Excerpt: PROBATE

This novel excerpt was written by Cully Irving in Catapult’s first 12-Month Novel Generator graduating class

When Elliott Baker’s mother and grandmother die within months of one another, Elliott is faced with the loss of the one place – Camp Chiquagwa – that brings him peace from his emotional and cognitive difficulties. Part of the 75,000 acre Sloane Park acquired by Elliott’s great grandfather Augustus Sloane I in 1895, Chiquagwa and the rest of Sloane Park have provided a private paradise for three generations of increasingly dysfunctional members of the Sloane and Baker families. Now, because of financial difficulties, Elliott, just out of college, must choose between Chiquagwa and Garden Woods, the 100 acre estate built by Augustus on the gold coast of Long Island and on which succeeding generations of his family have built their homes. Elliott’s battle to save Chiquagwa pitts him against his father, Henry Baker, desperate to keep his home at Garden Woods, and his great uncle, Augustus Sloane III, who will do anything to get Chiquagwa. Along the way, Elliott falls in love with Augustus III’s step-daughter, is seduced by her mother – Augustus III’s glamorous fourth wife – and has to make decisions that could leave his family homeless and penniless after years of abundance and ease.

Part family history, part exploration of a vanishing class, part love story, Probate is a cautionary tale for a new gilded age in which members of a new landed class are amassing estates of their own, estates that will soon be populated with generations of descendants who may be destine for the same fate. Probate is a deeply felt exploration of the ways in which inheritance, both material and psychological, can alter and shape one person’s fate.

*

Elliott backed the outboard out of the slip and then drove out to the middle of the lake and powered the engine to full speed. He didn’t think there were any rocks but stayed in the middle of the lake just to be safe. Willis had given him a flashlight, and he shone it from side to side once in a while so that he could see if anything emerged from the pre-dawn darkness. There was nothing, though, and it was still, and he knew that if he turned the engine off there would be nothing but silence.

After about 20 minutes, the sun started to come up and he saw that he was getting to the end of the lake, to Camp Eden. There was a simple dock which led to stairs. He pulled the boat up and tied it to small cleats at the front and the back and then cut off the engine. He picked up his fishing bag and walked up the stairs. The camp was simple. It had no generator. The cooking stove and oven were powered by wood, and lighting was provided by kerosene lanterns. It gave Elliott a sense of stillness and isolation.

He opened the door and Augustus was sitting with Armand, his fishing guide, smoking a cigarette and holding a glass of whiskey in his hand. He seemed calm, unworried, different than he had been at the sailboat races the week before, where he had been puffed up. He looked at Elliott frankly, with only a slight smile, and smoked his cigarette and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Good.”

There was a gray light coming in the windows, and Elliott could see that the walls were made of thin wood paneling, shiny, as if coated with shellac. A kerosene lamp sat on a table in the corner, its glass enclosure the shape of an upside down teardrop. On the walls were sheets of paper affixed with thumb tacks and on the pieces of paper were outlines of fish, drawn in pencil, and in the corner of each piece of paper were a set of initials and some other information.

The one with an outline of the biggest fish had the initials “A.S.S. Jr.” in the lower right hand corner and “August 2, 1955, 6:15 a.m., 4.1 lbs.” Augustus’s initials. Four pounds. Elliott had never caught a brook trout that was more than two and a half pounds. He looked at the outline of the fish, and looked back at Augustus, and he seemed both foreign and known at the same time.

Augustus seemed oblivious to the drawings. He and Armand began to look through the flies in a small aluminum box. Elliott looked at the other drawings, and walked around the small camp. The room they were in, sparsely furnished with a small dining table and chairs and two lounge chairs, opened onto a kitchen in which was a wood stove and oven, and a kitchen table covered with a red and white checked table cloth. Off of the main room to the side were two small bedrooms with twin beds in them, and it was apparent to Elliott that Augustus had spent the night in one of them.

“Armand thinks I should use the royal coachman,” said Augustus all of a sudden. “What do you think?” Normally, Augustus’s head shook almost imperceptibly as he spoke, as if he had the beginnings of a neurological disorder; but this wasn’t happening now. Elliott looked out the window. It was twenty minutes or so before 6:00. It looked like it was going to be overcast, but he couldn’t be sure. “I think it’s late in the season for that,” he said. “I’d think about a Black Gnat instead.”

“Hmm” said Augustus, and then he laughed and pointed at Armand. “The young man disagrees with you,” he said. “I’ll tell you what,” he said to Elliott. “I’ll put on the gnat. Let’s see what happens.”

“You can always change it out there if it’s not working,” said Elliott. Augustus smiled at Elliott, and then nodded at Armand, who stood and walked to the corner to pick up Augustus’s rod. It was 7 1/2 inches, a two-piece, and made of bamboo with a stainless steel Orvis reel. Armand carried it back to his chair and sat down. “Here,” said Elliott, without thinking. “Let me do it.”

Augustus and Armand looked at him, silent for a moment. Then Augustus nodded at Armand, who then handed the rod to Elliott. It was a dark honey blond color, with variations and variegations in the wood, and Elliott could tell it was perfectly weighted, the natural flex of the wood providing just the right give to play a fish without breaking. “It was my father’s” said Augustus, who noticed Elliott admiring the rod.

Elliott propped the rod against his body. Armand had already affixed the reel to the butt end, tied a leader onto the end of the line, and pulled the line through the guides. Augustus handed the black gnat to Armand, who handed it to Elliott. Elliott ran the tippet through the small metal loop at the head of the fly and then wrapped the line around itself seven times before slipping the tip through the loop that had been made at the bottom. He pulled tight and the seven loops slid down into a solid cylindrical mass, and then he used a nail clipper, which he carried in his pocket, to cut off the excess line. Augustus and Armand watched him, and when he was done, Augustus nodded his head.

Once in their canoes, they paddled through a bed of lily pads, to the left of the camp, and in to Otter Pond Stream. The land was open on either side, as though there had been a forest fire, and then the woods resumed about a quarter mile away. A merganser flew away in front of them, a foot or two above the water, and Elliott saw an otter swimming and then dive under. It was early enough that the fishing would be good. Once the sun rose in the sky, the surface of the water would warm up, and the trout would become skittish from the brightness. Elliott had nymphs that he used at those times, which he let sit on or near the bottom, but at this time of day he could catch fish on a dry fly that sat on the water waiting for one to rise to the surface and sip it in.

Armand slowed Augustus’s canoe to a crawl and they meandered around the curves in the river until they came to a small clearing on the right where the tall grasses and plants lining the stream had been trampled down. He beached his canoe there and stepped out on to the shore to pull it up a little farther, and then he helped Augustus out. Augustus stood on the shore next to their canoe, and Armand motioned to Elliott to land upstream 50 yards or so at another cleared area, a little promontory almost. “Look over there,” said Augustus, pointing to the opposite side of the stream. He spoke in a loud whisper so as not to disturb the fish, since it was quiet and the fish were skittish. “That’s the hole, where that tributary enters. The water is colder there.” Elliott knew that, knew that trout liked colder water, but he had never been to this stream before. Looking across, though, he could see it. It was about 50 feet to the other side, a fair distance for the small rods and light low test lines they were using, thought Elliott, especially if you wanted to be accurate.

Elliott found his spot upstream and lay his fishing bag on the ground. He sat and looked at the still water. It was early still and the water was a dark color, and mosquitos and gnats and dragonflies dipped and rose above its surface. After watching for a while, Elliott chose a small blue winged olive, like the little olive duns he saw among the mosquitos and dragonflies. It was a dry fly, so it would sit on the surface. It might have been a little early in the season for the olive, but it had been cool, and this early in the morning the fish might rise to get it, at least if he could drop it on to the fishing hole where the water was moving.

Elliott watched Augustus casting. He cast with a relaxed motion, using his wrist more than his arm, bringing the rod back behind his head and then trying to shoot the line forward without a lot of movement in his body. On his next cast, Augustus brought his rod too far behind him on his back cast, and his fly got caught in a small shrub that was behind him and to his left. At that point, Elliott walked over the boggy area along the shoreline towards Augustus and, before Armand could get to it, unhooked the fly from the small branch it was on and unraveled the line and walked it back to Augustus. Armand had been chain smoking Gaulois cigarettes and one of his fingers had been cut off at the middle knuckle in a carpentry accident. Augustus looked Elliott up and down at first, but then relaxed his face and took the fly back.

“Here,” said Elliott, pulling something out of his pocket. It had been in his fishing bag and he had pulled it out before walking over. It looked like a big rubber band, flat and about 3/4 of an inch wide and three inches in diameter. He held it out to Augustus.

“What’s that?” asked Augustus.

“You’ll cast farther if you keep your wrist straight. Use your arm, from your elbow, not your wrist.”

“Ha ha,” said Augustus, “so you’re going to tell me how to fish, are you?” He looked at Elliott with an expression more of amazement than disdain. “I’ve been fishing here for 60 years, maybe more. Caught the biggest rainbow trout ever taken out of this stream. Bigger than my father even.”

*

Cully Irving is a writer and lawyer who lives and works in New York City. He has been writing fiction since he was a teenager and was editor of the literary magazine at his boarding school in Massachusetts. He took writing courses in college with Edmund White and David Milch and attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in 2017 where he took part in the fiction workshop taught by Peter Ho Davies. He is a partner and chair of the real estate department and member of the executive committee at Carter Ledyard & Milburn in New York. He has a special interest in writing about families and nature.