The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg Read Free Book Online Page B

true leaves had a metallic glint that gave them away. They were sugar maples. Every samara that fell last year seems to have taken root. We now live in the middle of a forest that’s three inches tall. When the sun sets, it catches the tint of the seedling maple leaves and the pasture turns bronze.

    T he oldest cottonwoods along the Bighorn River have fissured bark nearly as deep as my palm is wide, and where cattle have rubbed against them their bark is pale. Morels grow in the new grass beneath the cottonwoods. To hunt for morels is to remember something unsettling about the task of looking. One day last week I searched the partial shade of each tree along a quartermile of riverbank, and as I did I tried to concentrate on seeing the fawn-brown cranial effusion that is a morel. But concentrating didn’t make the morels appear. They were there or not there, and nothing could induce them to surface where they weren’t.
    On a bright day a few trout are visible from a high bank—wisps of movement against a dark green background, more angular and better camouflaged than the undulating filaments of aquatic weed that wash downstream. But to some anglers a fish is truly visible only when it rises and feeds. Sometimes trout shoulder the river aside, and sometimes they barely crease it, taking a cluster of midges sliding past on the water’s tension, as light as thought. Most of the time the fish adhere to the stream bottom, waiting, feeding in the subsurface drift.
    Until the fish rise I wait too. In slack current, rafts of goslings test the water, their parents, like tugboats, nudging them this way and that. Everywhere there is the racket of red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds, the high-ceilinged squawk of pheasants, the wet slap of mergansers’ wings on takeoff. Green hills climb in the distance, level off, and become wheat and barley fields, private inholdings on the Crow Reservation.
    Then a morning comes when the wind has died and clouds have hidden the sun at last. The thing that will make the trout appear from nowhere is about to happen. The nymphs of a species of mayfly—
Baetis tricaudatus
—will rise through the water column and hatch on its surface, and the trout will rise with them.
    In midafternoon the mayflies are not there, no matter how hard I look, and then a minute later they are. It’s as though morels erupted from the grass while I watched, beneath every cottonwood and as far as the eye can see. The mayflies are the same color as the river’s dull surface, their wings canted upstream over slender bodies. They drift into view no matter where I look, and coming into view among them are the heads of brown trout and rainbows, suddenly visible at last.
    I tried, with friends that night, to estimate how many
Baetis
hatched during the single hour of their emergence. Even the most conservative number looked improbable, and the probable number was unimaginable to us all.

    I t’s taken me nearly thirty years—the thirty years since my mother died—to learn that what I miss the most about her is her voice. I can hear it, but I can’t tell you much about it beyond what most people know of a mother’s voice—that in childhood it fell like consoling shade on a hot ear. So much—the sound of her talking—I missed from the first. More and more, I lack the very way she talked, unadorned and ordinary as it was.
    My mother’s mother said “pie-anna” for “piano.” Like her daughter, she sat at that instrument in the intervals of housework and played hymns. Her voice had the reediness that comes to the throat after a hard life. I know a lot about my grandmother, but they’re things a child knows, not adult information. I don’t know a single sentence her parents ever said to her.
    My mom learned in school not to say “pie-anna,” and I would wager that she never once used a phrase that was uniquely hers. She spoke, as we all do, a temporal dialect—a speech made up in the main of plain, enduring