Disclaimer:  I do not and never have believed in a life after death.  I do not and never have believed in the concept of ‘duality,’ as in there being some magical ‘me’ that exists aside from the physical me and that will somehow last beyond death.  But years ago, when I had the idea for this story, the idea of going on just a few moments past that moment was essential to the ending, so…  well, enjoy.

***

Paul Frasier was an old man.

He knew he was an old man.  At eighty-eight, he could hardly have considered himself anything else.  He knew he was in good shape for a man of eighty-eight, but that qualifier made all the difference.

At least he could still fish.  That was something.

A pretty stretch of trout water spread out before him today.  A beaver pond, it was, on a small stream high in the Lost River Mountains above Challis, Idaho, where Paul had lived for almost seventy years.  The pond lay in a meadow, a pool of grass in the center of a big drainage between two pine and spruce-covered ridges.  A stand of aspens glittered on the south-facing slope behind where Paul stood, casting his spinner repeatedly to the unseen trout.

He looked downstream to see his grandson, Matthew George, teaching Paul’s great-grandson Jacob to fly-fish.  The boy was doing well for a twelve-year old.

Paul smiled a sardonic smile.  Fly-fishing looked too much like work to him.  He liked his old spinning rig.  He had been catching trout with it since before Matt’s mother was born, and he would keep using it.  Let’s face it, he told himself, it won’t be for much longer anyway, really.

Matthew looked upstream at the old man.  “Any luck up there, Grandpa?” he called.

“Slow day,” Paul called back.  He was tired.  They had only walked about half a mile up a cow path from Matt’s truck, but Paul was an old man.  Only a few years earlier he would not have been so tired after such a short walk, but things like that had a way of changing.

Melospiza melodia, the Song Sparrow.

“Let it be,” Paul whispered to himself, remembering a song that had been popular when he was a young man.  “Let it be.”  Somewhere off to his left, upstream, he heard a song sparrow singing.

It bothered Paul that his family wouldn’t let him come up here by himself anymore.  He looked downstream.  Matt and his wife and children were now, for all intents and purposes, all the family Paul had left; Matt was the only son of Paul’s only daughter.  Paul’s wife Jean had died ten years earlier of a stroke, and their daughter Jennifer had followed her mother two years later – liver cancer.

Jenny’s widowed husband still lived in Challis, and Paul was on friendly terms with him, but he was not family.  Not anymore.   The connection was lost.

Matt was family.  Little Jacob was family.  Matt’s wife, a pretty young girl named Janice, she was family too.  The family, they did not like Grandpa driving into the cold dark early-morning mountains alone, just to catch fish.

Fortunately, Matt and his son liked to fish, too.

Paul had made sure of that.  He had taught Matt to fish, just as Paul’s grandfather had taught him to fish.  That was a lifetime ago now on the Upper Iowa River, where he had been a boy.  The song sparrow singing somewhere upstream brought back vivid memories of those times.  Song sparrows sang all along the Upper Iowa every spring and summer, but they were not common in the Lost River Range.

There had been trout on the streams near the Upper Iowa, too, and in the river itself, smallmouth bass.  With the distance of time, Paul remembered only the good days fishing in Iowa with his grandfather; he doubted today would be as productive as he remembered those days as being.  The trout were not cooperating.

He reeled in his spinner, hooked it on the bottom guide on his rod, and sat down in the grass.  He laid the rod in the grass next to him and shrugged off his fishing vest.  It was enough to be out by the water, in the mountains, on a nice warm July day.  He did not need many fish.

After a while, his great-grandson came to sit in the grass beside him.  “It’s about lunchtime, Papa,” the boy said.

“I suppose so.”

The boy looked around.  “I think Dad went back to the truck for the cooler.”

Paul frowned a little.  He would not have wanted to make that brisk walk in the thin mountain air just now, a half-mile to the truck, carry the heavy cooler a half-mile back.  Knowing his grandson would cover the distance easily, even lugging the cooler, did not make him feel any better.

Upstream, the song sparrow let out another burst of song.

“That always reminds me of when I was a boy,” Paul said.

“What’s that, Papa?”

“That bird singing up the creek.”

Jacob inclined his head, listening.  “I don’t hear it.”

“Wait a bit,” Paul told him.  “It’s a song sparrow.  You don’t get many of them around here, but they sure were thick when I was a kid in Iowa.”  He thought about that for a moment.  “I can’t remember the last time I heard one.  I didn’t think there were any this far west.”

Mountain Trout water.

“Did you fish streams like this?”  Jacob had never been back east.  The boy had spent his entire life in Idaho.

“No,” Paul said. “Not like this.  My grandfather and I used to fish for smallmouth bass on the Upper Iowa River, near the town where I grew up.”  He smiled at the memory.  “Kendallville, the town was called. I haven’t been there in thirty years or so.  There were trout streams around, too, bigger than this one.  We caught rainbow and brown trout, not cutthroats.”

“We catch rainbows in the lakes sometimes,” Jacob observed with all the sagacity a twelve-year-old can muster.

“Yes,” Paul agreed.  “They have German browns in the bigger streams sometimes, too.  Rainbows and browns were pretty much the only trout we caught in Iowa, though.  We would catch catfish in the bigger rivers, down in the Cedar or even over at the Mississippi.  In the spring we would fish for white suckers when they would run up from the big rivers to spawn.”

Paul sat for a moment, not quite realizing how lost he was in the memory, not quite understanding how long it had been since he had thought of those places, those times, so long past now.  “The Upper Iowa,” he went on, “it was different than these streams.  There were not very many pines or firs, mostly oaks and hickories.  The hills were lower, and there were these beautiful white limestone bluffs along the river in places.  Not far from where we lived there were these big white limestone columns over the river, they called them chimney rocks.”

“Sounds neat, Papa.  Do you think we could go there sometime?  I’d like to see where you grew up.”

“I haven’t been there in forty years or so,” Paul said.  “I wouldn’t mind seeing it one more time.  We’ll have to talk about it with your folks.”

“Here comes Dad,” Jacob said.

Matthew plopped the plastic cooler in the grass a moment later and sat down next to it.  He opened the cooler, rummaged inside.  “You want ham and Swiss, Grandpa?”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

“Hannah put some tea in here for you too.”  He handed Paul a wrapped sandwich and a bottle of cold tea.

“Thanks,” Paul said.  He cocked his head, listening upstream.  “There goes that song sparrow again.  He’s sure staking out his ground.”

“Song sparrow?” Matthew asked. “I didn’t hear anything.”

Paul unwrapped his sandwich.  “He’ll sing here again in a bit.”

“So, what were you two sitting here talking about?”

“Papa was telling me about fishing when he was little,” Jacob offered.

“The old Upper Iowa, eh?” Matthew smiled at his grandfather.

“And the Mississippi, and Bear Creek, Waterloo Creek, Paint Creek – I probably couldn’t remember them all if I tried.”

Upper Iowa Chimney Rocks.

“You met Grandma there, right?”

“I did.”  He took a bite of his sandwich, chewed, and swallowed.  “There was a little town, Highlandville, over east towards the Mississippi.  There was an old one-room schoolhouse there, and they used to have local bands come play for dances.  I met your Grandma at one of those.”

What a long time ago that was, he realized suddenly.  Seventy years this fall.  Seventy years.  Where did the time go?  It doesn’t seem like it has been seventy years.

“I was nineteen,” he went on, talking mostly to himself now.  “Those dances, they started with a big potluck supper, and then the band would play until nobody had the steam to dance any more.  That first time I saw your Grandma, she was wearing this big white frilly blouse and blue jeans.  I thought she looked like a million bucks, and apparently, she didn’t think I looked too bad either, even if I was just a raggedy farm boy with cow shit on his boots.  We danced until we were the only ones left dancing.  I didn’t ever want to let her go.  And I guess I never did.”

Until the stroke.  Then I didn’t have any choice.  Two weeks short of our sixtieth anniversary, too.

I wonder if there was a song sparrow singing that day, too?

He listened.  As though on cue, the song sparrow upstream spilled out another torrent of notes.

“What was your grandfather like, Papa?” Jacob wanted to know.

Paul smiled.  “He was everything a grandfather could be for a boy, I expect.  Grandpa always wore these old hickory overalls, with a big silver pocket watch in the bib pocket.  I can still see him standing on the riverbank with his old casting rod, an old engineer’s cap stuck on his head, grinning at me.  He knew all the good spots along the river, knew where to go to catch bass, but he always said that it wasn’t just about catching fish – it was getting outside, out along the river, being out there.  That was enough for Grandpa.”

He reached out and ruffled Jacob’s hair.  “It’s enough for me, too.”

They sat silently then, as they slowly finished their lunch.  Paul was lost in a haze of memory, as he reviewed places, events, times long lost.  He wondered, what was making him think of all these things now, after so many years?  His great-grandson’s questions had no doubt prompted his memory – or was it the song sparrow that even now sang just upstream, somewhere upstream?

Matthew brushed breadcrumbs from his hands.  He stood up and picked up his fly rod.  “Come on, Jake; let’s try that next pool downstream.  Grandpa, do you want to walk along?”

“I’ll wait just here,” Paul said.

He watched as his grandson and great-grandson walked away down the cow path that paralleled the creek, finally disappearing around a rock outcrop where the creek turned to the west.  Paul yawned.  He really was tired; a nap in the grass, here in the warm sunshine, seemed a better idea than more fishing.  He lay back in the grass and closed his eyes.

Some time later he awoke with a start.

It seemed no later in the afternoon; the sun still stood overhead.  The song sparrow was still singing, even as Paul sat up, he heard it again, closer, it seemed.

He turned his head and looked upstream towards the source of the birdsong.  He thought he saw wings fluttering in the streamside willows.  The willows looked taller than he had remembered them.

Paul stood up and stretched.  The nap had done him good; he no longer felt so tired, not like he had after the brief walk up from Matthew’s truck.  He started to walk upstream, towards the call of the song sparrow.

Memory.

As he walked, it seemed like the landscape before him was changing, somehow.  The willows at streamside seemed taller than he remembered; the little mountain stream seemed larger, smoother.  The mountainside seemed lower, and the trees looked more like oaks and hickories than pines.

Odd, he thought.  I don’t remember trees like this along here.

Off in the distance, where the snow-capped peaks of the Lost River Range should have stood, it seemed like Paul could see instead tall, gray-white columns of limestone.  Up ahead, where a bank of gravel came down to the water, he saw another old man casting into the shallows.  He was wearing old hickory overalls.  A battered old engineer’s cap sat on his head.  As Paul stopped, watching, the old man looked downstream at him.  He smiled at Paul and waved.

Paul turned once and looked back.  Downstream, the landscape looked as he had left it: the mountains, the pines, they were all there as they should be.  He could even see himself, lying in the grass on the bank near the beaver pond.

He smiled again and turned to walk on upstream towards the old man, towards the sound of the song sparrow.