Lay Down My Sword and Shield (Hackberry Holland 1)

“For a Yankee girl you may be all right after all,” I said, and watched the smooth curve of her hips against her shorts as she walked into the back of the house.

We drove north through the hills and flat farmland of string bean and corn fields and cow pasture to a wide, green, slow-moving river lined with willow, redbud, and juniper trees, where I had fly-fished as a boy with my father. The river was low from the drought, and the surface was covered with seeds from the juniper trees, but there were still eddies and deep holes behind the boulders in the current, and I knew that I could take all the crappie, bream, and bass that I could put on a stringer. The mud banks were covered with the sharp, wet tracks of deer and raccoons, and mockingbirds and blue jays flew angrily through the hot shade of the trees. The sunlight reflected off the water, and farther down, where the river turned by a grove of cypress trees, the sandbars gleamed hard and white in the middle of the current. Dragonflies flicked over the reeds and lily pads near the bank, and the bream were feeding in the shade of the willows, denting the water in quiet circles, like raindrops, when they rose to take an insect.

I took my three-piece Fenwick fly rod in its felt cover and the small box of number-eighteen dry flies from the trunk, and we walked through the trees and dead leaves and twigs to the river. Comanche and Apache warriors used to camp here on the banks to cut and shave arrow shafts from the juniper wood, and for a moment my eyes became twenty years younger as I looked for the place where they had probably built their wickiups and hung their venison in the trees over smoking fires. I knew that if I looked long enough I could find their old camp: the fire line a foot or so below the soil, the flint chippings from a work mound, the bone awl

s and shards of pottery. Since I was a boy I always felt that the land breathed with the presence of those dead men who had struggled on it long before we were born, and sometimes as a boy, particularly in the late evening, I almost felt that they were still living out their lives around me, firing their arrows from under the necks of war ponies at pioneer cabins that had long since decayed into loam. Once when I was plowing a field that we had always used for pasture, I felt something hard and brittle snap against the share and grind into pieces over the moldboard. I felt it right through the vibration of the tractor, and before I had shut off the engine and turned around in the metal seat I already knew that I had scraped across a warrior’s grave. The shattered skull and bits of white vertebra were scattered in the furrow, and all of his rose quartz arrowpoints gleamed among his ribs like drops of blood.

We sat under a cypress tree close to the water, and Rie opened the beer and made sandwiches of sausage and cheese while I tied a new tapered leader with one-pound test tippet. I waded out into the warm water and false-cast under the overhang of the trees, pulling out the line from the reel easily with my left hand, and shot the small brown hackle fly into a riffle on the far side of a boulder. The Fenwick was a beautiful rod. It was as light as air in my palm, and it was tapered and balanced so perfectly in its design that I could set the hook hard with one flick of the fingers. The fly drifted through the riffle twice without a strike, but on the third cast a largemouth bass rose from the bottom of the pool, like a green air bubble floating slowly upward, and broke the surface in an explosion of light. He took the fly in the corner of his lip, shaking his head violently, his dorsal fin and tail boiling the water, then he dove deep again toward the heavy current. I kept the rod high over my head with my right arm outstretched and let the line run tightly between my fingers. He sat on it once, deep, pointed downstream, and the tip of the rod bent downward until I knew that he was about to break the leader and I had to give him more line. I waded with him in the current, working him at an angle toward the bank, then he rose once more, the hook now protruding close to his eye, and hit the water sideways. He tried to turn his head back into the current, but he was weakening fast, and I started pulling in the line slowly with my left hand. He waved his tail in the shallows, clouding the water with sand, and each time I lifted the rod to bring his mouth to the surface he sat on it again and bent the tip in a quivering arch. I let him spend his last strength against the spring of the rod, then I worked my hand down the leader and caught him carefully under the stomach. He was heavy and cold in my hand, and I slipped the hook out of his mouth, watching the eye, and placed him back in the water. He remained still for a moment, his gills pulsing, then he moved slowly off through the shallows and dropped into the green darkness of the current.

I leaned the rod against the cypress trunk and drank a bottle of Jax with a sausage and cheese sandwich. The Spanish moss overhead looked like wisps of cobweb against the sun, and I could smell the dank, cool odor of the rotted stumps and worm-eaten logs back in the woods. Rie had waded on the edge of the river while I fished, and her bare, suntanned legs were coated with sand. She sat with her arms behind her, looking at the sandbars and stretch of willows on the far side of the river, and I had to force myself from dropping my eyes to her breasts.

“How did you find such a wonderful place?” she said.

“My father used to take me here when I was a boy. In the spring we’d fish the riffle from that rosebud tree down to where the river turns in the shade. Then we’d dig for an old Indian camp. I found my first bannerstone in the bottom of that wash.”

I sat down beside her on the tablecloth and drank from the beer. A shaft of sunlight struck inside the amber bottle.

“It must be fine to have a father like that,” she said.

“Yeah, he was a good man.”

“Was he a lawyer?”

“He taught southern history at the University of Texas, then he was in Congress two terms during Roosevelt’s administration. He took me deer hunting once on John Nance Garner’s ranch in Uvalde, but I was too small then to believe that the Vice President of the United States could chew on cigars and spit tobacco juice. My father had to convince me that Mr. Jack really did work in an important capacity for the government.”

“Gee, what a great story,” she said.

“I shook hands with Roosevelt once at Warm Springs, too. I wanted to look at the metal braces on his legs, but his eyes were so intense and interested, even in a boy’s conversation, that you couldn’t glance away from them. I was full of all kinds of pride and sunshine when I realized that my father was a personal friend of this man. I watched them drink whiskey on the verandah together, and for the first time I knew my father had another life that I’d never imagined before.”

I drank the foam out of the bottle and looked at the summer haze on the river. It was a wonderful place. The juniper seeds on the water turned in swirls past the sandbars, and stray seagulls that had wandered far inland dipped and hovered over a dead gar on the mud bank.

“Go on,” she said. Her face was happy and so lovely in the broken shade that I had to swallow when I looked at her.

“I don’t like people who show home movies,” I said.

“I do, especially cowboy lawyers that dig up old arrowheads.”

“I told you I’m shit and nails, didn’t I? The Lone Ranger with a hangover.”

“You just think you’re a bad man.”

“There are probably several hundred people who will disagree with you.”

“You’re not even a good cynic.”

“You’re taking away all my credentials.”

“Go on. Please.”

“The old man knew Woody Guthrie, too. He stayed at the house once during the war, and every evening I’d sit with him on the front steps while he played that beat-up old Stella guitar and his harmonica. He always wore a crushed felt hat, and when he spoke his words had a cadence like talking blues. He could never talk very long, at least while he had a guitar in his hands, without starting another song. He played with three steel banjo picks on his fingers, and he had the harmonica wired to a brace around his neck. He played Negro and workingmen’s beer-joint blues so mean and fine that I didn’t want him to ever leave. When we drove him to Galveston to catch a merchant ship my father asked him what the migrant farmworkers thought of the movie Grapes of Wrath, and he said, ‘Most of the people I know ain’t going to pay a quarter to see no more grapes, and I don’t expect they need any more of this here wrath, either.’”

“Wow, did your father know anybody else?”

“Those were the best ones. And I’m all out of stories, babe.”

“Your father must have been an unusual man.”

“Yes, he was.” I bit the tip off a cigar and looked at the haze on the water and the line of willows beyond, and for just a moment, in the stillness and heat of the summer morning, in the time that the flame of my match burned upward in one sulfurous curl, I saw my father lying half out of the chair in the library, the circular explosion of gunpowder on the front of his cream-colored coat, with his mouth locked open as though he had one final statement to make. The pistol had flown from his dead hand with the weight of its own recoil, and his arm had caught behind him at a twisted angle in the chair. His eyes were receded and staring, and his gray hair hung down on his forehead like a child’s. As I stood in the doorway, unable to move toward him, with the shot still loud in my ears and Bailey running down the stairs behind me, I thought: It was his heart. He had to do it. He couldn’t let it kill him first.