Lines on the Water Read Online Free PDF

and as pleasant as I could when I sat there. But sometimes I would tell him my left foot ached, when it didn’t, and I would look sorrowfully about, and then I would look up at the birds flying, as if I could never be as free, yet my spirit soared (or something like that). So it must have been a very poignant moment.
    “Christ child, you’ve got to go fishing,” he would say, his lips trembling when he looked at me, and then bending over to spit out his plug.
    “I know,” I would say. “I will—but now I’m a little tired.”
    The truth is this: All my life men and women (except those individuals who actually hate me) have found in me some endearing quality that they wish to protect, and Mr. Simms was one of these people. He told me about his son, who went away and never came back, and he would get me ice cream and sit and look at me, and ask if my foot was still hurting.
    “Not so much now,” I would say. “Thank you, sir.”
    “God almighty, Christ child—don’t call me sir. I’m just ol’ Alvin Simms.”
    Then I would have to go to confession. I would tell the priest that I had lied about my foot aching.
    “Why would you ever do that?”
    “They all think I’m the little Christ child.”
    There would be a disturbed silence on the priest’s side of the box.
    “Did you ever get fishing yet?” Mr. Simms would ask.
    I would have to tell him that no I hadn’t, but that I would go in a few days time. That was always the story.
    One day when his twin brother came to visit, Mr. Simms said, “Why don’t you take the little Christ child fishing?”
    I looked up with a feeling of dread and expectation. I immediately thought that though I had bragged about wanting to learn to fly-fish I wouldn’t be able to do it. It wouldbe the same as skating for hockey, or baseball, or volleyball, or anything else I had ever tried. I would try to do it and find out with my limitations that I could not do it. This was the curse of my childhood and took me a long while to overcome.
    I would be up in a tent somewhere in the middle of nowhere and I would be left behind, frightened of being eaten almost immediately by a bear.
    But his brother looked around, as if trying to see where the little Christ child was, and then saw this miserable skinny specimen sitting in front of him.
    “No, I can’t do that,” he said laconically. “I’m going in for the week. Why don’t he go become fishers of men?”
    This rather blasphemous statement aside, I liked Mr. Simms’s brother. They worked in the woods all their lives and had shared the same woman. This started at a dance when they were sixteen and they continued to try to fool her their whole lives. They both took her out, and they both decided that they were married to her.
    “She married you but she thought you was me!”
    “LIAR!”
    They made a mad dash for home when they left the woods, trying to get out before the other, jostling and bumping one another, and trying to force each other off the road.
    She wrote Ann Landers about this for advice, because she couldn’t decide. To her, they both seemed exactly the same.
    I remember Mr. Simms’s diary only vaguely—as you remember things from the past by a peculiar kind of association that is never straightforward. Mr. Simms’s diary will always remind me, in a circuitous way, of nuns. And of school. Of Sister Saint John Daniel and Mother Saint David because of how his diary was written in pencil. And the nuns had taught both of us to write.
    In this diary there were small sketches of a man—perhaps of Simms himself—standing along a bank of a river, with the line of his fishing rod taut. The water and the rocks were just a few discernible pencil strokes, but these pencil strokes showed man against nature, far up on some river bend alone, as well as any I’ve seen sketched.
    One day, many years later, when I told him I had poled the North Pole Branch from Lizard Brook down eight miles with my friend Peter, in search of