by Lamar Herrin
Click.
But I’d shown myself to be discreet, and for all those years mum continued to be the word until Jean, who’d make a nice living sorting through and selling once prized possessions, came across that photograph and showed it to me. It was only then that I told her what as a boy I had overheard our mother remark to our aunts. But by the time Jean had found that photograph, more babies were probably being born out of wedlock than within it—in fact, by then “wedlock” had become pretty much an archaic word—so to get the full dramatic impact of the situation, you’d have to be willing to put yourself back in those times, and who, Jean wondered, would want to do that? What times! Yes, the family lined up in front of the lake at sunset telling their tales, it sorted itself out until only the good stuff was left, and it cast a nice glow, but—wedlock? Young lady, I’m going to wed you and lock you up for the rest of your life? And for a couple of generations at least you could count on that lock holding? Is that what we’d all bought into whether we knew it or not? Well, unlock the locks and bring me your heirlooms and let’s start spreading all this good stuff around. What a family, and none of us ever met the preacher man who’d turned the key.
I did, I reminded my sister. I was one year old. He’d been famously handsome once and wanted to spare me the sight of what he’d become.
Jean laughed. Then, with a certain cemetery plot in mind, she said, Just don’t expect me to be lying for all eternity at his side.
And with another cemetery plot and another monument with an even broader wingspan in my mind, I responded, You know what would have made a difference? If our grandfather had lived a few years longer and gotten to know Little Howie. Who better to introduce him to the great out of doors?
Jean laughed.
I am referring to the great, wedlock-free out of doors.
Little Howie?
Seriously, I said.
Seriously?
When you come down to it, I said with a straight face, Little Howie may be the only remarkable one of the bunch.
Little Howie?
Little Howie, I repeated.
Matching my straight face, my sister replied, Now, there’s a novel idea!
But there was really nothing up there on the lake Little Howie couldn’t do, and do as though born to it, which made him as a teenager a natural, perhaps the only natural I’d known in my life, and how was he not going to make a lasting impression on me? But I did not go on in this vein to my sister. I really don’t think she would have understood. If the world for those summer weeks was that lake and the pleasures you took on it and the tasks you first had to perform to make those pleasures real, then there was only one man equal to it all and that man was a boy—and I certainly didn’t reveal any of this to my sister, who, like our aunt Lily, had a good hooting laugh of her own.
Fishing was at the heart of it, of course, but I also had memories of going out with Big Howie to fish, just the two of us, Big Howie in his swivel seat back in the stern of the boat, like his son making selective casts up among the stickups by the shore, Big Howie with all his girth letting his flicking wrists do the work, a cast here, a cast there, it was his world, he’d gotten here first, and to use an analogy my sister might have hooted at again, but this time with pleasure, marking his spots with each cast as a dog marks his, warning other dogs to go find their own place to pee. But he didn’t catch fish. He’d talk to me during his time. Unlike his son, Big Howie was a big talker, and as I got older his talk would become more boastful, about the good things he’d done for his town, and for the colored folks, especially the colored folks, the firewall, in effect, he’d built around his town as the country’d begun to heat up, and every so often with a delicate flick of the wrist he’d shoot a little double-jointed Bassmaster spinning plug up into the brush, twitch it, make it dart this way and that, a big man with chubby, short-fingered hands and a pencil-thin rod held at ten o’clock, masterfully retrieving a lure as he recited his life’s accomplishments, but he didn’t catch fish, because the fish, I came to realize, were indifferent to his boasts. In a way, he could make a case for all this being his, all this shoreline, every cove we cruised into with the electric motor barely making a purr, but the fish preferred someone who could get down among them, take on their ways, feed as they fed, work the shoreline as they did, and dart to the kill while continuing to cruise, and that was Little Howie, who rarely said a word. Naturals don’t talk, they become one with their prey, take on their prey’s ways, deer, bear, long-horned sheep, it didn’t matter, it was pretty clear there was a bond of sympathy there, a willingness to step out of your skin and into another’s, just as Little Howie could be said to have stepped out of his skin when he measured me for a suit that fit as naturally as a second skin of mine. When you fished the jumps, you got wild; when you fished the stickups along the shoreline in these secluded coves, you got as quiet as if you were out for an evening stroll. Big Howie recited his life’s accomplishments in case, as the oldest of my generation, I’d want to make a record for future generations to consult. Only occasionally opening his mouth, his son caught fish. He taught by example, but there was just so much he could teach. Make yourself one with the fish, one with the deer. I remembered him following those narrow deer paths in the woods below his house. Even as a boy he was not trying to get anywhere. I followed along behind him and came away with my arms scratched and my shirt torn by the briars. Little Howie, with a deerlike fluidity, slipped through.
With those clear blue eyes of his, you saw right through Howie. It was unnerving only until you realized he was offering you, if your nerve held steady, the whole natural world. Did Howie know this about himself? That for all those years up on the lake as the family grew and cousins brought friends who became boyfriends and girlfriends once puberty had been breached and a whole new class of activities had taken hold, did Howie know that he was providing an avenue into the only world that would at last matter? Probably not. Almost certainly he didn’t. He’d become a shirt and pants man like his father, he’d marry the prettiest girl in town, have himself some kids, and buddy up to his high school friends out on the town square. While still a boy up on the lake, he’d put on a target practice show with his pistol and his bow and arrows if he felt his little cousins weren’t giving him the admiring attention he deserved. He always had a supply of cherry bombs around if things were too quiet for his taste. Even before he had his driver’s license, he’d grab the keys to the family car and run it up and down the road. He’d run his father’s Cadillac, too, when Big Howie was there. If he went into a sulk, he did his best to impersonate a black hole and take everybody with him. If little cousins—and some big ones—began to stray into the boathouse with all its enticing boating and fishing equipment, its rods and reels and various landing and seining nets, its minnow buckets, its gigs and its spear-length boating poles, its life preservers and cushions, its water skis and tow ropes and all that shiny speedboat paraphernalia, a magical world in there for a kid who was only used to exploring his own garage, Little Howie might run them out. He was, for those who chose to see him in that way, insufferably spoiled. None of that had anything to do with my lasting impressions of him and the part that he played in my life. I would have gladly relinquished to him my honorary first stack of isums if Mama Grace had still been on the job. But she was too old to stand in front of a stove for any length of time and occupied her position out in that line of chaise lounges, except she had to sit in a cushioned straight-back armchair and safely in the shade of that catalpa tree with those long, cigar-like pods hanging straight down as though in the pull of a gravity-enriched earth.
The last year I went with my parents and sister to the lake I was on the point of turning eighteen. No one in the family had died, and still others had been born, but the sense was that by the summer of my eighteenth birthday that generation of the family was complete. A late-comer like Ellie wasn’t given a chance. I was set to go to college and leave all this child’s play behind me. I took a few long wa
lks up into the hills, which were not so steep as I recalled them being, the streambeds not so wide and the stones situated not so far apart. There was a current but nothing like a rushing one, and I quickly got a sense of how things had been scaled up and then scaled down as I passed through my childhood to arrive at where I now stood. In a commemorative state of mind, I breathed it all down, the pine trees and musky, mossy odor of the dampened and dried, re-dampened and re-dried earth. When I struck a path, I stayed on it for a while, working my way around the brambly underbrush the snakes made home. I didn’t see a one, but all I had to do was stand motionless long enough for the treetop-to-treetop screech of the birds to go still and I’d begin to hear that quiet thin rustle the snakes made, unlike the quiet scampering rustle their small prey made, or other small animals seeking the safety of their holes.
Before I made my way back down to the road, I came upon a cabin built back in the woods, which years later I would recognize as Little Howie and Laurie’s first lakeside residence although the lake was down a rutted drive and visible only at a distance through the trees. It was something like their honeymoon bungalow until they built higher and grander on land more sweepingly located, with a panoramic view of the lake. None of that, of course, I knew at the time. I’d heard family talk about Laurie Kingston, for she and Howie had been sweethearts from junior high on, but not from Howie, and not even from the family as they occupied their chaise lounges in the evening and in a family forum told their stories. I’d heard it privately, perhaps from my mother or sister, perhaps even from Mama Grace, for whom sweethearts had a special appeal.
When I reached the road, I turned away from the Whalen house and walked on a ways more to Coggins’s bait shop and lunch counter and boat dock, where we often pulled in to get gas for a boat or to have sandwiches and Cokes or, when Little Howie wasn’t on the scene and we didn’t want to dig for worms or seine for minnows, to buy bait. A father and son ran it. Their faces were swollen and baked, their eyes sun-narrowed into slits, they were heavyset and smelled like boats and gas and fish and bait, and at a quick glance the only way you could tell them apart was by the burnt baldness of the father’s head and the bristly crew cut of the son’s. Big Howie paid them something every year to keep an off-season eye on the house and the boats. In turn they were more than obliging to every Whalen family member who showed up, to the point at times of seeming servile, and I’d become curious about them, these not quite official employees of Big Howie’s, and mildly fond of their folksy ways and all their fishing lore. I stopped in to say goodbye and sit at their counter and have a last Coke. How’re they biting, what are they hitting, how deep down, what time of the day, and the crappies, and the bluegills, and the walleyes, what about them, and how about the jumps, middle of the day, middle of the lake, anybody doing any good there? I told the father, whose name was Buck, I was about to go off to school and probably wouldn’t be coming back, which caused him to nod skeptically with his lips pressed tight as if he were holding back a howling laugh. He had the key, he reminded me, and anytime a Whalen had a hankering to spend a few nights up here, all he had to do was stop by. If Coggins Senior wasn’t there, Coggins Junior would be. I didn’t remind him I wasn’t a Whalen, because he would have shaken his head and in his own set-in-stone way would have said, Oh, you’re a Whalen, all right.
I wasn’t even a Pritchard. I was a McManus, but on that side of my family nothing even faintly resembled what I had on this side. I had an uncle on the West Coast that I had seen three times in my life, and he had a daughter from a busted marriage he saw infrequently and I had only seen once. Grandparents equally indistinct. Since there were no family reunions, there were no family stories, and if my father knew one, he wasn’t telling. The continent, once you crossed it, became a great tabula rasa, if you wanted to think of it that way. California could have rewritten its state motto to read: “We do do-overs like nobody in the world!”
It really wasn’t until that summer I turned eighteen, when I doubted if I’d ever come back and when it was too late to do anything about it, that I realized just how beautiful the Pritchard girls were. I suppose I had to be eighteen to pay the right kind of attention, and they, my mother and my aunts, had to be on the full-blown point of losing it all. They had gotten my grandfather’s black hair, all except Lily, they had gotten his high cheeks and versions of his straight prominent nose and his strongly modeled chin, and Rosalyn had gotten his dimple there. They had all gotten the best bone structure available, on which they had gotten Mama Grace’s faintly rose-flushed skin. All except Lily. Or, Lily had gotten it all raw and she made sure she kept it that way, so to see the four of them side by side, you saw Pritchard beauty both sheltered and unsheltered, cared-for and weather-worn, as though in peace and in war. They got their mother’s blue-to-gray eyes, all except Ruth, whose eyes were as dark as her father’s to go with the darkest brows and the very darkest hair, which made you wonder if there wasn’t a Latin strain to the family. None of the sisters had gotten cheated feature-wise, stature-wise, stamina-wise. They had soothing voices and full, even joyous, but unabrasive laughs, all except Lily, whose joy was abrasive and whose pleasure it was to rough things up. None of them stood in a slouch. And not one of them looked as if she was about to go tiptoeing off. They belonged where they stood, and when you saw the four of them side by side, the Pritchard girls, as commanding a get as a roving preacher ever got out of a Kodak-crazed girl, the earth they stood on belonged to them. The great sadness was that their father never got to see them as I did that summer I turned eighteen, when beauty began to mean something to the boy I’d been, at which point I realized that the moment it reached its peak, beauty began to steal away, that there wouldn’t be another eighteenth year for me and another reunion on the lake, that this was it, and in my eagerness to be gone I should be willing to take the loss like a man. That was how I saw my aunts and mother that last summer I was there—as a preview of that loss. Beautiful women, daughters of their pretty, flirtatious mother and striking, flirtatious father, who in summers hence would lose it all. I would see them together again, at weddings especially, most memorably Little Howie’s, but never as I was seeing them there that summer I turned eighteen. My mother had those widely spaced eyes, really the only feature distinctively hers, which I fantasized her father had left her so that she could keep his entire family in view when he was off preaching to other congregations eager to hear what he had to say—“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”—and which, lacking such eyes myself, I had expropriated to view the four of them there. The Pritchard girls on the way to losing it all in the year that I, one child out of many, but the firstborn, in a family whose children were deemed by scripture to be holy, turned eighteen. Beautiful women. Damn, I’d tell myself in the voice of a young man who would one day lay claim to having seen it all. Look at them there! Damn it all to hell!
Click.
But I did come back. I came back after both Little Howie and Big Howie had died and Rosalyn in the last years of her life built a house that was like an ocean liner cruising into port and from whose prow you looked out over the lake. Its only purpose was to gather everybody together there in protest, and in celebration—the two would never again be separated in Rosalyn’s mind. All my cousins had married and had children—many children, it seemed. I too had married, but so briefly that children hadn’t made a peep. Even though my cousins’ children did their best to fill the house, space was left and Rosalyn was counting heads. Children’s heads—new life. My sister was there with hers. But not my mother that I recall. Aunt Ruth was, first widowed in the family and so a source of consolation for her younger sister. Mama Grace had died. Lily, who’d never really been married as the Pritchard sisters knew and lived the word, was also widowed and her stepson long disappeared, but none of that mattered. It was for the children Rosalyn had built such an enormous house. Ellie�
��s daughters were not there. That might have been the summer that Ellie was getting her divorce. Little Howie’s children, grown except for one, had scattered, but there were children left, surely there were enough children left out there to fill this new house, which featured a loft on top of a loft, and semicircular tiers of rooms.
I stood it for two days. I think my sister had tipped me off, in a worried tone, as if Rosalyn was going to need support. I never heard her laugh, not as I knew Rosalyn to laugh; I heard her greet newcomers with a sort of welcoming urgency and, impressively, I heard her name names. Many names. These were numbers she was calling to her defense as if she knew someone soon was going to try to take it all away. With my sister acting as a sort of knowledgeable secretary, I made an effort to meet all these new young cousins of mine, but they were as strange to me as I was to them. They wanted to get into the lake, they wanted to run wild, and there were moments when the house and its portion of the lakefront seemed rife with enough energy to give birth to more of its kind. Moments when Rosalyn might have looked down from that prow-like deck cantilevered out over the road and said, Keep it up, keep it up, forget anything you’ve heard! This is your captain speaking. Play, dammit!
I got the key and went down to the original boathouse, at the end of that long dock, took the fishing boat out and just sat there in the middle of the lake without, as they say, wetting a line. I sat there until all that combustion of childhood on shore had died down. I sat through an afternoon rain, then more sun, and the rocking wakes of larger boats returning home. For a while I gazed at the new house crowding up through its avenue of trees. It was far too large, it seemed stranded there, stopped short in its quest to reach the open seas. The old house was closed down, the row of chaise lounges lined up in front removed. None of this should have been allowed to happen, I told myself. As firstborn I should have been consulted. Someone should take it away from her, someone should snap poor Rosalyn awake. Say it was her father’s fault, with all that talk of children made holy. Or the little dog Bing’s fault, intercepting the snake in midair, saving the child. I remembered Little Howie, one with the fish, one with the animals and birds, slumped on his sofa, a pablum smear left unwiped beside his mouth, looking more beastlike than human in that moment but pleading a case for God. But who wasn’t pleading a case? I suppose seen from the prow of that new house my aunt had had built I made a spectacle of myself out there in the middle of the lake, pleading for a return to the way things had been, or just being standoffish and better left alone. Two days later, with no notice being taken, not really, I was gone.
