Silver Heart
By Tom Brosman
Three Coho salmon with dark green backs and chrome colored sides rested in the clear water of Charlie Creek. They were less than a mile from home, where they would spawn. They could smell their “home waters” where they began their lives.
Charlie Creek was eight feet across. It drained with the outgoing tide into Grays Harbor and at full tide it was several feet deep. The three great fish had made the perilous trip home from the ocean into Grays Harbor and found the smell of Charlie Creek like the welcoming porch light to a weary traveler. It was a journey to spawn and start more journeys.
Noland saw them there in the clean cold water. He had parked his pickup by the 3 big fir trees and walked slowly through the salt grass. He smelled the air and felt the warm sun on his shoulders like an act of kindness to another weary traveler. He closed his eyes to see her again, to feel her, to perhaps breathe some of the last air that she had breathed. He could just hear her voice now, just smell her hair and feel the tug inside of him of the abiding, forever love he carried for her.
He stood there, with his fishing pole and thought of happier times and a love that was rooted deeply in the bottom of his soul. It was an unrequited love that he still dangled upon. He could hear them, Noland and Jenny when they were six years old playing along these banks. He remembered those years of youth and times with Jenny. He remembered her hair and her laughter. She always said that he was too serious about things and she made it a point never to take life seriously.
Noland was a complex man, except for how he loved. He was born an old soul with room for only one woman. Jenny brought out an abundance of nurturing, protection and devotion from him. Jenny it was and Jenny it would always be. Jenny was a kind girl with a yellow pony tail and laughing eyes. She was never meant to be someone’s’ soul mate. “What an odd concept” she had thought. She gave Noland friendship and laughter and even dated him in their high school years, but she would belong to no one.
Noland had fallen for her when they were children. When he was 12, he had mowed lawns all summer and taken the money to Herbig Jewelers and bought a sterling silver heart with a loop on the top for her to hang it in her bedroom. The heart filled her palm and he told her that she owned his heart forever. She was gracious as always and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Jenny came to his high school football games and many nights they walked the banks of Charlie Creek and talked as the moonlight made the water sparkle and sent long shadows from the big fir trees.
A flock of Canadian Geese flew over him as he visited the past. He felt at home there on Charlie Creek. It was the best place to remember her. Not only were the smells and sounds the same, but the trees and rocks along the creek remembered Jenny and her laughter. So, he was among friends who understood.
It was at Christmas time in their senior year at Aberdeen High School that his fears came true and Jenny found a new boyfriend that was “more fun”. A few days after graduation, his dad and mom had driven him to SeaTac where he caught a plane for Marine Corp boot camp and a new life.
The Corp was a haven to Noland and he took to the lifestyle. He won two Purple Hearts fighting in the Middle East. He had just finished his 23rd year as a Marine, when a letter from his mother found him in Iraq. He was the sergeant of the Stryker Brigade and as the Humvee bumped along, he opened her letter. Usually his mother told him about the salmon runs or how it was time that his dad retired from Weyerhaeuser, a job he loved.
This letter was short. “Son, I am so sorry. Jenny passed away from cancer this morning.” The decorated sergeant, strong from battle who shared the Humvee with 5 of his men began to sob. The marines around him gave him his privacy and looked the other way. Loss was a part of life to them and to a man, they understood.
Noland finally cast his lure upstream from the salmon and twitched it down to them. A large male took the lure and he set the hook and fought the fish until he could beach him. The fish was just what he needed for his parents’ 55th anniversary and he placed it in the gunny sack he had carried and wet it in the water to keep the fish fresh until he could get it home and clean it. He put the fish in the shade and went back to his memories.
There was a big boulder that Jenny and Noland used to sit on and talk and joke. He found his old place there and dangled his legs in the warm sunshine. Without thinking, the wounded man reached into a crevice in the rock that was protected from the weather. It had been their secret hiding place and their post office where they left notes for each other. He reached inside and felt a plastic object. He placed it on his lap in wonder.
With his knife he cut the strings and unwrapped several layers of plastic garbage bag. There was a tremble that ran from body to soul in the retired Marine. There was a wooden box inside with a hinged lid. He slowly opened it and found a folded piece of paper, on top of more plastic. Just as the magnificent salmon had come home, so had he. Again he cried, as he read a message from across the veil.
“My Dearest Noland,
When you find this, I will have gone. I never thought much about life and it’s complexities like you do. That is, until the Dr. said I had a month or less to live.
I knew I was sick, but avoided getting it checked. Until Dr. Erickson gave me my death sentence, 20 minutes was the most I thought into the future. When he said, ‘I am sorry Jenny, you haven’t long to live,’ it dawned on me, that I have lived, through children and marriages and never deeply loved! Sitting beside the Dr. while he was trying to comfort me, I fell head over heals, deeply, madly in love with you, Noland. I am so sorry I missed our life together and I am tormented by the offhand way I treated you. You who loved only me, deeply, forever. At the bottom of this box, is my most prized possession. It is your heart that you gave me that you worked so hard for. It is mine and I give it back to you.
I am yours Noland, at last.
Love,
Jenny
The clouds moved in and the sunlight changed and still he sat, holding her heart to his. Hours passed and tide went out and a cool breeze came in from the sea and enveloped the man who belonged as much to the wind and the rocks and to Charlie Creek as he did to his folks and the men he had fought with. It was a quiet man who cleaned the fish at his parents’ house and left the bright orange fillets in a container in their fridge.
His dad got him a job with Weyerhaeuser and he worked there until he retired. He never did marry. His folks left him the house and the garden out back with the apple trees. The mayors of Hoquiam and Aberdeen, the towns along the Harbor, spent many coffee clatches trying to figure out who it was that paid the doctor bills and the late rent for those on the Harbor who came up short at the end of the month, or were just stranded on their way to somewhere. Noland always left cash in an envelope at the right time, for the right people, those in dire need. Noland had an attorney deliver the money when there was no way of hiding his gift. His attorney kept his secrets and he was the executor to Nolands' sizeable estate. When Noland passed away and crossed the river to his Jenny, he was given a hero’s funeral. His attorney sent some of the money to a cousin of Nolands’ and the remainder was donated to the Aberdeen Rescue Mission. The attorney directed the completion of Nolands’ most important wish. At Grays Harbor Cemetery there are two headstones, side by side on the edge of the property that look out on Grays Harbor and across to Charlie Creek. The brick mason that the attorney used had been hand picked for his skill and his understanding. The mason had joined the
headstones and built a recess in the center where he had mounted an object that had hung in Herbig Jewelers window six decades before, their silver heart.
