License Notes
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Half Sour, Half Sweet
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Connect with S.A. Barton
By S.A. Barton
Copyright 2014 S.A. Barton
Fifty years later the towns had grown, squeezing the country between them. The narrow rural routes had become fat and sleek highways. But not all of them—not quite. David Brown guided his little car off the highway onto one of the holdouts. Two lanes, one each way. A ribbon of pebbly blacktop, rising and falling with hills he hadn't seen in five decades.
There wasn't much traffic. Nobody drove up behind him as he slowed, passing a familiar old oak near the crest of a hill. It was a little taller, a little thicker, bushier; its lines and curves were as he remembered them.
From the hilltop he could see the house he grew up in. An addition had been built and a garden patch had been fenced off in one of the side yards. The long gravel driveway had been paved. But otherwise it was the same—a two-story square farmhouse with a gigantic backyard that had been a ten acre family farm some time in the century before last. Now, as then, it was mostly a field long fallow under long grass.
Past the house, he sped up again. From the depths of his seventy year old mind came faint memories of a twenty year old leaving home, a ten year old playing in the apple trees across the field.
Now strange people lived in that house and it was theirs. Thirty years ago he'd buried his parents one after the other, in a single year. He'd cleaned out the few mementos they'd taken with them to the condo they'd bought after he left home. They weren't much, mainly photographs. They remained in the back of a closet in a cardboard box, still sealed with tape.
The photographs meant little to him. But this place... he wondered why he hadn't come back before now. The hills, the grass, the trees... the entirety. It spoke to him. It was real in a way a photograph could never be. He'd thought about looking the old place up and buying it after mom and dad were gone, if it happened to be for sale. It wasn't a place for a bachelor anyhow, he had thought, so he had never checked. It was a place for a family.
He drove down the road a mile or so, over the next hill, hoping to see the dirt road he remembered, down by the windbreak on the border of the next farm.
It was still there, to his right. He followed it down, then to the right again. Tall weeds in the center of the lane bowed down under the bumper of the car as he went. It was as seldom used now as in his childhood. It brought him back to the far side of the property his former home stood on. David pulled over, in the shade of a familiar stand of apple trees. If he remembered right and nothing had changed, the single lane went on for another mile or so then turned left, over a broad rocky ford in the creek that ran on the other side of the little road.
The clearing looked right to him, so much so that David could only stand and stare as he worked the kinks of the long drive out of his back, straightening inch by inch. The apple trees were a little changed, a little larger, but not much. One was lightning-struck, that was different. The scars were old and they gnarled the split that had cloven the tree in half. There was no sign of the other half. It must have happened years ago, decades.
He took a step toward it, looking up into its branches. It was a little early but the apples were fat. He reached up for one that was beginning to blush gold and bit into it. Half ripe; half sour, half sweet.
Broken by chance, the tree hadn't grown nearly as large as it might have done unmolested. The apples were still fine, though. He picked a second one and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Then he opened the trunk and took out a folding chair and a fishing rod.
David hadn't bothered to get a license to fish, but the weeds in the gravel roadway said it probably wouldn't matter.
And if it did? If some wandering policeman or ranger gave him a ticket? It'd be worth it. He'd been thinking of this creek for fifty years, always meaning to come back, never quite getting around to it, never able to forget it.
He set up the chair, put his little cooler beside it. Took out a cola and a styrofoam cup of red wrigglers he had bought forty miles back by a little lake he hadn't remembered. He lowered slowly into the chair, knees and hips popping. Baited the hook. Hoped the little brown trout still ran like when he was a boy.
He hadn't held a pole in twenty years, and it showed. It took a dozen bad casts to remember the knack of it, and then the thirteenth put the worm just under the overhang of the bank, in the dark where the fish hide. The worm drifted with the current as it sank. The water was shallow, no more than waist deep, and he could see the worm go. It wriggled, living up to its name, and bounced over the stones in slow motion until it fetched up against a big granite stone half-buried in the bottom right by the opposite bank. A zigzag of bright white quartz and flecks of fool's gold striped it top to bottom, vanishing into the feathery spray of seaweed that ringed it like a skirt.
David recognized the zigzag, the quartz, the gold. How many times did I see that stone as a boy? he wondered. How many times did I think of digging it out and taking it back home with me? But he never had. There was always a reason: it looked too heavy, couldn't tell how deep into the creekbed it was sunk, the water was too cold, it probably wouldn't look as pretty once it dried.
The worm kept eddying back against the bumpy granite, doing jerky loops in the turbulence. A little brown spotted torpedo flashed out from next to the stone, from behind the thin screen of seaweed. It tried to drag the worm back under but David set the hook. Unlike the trick of casting, he remembered how to set the hook well: the firm, precise snap of the wrist that caught a trout without yanking the metal barb completely through its delicate lip. The fish put up a little fight and then it was up on the bank. It was small, but big enough to eat. Maybe half a pound. He gutted it with his pocketknife in the grass, leaving the head on, and slipped it into the cold bag in the cooler. He rinsed his hands in the cool water and dried them on a different patch of grass.
As he closed the lid he looked back at the stone. Where the fish had emerged, there was a little black gap in the seaweed.
It hadn't come from next to the rock. It, or the current before it, had opened up a little burrow of sorts underneath.
The stone wasn't as big as he had always thought. It was lying flat on the bottom. It didn't reach down into the mud at all.
I probably could have lifted it out when I was ten, he thought. A seventy year old man could probably manage it too, arthritis or no arthritis.
He sat back down and fished, thinking. That little hole under the rock kept drawing his eye even though no more fish came from it.
There were no more under the rock, but there were more lurking under the banks. They were biting better than he remembered—or maybe seventy just has more patience to wait for the next bite than ten. In an hour there were two more trout in the cold bag, and he had missed hooking three more. If seventy was more patient, it was also slower setting the hook than ten. If he were still a boy, maybe he'd have caught them all. He reeled in his line and set the pole aside.
He ate a summer sausage sandwich he had made for the trip. His eyes kept sliding back to the little hole under the rock; he half-expected to catch it winking at him. He had another cola and walked across the little road to water the apple tree. Old man, weak bladder.
He went back to fishing, and in another hour there were five fish in the cold bag. Enough for breakfast and dinner tomorrow. He packed
up, then came back to the bank.
His eyes kept catching on the rock, pulled toward it like iron to a magnet. I should have gone in and gotten it up when I was a boy, he thought. It might have looked nice in the back of mom's garden, in among her marigolds. She'd have liked it. She had always had an eye for natural beauty.
“I came out here to do something I haven't done since I was a boy,” David said aloud to the stone in the water as if it could hear. It felt a bit foolish, but it also felt good to speak after sitting quiet on the bank for so long. “Take trout out of this stream. And now there's one more thing I need to do.” He shook his head. My voice is too deep and old for this place, he thought. He remembered a boy's voice here.
He took off his jacket and laid it on the bank in the grass. He emptied his pockets onto it, added socks and shoes to the pile. After a moment's hesitation, he added his pants, thankful that his boxer briefs were black and not white.
There was nobody to see but the birds, but somehow it mattered. He stepped into the water, expecting icy cold. It was just cool, too cool to linger long, but refreshing after sitting in the sun fishing. He waded over to the rock, wiggling his feet on the bottom with each step to find firm footing on the slick algae-filmed stones.
He set his feet on either side of the stone, reached down. To get his fingers under it he had to hold his breath and duck his face in. He kept his eyes open to see what he was doing, dug wrinkled fingers carefully under the rock, and pulled.
It was heavy, but not as mired in the bottom as he had thought it might be. It came up smartly and he stumbled a step back. Disturbed mud and bits of green seaweed swirled downstream as he carried it back and set it on the bank, shivering a bit from the chill of the water.
Before climbing up after the rock, he looked back. The sun caught a buttery yellow gleam on the bottom where the rock had been, shining through the dissipating silt. He turned around and waded back to the spot.
There in the mud and fine gravel, there was a shiny brass key. It was a style that was old fashioned before he had been born, an ornate lobed top and a round barrel with the teeth sticking far out to one side only, blocky and rectangular. He reached down and brought it up in his hand. It was heavy. It was not warm and not cold, though it should have been chilly from the water. It was body temperature.
This key is special. He could feel it. It has been down there waiting for him, he imagined, since before he was born, since before his parents met. He found himself thinking that it must have been disappointed that he hadn't lifted the rock and found it when he was ten. That had been a failure of curiosity, a failure of adventurousness. But still the key had waited patiently. For an old man to come home, with nothing left to lose, with no mother to be angry if he came home wet. With nobody but himself.
But who do we ever truly have, but ourselves? He wished he'd found it when he was ten with a thin and bitter ache in his gut. He made his way back to the bank, roughly dried his legs with the outside of his jacket and put his pants back on. The key went into his pocket, on the side where he kept his loose change, not on the side with his key ring.
It wasn't a common key. It was a key of importance.
Of its own accord, his head turned and he found himself looking across the generations-fallow field to the farmhouse he'd grown up in, with its new additions. From this angle, he could see a shiny new car and a dusty less-new pickup truck parked in front of the kitchen door, just outside the kitchen whose L-shaped layout he knew better than the layout of the bland little apartment he was finishing up his last years in. After all these years, he remembered.
There was one more thing in that yard. A bicycle. Not a ten-speed or a big mountain bike made for an adult.
A little dirt bike, the kind you'd give a ten year old. He stood unmoving, staring at the bike for a long time. The sun began to dip down under the trees to his left, throwing long shadows across him. One of the shadows crept across his eyes and finally broke the spell. He turned away and walked back to the car, an idea opening like a flower in his mind.
The idea didn't entirely make sense to him. It was bold and sudden, and he was an old and cautious man with an old and cautious life. He had a cautious man's apartment to drive his cautious way back to, and an old bed to lie down in until...
...until he died an old and cautious death.
Or he could listen to the boldness in his head now. The voice he had covered over with old and cautious ways his entire life, even when he was a child.
The key had called to him when he was ten and he hadn't listened, more worried about his mother yelling at him for getting wet than about what he was missing.
It was time to go home. Instead, he sat down in this little chair, hips and knees popping, and watched the sun set.
When it was full dark, he used his pocketknife to dig a little hole deep in the bank, his car between the hole and the farmhouse far across the field. Surely nobody would notice at that distance, but still, light traveled far in the dark. He filled the hole halfway with small twigs gathered from the tree. He lit the little fire with pocket lint that he set alight with the car's cigarette lighter, and fed it with deadfallen branches he broke with his hands until the bottom of the hole was filled with orange embers. While he waited for the sticks to burn, he drank another cola and cut the top off of the can. He caught an inch of creek water in it, added some salt from a little packet that had survived a past fast-food meal, and cut up one of the trout into it. He gingerly set the cola can in the fire, pushing down on it lightly so that it would sit on the embers evenly. He added more twigs to the fire and waited, nursing a little cut the can had made on one finger.
After the fire had died back down, he used a folded napkin to pull the can out of the little hole and ate hot trout with an old plastic fork, spitting the little bones into the grass. It wasn't much food, but it sat better in his stomach than any fast food burger or frozen dinner he could remember having in the last decade.
He got in the car, rolled the window down halfway, and reclined the seat as far back as it would go. Soon he was snoring at the moon in the cool night air.
He woke while the morning was still dim gold, little spears of light coming and going as the breeze rustled the leaves. Dew covered the windows in soft pearl. The bright, high kill-deer namesake cry of a little brown killdeer sounded over and over as it flew down the creek, fleeing from the sound of the car door opening. His back was stiff, his hips, his knees, his neck... everything was stiff. But still, he couldn't remember the last time he had fallen asleep so quickly, slept so soundly, woke so rested.
He ate the second apple he had picked the day before for breakfast, washed it down with water cupped from the creek in his hands. He rinsed his face in the chill silver flow and straightened up, kinks popping and cracking out of his back.
He walked over to the apple tree. He picked a new half-gold apple for his pocket and then stood, arms braced on a low, straight branch. Watching. A small black ant of a figure came out of the kitchen door, walked past the cars down the driveway to stand beside the road. A few minutes later, a yellow schoolbus stopped and let him in. Fifteen minutes after that, a bigger black ant of a figure came out, got into the pickup truck, and headed off in the opposite direction from the schoolbus.
He passed another hour, eating another apple he plucked from the tree, before the last black ant came out of the door, got into the car, and went down the same way the school bus had gone.
Now he could go see what the key drew him to, what had waited for him all those decades. He started off across the fallow field, carrying the cold bag with the last four trout in it as an afterthought. After two steps his pants legs were heavy with the thick dew wiped off the tall grass. After ten steps the chill was beginning to seep through his shoes. The walk warmed him despite the cold damp, and his steps grew faster as he went. It wasn't long before he stepped out of the weeds and onto the mowed oval of the lawn.
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A big brown mutt stretched itself out from under the porch and gave a cautious, muffled woof. David smiled. He remembered when his own dog slept under that same porch. He pulled one of the trout out of the cold bag.
“Good boy,” he said, and tossed the trout into the grass off to the side, closer to the dog than to him. The dog hesitated, looking at the brown fish laying in the grass, then back at David.
He was a good dog. He was going to take more convincing before he gave up guarding the house in favor of food. David took a second trout out of the bag, swinging it back and forth to catch the dog's attention and hopefully waft a bit of food smell into the air.
“Food, boy. Food. Good boy. Who's a good boy? Who wants food?” He stepped toward the dog, slow and careful. The dog watched the trout. Wuff, quiet. Thinking dog thoughts. David saw the dog's nose move, sniffing. He tossed the second trout the same direction as the first, but not as far. Closer to the dog. The brown muzzle followed the fish and the dog took a half step and stopped, one front leg splayed out to the side toward the morsel. David took a third fish out.
“Here,” he said, holding it out in front of him, leaning way forward. The arthritis ached deep in his hip joints and flowed down his legs into his knees. It curled hot tentacles up his lower back. But he leaned out, doing his best to ignore the pain. The dog took one step forward, then two. David shuffled to meet the dog, trout-first. The dog's black nose wiggled and sniffed up and down an inch from the moist brown shape. The dog growled, but softly, weakly. Without any force behind it. David held the fish out sideways, by the head. The trout drooped at the tail, the rest of it stiff and straight. Wuf. The dog opened his mouth halfway, eyes locked on David's eyes, brown like his fur and sharp, clear.
David carefully laid the trout across the dog's teeth. The white points closed on the fish delicately, denting the flesh but not puncturing the skin. The dog blinked at him. David smiled.
“That's a boy.”
The dog trotted off to the side near the other two fish and laid down with the third across his outstretched paws, exploring his fishy prize with cautious licks. David walked softly by, and up the kitchen stairs. They were not the same stairs David remembered, but they were not new. They were still wood, and they still creaked a little. They were the same stairs after all, rebuilt all over again. He tried the door.
The next house had been a mile and a half away when David had been a boy, and his family had known all the neighbors for twenty miles around. They hadn't bothered locking the door. When he had driven through, it didn't look like the neighbors were any farther than before, at least in this corner of the country. But more people locked their doors these days.
What would he do if the door was locked? He turned the knob.
Click. The door swung open. For a moment his vision doubled and he could swear he saw the swirl of a blue skirt by the sink. The same deep enameled double-tub sink from his boyhood. His mother had loved to wear blue, blue like a summer sky. The rest of the room was redone, new appliances, more modern colors. And it was big, but it was small. The last time he had been in this room, he had been twenty, saying goodbye, a U-Haul full of odds and ends out in the driveway. But it was small, because everything had been bigger in the eyes of a ten year old. He remembered that even at twenty sometimes things in the house looked strange to him, because he could remember when they had all been bigger.
But he wasn't here to reminisce; he shook his head and the double vision of memory broke and faded. He walked through the kitchen, past the different-but-same-shape-and-size table in the dining room, through the living room where his father had nursed his one and only beer of the evening, every evening, while he read dog-eared book after book from the used bookstore out in town.
David headed up the stairs that opened up next to the corner where the TV had sat (echo: the new people had chosen the same corner for theirs, this mystery family whose home was now where his had been), and into the hall.
The hall was perpendicular to the line of the stairs, with two rooms to the right and two to the left. One had been his, one his parents', one for storage, and one for mother's hobbies and father's bookcases. Though his parents still talked of a sibling until he was in high school, they had never managed to have another child.
“The stars aligned for you,” his mother had taken up saying after he had left home. After a few more years she had begun to add, “I hope the stars will align a woman into your life so I can have a grandchild before you-know.”
You-know. She had been younger than he was now when she died. There had been a woman once, a maybe, but then she...
...she disappeared. They had dated for three years, then been engaged for four.
“Maybe after Christmas,” he had told her one autumn night. When he said it, it echoed in his mind and he realized that he had said it before. More than once. Probably seven times.
The next day she had been gone, her drawers in the dresser empty, her hangers gone from the closet, her shelf spotless in the bathroom. He had never heard from her again. Elizabeth.
Standing on the top step, he took a deep breath and pulled himself out of memory again. Being in this house was like walking through his own mind. He was here, standing in his own past, on the top step. What the key was for, was right above him through the dangerously-placed attic door in the ceiling of the hall, right at the top of the stairs. When the ladder was unfolded, you could look to the left and feel like you could fall right down all the stairs without touching a single one, to land splat right on the living room floor. There was no rail.
It was up there. Whatever it was waiting behind the door the key wanted to open.
But first.
His room. It wasn't what the key wanted. But it was what he wanted. His whole life had been lived in fear of what he wanted: the thought pounced whole and shocking into the middle of his mind like a beast, scattering the other thoughts away like frightened rats.
“Fuck fear,” he said suddenly, almost spitting with the violence of the word. The word that mild David didn't say. He hardly ever even said damn. He felt a child's thrill of naughtiness at saying it. I'm seventy years old and I feel guilty saying a bad word with nobody around to hear it. “Fuck fear,” he repeated softly, addressing the closed door of the room he'd called his for the first twenty years of his life, and he didn't feel a thing this time.
It felt good. He walked forward and grabbed the doorknob. He turned it with care, all the way until it stopped. He took a deep breath and opened it slowly.
There was a bed by the window, where his had been, but it was not his bed. The posters on the wall were different. There was a new computer on the modernly skeletal desk instead of a pad of paper on the old rolltop he had had. He had almost expected to see his old room, as it was when he was ten. He knew better, but he had almost thought he'd see all the old familiar things. He walked to the bed, looked out the window. The roof of the new addition was strange to his right, but the rest of the view was the same as when he was a boy. The grass, the field, the trees in the distance, no glimpse of the creek that ran behind them or the old man's car beside it, abandoned. The clear blue sky. Not a power line in sight, they were all out front.
He turned, looking around the room. It was a simple rectangle of a room, not large. The closet was closed and he felt no urge to look inside. Those were another boy's things.
The computer hummed faintly behind him. An alien sound. If his old pad of paper was there, he'd leaf through it. He reached out and nudged the mouse. The screen blinked to life. Most of the screen was filled with a word processing program. There was a slice of an old face behind it, the desktop image. A woman's face, long white hair, wrinkles, a blue eye with a bag under it. Smile lines. A simple pearl stud in her ear.
He clicked on the text to activate the scroll function, and read the most recent entry, yesterday's.
David Jr.'s Jo
urnal
September 18