Fishing the Jumps

by Lamar Herrin

  The day after he’d seen the reverend, he put in a couple of hours at the plant, still the businessman, still money-minded enough that if you’d given him irresistible odds he’d make it through the week, the month, and the year ahead, he’d have known to decline the bet—he’d become that light on his feet, that close to walking on air. Arriving home for lunch, he fell on the walk leading up to the kitchen door, and rather than try to get up and continue on, he managed to roll over so that he was looking up through the limbs of trees to where birds, the lightest-boned creatures alive, flitted from branch to branch. His trees, his birds, his sky, his dome of heaven shining through the branches. That was where his wife found him, the dome of his still enormous belly earthbound like the rest of him, and with far fewer mourners in attendance they buried him beside his son. Curiously, though, members of the black community turned out in numbers they hadn’t for the son, as if only now did they know for a certainty that with the progenitor’s death the Whalen chapter in the town’s history was done. They could pay their tribute and turn a page.

  Turn a page? Walter wouldn’t let it go. By my count you’ve still got four younger Whalens left. And then there’s Ellie.

  It’s late, I reminded him.

  I know it is. And we’re getting older by the minute. A touch more?

  A touch.

  Walter poured, then reminded me, We got a late start. You wanted to hear my unsociable neighbor play that first chord on his cello, remember, before you started it again.

  I won’t make that mistake a second time.

  So there is more. We’re not done. It doesn’t end with Big and Little Howie Whalen lying side by side as the world files by.

  I didn’t say anything. Curiously, I thought of my ex-wife with whom Walter and his wife had paired me up. Or maybe not so curiously since, once we’d divorced, Elaine had taken on the role of wise friend in my life, a counselor of sorts, and I the role in hers of someone who divulges what might bring pleasure or relief or modest intrigue but spares her all the rest. Had I told her the story of the Whalens, both the long-haired and short-haired versions? Walter, a smart cross-examiner, had wanted to know. No, maybe snatches here and there, anecdotes, if the family were a mosaic, then a chip or two to represent the Whalens, Rosalyn’s laugh, the aunt of mine named Rosalyn who laughed up the world’s riches, very modest riches by the world’s standards, but in the eyes of a boy …

  No, it doesn’t end there, I told Walter. How could it? A second funeral so soon after the first. The family at large now with two big holes in it, pouring back into town. My mother was still alive. Only Rosalyn and my mother would get the joke, which no one uttered, I’m sure, and which wasn’t a joke at all but a terrible play on words. Two deaths, one so soon after the other. The Whalen family was …

  Snakebit? Walter said.

  If I could, Walter, I’d ask for that story to be struck from the record.

  Too late now. And, Walter reminded me, there’s more.

  I nodded. My widowed mother, I went on, could look after herself, fiercely if she had to. But not Rosalyn. I held my aunt. There was nothing I could say. And when she laughed, which was really the only way she knew to expel breath, nothing came out. There was still money to burn. And grandchildren. Eventually Howie’s children would each take their share of the money and run, at least three of them did. For a time Laurie assumed her husband’s place at the plant, dressed in a pin-stripe suit common enough on Wall Street but pretty much unprecedented down there. Soon competitors would spring up, both in town and in towns close by, and Laurie would be hard pressed. Apparently she married somebody, but it ended before it began. She left and came back, it’s an old story. She claimed that before she’d sell the house she and Howie had had built, she’d tear it down, which was what she did, and then sold the land as five lakefront lots. Her elder son, Alan, lived with her for a while and it’s possible nursed her through a bout with drugs. She put on weight, went through a period of accelerated aging, and then tried to tuck and facelift it all away. I can’t imagine it worked. I didn’t see her again. When I had a chance to, I declined.

  Really? Declined, you say?

  Declined. I didn’t bite, Walter. I had Rosalyn to worry about, and Rosalyn had Ellie.

  To worry about or to bring some comfort to her old age? And two granddaughters, you said.

  Both blonde, both pretty. Two little sisters who got along, very polite little girls, who took care of each other and never fought, not that I saw, and when they visited their grandmother took turns in trying to lift her spirits and keep them lifted so that Rosalyn wouldn’t see …

  You’re asking me to guess?

  I’m asking you to go to bed.

  But if that’s what you were asking, I’d guess the little girls banded together and behaved the way they did because all they saw around them was grief and mourning and parents who fought. I’d guess that Ellie had married someone who professed to adore her the way her father did but who had his own agenda. Or she’d married someone who quickly diminished in stature once he’d fathered the two girls, a man who couldn’t fish and couldn’t hunt, had never stood on the line of scrimmage and taken his licks, and who couldn’t even defend himself from his wife’s attacks, if that was what she chose to do, so she simply seethed, and the little girls went off and tried to make their grandmother happy, the way little boys might go off and build a clubhouse, a little fortress to hide in and defend …

  Ellie married a young lawyer fresh out of school, I said. He went to work for the plant, handling their legal affairs and keeping an eye on the books. Thin and fit, a runner type. Modest achievable ambitions, but he wouldn’t be cheated. I didn’t dislike him. Even when it was rumored he’d scooped off more than his share, I didn’t hold it against him. When Little Howie died, then Big Howie did, Ellie’s husband was smart enough to know that together the two deaths would form a black hole in the family. So he pocketed what he thought was due him, perhaps a little more, and stepped free. Ellie took to drink and got sucked in. Rosalyn, not knowing where else to turn, called on me, and down I went. What more can I say, Walter? She called, and just like a child I went to see what she would now pile in my arms. That’s it. Nothing else. Moon’s down. Goodnight.

  III

  MY GRANDMOTHER—MY MOTHER’S MOTHER—had been a flirt. Before she died she sat me down and told me her life’s story, by which she meant her love life’s story. So there would be some record. So someone could smile, nod approvingly, and finally applaud. I was to write it all down, and I assured her I would. There was even a way I could quantify her success. Did I know what a Kodak party was? My grandmother had been a Gibson girl, that had been her style of dress, with long flowing skirts, ruffled blouses, a cameo brooch at her throat, and a pompadour wave in her luxuriant auburn hair. Back then, she said, the Kodak company had begun to manufacture their Brownie cameras, and they made so many of them, they could afford to sell them cheap, so cheap, in fact, that a young man of ordinary means could afford to buy one and invite a young lady of his choice out for an afternoon of picture taking in the country. An afternoon because that was when the light was right—remember, there were no flashbulbs back then—and out in the country because that was where the most scenic pictures could be taken. My grandmother, whose Christian name was Grace, chose a snapshot from a stack she kept in what looked like a jewelry box and handed it to me. A slender, tall, and very attractive young woman hung out by one arm from a windmill and allowed the wind to blow her skirt, blouse, and upswept hair. Behind her stretched the countryside. Grace, the young woman swinging out from the windmill, had been on a Kodak party, and here was the proof. In the picture her mouth was open, as though she was savoring the breeze, and with her free hand she was waving, presumably to her date, the picture taker, to indicate what a fine time she was having. The Kodak party ended when the roll of film had been shot and the light had faded. At that point it was customary for the young man to present the Brownie camera to the young woman,
as a memento of the occasion, but it was equally customary for the young man to keep the roll of film. When he’d had it developed, he could use the snapshots as bait for a second date, which, depending on the young woman’s curiosity and her vanity, she could accept or not. My grandmother told me she collected Brownie cameras back then and invited me to imagine her bedroom at home and her dorm room at school crowded with black boxes. Add them up and I could give a number to it all.

  She thought of those cameras the night she met my grandfather, a preacher twenty years her senior that she and a girlfriend had gone to hear. He was something of a celebrity. He helped organize First Christian Churches, and he traveled a three-state area of the South preaching inaugural sermons. That night—it was a Saturday night and his was the only show in town—he was preaching a sermon from Saint Paul on the sanctifying power of marriage: “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now they are holy.” The girlfriend Grace had come with kept tittering under her breath, He’s looking at you! Oooh, he’s looking straight at you! Grace, in her Gibson Girl attire and with her hair thrown up in a bouffant wave, tried to hush her friend, and she tried letting her eyes stray to the stained glass windows, where the early evening light lit up a depiction of Joseph and his coat of many colors, but the preacher with his eyes as black as onyx kept calling her back. Grace claimed she realized then what it was she liked about the picture taking. It was that moment when her admirer had to lower his eyes if he was going to locate her in the viewfinder; it was the sensation of being admired and admired, then left alone on that stage of one. Those Kodak cameras that she had hoarded were taking their revenge. Her flirtatious girlhood was about to come to an end.

  The scene at the church door, when the preacher took her slender hand in his broad, Bible-gripping one and said what he had to say, was anticlimactic. He said, loud enough for the girlfriend to hear, and certain prominent citizens of the town as well: Young lady, I am going to marry you. With so many witnesses present, if he hadn’t married her it might have been construed as a breach of promise. But Grace believed all had been determined the first time she’d strolled out into the countryside, climbed up a windmill, and then swung out so that the sun and the breeze could catch her blouse and hair and light up her smile. Click. And he really was the most handsome man in the world.

  Would I remember all that?

  Because of their age difference I was the only grandchild my grandfather would live to see. He would, I was told, wave me off quickly, afraid that too prolonged an exposure to his cadaverous state might mark me for life. I had no memory of him, cadaverous or otherwise, so I took my grandmother at her word. He’d been the most handsome man in the world.

  My grandmother gave him four daughters, collectively known as the Pritchard girls. My mother was the first. Esther, a biblical name that my grandmother was led to believe meant “morning star,” and a beautiful morning star at that. My grandmother didn’t have it in her to be a disciplinarian, and my grandfather was frequently away preaching those inaugural sermons, so it fell to my mother to be my grandfather’s proxy at home. To her kid sisters she preached the straight and narrow—but with a provocative wink and mischievous grin. Ruth, the exiled, the faithful, was the next-born. She had a sweet, unmarred voice and, along with a girlfriend, sang love songs on the radio. When the war came she married a sailor, and when the war was over her sailor husband took a job with an oil company that had him transferred over the map for most of his working life. His wife, never a troublemaker, utterly compliant, faithfully followed. The third of the Pritchard girls, Lily, a flower of a girl, was a preacher’s daughter in reverse and made enough trouble for all her sisters combined. She joined the WACs and served as part of the mail detail in the reconquered Philippines, surely sorting letters to some soldiers no longer among the living. Demobilized in San Diego, she took a year to get back East, a year’s worth of vacation days she claimed she’d saved up, and arrived home raw-boned and with a booming laugh. Lily kept the current flowing in the Pritchard family, and the fourth daughter, after which Grace, known to all by then as Mama Grace, told her husband she had tried to give him that son he wanted, tried and tried, and was finally forced to admit defeat, was my aunt Rosalyn, a rose that faithfully bloomed each year and never stopped giving off the most winning of scents. Born laughing, but unlike Lily’s laugh, which could knock you down, or Ruth’s laugh, which was like a mild breeze, or my mother Esther’s laugh, which sized up a scene as she happily prepared to take it on, Rosalyn’s laugh rose out of the goodness of her nature, pure and simple, self-replenishing and available to all—until it wasn’t anymore. Until it stopped and everything around her turned grim.

  There were many photographs, countless if you included the snapshots, but there were formal family photographs, too, and in them my grandfather sat erect in a high-backed chair, with a lean, aquiline face, a full head of still black hair and, yes, very dark eyes. My grandmother stood, matronly and a bit dazed, at his shoulder. She seemed stranger to me than the grandfather I had no memory of. Her daughters were artfully positioned around her. None of them was smiling. These would be happy—happily engaged—women, but they all looked as if they had their minds elsewhere and were standing sentinel duty until the photographer dismissed them.

  Scroll formal family photographs back through your head and there comes a moment when something needs to be done. You can’t just stand there as stricken-seeming as the subjects of the photographs themselves. You can’t call out, “And action,” as a film director might, for the actors are all dead. Take a stack of those photographs in your hands and, riffling through, you might bring them to a flickering sort of life, nothing more. If screen porches weren’t a thing of the past and taletellers so far flung, you might gather in the evenings on screen porches and tell old tales until the figures rose before you. Or to be up to date you could transfer all the family photographs onto some sort of smart phone—an irreversible transfer, a click away from cyberspace—and then to outsmart it you could throw that phone into the deepest lake you could find, or the one closest at hand. You could sit there and watch it sink, wait for the bass or the pickerel to rise. Listen for the farewell wail of the loon.

  I held Walter off as long as I could, and when I couldn’t any longer I played dumb.

  So what did she want? Walter said.

  I’m sorry?

  What did your aunt Rosalyn call you down there to do?

  You’ll have to forgive me, Walter.

  For what, Jim? A memory lapse? A failure of nerve?

  It was going to be a fishing story.

  In which you never wet a line.

  You’re right. Not in the lake where it counted.

  We could take the canoe out on this one.

  We could.

  Catch a pickerel or two. Or I could go get the bottle.

  I’ve had enough bourbon to last me for a year. Anyway, I thought we finished it.

  A second bottle.

  And after the second there’d be a third? You weren’t planning to ply me with liquor?

  Walter gave out a thumping laugh, to add to the other weekend sounds we heard from over the water. Up the lake things were stirring. Voices, dog barks, sawing, hammering, digging sounds, motor-free sounds of manual labor, doors opened to be closed, a child, a grandchild out in the water, snatches of recorded music turned up to be turned down, not yet a live cellist next door. People pulling in and pulling out in their cars, loading and unloading, and down at our end of the lake Walter and I sat there in front of what WPA workers had or had not wrought. I let out breath as quietly as though we were hunters lying in wait. Then I laughed, humbly, as though acknowledging the everlasting absence of game.

  My aunt, I said, the youngest, was going to be the first to die.

  You mean Rosalyn, don’t you?

  Youngest of the Pritchard girls. Yes.

  And your favorite.

/>   I loved them all. I was fond of them all. If we had world enough and time, I would tell you all their stories, but … yes, Rosalyn.

  And you said she called you down there to ask a favor. She “called on you” I believe were your exact words.

  You have a keen memory, Walter.

  In my profession …

  Well, you also have your lapses. Sometimes at the poker table the camaraderie gets the best of you, you know. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but things can get a bit too chummy for your own good.

  So you pay a bit for the chumminess, that’s all right. Like tipping the dealer a chip from your winnings. The poker table’s not a court of law. So it wasn’t just to say goodbye.

  Goodbye? You mean because of her illness? No, no, she wouldn’t talk about that. She knew what was eating away at her—I assume she did. I had only seen her once since the week Big Howie fell over dead outside their kitchen door, it had been …

  You’re counting the years?

  Yes, six or seven. But my mother kept me informed. The business was unraveling. Those offshore plants had become independent businesses of their own, which is the way it was supposed to work and the way Howie—Little Howie—had set it all up. The offshore plants serve a sort of apprenticeship to the imperial power, then when they’ve learned the trade and the imperial power begins to weaken, they’re equipped to strike out on their own. But in the Whalens’ hometown it was … messy. It all fragmented, little plants, niche apparel, exercise outfits, unisex stuff, children’s clothes. The meat and potato days were done. Head-to-foot clothing, twenty-four hours a day, that was over.