The Fisherman (26 page)

Truth to tell, most of the time, Jacob’s presence appears barely to register on Italo. As the adage has it, the man has bigger fish to fry; despite what they went through the year before, Jacob can’t muster the courage to ask him about whatever’s in the skillet. As it turns out, he won’t need to. A couple of months after the Dort house and its surroundings have been reduced to a foundation and bare ground, there’s a morning Regina doesn’t rise from bed. Italo sends his oldest boy, Giovanni, for the doctor, but by the time the man arrives, she’s well on her way to her last breaths. Cancer, apparently of the uterus, which likely has spread to other places in her body, the doctor opines. Italo and the children sit with her as she completes the remainder of her journey out of this life. At the very end, Regina’s eyes flutter, her lips move as if she’s about to say something, utter a final instruction or bit of wisdom, but all she manages is, “The woman:” the rest is pulled down into death with her.

Everyone who knows them expects that, with Regina gone, Italo will collapse, crushed by the weight of his sorrow and the responsibility of so large a family. After work, Clara stops at their house to lend what assistance she can with the cooking and cleaning, as do Lottie and her sisters, but mother and daughters alike judge it only a matter of time before Helen and George’s children finish their long-delayed trip to the orphanage, and take Italo and Regina’s brood with them. While Italo hasn’t retreated into the glassy depths of a bottle of alcohol, or mummified himself in layers of grief, the façade he shows to his family, to the rest of the camp, is riven with cracks. To Clara and her girls’ surprise, however, Maria, the oldest of the adopted children, steps forward and seizes the reins of the situation. The general expectation is that she’ll be no match for it, that it’ll whipsaw her back and forth and fling her away broken. But the girl digs in her heels, braces her legs, and winds the reins around her arms and shoulders. It’s neither easy nor smooth, but over a course of months, she settles what’s become her family into a new kind of normal. Nobody leaves school; nobody loses their job—except for Maria, herself, who doesn’t return to school and quits the part-time position she’s had at the bakery. There’s some suspicion she’s angling to marry Italo, about which opinion is more divided than you might expect, but gradually, it becomes clear that Maria’s assumed the role of maiden aunt, rather than wife-in-waiting. She’ll maintain the position for the remainder of the family’s stay at the camp.

XXX

Three years pass. Jacob’s slow courtship of Lottie progresses to a long engagement, which leads to marriage right around the time the Reservoir’s west basin starts being filled. The previous summer’s been hot and dry, leaving the Esopus shrunken within its banks, and the water collects slowly in the great bowl—so much so there’s fear that the Reservoir’s been built too big, that it’ll never be full. Those fears are put to rest the following fall, when a succession of storms pours rain into it and lifts the water level within sight of where it’s supposed to be. Next spring—on June 19, 1914, to be exact—all the whistles in the camp will blow for a solid hour, announcing the completion of the majority of work on the Reservoir. Although it’ll be another two years after that until the project is officially finished, the roar of the whistles echoing up the Esopus valley, off the surrounding mountains, overlapping itself to form layers of a sound, a geology of sound, serves notice to those working at the camp that the end is drawing nigh. Already, most of the crews who cleared the valley have been handed their walking papers. Some of the stoneworkers have been let go, too. What’s next for them is a topic Rainer and Clara, Jacob and Lottie, have discussed, but after those whistles, there’s an element of urgency mixed into their conversations.

Italo departs the camp first. Within six months of the whistles blowing, he’s secured a position with a stonemason in Wiltwyck. The next year, Lottie and Jacob and their first child, Greta, will settle in Woodstock, so that Jacob can take up a job with a fellow who carves headstones. In order to continue their schooling, and to help with the baby, Lottie’s sisters, Gretchen and Christina, accompany them. Rainer and Clara will remain at the camp the longest, as its streets empty, its houses become vacant, its bakery and general store close. At the end of 1916, when the Reservoir is formally pronounced done, Rainer and Clara will be among the only residents of the camp that’s in the process of being taken down. Through the same talent for persuasion that brought him and his family to this place, Rainer succeeds in obtaining a position with the Water Authority that’s been established to oversee the functioning and maintenance of the Reservoir and the tunnels that funnel its water to New York’s thirsty taps. This is a time when the U.S. is on its way into the First World War, and you might not expect a fellow with a German accent to be hired to so sensitive a position. He convinces whoever needs it of his loyalty and his trustworthiness, and for the next decade, he travels up and down Ulster County, inspecting its portion of the Catskill Aqueduct—that’s the tunnel that runs south out of the Reservoir. He and Clara relocate to Woodstock, to a modest house a couple of doors down from Lottie and Jacob, whose family has expanded to include a son, also Jacob, and another daughter, Clara. Christina, Rainer and Clara’s youngest, has scandalized everyone by falling pregnant with the child of a much older man who has come north from Beacon to tend to his sick brother. After a hasty wedding, Christina and Tom head back down the Hudson to settle. Gretchen, the middle sister, attends the teachers’ college in Huguenot, and takes a position teaching in Rhinebeck. She’ll marry late, a railroad conductor with whom she develops a romance over the course of trips to Manhattan to visit the museums there.

Life goes on. That’s the remarkable thing, isn’t it? Not that everything the Schmidts and their companions had been through with the Fisherman wasn’t incredible, but that the world could have continued as it always has, anyway, seems astonishing. Once or twice a year, usually when summer’s at its height, Italo brings his family to visit. While Clara and Lottie fuss over how big the children have grown and listen to them report their latest activities, Rainer and Italo trade remarks about the weather and whatever news the headlines have been concerned with; while Jacob listens quietly, nodding every now and again to show he’s paying attention. He’s done quite well for himself, has Italo, buying out the stonemason who hired him, bringing on his son, Giovanni, to work with him. He has more business, he says, than he knows what to do with, but he’s lucky to have such problems. Clara tells him he should find a nice woman, but Italo insists he doesn’t have time for such things. Over the course of his visits, his hair whitens and thins, his skin takes on a gray pallor that Clara declares she does not care for. Italo poo-poos her worrying, but when word comes from Wiltwyck that he’s suffered a heart attack and been hospitalized, her fears are borne out. Rainer and she set off for the hospital, but by the time they arrive, Italo’s heart has failed, completely.

A year after his friend’s death, Rainer will be retired from his job, forced to do so by the dramatic decline in his faculties that’s been showing early symptoms for longer than he’s wanted to admit. His short-term memory’s crumbling. He loses the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. He forgets the name of the person he’s talking to. He can’t remember the date. Worse, he’s started to slip from English to German unawares, then to become annoyed if whoever he’s speaking with doesn’t understand him. He resists accepting what’s happening to him, which is the cause of several bitter arguments between him and Clara. In the end, his boss will deliver an ultimatum: either Rainer retires, or he’ll be forced to fire him. Protesting the injustice of it all, Rainer opts to tender his resignation. Once he leaves his job, his condition falls off steeply, until he’s little more than an oversized infant. There are moments, when she’s spooning chicken soup past his quivering lips, that Clara will recall the pale light she saw washing over Rainer’s features when he was engrossed in his books, trying to sort out the mess with the Fisherman. She’ll remember the way it blurred her husband’s face, and how she had to fight back the fear that clawed at her at the sight of him. Wiping his chin with a napkin, she’ll think that it’s as if that dead light sunk inside him, bleaching away whatever of him it fell on. When he’s breathed his last, Clara, her eyes dry, will turn to Lottie and tell her that she lost her husband long before this. She lost him to light the color of the full moon, of the froth on top of a wave, of a burial shroud.

XXXI

Before his retirement and death, though, there’s one more matter with which Rainer Schmidt concerns himself, and that’s Dutchman’s Creek. If you go back to older maps of the area, you’ll find sections of streams and creeks that appear to follow some of the same route, but nothing substantial enough to count as a match. At first, the fishermen who come to try its waters assume it is one of those other streams, and that whatever map they’ve consulted is off, or their memories of the place mistaken. Over the course of a couple of years, those fellows talk to one another, compare notes, and gradually, it becomes clear to everyone that this in a new creek. Such things happen, of course: heavy flooding can carry away part of a stream’s bank, open a fresh path for it; a rockslide can push its waters in another direction. This creek runs all the way to the Hudson, through banks steep and thickly forested. Not a few of the men who trade their impressions of it agree that the stream looks as if it’s been there for a goodly number of years. It’s as if the land has unfolded a little extra of itself. No one can remember noticing it, previously, but no one can recall not noticing it, either.

What brings Rainer to it is the notice the creek draws from the Water Authority. A few men have tried, but no one has been able to pinpoint the location of the stream’s headwaters. As you trace it back, the creek appears to be headed directly towards the Reservoir. However, its upper reaches snake through dense woods that seem to confound anyone who ventures too far into them. A couple of fellows were lost for a day and a night amidst the evergreens, and one old man spent upwards of three days wandering the area, as the pines and spruce gave way to tall trees unlike any he’d seen. Through their trunks, he claims to have seen a distant body of water, what he thought was the Reservoir, except the water looked dark. Everyone who hears his story dismisses it as a hallucination brought on by combined exposure and lack of proper nourishment. Concerned about a possible leak, the higher-ups at the Water Authority have had the Reservoir inspected, from dam to weir to bed. Nothing has been found amiss.

This is when Rainer arrives. At first, he hadn’t paid much attention to the talk about the new creek. You might imagine, he isn’t much on fishing. As the talk of the stream has continued, though, his interest has been stirred. The more he’s heard of it, the less Rainer has liked what he’s hearing. It would be easy enough to dismiss the reports of enormous fish whose like no fisherman has seen—and which conveniently snap whatever line has them as they’re on the verge of being landed—as the usual exaggerations of men who’ve used their trip to the woods to sneak a little moonshine. Had Rainer not been through the events at the camp, he might discount the other stories he hears as further evidence of that liquor’s potency. A pair of boys playing hooky is gone much longer than they’d planned when they become lost trying to follow a pale figure they glimpse in the woods upstream. An old man returns to the same spot every day for two weeks, not to fish, but to listen to a voice he swears is that of his son, killed in the War. One member of a fishing party falls into the creek and would likely have drowned were his companions not excellent swimmers; the man insists he saw his brother, dead these many years from pneumonia, staring up at him from beneath the water’s surface. When Clara and Lottie ask him what’s happening, Rainer gives his usual answer—he isn’t sure—but this time around, he doesn’t wait for things to grow worse before he acts. He convinces whoever requires it that his position patrolling the aqueduct makes him perfectly suited for getting to the bottom of this matter, then tells Jacob he’ll have need of him the following Sunday, after church.

It’s a hot, humid afternoon when Jacob parks his car on one side of Tashtego Lane and sets off with his father-in-law in search of the stream. You can be sure, he’s thinking about the last excursion he accompanied Rainer on. They don’t have axes, don’t have any tools, at all, which Jacob hopes is a good sign. They walk a few hundred yards across a meadow to a low ridge. Rainer and Jacob climb the ridge, then half-slide down its far side to the modest valley it forms with the ridge behind it. This second ridge is steeper, taller, an earth and stone wall, but it’s heavily forested with evergreens the men use as handholds to help themselves up it. Just past the top of the hill, he looks down through the spruce and pine and sees a creek white and foaming below. Digging their heels into the soil, zigzagging from tree to tree, he and Rainer descend the hillside, until they’re on the narrow shelf that borders this side of the stream. Maybe a dozen yards over the turbulent water, the other shore is a mirror of theirs, a slender strip of land at the foot of a ridge heavy with trees. On the left, the creek foams down an incline halfway to a waterfall; ahead and on the right, it runs level for ten or fifteen yards before plunging down another set of rapids. Jacob glances at Rainer, who’s staring at the water’s surface. Afraid that his father-in-law is having another of his spells—the name his wife and mother-in-law have given to his moments of blankness—Jacob touches Rainer’s shoulder, whereupon the older man starts, shakes his head, and turns left. “This way,” he says, heading upstream. Over his shoulder, he adds, “You remember from before. If you hear someone, do not listen to them. If you see someone, do not look at them.” Jacob wants to ask how exactly he’s supposed to avoid looking at someone he’s seeing, but he understands the gist of Rainer’s instruction, and hurries to keep up with him.