Adsila, Wyoming

Iris Moulton

Adsila, Wyoming

Nobody comes here anymore except him, and since they were born and could walk on their own and lift their own spoons to their own mouths, them. This is their time. This is Wyoming. Extremes of sun and shade, mountain in the lap of prairie, and rivers with runs of seething white, the mournful stillnesses of their deeper holes—this is what brings him.

He taught them to cast there, into that stillness, because a stressed fish busy negotiating a run isn’t thinking of eating. It seeks comfort and reward once the waters calm.

Nobody comes here anymore except him. And them. He is a man who has lost much: friends, a daughter, his wife. It could also be said that he is a man who has much: a son-in-law, two granddaughters, Wyoming. But in his mind it is the other way, feeling sharply without his friends, his daughter, his wife, and, when he sees the clean fingernails and bored faces of his granddaughters on the river, their eyes and mouths big and open as begging fledglings, he wonders if Wyoming is lost to him now, too.

This is not his favorite run. This is not what he would otherwise be doing, sticking close to the road and moving slowly. But here is the bank best for leaving and finding them again, the one his wife liked for its sparse willows and easy path down, its wide banks for sunning when she tired of casting. My wife, too.

It is not that when I died I came here, though he believes this, or would like to. He feels me in the air like dew, like how dew clings and then evaporates or is absorbed, as one is to another. This is what people say: that once you are gone you are everywhere.

It is not like they say, either, about how we see you so clearly and all the time. The him I see he would neither recognize nor claim. This is more like being in a parked car in winter: only in moments of bored curiosity will the window be wiped clean of fog. To do that again and again grows tiresome; we do not watch you very much. I do not watch him very much. Or I watch Wyoming and he stumbles into it. We fish like we always did, he suspects. He looks to the sky when he talks to me. He says more now than he did before.

Our myths are both real dragonflies on the water and real hooks that look like dragonflies.

His oldest granddaughter approaches the shore and plunges her hand in.

“Yeesh,” she says, shaking it. The drops shatter in the light. “I would hate to be a fish! That water is cold cold!”

His youngest granddaughter says from the blanket, “Maybe if you were a fish though you would love it. Maybe you should be a fish!”

This is possible: if one can be alive or dead one can be a fish or no. Like all things it takes only time. The youngest thinks of her mother when she joins her sister at the edge and puts her hand in the cold cold river.

“Oh yeah?” says the oldest. “And get hooked all the time by Grandpa? And sometimes eaten? He rips their guts out, you know.”

The youngest feels her hand disappear in the river, but when she looks it is still there. Just numb.

The oldest shades her eyes and scans along the mountain at the river’s other side. They are always hoping for an animal, ideally with a baby, but so far there has been nothing. She checks her fingernails against the sun. The youngest returns to the blanket, cradling her cold hand like an egg. She roosts on it. The oldest turns to watch her, filling the air with the rapid zipping and unzipping of her jacket. An outdoors jacket. The oldest likes most of all about these trips that there are these special costumes.

“Do you think if something came to eat us Grandpa would hear us scream?” the oldest asks.

The youngest nods hopefully.

Just a few miles away—on the river’s other side—a mother bear is growing impatient with her cub, who is reluctant to tamper with a hive. It is as if the buzzing hurts his ears, the way he shakes his head No. There is a thorny pod caught in his coat, and in that pod, a seed. He cannot reach it. Most of the time he forgets it is there. He hears the river and is thirsty now. He remembers how the water cooled his paws, calmed the scrapes and bruises. He looks toward the river.

The girls will never see him, or her. This means they do not believe they are real. It is this way for almost all things. They hope, but see only the usual birds and chipmunks and brush shaking with departed lizards. The absence of uncommon creatures signifies to the granddaughters not an indifference—which is unimaginable—to being seen and admired, but rather that there is nothing here. Maybe once there were such things, but they’re gone now.

The grandfather catches nothing, though a few roll at it. Their white bellies raw and unsunned. He pinches the fly into the cork of the rod and turns his back on the sun to make for the bank.

He helps them seal the box of crackers, bind the blanket to his bag. He leads them through the willows, pausing only to suggest that maybe they should blow the moose whistle as loudly and irritatingly as they can in case there is anything out there in need of scaring.

*

At camp he demonstrates how to build a fire. He gives them a choice: teepee, parallel, pyramid, or star. Star! they say. No, he says, that never works. He shows them teepee, tipping the sticks lengthwise against each other, and calms their protests by telling the story I first told him, about the Fair Indian Maiden Adsila (“This is where she lives,” he says, “right in here, right in this teepee”) and her white man John Henry, and how John Henry loved her so much that it started a war. His brothers charged over the hill just as Adsila’s brothers were charging over that same hill, and they met at the top, and there they killed each other, sometimes with one driving a sword into the other just as the other was driving a sword into him, so when they fell they fell like a horse, four-legged. And that’s what this part of the canyon was named for, I told him but he did not tell the girls, Adsila. He did not tell the girls because the whole thing was a lie. But I really had him going about the Fair Indian Maiden Adsila and her white compatriot, pointing up at that hill like I did. If he hadn’t caught a fish on that trip he would have never talked to me again.

So he stops before he tells them that’s how this canyon was named, because the whole thing really is a lie, but without that bit at least it’s a harmless one, one that doesn’t impede their education. But, he is realizing, without it the story has no ending.

They are looking at him, and at the little pile of sticks where the fire should be, so he kneels at the pit and begins to blow, and says: “And the Fair Indian Maiden Adsila fell asleep one night, right in here, right in that little black place. And she dreamed about John Henry. She saw his face. And he sang her a song. About how their dead brothers had forgiven them for being in love, and they should forgive their brothers for dying and killing. And her heart got warm, warm, then hot, and then pretty soon—”

The teepee started smoking and then caught fire. And there, Adsila burned.

He didn’t know why he told that story, or especially why he gave it that end. It was just a story to tell, one he might have told his wife because she’d be only half-listening anyway in her own paradise of the setting sun and bird calls and rustling brush. But the girls watched him carefully: adults only ever spoke to them in meanings, and they were searching for his.

“So let that be a lesson to both of you,” he says. He went to the bear canister for the food, breathing out all the idiot air that helped with that story and its end.

They eat by passing cans around the fire. He had warmed the beans some, and they are cupped with a rag for easy holding.

“Behind those clouds,” he says, pointing up with his fork. “Is a meteor shower, if you can even believe it.”

*

The next morning he lets them play as long as he can. Let’s them run, turning and counting the seconds until the dust behind them settles back into road, trying it again, trying to best their own time or raise the dust even higher. He takes care to pack the truck. He takes time doing unnecessary things: changing the flies again. But soon he calls them back, says they’d better get on the river before someone else gets all the fish or before the fish swim clear to the ocean. They come in. He double checks that the coals have cooled and the tents are zipped as they jump from the table to the dirt, aiming for their same footprints.

The girls watch from the window of the truck for animals. There are deer and moose and bear and hawk and pika and coyote and bobcat all tucked quietly away, looking for any sign of the girls, who they don’t know exist, as is the way for most things, so they search by instinct for an approximation, a general upset in the usual order. This is how the living and the dead see. We feel the air for each other, detect only the effect we have and not the shape we are.

There was an upset in the order of things when they put me in the ground: a toupee of grass over hygienic earth. There was a seam but by now it is undetectable, grown in well. It is not the same in him. The place in him that I occupied has stayed scorched and barren. But it is not my death that is important here. There is no my. Death only belonged to me for an instant, and it was the same instant in which it was pulled from me. In which I was pulled from me. All death combines to make the blackest sky and the telescope is your pupil, black and ringed by useless color. He sees it, sometimes, in the mirror, widening as if to take him in.

At the river he is thinking of my wife sunning herself on the bank, or I am, and so I imagine he is too. Isn’t it always that way, even for the living? And now we are thinking of his wife, who was a prophet sent here for the benefit of all living things, who would fish for hours joyfully with no hook. When she had to lie down in a tent after being with us on the river all day, complaining of cramps, I remarked to him—secretly, I’d thought—about women being inherently in need of more care. Weaker, I might have said. And she marched out and put a finger in my face and said, “Without my period you would have never been born.” Cloth napkins with stains the color of rust wetted in the river and drying on our table in the sun.

She would braid strands of weeds into their daughter’s hair—for hours—at camp. The thorniest to teach her about different kinds of beauty.

They willingly give him to the willows and he slips from sight. The granddaughters have an hour to fill and they know enough to know it would take too much juice and crackers to try to fill it with only that. So they cast, and remind each other how to cast, mostly worried about how far apart they have to be before they’ll hook each other. They remain closer together than any expert would advise. Occasionally the youngest dips her head and blows the whistle, just in case.

There are red berries behind sharp-looking leaves across the river. The birds flit in and out, eating some there in the pointed shadows and carrying others into the trees to store. The grandfather sees them too, and the killdeer, the metronomic bob of their butts, their sharp, incessant whistle.

The girls flick the line. They splash more than one should.

When the grandfather returns they are sitting on the bank. Their faces are red and swollen with tears. As he approaches he sees, wafting in a cool inlet, the wide flat side of a cutthroat, dead.

“You caught one,” he says, but it sounds more like a question.

The oldest turns her own red face away.

He sees the hook, a cruel decoration now, and reaches down into the cool water. The girls lean over, more as a funerary rite than from any desire to learn. He grips the fish and shows them to push the hook in a little to unlatch the barb from the flesh, then sweep it out through the tunnel the hook’s already made.

“But knowing how to get the hook out of the fish isn’t what gets the hook out of the fish,” he says. They nod because his voice is kind.

He shows them the fish he caught, and says they’ll fry them both for dinner.

He says they don’t have to watch this part, and takes out his knife, but they do.

He finds the dark entrance at the fish’s tail and draws the blade up to the cut-shape already waiting at the throat. He makes his own gash there, seeing the tongue flit, and rips downward, pulling out a ball of slippery brown and red organs. He shows them the heart, only after finding the liver so as to make the distinction for himself. He massages the spinal fluid into the river. He steadies the fish on a rock and chops its head off, and turns it around, working the tail. Always the genius bundle of muscle and sinew makes the tail swim, whether in air or water, alive or dead. He says so. He tosses the tail on the bank and gives the filet a final rinse in the river.

The youngest pokes at the tail with her finger, its spotted sheen like a butterfly’s wing. The grandfather reaches and picks it up, shows her how it would flap and fly away if it were a butterfly, but when he drops it it flops on the shore and begins a new puddle of river and blood.

The girls see in all things other things, and are all the time showing him. How those black trees on the ridge look like the trees of x-rayed lungs they’ve seen in books at school. This leaf looks like the shape of its own tree, and so does this one. These petals look like lizard skin. Those branches look like antlers. These branches look like bones. This rock looks like a heart. This deer hoofprint looks like a heart. Those marks on the butterfly look like eyes. These marks on the fish look like eyes.

When it comes time to slit his fish’s belly he sees and tries to hide as the bright balls of eggs spill out.

“What are those?” the oldest asks.

“Well,” he begins.

There is this thing about the repeating patterns in nature, and that is that they’re all true. Wood grain and current, hornet and tiger, the hand of a bat and the paw of a wolf, the hummingbird’s heart and the heart of his daughter, stopped, mushroom and palm tree, a dead fish’s eyes and the eyes of his friend, his wife, their mother, his daughter. The way women are made to carry. The world is small and shares material. They see this already, and so he continues,

“This fish was pregnant.”

And there isn’t anything else that needs saying.

*

In early morning before the sun, the bear is black breath against the trees, but all else is black so the grandfather doesn’t notice. She disappears, taking only the scent of cooked fish back to her cub. He thinks of Adsila as he starts the fire for coffee, he burns her alive again. From inside the tent the girls smell the smoke and coffee and turn away to put their faces in cleaner air and return to sleep.

Nobody comes here anymore, but he thinks of me in moments like these. This was our time, while the women slept, to build a fire, make the coffee, dig a hole to shit. Just to see our breath was enough as it eased in and out, small clouds from our mouths into the sky. Our clouds more often than not disappeared before they could but sometimes they would converge.

It is not my death that’s important.

Today the girls will watch him fish.

He makes scrambled eggs but they say they can still taste the fish, and he says it’s a different pan he’s using, and they say it must just be in their mouths. They see their breath in the air, part fish. It will live in them forever.

He puts them in the compromise of a nice run for him and a nice resting place at shore for them.

He begins to cast. The reel whines like an insect.

Slowly, he inches down the bank and away from the girls. When they look up he is just close enough to not be mistaken for a stranger.

“Poor little fishies,” the youngest says softly.

“So so cold,” says the oldest.

They watch the grandfather, his line in the sun from his belly like a spider’s thread, and gone again in shadow.

The oldest picks up a pebble. She arcs back and tosses it, and picks up her book just as the rock plunks down. The grandfather looks over, thinking it might have been a big one. He looks back at the girls, who seem to be getting along fine, and recasts where he heard the splash.

The sun on the river is bright, reflects not sky but nothing. Below its veil: a world of living things, and such a thin seam that separates them, cruel gods and hideous believers.

The youngest has been picking at a rock with a stick for some time now. The rock is loosening itself. She can glimpse the cool wet print beneath, the cavity it would leave. She lets it drop and—now this is important—admires how it looks undisturbed. She wonders if she has been, in fact, the only one to ever lift this rock, or if others before her have peeked beneath it. She lifts an edge again and lets it drop. She picks it up all the way, turns it over, sees the galaxy of its blackest, sand-splotched other side. She is overcome with a feeling, small at first, which grows like the swell of floodwater, like a pupil in the dark, that she has made a mistake, that she has bothered something once perfect already in its stillness. In this urgency she tries to replace it exactly as it was, to match the lines perfectly and hide the underbelly and the piece of the world it concealed. Is that how it was? She tries again. It is as if it had been the last and only thing holding the world together. And, in fact, it was exactly the last and only thing holding the world together, and there, slowly, it begins to end.