I looked at the man, at the vest and the sunburned nose, and I understood that a miracle of timing had occurred. “I am Etta,” I said. “And those hoppers are mine.” He took a step closer, still holding the fly up to the light. “Madam, my name is Bill Thatcher. I am the product director for Mountain River Outfitters. In June, we bought forty one patterns from Etta of Island Park, at a price of four million seven hundred thousand dollars. I have been trying to reach you for two weeks, because our lawyer has a few forms.” He turned the fly slowly. “And I find them in a driveway, for two dollars a box.”
Caleb had come around the card table. He is twenty nine, a long, slouching young man with the broad shoulders of Dutch and nothing else of him, and he stood with his thumbs hooked in his belt, grinning at nothing. “Sir,” he said, “I think there is a mix up. These are the old flies of my grandmother. She makes them for fun.” Bill Thatcher said, very politely, “Young man, each one of those flies has been tested by guides from Montana to Patagonia. We paid four point seven million dollars for the right to put her name on the box.” The grin of Caleb did not fade at once. It slid, like wax on a stove. “Four,” he said. “Seven. Million.”
Brooke, the girlfriend, dropped the cash box. It landed on the concrete with a clang, and silver dollars rolled across the driveway. I did not move from my lawn chair. I laid my hand on my pocket, where the pawn tickets lay folded, and felt them crackle. “Caleb,” I said, in a plain voice, “when you cleaned my house, you took two things that I did not give you. I would like them back.”
A hand tied fly turned in the sunlight of a driveway drew a company man to a lawn chair and gave one fly tier the afternoon to bring her grandson back to the table.
He knew at once what I meant. I saw it go through him like a current. His eyes flicked toward the kitchen window, where the belt buckle sat on the counter, and then back to me, and in that second his face did something frightening and sad. It went completely blank, the face of a child caught at the cookie jar who has decided to deny the cookie. “Grandma,” he said, “I do not know what you are talking about.” I took the tickets from my pocket and held them up, one in each hand, like cards. “Ticket six six two seven,” I said. “Ticket six five eight nine. The buckle of your grandfather. His Winchester.”
A hush fell over the driveway. Even the sprinkler, ticking over the neighbors lawn, seemed to turn away. Bill Thatcher lowered the fly to his side. Caleb stared at the two scraps of paper in my hands, and then, shockingly, he began to cry. It was a hoarse, helpless, frightened noise. He sank to his knees on the concrete beside my chair. “Grandma,” he said, “I owed money. I owed a man in Pocatello two thousand dollars on a bet, and he said he would come to the house. I thought, I will get the buckle back before you notice. I only borrowed against it.” He put his forehead on my knee.
I looked down at the back of his head, the sandy hair going thin at the crown, and I felt the old grief rise in me, patient and enormous. And I laid my hand on the hair of the boy, as I had laid it a thousand times, and I said what Dutch would have said. “Get up, Caleb. Get up off the ground. A grown man does not kneel.”
He rose. I handed him one ticket, the buckle, and kept the other. “You will redeem the buckle this week,” I said. “With your own money. Not mine.” He nodded. “You will tell the man in Pocatello that you have no more to give, and that if he comes to this house, I will call the sheriff.” He nodded again. “And you will put every one of those fly boxes on the table, count them, and pay me two dollars for each, out of your pay.” Bill Thatcher gave a short, delighted bark of laughter. I turned to him. “Mr. Thatcher, I would be obliged if you would help me carry the boxes back inside.”
He carried them. We stacked them on the kitchen table, fifty boxes, thousands of flies, bright as a flower bed, and Bill Thatcher sat down across from me with a cup of coffee and his legal pad. He asked me, with great respect, to tell him about the gold wire. Three turns, always three. I told him about my father, the kitchen table in Ashton, the rooster hackle drying on a newspaper. He wrote for an hour. When he rose to leave, he said at the door, “Etta, this company will make your name famous. I want you to understand that it is already famous.” I said, “Thank you, young man. Do you tie?” He said, “Badly.” I said, “Come back Saturday.”
Caleb redeemed the buckle on Friday, in a hushed silence, and laid it on the kitchen counter in front of me without a word. It was polished. He had polished it himself, I could tell from the thumbprints. I picked it up and turned it over. All Around Cowboy, Eastern Idaho State Fair, 1968. I held it for a long while. “Thank you,” I said. He stood in the doorway in his socks. “Grandma, I would like to learn,” he said. “To tie a fly. If you will teach me.” I put down the buckle. “Sit,” I said. I pulled out the chair next to mine and handed him a hook.
His first fly looked like a drowned mouse. His second was worse. But by the end of the month he could wrap a clean hackle and keep the gold wire to three turns. Not four. Not two. I did not praise him until the fourth week, when he tied a small, perfect mayfly, and I held it up to the window. “That one,” I said, “I would sell.” He turned scarlet to the ears. On the first Saturday of June, he took the buckle of his grandfather out of the drawer and put it on, with his good belt, and drove me to the Henrys Fork. We fished until dark, and neither of us said much. A rise broke in the shadows. He cast, and it took.
