A man sits on the wall of the bridge. He isn’t sure why he stopped the car, why he’s standing here in the middle of the bridge over the Wee Agivey on the A54. He hasn’t done that in decades. Perhaps it was nostalgia. Perhaps he was trying to fill something he knows is missing, though he can’t quite put his finger on what.
Below him, the river glides dark and slow, folding around the weed-fringed rocks. In the shadow of the bridge’s arch, he sees a brown trout hovering in the slack water, motionless except for the tremor of its fins. Every now and then it flicks forward, a brief bronze flash in the current, to take a fly that’s landed carelessly on the surface.
He hears his father’s voice again, soft and certain, as if from just behind his shoulder.
“So they’re taking a brown sedge just now.”
The memory blooms whole — the smell of Erinmore Flake, rich and dark, being rubbed between tobacco-stained fingers before the liturgy of packing the bowl. The rasp of a Swan Vesta match, the first whistling draw, and that cloud of blue, sweet smoke rising like incense into the evening air.
He half turns, expecting to see the elderly Canon from the Church of Ireland, his father’s fishing companion, and old Bert, the quiet oracle who seemed to know every pool and bend of the Agivey by heart. But of course, they’re all long gone now, the Canon, Bert, his father, all decades ago and the memory of their evenings by the water has thinned like the fading scent of pipe smoke.
Still, one image remains vivid: his small hand tucked in his father’s, the two of them climbing stiles over stone walls, the grass damp with river mist. They would follow the path downstream from the bridge to the wide pool where the Wee Agivey meets the Big Agivey. His father’s hand was always warm, not sweaty warm, but a steady, comforting heat that seemed to hold the world together.
He can still hear the conversation, his father pointing at a flower, naming it in local slang and then in Latin, reciting what it might cure or what it might kill. He’d meant to write those things down once, but life had moved too fast. The old knowledge slipped away like silt in a current, forgotten in the bright rush of newer things.
And there was always the Harris tweed hat, the one his mother, the man’s grandmother, bought each year as a Christmas gift. His father wore it every outing until it became soft and sweat-darkened, smelling faintly of lanolin and smoke. A good fly was always stuck in the band, bent and feathered, proof of success and superstition both.
The man finds himself smiling. He wants a hat like that, one that’s lived a little, that carries its own quiet history. But the world now is too fast, too clean, too replaceable. History doesn’t mean much anymore.
Fly-tying comes into focus, when the season ended and the nights got longer, his father at the dining room table, a bag of multi-hued feathers, rich silver and gold thread, a pot of glue and a small jar of Fuller’s Earth. For some reason he remembered what that for, his father’s voice echoed down the years.
“Makes it water proof and take the smell of humans off it”
These where the days before the internet, before Netflix when evenings were for other things.
His phone buzzes on the stone beside him, breaking the spell. A text from his wife:
Where are you?
He hesitates, thumbs hovering. Then he types, Remembering… stuff. On the way home now.
He swings his legs down from the wall, the stone rough beneath his palms, and walks back to where the car waits at the corner where the old post office used to be. The air is cooling; the sky has gone the colour of pewter.
Somewhere in the trees, a buzzard cries, a long, lonely note that echoes down the valley. The man pauses, breathes in, and for an instant he swears he can smell Erinmore Flake again rich, sweet, and gone before he can catch it.
He smiles, gets into the car, and drives home.