Read Online Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing by Patrick F. McManus - Free Book Online Page B

Smithers, our fourth-grade teacher, rudely awakens me with some stupid question about the capital of North Carolina! Just as if that were something I might be expected to know! What could she have been thinking of? As Mrs. Smithers taps angrily on a map with her pointer, the great fish swims into oblivion, about halfway between Greensboro and Winston-Salem.
    Later, I tried to pick up the dream where it left off, to see how it turned out, but I never could.
    Around the end of May each year, cutthroat would come up the creek to spawn, and that would be my one chance to catch really big fish. The water, typically, would be swift and murky and high up on the banks, and for about a week I could catch cutthroat up to maybe eighteen inches, and sometimes did. But then the water would recede, the cutthroat with it, and the resident brookies and I would be left to contend with one another over the summer.
    That was the problem with the dream fish. Because of its size, I was almost certain it had to be a spawning cutthroat. But that particular hole couldn’t be fished on Opening Day, when the cutthroat were running, because the water was always too high for me to reach the island, the willows too thick to permit access from the far bank. But it had been only a dream. A dream can do anything that suits its fancy.
    I made the mistake of telling Retch Sweeney about my dream fish.
    â€œSo?” he said. “What’s your point?”
    â€œNothing,” I said. “But don’t you think it’s interesting?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWell, I guess you had to be there.”
    â€œDon’t put me in your dreams, I’d die of boredom. You want dreams, I’ll tell you dreams. Make your hair stand on end!”
    â€œBut don’t you see, Retch? Maybe the dream was trying to tell me something.”
    â€œLike what?”
    â€œIt could be trying to tell me to fish that hole on Opening Day.”
    â€œIt could be trying to drown you, too. Ain’t no way you can get near that hole on opening day.”
    I had a little better luck telling my dream to the old woodsman Rancid Crabtree.
    â€œNow, thet is interestin’,” he said, biting off a chaw of tobacco. “Ah’m purty good at interpretin’ dreams. Maw momma taught me how to do it. You see, a dream never comes at you straight on. Nothin’ in a dream is what it seems to be but always somethin’ else. And once you figger out what the somethin’ else is, then you gots to go along with it.”
    â€œReally, Ranee? Can you tell what my dream means?”
    â€œJist hold yer hosses, boy, it’s startin to come to me.Now, the way thet fish pole of yourn was choppin’ up and down, Ah suspect it was really an ax. Yep, thet’s it, an ax. Now, thet big stump, it’s got to mean wood of some kind—firewood! Gots to be firewood. And the big strong handsome fish, thet gots to be me.”
    â€œBut what does it mean?”
    â€œIt means you should go out thar in the yard and chop me up a big pile of firewood. Ain’t no doubt about it.”
    I preferred to interpret the dream for myself. It was less work. I knew what it meant, anyway. It meant that I was supposed to fish that hole on Opening Day, no matter what.
    The rest of the school year crawled by with ever-diminishing momentum. I began to fear that it would stop entirely and I would be trapped forever in fourth grade, a fear not without basis. But with a sudden burst of energy in the final weeks of school, I learned the capitals of all forty-eight states, conquered long division, learned to multiply and divide fractions, and memorized the Gettysburg Address. Contrary to all my expectations, school finally ended for the year, and I was promoted to fifth grade with what Mrs. Smithers described as a “photo finish,” whatever that meant. And now a whole endless summer of fishing stretched before me. It was, after all, a perfect world.
    Shortly