The Valley of Light: A Novel - Hardcover

Kay, Terry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743475941 ISBN 13: 9780743475945

Publisher: Atria, 2003

Synopsis

Haunted by memories of the Second World War, veteran Noah Locke impresses the locals of his new North Carolina lake community home with his near-mystical fishing capabilities and is invited to participate in an annual fishing contest, an event that draws him into the lives of his neighbors and helps him to heal.

About this title

About the Author

Terry Kay's novels include Taking Lottie Home, The Runaway, Shadow Song, and the now-classic To Dance with the White Dog, twice nominated for the American Booksellers Book of the Year Award, and winner of the Southeastern Library Association Book of the Year Award. Terry Kay has been married for 44 years and has four children and seven grandchildren. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

He made his way to the lake watchfully, crossing the bulldozer-built dam that was covered in weed-grass across its ridge and in trash trees growing on the waterside. It was late afternoon. The sun was behind him, his shadow making a long ghost that wobbled over the weed-grass. Grasshoppers sailed away from his footsteps.

At a clearing among the trash trees on the east end of the dam, he stopped and surveyed the ground. The lake had not been fished in a long time, he believed. Weed-grass grew high, with no look of being trampled. Left-behind bait cans were old and rusty. A coil of nylon line dangled like a spider's silk from a limb of one of the nearby trash trees, causing him to smile a smile that did not show on his face, knowing the spit of frustration the miscast had caused in some fisherman. A child's cast most likely. Not easy for a child to make a cast with nylon. Would be better to teach him with braided line.

He thought about the fishermen who had abandoned the lake. Once, they had come to it from the logging road, he reasoned, bringing their families in wagons or trucks, chairs to sit on, fishing early to late with long bamboo poles and cork floats, eating their sausages and sardines and baked sweet potatoes, and at day's end taking home their stringers of bream and bass and catfish, muscle-weary, smelling of fish slime and worms.

The water of the lake was the color of dark tea in the late-day shadows. Acid from trees. He closed his eyes, listened. The water lapped softly against the bank, rolled in, seeped back. The lapping sound was like a slow and lazy pulse beat. A dozing lake. Not much different from an old man sleeping in sunshine. Just enough breathing to keep alive.

A good place. A good place.

He wondered if it was the lake he had heard of. His sense told him it was.

A hundred yards or so up the east side of the lake, he had seen a small frame building that seemed empty from his distant view, though it was hard to tell since it had a screened-in porch, the screen hiding whatever was behind it. Probably a shack used by hunters, he had reasoned, remembering such shacks from his childhood. If somebody lived in it full-time, they did a good job of making it appear deserted.

Whoever it was that owned the lake and the shack had a good place.

He squatted at the lake's edge, placing the fishing rod he carried on the ground, and then he leaned forward and lightly touched the palm of his hand on the surface of the water.

Tell me, he said silently, said inside his mind.

The water was cool. Against his palm it had a ticklish feel of silk.

Yes, a good place.

He pushed his fingers into the water and wiggled them, paused, let his eyes scan the lake.

Forty feet away, against the bank, the water roiled, quivered like a muscle.

He smiled again, held his fingers in the water, watched the roiling ripple toward him in perfect circles. Soon, the first ring touched him. He pulled his hand from the water and lifted it to his face and inhaled slowly, taking in the scents of the lake. Algae. The decay of trees pushed over by wind storms and dropped into the water. Hickory, oak, beechnut, sweet gum. Silt of leaves and wash-off of wood dirt. Frog and snake and turtle. And fish. The sharp, almost metallic scent of fish.

He rubbed his hand across the front of his shirt.

A very good place.

He stood and slipped the army knapsack he wore off his shoulder, then picked up the rod and pulled loose the line on the bait-casting reel, letting the lure dangle before him. It was an old lure, turned like a small minnow with silver flecks on its sides. He had caught many fish with it before snipping off the hook with a pair of wire cutters. It was now a lure for holding his line on the rod and for teasing.

One cast, he thought.

One cast to let Mr. Fish know he was there.

Enough to anger Mr. Fish, to make him restless.

Make him coil and leap at anything moving near him.

He tilted his rod to the water, dipped the lure, wetting it. Then he made his cast near the bank where the fish -- a bass, a largemouth, he believed -- had rolled. He watched the lure slap the water, dive and disappear, and then he began his slow reeling-in of the line. He could feel the lure drag through algae and he flicked his wrist twice, giving the line a jerking motion.

A cloud skimmed the July sun, dimmed it. He felt a puff of air against his face and stood motionless to let the air pause on his skin. A sense of peace settled over him as though he had marked the place he stood on a map and, after a long journey, had arrived at his destination. He wondered what day of the week it was and the date marking the day. Thought: What does it matter?

For more than two years, he had walked into days and weeks and months without knowing them by calendar, only by season. The season he read in trees -- lime-green buds in spring, full-leaf in summer, colors of hot embers in autumn, the dark limbs of winter. He had walked and fished, leaving behind war and the burial ground of his parents and the sadness of his brother and the open and the secret experiences of his boyhood. Walked far enough to stop looking over his shoulder to see if his history tagged after him like a scolded yard dog. Now it was only memory, and memory had a way of rubbing down most of the rough edges.

Still, he had always believed there would be a place to stop the walking, to stay, to become his own forest, show his own seasons.

And there, with the air on his skin, he wondered if he had found that place.

Three weeks earlier -- in Kentucky, he believed -- he had come upon an old, white-haired man with bowed shoulders fishing from a bridge over a wide, slow-moving river. They had made nods to one another and he had gone below the bridge to the riverbank and made his touch of the water, and then had joined the old man on the bridge and unreeled his own line over the bridge's railing and they had fished together for a long while, paying more attention to the talking that went on between them than to the fish that swam in the water below them.

The man, who offered his name as Hoke Moore, had put him on the path to the valley. Had said it was a good place to find fish and rest if a person could avoid certain elements of the population. "It's called the Valley of Light by some, Bowerstown by others. Where I was born," he had added in a voice that had the sound of longing. "They's some good people there, and some you'd just as soon not get caught with. Mostly good, though. Mostly good. You need a hand, they'll give it."

And then Hoke Moore had begun telling of a great lake called the Chatuge, built some years earlier as part of a government project called the Tennessee Valley Authority. Said word of the lake gave it good enough marks for fishing, though there were still too few fish for all the water pooled up behind the dam. "Takes time for fish to find out where they want to be when they's so many places to go," he had speculated.

He had never fished the Chatuge himself, Hoke Moore had admitted. Liked smaller places, something he could walk around and not lose sight of where he'd started the trip. "They's another little lake over there -- twenty or twenty-five acres, I'd guess -- that's got the biggest fish I ever seen in it. A bass, it was. Must have been fifteen pounds. Maybe more. Used to try and catch him, but all he'd do was spit water on me. He'd jump up out of the water, like he was trying to swim through the air, mad as a wet hen. Never seen a bass do that. Not one that big. Not coming out of the water high as he did. It was like he was telling me I weren't good enough to catch him."

Hoke Moore had paused and turned to look in the direction of the far-off mountains in the southeast -- the direction he had given as the location of the valley -- and he had added, "Must be big as a whale now, if it's still alive. You just wandering around, you ought to go down there and try to catch him. You might can do it. Might can. You a fisherman, sure enough. I can tell that in any man just by studying him a little bit. If you go down there and you catch him, you look him in the eye when you drag him up and you tell him Hoke Moore's been thinking about him for a long time."

He had smiled, had said, "Yes sir. I get down that way, I'll do that."

"You got to take your time with him," Hoke Moore had said. "Got to aggravate him some. Got to make him want you, much as you want him."

"Yes sir, I've seen fish like that," he had replied. And it was true. Even as a child, he had known fish liked to fight, some more than others.

And then Hoke Moore had chuckled and made another soft cast with his line, watching the hook disappear under the pull of the sinker. After a moment, he had said, "I wonder if they doing the fish-off in the Chatuge these days."

He had asked, "What's that?"

"What I call it -- a fish-off," Hoke Moore had answered. "Used to be on the river. Been going on over there for twenty years or more. Got started by the school as a way of making some money to pay teachers. First year they done it, they was catching fish fast as they could drop a line. Not much need to bait the hook, they was catching fish so easy. Had the biggest fry at the school I ever saw. You'd of thought Jesus had blessed them fish, they was so many of them. Everybody pays a dollar or two to get in on it and the man that catches the most fish by weight gets a cash prize. Used to be ten dollars. Guess it's more now. When they get through with the fishing, they have them a fish fry and everybody in the valley shows up. That's where they make the money."

Hoke Moore had paused, wagged his fishing rod over the water; then he had added, "Won it myself two or three times." Had laughed softly over the thought.

"When's it held?" he had asked.

"Right along now," Hoke Moore had answered. "July, August. Date changes about -- or it used to. Tell the truth, I don't even know if they do it no more. War changed a lot of things." He had paused, clucked with his tongue, shook his head slowly, had added, "Had me some ups and downs there, but I miss the place." He had gazed again at the distant mountains. "You just going place to place, you ought to head down that way. Get in on that fishing if they still doing it. Catch that fish of mine while you there."

"Maybe I will," he had said after a moment of thinking about it.

"What you ought to do," Hoke Moore had urged. Had said again, "You a fisherman. Yes sir, you are. One thing I know about is fishing. Some people just born to it. Others can't do nothing but drown worms. You born to it, boy. You born to it. Just like I was."

"You going back over there someday?" he had asked, wanting to be friendly.

And Hoke Moore had turned slightly to look at him in an old man's studying way before answering, "About all I ever think about, you want to know the truth of it, but it's a long way off for old legs. If I go back, somebody'll have to throw me over his shoulders and carry me. You take a mind to go on down there, I'll consider I'm along for the ride." And he had smiled and turned back to his fishing and to his low-voice way of talking.

He had listened with interest to Hoke Moore, had found something pleasing in the description of the valley and had made his turn in the direction of Hoke Moore's pointed finger, walking toward the far-off mountains, so distant and pale gray on the horizon, they had the look of a lace hem on the blue skirt of the sky. Had made his journey at a languid pace, catching an occasional ride in a farmer's truck, stopping often to fish. One river in Tennessee -- the Ocoee -- had held him for three days with its hypnotic run of water over rocks and with the satisfying look of the mountains around it. Good fishing, too. If Hoke Moore had not told such a happy story about the valley near the Chatuge, he would have liked staying longer on the Ocoee.

But maybe Hoke Moore had been right. The valley had a natural feel to it. Coming into it, he had got an idea of the people living in it by studying the washings hanging on clotheslines. Reading a clothesline had always been an easy thing for him to do -- a trick taught to him by his mother. If you read it with some careful attention, you could tell if the house belonged to a couple just starting out, or if it had children, or old people, or whether they were fat or skinny people. Could come close to guessing how much money the people might have by the new or faded look of their clothing and bedsheets and towels.

The clotheslines of the valley left him believing it was a place fairly well off, with people more or less settled in, happy enough to be where they were and who they were.

It was little wonder that Hoke Moore had a yearning look when he pointed out the direction of the valley.

He saw the water behind the line heave and bubble, and he raised the tip of the rod. He knew what was about to happen.

"Take it," he whispered.

The fish erupted from the water, flinging itself high, like a god becoming flesh, a spray of water spinning from its silver head, its tail fins dancing over the shattered surface. For a moment -- a flash -- the huge mouth flared open in outrage at the tasteless lure and he could see the orange of the gills shining in the sun.

He had never seen a lake fish so large.

The fish fell hard against the water, making a belly-flopping slapping sound, a sound like a sudden thunderclap, and then it disappeared. Water rippled again in circles and the late sun filled the circles like ringlets of liquid gold.

Hoke Moore's fish, he believed.

Hoke Moore's fish announcing itself, coming out of the water like that. Not the habit of bass to leap up, though it depended on the spirit of the fish, he guessed. He had seen such leaps. Not so high, though. Not from such a large fish.

Soon, he thought. Maybe tomorrow. Soon, I will catch you and see if you are the giant Hoke Moore says you are.

The fish would bring good money, being so big. Feed a good-size family, though it might not be easy finding somebody wanting a bass as big as a small pig. Most country people he knew -- white and colored -- liked the taste of catfish more than bass. So did he. Catfish -- small ones, the length of his hand, wrist to fingertip -- were as tasty as any fish he had ever eaten if they were cooked right in seasoned meal and melted lard. Some of the colored men he had fished with in his boyhood would come close to fighting over a string of catfish. One he knew -- Runt Carter was his name -- had a habit of collecting the heads of catfish and stringing them across his barn with binder twine, saying the fish kept away owls. Runt Carter had so many catfish heads dangling on binder twine, his barn had the look of wearing a necklace.

He wondered if there were many colored families in the valley. Doubted it, being in the mountains. Most colored people he knew were workers in cotton fields, and there was little cotton grown in the mountains. He had seen only one colored family in the last two days. They lived in ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743475941
• ISBN 13: 9780743475945
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256