In fact, perhaps my greater sin was my presumption that violence, in this case the attempted assassination of Karsten Mabus, can change history for the better. As Wyatt Dixon suggested, Mabus cannot be gotten rid of by a bullet. Mabus is of our own manufacture, an extension of ourselves and the futile belief that the successful pursuit of wealth and power can transform avarice into virtue. His successors are legion and timeless. They need only to wait in the wings for their moment, then walk onstage to thunderous applause, their faces touched with an ethereal light.
I also knew that Mabus had a long memory and my story with him was probably not over.
But I refused to borrow tomorrow’s trouble and make it today’s concern. Our child would be born in spring, and each day Temple seemed happier and more lovely than the day before. During the fall she, Lucas, and I packed a straw hamper with supper and made a point of spending at least two afternoons a week fishing for German browns on the Blackfoot River, not far from the steel suspension bridge that led to Wyatt Dixon’s house.
The river was low, the coppery color of tarnished pennies, the scales of hellgrammites wrapped like spiderweb on the great round boulders that jutted out of the current. Right at sunset the browns would take an elk-hair caddis or blond wolf with such hunger and force they would slap water up on the bank. But German browns begin spawning not long after Labor Day, so we kept none of the fish we caught and instead replaced them in the river, holding their fat bellies cupped in our palms, while they rested, bursting with roe, their gills pulsing, waiting to reenter the current and disappear beneath the reflections of sky, trees, and human faces that can appear and dissolve more quickly than the blink of an eye.