The Fern Pool

 I’m a scientist, or rather I was, and during my career I possessed an unerring faith in the ability of rational thought to ferret out the answer to any question put before it. Now I’m not so sure, and if before I lived in the land of facts, now I inhabit the space between knowing and not knowing. The Fern Pool is, for me, the point where that space begins. I’ll tell you what I mean.
     I retired at the beginning of the summer of my sixtieth year, and I remember thinking when I discovered The Fern Pool that it was some sort of good omen—though I didn’t believe in omens—for the rest of my life. I say “discovered” even though my friend Frank had fished it for years. He had invited me along a few times, but I had declined. I’ve learned to respect the place that favored haunts hold in the hearts of outdoorsmen. But when Frank abruptly stopped visiting The Fern Pool, all bets were off. In fact, when I think back to that summer, I’m hard-pressed to remember a span of more than a few days when I didn’t visit the pool.
     Reaching it took dedication, since woods and deadfalls and copses of stinging nettle made travel anywhere but on the streambed almost impossible. During that summer, I came to know the stretch of creek upstream to The Fern Pool like the back of my hand. I knew which nooks always held trout, and I knew which otherwise fishy-looking spots to avoid, as they never held fish for reasons only the trout knew. But all of that water was just a prelude, and sometimes I hurried through the last few fishable stretches without making more than a few cursory casts. On days when the wind wasn’t up, I could hear the quiet burble well before I could see the pool itself. I’d splash through a riffle, round a corner marked by cottonwoods which arched high up over the stream, and there it would be.
     At the head of the pool was an accumulation of washed-out timber. Some trees had been there so long that their bark had fallen off to reveal the etchings of bark-borers, and some were so new that their leaves still hung green and waxy. Below the logjam, the water swirled and bubbled and swept rafts of foam along with it, and sometimes I could just make out the outlines of boulders beneath the green sweep of the water. The pool was big, at least by the standards of Wisconsin trout streams: perhaps fifty yards long, and forty yards across at its widest point. It was ringed on all sides by the ferns that gave the hole its name. Beyond the ferns on the north side of the pool was an expanse of lawn that led up to a white house. The house was in need of repair—the front porch sagged at one end—but looked as if it had been solidly built. East of the house was a barn. A driveway—obviously not often used—led from the barn. A hickory-studded ridge rose gradually from the drive, and to the west of the house was a well-tended garden.
     I first saw the woman as she pulled weeds in the garden while a boy and a girl played nearby. It was a soft June morning, and I was waist-deep toying with the legions of brook trout that boiled out from the boulders in pursuit of my streamer. She waved hello and I waved back, shouting “Good morning!” to carry over the noise of the pool. At the sound of my voice the children scampered off and peered out at me from behind a trellis covered with grapevines. The children wore white, and even at a distance I could see the similarity in their features.
     “Twins,” I thought, and went back to fishing.
     I casted for another hour, and caught about a dozen carbon-copy brookies. I missed a nice brown, too, which had slashed short at the streamer. I watched the children while I fished. They giggled as they swung in a tire suspended from a mulberry tree, and made faces at me when they didn’t think I was looking. I laughed to myself, and when I was ready to start the trek downstream to my truck I waved again.
     “See ya next time,” I yelled.
     The woman looked up from her gardening and raised a hand. The children, still giggling, raced off to the ridge behind the house.
     I fished The Fern Pool the very next day. I remember pitying some of my other retired acquaintances as I waded upstream. They spent their summers in a state of regimented boredom, meticulously tending already-immaculate lawns and waiting for five o’clock so it would be alright to have a few cocktails on the grass without the neighbors talking. It seemed to me as if they had spent their entire working lives waiting for this moment when they would be freed from the lockstep march of time, only to find that now they were more helpless against it than ever. I counted myself lucky. I lived under the rhythm of the stream. If I felt like it, I ate my lunch at eight in the morning. If I was tired, I found a grassy bank and went to sleep. My only nod to responsibility was to check myself for ticks upon waking up.
     The woman was scrubbing a cast-iron pan in the stream when I rounded the familiar corner and came upon The Fern Pool.
     “Hello again,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind if I fish here.”
     “Not at all,” she said. “Fish all you want.”
     I stuck out my hand.
     “I’m Jeff.”
     “Rachel,” she said, and shook it. Her hand felt rough. I studied her: wispy blondish hair graying in spots, muscles which bulged beneath work-worn clothing, and an overall countenance which said tough, but tired. While we spoke the twins played. They were again dressed in white, and from the closer distance now I could see that they were, to borrow a feminine term, adorable. If they were my kids, I remember thinking, I’d remove every credit card and membership affiliation from my wallet and carry nothing but pictures of them.
     “You have beautiful children, ma’am,” I said.
     She hesitated.
     “Thank you.”
     A guinea hen pecked its way ambitiously down the lawn. It stood at the edge of the ferns and cocked a hard eye at me.
     “I’ll let you get on with your fishing,” she said, but followed it with an invitation for refreshments when my day was done.
     Later, as dusk came on, we sat on the sagging porch and swatted mosquitoes while we watched bats flit overhead and listened to the calls of whippoorwills. I sipped a bourbon
and water from an enamel mug and she sipped one, too. I talked about fishing and my former career, and she spoke of my friend Frank, and how he didn’t come around anymore. Then she talked about the trials of running the place by herself.
     “It’s just hard,” she said, studying the drink in her lap. “There are people who want to help, but…”
     Her voice trailed off.
     I knew that if she asked for help in town, the compassion juggernaut would leave her steamrollered in its wake. She’d get a couple of cards in the mail, possibly an article in the human-interest section of the local paper, and maybe a change jar with her picture on it next to the cash register at the co-op gas station. Not that that was wrong—it was generous, in its way—but it wasn’t what she needed.
     I motioned to the porch beneath our feet.
     “Next time I’ll shore this up,” I said. “Got any tools?”
     “Sure,” she said. “A whole wall full.”
     “It’s a done deal,” I said, and stood to leave. It was dark by now.
     “You can always walk the drive back out,” Rachel said.
     “Nah,” I replied. “I like taking the stream. It’s familiar.”
     “Familiar,” she said. “I know what you mean. Sometimes I think it’s why I stay here. Good night, then. See you next time?”
     “Sure,” I said, and walked down to The Fern Pool. I could hear the shouts and laughter of the children as I negotiated my way back downstream, and I think I was halfway back
to my truck before their voices were entirely replaced by the booming of bullfrogs and the croak of night-herons.
     I fished The Fern Pool another six or seven times that summer without seeing Rachel, although I saw or heard the children on every trip. I finally did see her on a mid-August day. It was nine in the morning before I was finally streamside, and the humid fog which had slunk in the hollows of the cornfields as I drove still hung on in spots across from the bridge.
     I saw Rachel at The Fern Pool as she picked tomatoes in the garden. I told her I had remembered my promise, and after some small talk about the heat I set to work shoring up the porch. I'm no carpenter, but when I finished the porch looked a lot better than it had when I arrived. By now the humidity was truly oppressive, and it felt as if the sodden air was pushing me into the ground.
     “Why don’t you go swimming?” Rachel called from the garden. She didn’t look any cooler. “The water right in front of the dock has to be ten feet deep.”
     I knew that it was and imagined the browns that would boil out of there when I dove. I pulled off my sopping shirt and walked down the lawn to The Fern Pool. The children were waiting for me, and as I neared the dock they executed perfect little swan dives into the stream. I ran the last few yards, launched my form as high as sixty-year-old legs could propel it, and splashed into the pool. The slap of the cold shocked me and I surfaced almost instantly, gasping short little twenty-below-zero breaths. I pulled out at the dock and shivered as I waited for the children. They didn’t surface.
     I waited some more.
      Nothing.
     I stood and scanned the pool. For long moments I didn’t see anything, and then I thought I could see a flutter of white down in the green, like a plastic bag caught on a branch and waving in the wind. I swam down until I saw garments billowing in the current. The children were wedged between boulders. I stretched out an arm, but my lungs burned and the current swept me past them and into the logjam. My lungs no longer burned by the time I freed myself.
     I dove again and again, but the children were no longer there.
     I was ready to dive once more when I heard the laughter. The children stood side by side on the bank.
     I had been had.
     I fumed and advanced toward them through the ferns, but they ran off, still giggling. I staggered onto the lawn. Rachel was nowhere to be seen. When she did appear, I told myself, I’d have a word with her about her kids. But as I rested my temper subsided. It was a trick—an abominable trick—but still just a trick, and who was I to tell Rachel how her children ought to be raised? The day was still relatively young, and after awhile I retrieved my tackle from where it rested in the ferns and headed upstream to explore new territory. Up here the stream narrowed, choked by alders, but in spots it widened where little trickling tributaries entered. The heat was still oppressive and the lush vegetation made for tough going, but I pressed on. I caught fish too—tiny brook trout—in water I water I would have sworn was not deep enough to support a pack of guppies, let alone trout. By late afternoon I had reached an expanse of shallow water covered with
duckweed. This flat supported only a pair of wood ducks which whoo-eeked into the distance, so I turned to head back to The Fern Pool. As I labored the sky changed in color to blue-black and thunder rumbled ever closer, accompanied by an ozone smell and lightning and the first wet smack of big droplets against the canopies of the trees. I knew I was close to The Fern Pool when I heard the shouts of the children.
     When I slogged into the pool the sky let loose with sheets of rain. Through the rain I saw Rachel race up onto the porch. I ran too as she urged me on, and then we stood laughing as the rain rattled on the roof like a roll from a snare drum. I toweled myself dry inside the house, and sat in the kitchen while Rachel prepared dinner.
     “Kids coming?” I asked when we sat at the table. I had never talked to them, besides a waved hello, and I wanted to see how they would react to me in light of their stunt.
     “No,” Rachel said. “I guess they kind of keep to their own schedule.”
     After dinner we sipped drinks, and I was only halfway through mine when fatigue settled into me. The flutter of my eyelids didn’t escape Rachel.
     “You’re not leaving tonight, are you? You should stay.”
     Silver beads of water raced each other down a windowpane in the glow of lanternlight.
     “That’d be fine, “ I said. “Thank you.”
     Rachel prepared a bed for me in the living room. In one corner stood a grandfather clock, with its swinging weight counting Tick, tock, Tick, tock. The sound dominated the room.
     I suppose I slept some that night, but it wasn’t much, as the toll of the clock startled me out of half-sleep every hour. I was reminded of my childhood, when I frequently
stayed with my grandparents. They’d had a grandfather clock, too, and I’d lie awake on the davenport next to a window that let the moonlight in. I dreaded the tolling, but the ticking sound was no better—I had read Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and was not convinced at that age that there weren’t very valid reasons to fear the dark. On those nights I’d wage an internal debate: Wake my grandparents, or not? I was on my way to, once, and nearly cried out loud when I stepped into a dark hallway and saw the manikin’s head my grandmother hung her necklaces on.
     I heard the children rattling around a few times during the night, and when the clock tolled 3 a.m. they were huddled in a corner with their arms wrapped around each other. They looked inconsolable.
I got up to help and at the periphery of my vision I saw the flare of a match strike. Rachel was sobbing in the kitchen.
     “Can’t sleep either, huh?” She half-smiled through her tears. Rachel filled mugs with coffee and motioned for me to sit down.
     “I wish I could see them.”
     “See them?”
     “You know. The children.”
     I pointed into the living room. The children rocked back and forth and mewled and gibbered to echo their mother.
     “I can’t,” Rachel said. “Your friend Frank could, and you can, but I can’t. I’d give anything to see them again. I don’t even need to touch them. That’s too much to ask. I just want to see them.”  
     She then told her story, and I realized how her face—which once must have been very pretty—had become so furrowed. One bright spring morning when the current was raging, she had gone down to The Fern Pool and had dragged first one child’s, and then the other child’s body from where they were wedged between boulders at the bottom of the stream. Then she had gone down to the pool again, and had retrieved her husband’s body and lain it next to those of the children he had died trying to save.
     I think now that our paths are marked with opportunities to make a difference in the lives of individuals, and on that night I failed miserably because of my fear. I left Rachel crying in the kitchen and ran out onto the porch. By now the rain had stopped and the moon had come out. I was confronted with the choice of leaving by the stream, or via the overgrown driveway. I preferred the familiarity of the stream, even in the dark. Besides, I thought I could see flashes of white amidst the rain-streaked popples on the drive as I fled down the lawn to The Fern Pool.
     I marked my progress by moonlit landmarks: the swell of a hole arched over with limbs draped in spider webs, and the undercut bank where I had taken a 24-inch brown. As I splashed through the creek I was followed by footfalls, and the titter of laughter like sparrows. I kept telling myself “There’s no such thing,” but there was. Once I rounded a bend and was confronted by the little ghosts hovering above the black water. When a heron crashed off through the canopy I felt my heart lurch crazily in my chest.
     I got closer to the road, but I forgot about the muck hole in the last stretch of alders before the bridge. I was sucked down, to my chest, and as I struggled I looked back. The children were coming; gliding and weaving through the alders as if they were swimming.
Finally they were next to me. They didn’t look malevolent, just mischievous and maybe a tad concerned as they extended their little hands to help me.
     I pulled myself out of the muck with help from a limb and a surge of adrenaline, and scrambled the last few yards up an embankment to my truck. I slammed the door and started the ignition, and before I turned on the headlights I wheeled the truck around and glanced at the water below. The children weren’t there. There was just a ray of moonlight on the black water pointing the way to The Fern Pool.
I haven’t been back to The Fern Pool since—or to the stream itself, for that matter, and for all I know my gear is still leaning in a corner of Rachel’s porch. I still fish, though: for perch, on Lake Mendota in the city of Madison. It’s nice now to steer for city lights when the wind lays down for the evening, and to hear the voice of a friendly fisherman as I trailer my boat in the dusk.
     Awhile back I was reading the newspaper, and saw Rachel’s obituary. Above the text was a reproduction of an old photograph. In it Rachel is flanked by two beautiful, smiling children, and behind her stands the husband I never met.
     I drove out to visit their graves one November day, when the sun shone brightly against the few leaves that still clung to the trees in the country cemetery. It was the kind of day which used to scream “Deer hunting!” to me, but which now whispers, and of another matter entirely. I placed flowers on the little set of graves: first Rachel’s, then her husband’s, and finally on the one headstone which marked the grave of both children. On the stone was inscibed: “Suffer the little children to come unto Me…”
I’ve remembered those words, and if I’m not now an ardent churchgoer I’m at least one who is fully aware of his own deficiencies. Science doesn’t do a lot for me now, or at least is incapable of addressing the questions that matter most. Now I look back at my life, and I don’t see a trail of logic leading from Point A to Point B to Point C. As I said before, I see missed opportunities—like the one I had in Rachel’s kitchen that night. I’m not a particularly good man, I realize, and in fact all of my education still leaves me powerless. My priest would tell me that it is in that powerlessness where God’s grace exists. It’s a comforting thought, in a strange way, and it helps me—sometimes—on those nights when I can’t sleep. There are a lot of them.
     The drill is this: I wake troubled, and instead of tossing and turning I get up and sit at the reloading bench by the window in my den. I read then—the old-time outdoor writers, mostly—relics from an era which is now gone, and which won’t be coming back again. Occasionally my reading is interrupted and I will think I see something outside, flitting behind the stalks of the ash trees I planted in memory of Rachel and her family.
     Sometimes I’m able to go back to sleep. If I’m lucky, I sleep straight through until morning. But other times I wake again, still troubled by the same vague fears, and I have to rise and get another blanket to ward off the chill.