Her mother mashed the berries through the strainer. Her faded blond hair streaked gray at thirty-five, her stomach swelling softly with a fifth, unexpected child, she thumped through the sweltering kitchen that July day, her pale face pinched as she added sugar to the mashed fruit, filling the clear jars with black jam. Emma hated how readily her mother turned her father's sweet gift into a bitter chore. Looking at her own hands, now raw and ugly with wash water inside the soapy mason jars, she swore she'd never marry. “You're too old to be pregnant,” she'd snapped at her mother.
        Now, Emma's own husband stood still and quiet beside the river, casting his line over and over into the stream. The fish were larger and wilder up here, fleshier than the little ones in his creel that would hardly make a decent supper. Then she noticed that Caleb was releasing these bigger catches.
        “There's more meat on the ones you just let go,” she said. “Why aren't you keeping them?”
         “It's enough to know they are here,” he said. “You can't cast toward an absence.”
        Emma had never met anyone who didn't eat the fish they caught. How is it enough just to watch a fish instead of eating it? she wondered. Before she could ask, Caleb unjointed the fly rod and began walking, no longer turning back to check on her. Following, she studied her husband's stooped posture, wishing this man were a little happier, more talkative, someone who didn't answer her questions with what her mother called “his fourth thought,” forcing her to angle out the first three thoughts that came into his mind before he actually spoke. It worried her that there were still so many facts about his past that were absent from their conversations. The longshoreman had told the coal camp priest and her family that Caleb just appeared one day, walking over the mountain with a stack of books under one arm, a bundle of money stuck inside a banjo slung across his back. He put all the money down on a mountain farm outside of Bluefield, where he'd taken Emma to live just that morning. The longshoreman had heard that Caleb worked for some “strange” men while in Italy, that these men paid for his return to America and gave him the money that was in the banjo. Nobody knew where Caleb's people came from, or if he had any.
        Unsure of what she believed, Emma thought of her dead trout in the woven creel at his side, remembered how deftly his hunting knife sliced through this fish, and for the first time she regretted her hasty marriage and flight from the coal camp. She imagined his Italian wife, slender and frail as the virgin saints, and wondered how she'd died. She considered following the stream back to the bottom, to the meadow filled with coneflowers and butterflies, hitching a ride back to her family's house, but she was too far into this to turn around. When the walking trail ended at a bare bluff, Caleb climbed the staggered outcropping of limestone. She pulled herself up by the limbs of rhododendrons, climbing until she reached the top, following Caleb along the ridge. Chilled by her own sweat, she looked down toward the stream, but no longer saw it. The soundless trees muted the water's comfortable tumbling.
        Caleb hiked several feet ahead of her, his back straighter, more assured as he strode relentlessly across a dry meadow stabbed with dying firs, bare and white as bones rising into the blue sky. At the edge of the meadow, she caught up with him as he hacked through some blackberry bushes. She heard the water before she saw it. This new water poured from a great height, echoing against stone, slapping against more water. The blue butterflies reappeared, clouding above Caleb's head as he turned, his face kind and eager as he held the branches back so they wouldn't snag her. She stepped toward him, and he placed his hand against her back, guiding her eyes to the high ridge covered with fir and hemlock, the white water veiling the dark joints and faults in the cliff face, slapping on the surface of a deep pool. She breathed in the heady scent of fermented berries and limestone water. Caleb's hand pressed softly against her back, and as he leaned toward her, she could feel his mouth close to hers. She could breathe his light, sweet breath. Her heart fluttered recklessly. She wondered if she were heading toward the irreparable mischief that had trapped her mother in that sweltering July kitchen, canning jar after jar of blackberry jam.

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