indigo water. I couldn’t raise my head so I kept my mind in the water. My angle was a lovely avenue of glossy riffle-water and rounded rocks mounting upward into the indistinct geometry of streamside trees.
He turned the engine off. The purl of the river rose into the silence. I got my eyes as far as the ridge-edge ahead, tight with conifers, and the house at the head of a meadow a quarter-mile upslope. Sun was gone from all but the highest places.
Morrow sat forward, his chin almost on his hands peaked over the wheel. He was looking up at the house where a porchlight had come on, or maybe just had become visible as the light failed in the quick fall gloaming.
“Look at the pronghorns,” I said. He sat still, still angled upward. “That’s the kind of thing my father wasn’t good at, didn’t try to do,” I said. “He would see the pronghorns first, and then tell me to see them. Order me to see them. He thought kids weren’t observant. He thought being observant was a virtue. He’d say, ‘Alex, look at the antelope. Over there. No, there! Further! Too late.’ And we’d drive on. Always expecting some kind of product, you know. If I ever saw the goddamn antelope he’d always want to be the one who showed them, you know? If I saw them he’d want my thanks. If I missed them he’d want an apology.”
Morrow shook his head. “And Rick was better? Cheap shot. A young guy, time on his hands? It’s easy for him to be a companion. No responsibility, all fun and games,” Morrow said.
“Yeah, I know that. I know it’s not fair,” I said. “I guess it’s never fair for fathers.”
Another long pause. The light had drawn away, draining upward.
I saw another splashy rise. “Are those rainbows in there?”
“Westslope Cutthroats. Did it myself seven, eight years ago. We went foot by foot with the zapper, popping out brookies and rainbows. We had ourselves quite a fry. The creek fades out into an irrigation ditch, so no repopulation. I’ve got a broad cohort in here now, steady reproduction. We’ll fish tomorrow.”
We waited. The sky angled down into glacial blue.
Morrow shifted again, and I could see him looking downstream. “David helped. He’s good on the stream, with a rod. Away from his dad, he’s good.”
I got my head up a bit, looked into the spruce that ranked up the south-facing ridge. “He looks like a hoodlum. He told me, and I quote, ‘I just want to get the fuck away from this place.’”
“Yeah, things aren’t too solid with David,” he replied.
“Is that it? Is he my inheritance? I’ve got kids of my own.” Morrow didn’t answer. I was embarrassed by my tone, tried to continue. “I just want to know what the problem was. People ask.”
He spoke without looking at me. “It’s not my thing, Alex, but you ask me, it’s not so serious. It’s all over, just gestures now. You can’t burn over it, not so much as your father did. That’s all between you and him now but it’s mostly done. It is my part to tell you, like you thought, tell you stuff other people should have, or you should have asked. Pass some things on. Not really a dying command. Well, sort of.”
I finally had him in front of me, torn away from the careless richness of his valley, the drained blue of the last tint of daylight sky. I was embarrassed by what I’d said. Morrow stayed focused forward for another long moment. When he spoke it went out into the silence before dark.
“Rick wasn’t your uncle. He was your brother.”
A minute or so later he started the truck. “We’ll be getting late for dinner,” he said.
* * *
The river was a quarter-mile arc through the horseshoe valley my grandpa owned, the top half of a backward capital C that continued across the road through another horseshoe counter-C that was a town park, ballfields, trees, hundred-year floodplain. It was rich dark dirt with cottonwoods as tall as the top of the ridge, which when you climbed it was actually the edge of a flat shelf that angled down into town, dry and exposed. The rock was all red, from crimson to dried-blood brown. Much higher bluffs ringed the town westward, a prelude to the high Rockies. Ten miles east the grass began and ran clear to Iowa.
The horseshoe valley was Grandpa’s current project, a sad little trailer park. Grandpa was a Depression refugee; he hated banks so he traded land the way I traded SEC football cards. He’d trade up, improve the place by the sweat of his brow and a lifetime with concrete and pipe and wood, and then trade up again. He didn’t give a pinch of red dust for the river except as a potential liability. For me, the river was all. I would have faced a boring desperation of gritty summer labor if it hadn’t been ringed by the fabulous moat of the North St. Vrain River.
It was a jangling flat freestone creek on the inside of the bend, with wild rainbows in the riffles and stockers in the big pool that the kids used as a swimming hole. But along the outside of the bend it was cliff-wall with deep seams along the solid rock: Brown trout water. Caddis came off every night, and stones and other Western mayflies that the trout and I never knew the name of. I had sole title to three hundred yards.
At first it was spinners and eggs, and grandma fried a lot of trout. But by late July Rick had me fly fishing, and though my success dropped off my interest was as high as the mountain moon.
Careless casting would put your fly into the rock, breaking the tip off of the drugstore Coachmans and Elk Hair Caddis. The rock was seamed with stubs of small plants and floodlitter, and the trout would turn away from a fly that wore a wisp of spiderweb. Willows made the backcast treacherous. The water slowed in the seam along the rock wall so a good drift was tough for a kid who didn’t know the magic of the mend.
Rick taught. He’d listen patiently, and never let me blame, never let me whine. He could shut me up with a quick shake of the head. I got weird little orders. One evening he wouldn’t let me bring the rod back behind my head. Another time I had to fish left-handed. Often it was the “one cast” rule: Pick it up, put it down. Then he’d drive off to Longmont or Boulder to see somebody, leaving me to follow or to break.
Mostly I broke. Confronted with rising fish I’d do what I could to catch one. But despite myself I began to connect. Once the fly hung in the brush behind me then popped loose. Instead of my broomsticking hump of a forward cast, the rod unloaded a soft tight little loop and the fly floated down with the line and rode high instead of crash-landing. I wasn’t quite stupid enough to miss it. When my knots failed, I learned better ones. When my patience failed, I stretched it.
Rick taught me the most essential lesson of learning: trust the teacher, trust yourself. He taught me how to learn. He gave me just what I could handle, a minimum of explanation, no science, then left me to do it or not, understand it or not, alone. He told me to “shake the water off,” and about the tenth try I threw a perfect little mend and the caddis bobbed happily along without turning into a little water-skier. He told me to “poke the moon and swat the fly” and I had a roll cast before bedtime. By the time I flew back to Raleigh in August I was forever a fly guy.
That fall Rick sent me a letter. He told me that he would have a gift when I arrived next June, but I had to bring in good grades. I knew instantly he meant it. I knew a gift from Rick would have the taste of trout about it. I knew it would be a confirmation, an initiation. I knew it was a one-time offer. That letter was the miracle my parents had clawed me for since the second grade. Whenever I began to drift Rick’s gift would galvanize me. For the first time I consciously and systematically did my duty and shocked even myself with how easy it was. My father thought I’d finally set my sights on Emory.
It was a gift of flies. Rick had tied them and bought them, but mostly he’d arranged them; something about the gathering conferred authority, control, independence. The brushed aluminum Umpqua box had ten dense ranks of Humpies and Adams and Wulffs and Sulfurs and a whole mezzanine of beetles and ants and perfect store-bought hoppers. It was what I had hoped for and it dwarfed my hopes. It gave me power. It was a gift of adulthood. My hands shook as I looked at that box.
* * *
I should have brought that box to the present time and place, an offering to Rick at his last party, but I hadn’t thought about it in several years. It didn’t seem to fit my current life, and his current death. He had never fished much, preferring action and people to trout. He quit tying flies when he moved to Idaho and took his first teaching job; he blamed his eyes, but we all knew he preferred conversation and coffee to the lonely basement repetition over the tying bench.
From those summers, I didn’t trout fish much, but I kept the flyrod in my hand and in my heart like a loyal creed. Carolina trout streams were thin and few next to the memory of those easy St. Vrain brownies. My fly time was spent on the bays and flats of the Atlantic coast, in the warm-water rivers of the Piedmont, and, when I could afford it, knee deep in the cream and turquoise permit flats of the Caribbean. From that summer a well-tied fly enchanted me far beyond its fishing value. Every time I tied one on I acted out the dumbstruck astonishment at the beauty of brand-new flies to a 13-year-old-kid who’d never before owned more than three at a time.
Clay cut the truck in among several others in front of the house, a moderate cedar-sided rambler that followed the ridgeline into darkness. His wife Helen stood in the broad flagstone foyer, leaning and smiling. People stood in the brightness beyond in the posture of guests holding glasses.
My mind and I ate and drank and talked for a couple of hours among Clay’s guests, another cluster of easygoing smiling Westerners, and I found myself oddly happy to wait. As the last guests left he nodded me into his office and started hanging more clauses on the sentence he’d begun on the bridge.
“A girl named Nancy Garvey claimed your father was responsible for her pregnancy in the fall of their senior year in high school. He never admitted it, so far as I heard. That’s what Carl told me, anyhow. Your grandpa talked to her ma, talked to her, and came home and ordered him to marry her. Carl said he didn't even answer the question; he just never addressed it, one way or another, and that fall he was gone.
“Rick never had any doubt. She was a steady homely girl. It was the same old small town scandal. She went away, came back in April with a little boy. She lived with her mother, had an older brother in Europe; that was ‘44. I don’t know where her father was. In June Nancy brought the baby to your dad’s house. Rick said it was your grampa’s idea. Sounds like him. Then she went east, to Washington, for a war job, and stayed. Rick used to visit her a lot. She died six years ago.
“Your grandpa raised Rick his son. Bradley was twelve; Melinda was fourteen or so, Carl was sixteen. Your dad just went east right after graduation, never had anything more to do with it. He never acknowledged the baby, far as I knew. Your grandpa and Carl were farming. Melinda mainly raised the baby, she was happy at it. You’ve seen how she is.
“In town there was a Catholic school. The nuns were where you went if you wanted a ‘get out of town education,’ the public school if you wanted to farm. Melinda was at the Catholic school; she wanted to be a teacher, was a good student. When she was about 16 rumors started the baby was hers, and the nuns were giving her a hard time, so your grandpa came in there one day and told them the truth. Your dad was two thousand miles away. Wasn’t long he was running for this office and that one but it never came out. All his ‘family values’ talk, a bastard son would have stung. Rick said they didn’t talk until just before he went to Vietnam, and even that, he said, ‘wasn’t a success.’”
“Rick was never mad at your dad, that he showed anyhow. Rick always said he never cared much, and I think he meant it. He let it go a long time ago. He just thought of your grandpa as his dad. Rick didn’t need acknowledgement. He was always real comfortable with himself, real confident. He was a natural-born teacher, you know that; he was the happiest dying man I ever saw. He said this, a lot: I had a good life. He told me that a dozen times in the past few months.”
Clay cleared his throat and leaned back, a signal that he was crossing into the judgement from the fact.
“Only thing Rick really regretted, only thing he ever did that wasn’t settled, was David. I, everybody else--hell, we admired his success with his kids, students and his own, but David was always stubborn, surly. Bad grades, drugs, trouble, all of it. He’s good at what he tries to do, baseball, fishing. David always wanted to be somewhere else, seems like. His sisters were happy where they were but David was always watching the tree lines and reading faraway books. It cut Rick deep, that they had such trouble. They were making some progress when Rick got sick. It’s funny, David never really knew what his Dad could do, had done. We told him but he didn’t want to hear. Maybe he knew and it didn’t matter. I don’t know. By then Rick was too sick to fish, and too stubborn anyway to try it, probably too afraid to offer that connection. And David’s a tough sell. He’s angry; he doesn’t listen, you can’t tell him things. We’re worried David won’t make it long enough and get the space enough to settle down. We thought there’s something might help.”
He leaned forward, stopped, leaned back again. “We thought you might help.”
On the floor by his chair was a big cardboard box with the flaps crossed over. Clay reached, yanked the flaps up, and pulled out a big oblong plastic box, maybe a foot long and three inches deep. My heart quickened at the sight.
“Rick wanted me to give you this. It’s part of your inheritance.” He leaned out of his chair and tossed it the two feet I couldn’t bring myself to reach.
It was a fly box. Inside, on a single horizontal rank, were about twenty of the most beautiful tarpon flies I’d ever seen. The first one was exquisite, an old-style Crimson Apte with exposed hook shank wrapped in alternating courses of red and white, hackles an elegant exact curve, big bold golden eyes. The flies in the box were all perfect, no two the same.
I could not look up from them. “These are tarpon flies,” I said stupidly.
“Whatever that is,” Clay said drily.
One fly in the middle was made of split hackles, each curved in an intricate pattern that overlapped into a weirdly persuasive impression of a big baitfish. It was tied on a heavy dull steel hook with an exotic bend. I’d never seen such a beautiful fly in such a strange place. They were all brilliant. They all had the loving polish of the serious home-tyer. They carried the pedigree of many ancestors that weren’t good enough to make it to the final row.
Clay dragged the box between us. It was stacked full of the same kind of fly box, a dozen or fifteen.
“Oh my God,” I said.
The next box was deceivers, forty or more: white bellies, pale chartreuse through to purple and black backs, large flashing eyes, delicate epoxy heads. Bendbacks, gaudy purple and pinks for trout and redfish. A box of Buffies--ghost-light striper flies made from woven synthetics in greys and olives and tans, so tall they had to lean over to avoid contact with the box lid. Rank upon rank of Clousers in neutrals and golds and reds. Seaducers. Buck and Bunnies. DL Goddard’s clever little epoxy glass minnows. Jolt-headed Butch Minnows, perfect smooth deer-hair noses against the box-edge. Crease-flies, each with a wet-alive finish. Four copies each of half a dozen complicated crabs. One box was all Cape Cod sand-eel patterns: clousers, synthetics, epoxies. Another was albie flies, at least a hundred: small clousers, epoxies, Bangers, crease-flies, ten or twelve types, ten or twelve shades. One box held only five huge gaudy billfish poppers on neatly coiled heavy shock-mono. They made me dizzy.
“These are my flies. These are the flies I use,” I said, mouth dry.
“Yep. I think you helped.”
“He always wanted to talk flies,” I said.
“He always wanted to talk,” Clay said with a little laugh.
“How did he do this?” I asked softly.
“Rick was Rick. He read magazines. He had a purpose, he had time.”
“Christ, Clay, I’ll never use all these,” I said.
“They’re not exactly for you.” He handed me a letter. “So maybe you will.”
* * *
The channel out of Harker’s was hinky as always. I cut it tight to the outside and made a note to watch the water and not the markers on the ebb. The November morning was that lovely fall combination of cool and warm, air and water competing to decide. The sky was full of winter streaks of grey glossy cloud but they were smooth, not wind-torn, and the wind was blunted and fading. The guides had struggled the day before, hunting and pecking fish in 20 knots of NW, skittish pods breaking and bolting all over the crowded inlet. Today looked better. The chances would come, maybe later on the tide.
I hammered on past the cycling boats in the inlet. Most would just hang out and wait for breaking fish, then run-and-gun them until they were scattered. I saw no sign of fish. We went on out into the Atlantic.
The wind had flattened the inshore ground swell to long random hills that the big center console could ramble over on a plane with only occasional bangs and thumps. The guides had gone east, so I did too. They would dart through the slough at the very base of the cape shoals, timing their cross with the surge, breaking waves just to the left. It would be worth it; I figured they would find albies roaming off the East beach in the morning, but that tiptoe dance with the breakers was too much for me. I expected to find the same fish running the cape toward the inlet where the bait would be balled up. Besides, we had something to take care of.
I cut the power half a mile off the beach about a mile short of the cape at the place the guides call the Gun Mounts. Except for the trout guys jigging around the jetty, all other boats were scattered and traveling. The lee shore was glassy smooth and the tide held us in a slow drift. No birds, no sign of fish. I knew this was the thoroughfare they would use if they came in, and I knew we could hustle over to the buoy line off Beaufort if the fish came in there. It was a fine place to start.
When the boat dropped down and lugged to a stop, David stirred himself. He’d been suspended between sixteen-year-old attitude and awe at the ocean, at the bundles of fly rods, at the glossy boats and cracker accents. Now he looked around at the empty water. He’d refused to cut the hair but he was off the weed and pretty close to the honor roll, and out on the salt where he’d always dreamed to be, where his father couldn’t take him but I could. Every boy has a dream, and they tend to be far, unreachable dreams, but they have false albacore power and can go deep into the backing of your heart if you let them. It wasn’t unaccountable to me that a youngest son of a young dying father would build his dreams on distant salt when he lived on class Western trout water. It wasn’t unaccountable at all.
I handed him the ten-weight. He held it comfortably but it must have seemed far outsized to his three-weight hands. The stripping basket was another curiosity. He knew the principles but it was still a half hour of hacking before he began to dial in the big rod. It was impressive how fast he got there. He overstroked them, he tried to carry too much of the intermediate line, he mistimed the double haul; but more and more casts came flat and tight and punched vippingly out of the basket to yank the reel over a turn or two.
He started with one of his father’s exquisite crease flies, a foam sandwich with a blue-and-white paint job over a slick silicone skin. I took him through the slow strip and the under-arm speed-retrieve, showed him how to clear the line with the rod high. He learned well and quickly but I could see that he didn’t completely believe it. It was quite a jump from ten-inch cutthroats. The day felt smiling good. He was the one who dreamed it up, anyway.
It was warming up as the wind fell. He punched out a particularly beautiful cast, all compressed and concise motion and stillness as the flyline took flight then curled over perfectly across the pellucid hump of a groundswell. He turned to me with a reckless smile, a friend’s smile, and tossed the hair out of his eyes.
I heard a splash behind me and turned to see a skirling boil forty feet to starboard. Suddenly the water around us was full of energy. Jittery ripples quivered across the swell. The air was charged with birds crossing and turning, all of them just a clue from gathering over fish. Before I could voice it we saw them: a phalanx of turquoise fish coursed through the berm of a wave fifty feet shy of where his fly was tracking through the surface film. They ran the nimble vector together and we could clearly see the yellow-streaked pectorals winglike as the big albies angled in echelon through the wave. The impulse to direct him, to help him, was strong, but all I could say was “Strip!” and all he could do was nothing before the fly vanished in an azure and silver flash that blew spray four feet high. A visible snap shivered up the fly line an instant before it went tight in his hand. I heard him whoop over the sound of the line chittering out of the basket. The second whoop was my own, unheard, a graceless counterpoint to the accelerating song of the reel.