The Valley of Light
The Valley of Light
TERRY KAY
ATRIA BOOKS 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
The Valley of Light
ALSO BY TERRY KAY
Taking Lottie Home
Special K: The Wisdom of Terry Kay
The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene
The Runaway
Shadow Song
To Whom the Angel Spoke: A Story of the Christmas
To Dance with the White Dog
Dark Thirty
After Eli
The Year the Lights Came On
TERRY KAY
The Valley of Light
A NOVEL
ATRIA BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY SINGAPORE
ATRIA BOOKS
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New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Terry Kay
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-13: 978-0-743-47594-5
eISBN-13: 978-1-439-12203-7
First Atria Books hardcover edition October 2003
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This book is dedicated with affection to Marjorie Ammons
A gifted teacher, a gentle and caring lady, and the first great influence in my life other than my own family.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Iseldom go fishing, though I have memories (and a photograph) of fishing in the small branch that ran through our farm in northeast Georgia. Catching a finger-long minnow was an accomplishment of great pride.
Truth is, I have no talent for fishing. Sometimes a little luck, but no talent. I have never caught anything on an artificial lure, for example.
But I have a son—Scott—who has a remarkable gift for catching fish. Once, when he was very young and we were on vacation at a lake house, I saw him go to the lake and kneel down and place the palm of his hand on the water’s surface, like a ritual in an innocent religious ceremony. He began fishing—and catching. I stood beside him. Used the same kind of equipment, the same bait. Fished within inches of where he was casting. I don’t remember getting a nibble.
That gesture of touching the surface of the water has stayed with me for years, and it is the leaping-off point of this story.
Yet, this is not a story about my son or about fishing, but about the mysticism of being gifted. It is a trait that has always inspired me—seeing that person who, by nature, had a way of doing something that was, in the long run, inexplicable, yet thrilling. The artist. The musician. The gardener. The mechanic. The engineer. The chef. The anything.
It has always been my practice to fictionalize the setting of a story, yet I have chosen an actual area for this offering—that region around Hiawassee, Georgia, and Hayesville, North Carolina.
However, the valley created for this purpose—the Valley of Light—is purely fictional, and the characters are residents only in my imagination.
In that area, there is a peculiarity in the spelling of the Hiawassee River. In Georgia, it is Hiawassee; in North Carolina, it is Hiwassee. In order to keep readers from being confused, and to keep editors from scribbling question marks in the margins of my manuscript, I have chosen to use Hiawassee. Call it prejudice on behalf of my home state.
In this story, there is a great bass and a lot of catfish. Regard the obsession with catfish another prejudice. As a young boy, when I fished Beaverdam Creek and the Broad River, it was for catfish.
To me, the catfish is a noble creature and, when properly prepared, a memorable feast, even if my digestive system now tends to quarrel with me when I leave one of those wonderful, all-youcan eat fish cafés that help define the culture of the South.
The Valley
of Light
ONE
He made his way to the lake watchfully, crossing the bulldozer-built dam that was covered in weed-grass across its ridge and in trash trees growing on the waterside. It was late afternoon. The sun was behind him, his shadow making a long ghost that wobbled over the weed-grass. Grasshoppers sailed away from his footsteps.
At a clearing among the trash trees on the east end of the dam, he stopped and surveyed the ground. The lake had not been fished in a long time, he believed. Weed-grass grew high, with no look of being trampled. Left-behind bait cans were old and rusty. A coil of nylon line dangled like a spider’s silk from a limb of one of the nearby trash trees, causing him to smile a smile that did not show on his face, knowing the spit of frustration the miscast had caused in some fisherman. A child’s cast most likely. Not easy for a child to make a cast with nylon. Would be better to teach him with braided line.
He thought about the fishermen who had abandoned the lake. Once, they had come to it from the logging road, he reasoned, bringing their families in wagons or trucks, chairs to sit on, fishing early to late with long bamboo poles and cork floats, eating their sausages and sardines and baked sweet potatoes, and at day’s end taking home their stringers of bream and bass and catfish, muscle-weary, smelling of fish slime and worms.
The water of the lake was the color of dark tea in the late-day shadows. Acid from trees. He closed his eyes, listened. The water lapped softly against the bank, rolled in, seeped back. The lapping sound was like a slow and lazy pulse beat. A dozing lake. Not much different from an old man sleeping in sunshine. Just enough breathing to keep alive.
A good place. A good place.
He wondered if it was the lake he had heard of. His sense told him it was.
A hundred yards or so up the east side of the lake, he had seen a small frame building that seemed empty from his distant view, though it was hard to tell since it had a screened-in porch, the screen hiding whatever was behind it. Probably a shack used by hunters, he had reasoned, remembering such shacks from his childhood. If somebody lived in it full-time, they did a good job of making it appear deserted.
Whoever it was that owned the lake and the shack had a good place.
He squatted at the lake’s edge, placing the fishing rod he carried on the ground, and then he leaned forward and lightly touched the palm of his hand on the surface of the water.
Tell me, he said silently, said inside his mind.
The water was cool. Against his palm it had a ticklish feel of silk.
Yes, a good place.
He pushed his fingers into the water and wiggled them, paused, let his eyes scan the lake.
Forty feet away, against the bank, the water roiled, quivered like a muscle.
He smiled again, held his fingers in the water, watched the roiling ripple toward him in perfect circles. Soon, the first ring touched him. He pulled his hand from the water and lifted it to his face and inhaled slowly, taking in the scents of the lake. Algae. The decay of trees pushed over by wind storms and dropped into the water. Hickory, oak, beechnut, sweet gum. Silt of leaves and wash-off of wood dirt. Frog and snake and turtle. And fish. The sharp, almost metallic scent of fish.
He rubbed his hand across the front of his shirt.
A very good place.
He stood and slipped the army knapsack he wore off his shoulder, then picked up the rod and pulled loose the line on the bait-casting reel, letting the lure dangle before him. It was an old lure, turned like a small minnow with silver flecks on its sides. He had caught many fish with it before snipping off the hook with a pair of wire cutters. It was now a lure for holding his line on the rod and for teasing.
One cast, he thought.
One cast to let Mr. Fish know he was there.
Enough to anger Mr. Fish, to make him restless.
Make him coil and leap at anything moving near him.
He tilted his rod to the water, dipped the lure, wetting it. Then he made his cast near the bank where the fish—a bass, a largemouth, he believed—had rolled. He watched the lure slap the water, dive and disappear, and then he began his slow reeling-in of the line. He could feel the lure drag through algae and he flicked his wrist twice, giving the line a jerking motion.
A cloud skimmed the July sun, dimmed it. He felt a puff of air against his face and stood motionless to let the air pause on his skin. A sense of peace settled over him as though he had marked the place he stood on a map and, after a long journey, had arrived at his destination. He wondered what day of the week it was and the date marking the day. Thought: What does it matter?
For more than two years, he had walked into days and weeks and months without knowing them by calendar, only by season. The season he read in trees—lime-green buds in spring, full-leaf in summer, colors of hot embers in autumn, the dark limbs of winter. He had walked and fished, leaving behind war and the burial ground of his parents and the sadness of his brother and the open and the secret experiences of his boyhood. Walked far enough to stop looking over his shoulder to see if his history tagged after him like a scolded yard dog. Now it was only memory, and memory had a way of rubbing down most of the rough edges.
Still, he had always believed there would be a place to stop the walking, to stay, to become his own forest, show his own seasons.
And there, with the air on his skin, he wondered if he had found that place.
Three weeks earlier—in Kentucky, he believed—he had come upon an old, white-haired man with bowed shoulders fishing from a bridge over a wide, slow-moving river. They had made nods to one another and he had gone below the bridge to the riverbank and made his touch of the water, and then had joined the old man on the bridge and unreeled his own line over the bridge’s railing and they had fished together for a long while, paying more attention to the talking that went on between them than to the fish that swam in the water below them.
The man, who offered his name as Hoke Moore, had put him on the path to the valley. Had said it was a good place to find fish and rest if a person could avoid certain elements of the population. “It’s called the Valley of Light by some, Bowerstown by others. Where I was born,” he had added in a voice that had the sound of longing. “They’s some good people there, and some you’d just as soon not get caught with. Mostly good, though. Mostly good. You need a hand, they’ll give it.”
And then Hoke Moore had begun telling of a great lake called the Chatuge, built some years earlier as part of a government project called the Tennessee Valley Authority. Said word of the lake gave it good enough marks for fishing, though there were still too few fish for all the water pooled up behind the dam. “Takes time for fish to find out where they want to be when they’s so many places to go,” he had speculated.
He had never fished the Chatuge himself, Hoke Moore had admitted. Liked smaller places, something he could walk around and not lose sight of where he’d started the trip. “They’s another little lake over there—twenty or twenty-five acres, I’d guess—that’s got the biggest fish I ever seen in it. A bass, it was. Must have been fifteen pounds. Maybe more. Used to try and catch him, but all he’d do was spit water on me. He’d jump up out of the water, like he was trying to swim through the air, mad as a wet hen. Never seen a bass do that. Not one that big. Not coming out of the water high as he did. It was like he was telling me I weren’t good enough to catch him.”
Hoke Moore had paused and turned to look in the direction of the far-off mountains in the southeast—the direction he had given as the location of the valley—and he had added, “Must be big as a whale now, if it’s still alive. You just wandering around, you ought to go down there and try to catch him. You might can do it. Might can. You a fisherman, sure enough. I can tell that in any man just by studying him a little bit. If you go down there and you catch him, you look him in the eye when you drag him up and you tell him Hoke Moore’s been thinking about him for a long time.”
He had smiled, had said, “Yes sir. I get down that way, I’ll do that.”
“You got to take your time with him,” Hoke Moore had said. “Got to aggravate him some. Got to make him want you, much as you want him.”
“Yes sir, I’ve seen fish like that,” he had replied. And it was true. Even as a child, he had known fish liked to fight, some more than others.
And then Hoke Moore had chuckled and made another soft cast with his line, watching the hook disappear under the pull of the sinker. After a moment, he had said, “I wonder if they doing the fish-off in the Chatuge these days.”
He had asked, “What’s that?”
“What I call it—a fish-off,” Hoke Moore had answered. “Used to be on the river. Been going on over there for twenty years or more. Got started by the school as a way of making some money to pay teachers. First year they done it, they was catching fish fast as they could drop a line. Not much need to bait the hook, they was catching fish so easy. Had the biggest fry at the school I ever saw. You’d of thought Jesus had blessed them fish, they was so many of them. Everybody pays a dollar or two to get in on it and the man that catches the most fish by weight gets a cash prize. Used to be ten dollars. Guess it’s more now. When they get through with the fishing, they have them a fish fry and everybody in the valley shows up. That’s where they make the money.”
Hoke Moore had paused, wagged his fishing rod over the water; then he had added, “Won it myself two or three times.” Had laughed softly over the thought.
“When’s it held?” he had asked.
“Right along now,” Hoke Moore had answered. “July, August. Date changes about—or it used to. Tell the truth, I don’t even know if they do it no more. War changed a lot of things.” He had paused, clucked with his tongue, shook his head slowly, had added, “Had me some ups and downs there, but I miss the place.” He had gazed again at the distant mountains. “You just going place to place, you ought to head down that way. Get in on that fishing if they still doing it. Catch that fish of mine while you there.”