by Lamar Herrin
And the toad?
The toad is a barely distinct figure behind a screen door. That is where he’ll remain.
Even though he ran off. Our toad did.
Yes, our toad ran off, he lit out for the territory, his pockets stuffed with the little that was left, but that doesn’t mean he’s not still squatting there behind a screen door, waiting for his princess to appear. Before too long somebody will step on him on the way out.
But not you, Jim? You didn’t step on him? You let him off the hook and he’s gone?
Not off the hook. You don’t hook toads. You gig them. You spear them with a barbed prong. A frog gig. A toad gig. My cousin would have known.
We’re not talking about your cousin now. He’s long been laid to rest. Your cousin might have gigged a frog or a toad at a hundred yards. A local legend, you just said so yourself. We’re talking about you, Jim. Why didn’t you step on that toad?
I had no answer for my friend.
You fought it, Walter went on, and you really didn’t believe it yourself, but that family meant everything to you. They were your blind spot and they were your shining light. You were a fool but finally you couldn’t fool yourself. You haven’t been telling me this story for the last three days just to while away the time. That was your family. And your aunt, your favorite aunt, the one who kept loading you down with clothes and laughing away all your qualms, knew it. Don’t let my daughter, don’t let your littlest cousin, marry that man! Unfair? Of course it was unfair, she should never have asked it of you, but you were first in line and the first with his arms held out, and it was you, you little blue-eyed cupid, that the snake had spared, and it was you who gave birth to your aunt’s laugh. There were endless riches in that laugh, you were dazzled, you were hooked every time you heard it, so why didn’t you step on that toad, Jim?
Walter …
What, Jim?
The short-haired dog got shaggy, I was about to say, I wanted to say, but didn’t because it had not been a shaggy dog story I’d told him, we both knew that. Shaggy dog stories came to nothing and ended out of inertia, not where they’d begun. I shook my head instead, turned and walked down the slope of the terrace, and stepped out onto his dock. The water lay motionless, the blue showing uncharacteristic traces of a mossy green. There wasn’t a breath of a breeze. The sky was overcast, and the trees overhanging the shoreline across the way deepened the shadows to the point that, if there had been bass in this lake, they would almost certainly have been feeding there, in the stickups along that shore, cruising that shore in small schools of three or four. A surface lure there, twitching in a crippled way, would have netted fish. Lacking such a lure, lacking even a rod and reel, at a lake supposedly lacking bass in any numbers worth fishing for, I was still on the point of stepping into the canoe and fishing that shore as if fishing, right now, in this northern but southern-behaving lake would restore a balance I had lost no telling when and, given my age, might never regain. I had to do something. If Walter hadn’t been sitting right up the terrace from me, I might have called Elaine. I had alerted her to the possibility, and Walter, if I were to tell him, would have said, By all means, do. Talk to Elaine. Take her hand. Molly and I might sneak a peek but, believe me, Jim, we won’t be able to hear a word. Call her. Reach out and touch someone. Phone calls, needy phone calls, seem to run in your family. I wouldn’t deny it. I could call my sister, Jean. I could get that protean energy, that doubt-free current she ran on, flowing down the line. As she recycled lives in her redistribution center, as she shuffled and reshuffled a town, she could pause long enough to bring her attention to bear on the Whalen family once more, what can be done with what’s left, what can be done with what’s been done, Jean, let’s get our bearings again, and she’d laugh, not with the windfall gaiety of my aunt’s laugh, but a shrewder, more targeted laugh, a laugh you might convince yourself could overcome any obstacle, negotiate any impasse, make a small miracle come true—oh, how southern women loved to laugh.
And what could I tell her that she couldn’t imagine for herself? As families lived and breathed, they shared their stories. What could I tell my sister that she couldn’t turn around and tell back to me? Up close Leland Oldham looked like a man who’d wasted a fortune and who’d drunk himself to a standstill and who was calculating an advantage that no longer existed. He had a small head, like a knob. Very small eyes and folds in the lids that threatened to overgrow his eyes entirely. Hair that had thinned and re-thinned until what was left lay flat and discolored and looked forgotten, like a toupee from years past. He spoke with an instant’s delay—first the mouth worked, then the words came out. A whiskey-parched voice. Shoulders that slumped. His chest had partially collapsed. He had a tidy potbelly, the best feature about him. Short legs, a little bowed. On an irregular rhythm he roused himself, he shored himself up, then a sad and no longer dismissible reality took hold and he allowed himself to sink. Toads did that, they puffed up, then they drew in. He wore khakis with an overlarge belt buckle and a checked short-sleeve shirt, clothes that I had worn when I was a boy. I recognized the pants and I recognized the shirt. There was, there had been, a goatee, a few scraggly hairs. At his back stood a cedar-red house, once a cabin, looking out onto a lake. There was no one else, no children, no kinsmen, no wife, and on the lake at large nothing that moved, no minnows fleeing and no largemouth bass in ravenous pursuit. He was utterly alone. There was a boathouse, inside of which, it had to be taken on faith, there would still be boats. And the accessories that went with them, paddles and ropes and life preservers and down-dragging, depth-sounding anchors. Taken on more faith, there would still be towns, schools and stores and churches with their steeples and cemeteries, at the bottom of that lake. And empty streets. He might find a home there. Come evening when the swallows swooped and the doves nested and the fish rose and down the line stories began to be told, and the moon waited until the last hour before it appeared over the hill, it might be possible to go boating as though in one’s own private universe, as though one owned it all, had never lost a stick of it, had only watched it grow. It might be worth waiting for. A boat ride in the quietness of that hour. Until then we took our seats in adjoining chaise lounges and, as the oldest of my generation, really the last authority left, I explained to him how this world had once been in the triumphant aftermath of a war, and how it had been overrun, trampled, befouled, made mockery of in the war that followed. I told him that story. It took the better part of the afternoon and evening. We might have looked for food, but didn’t. Strangely, he did not bring out a bottle. When I finished we had a window of time, a very dark window, before the moon rose, and really the only light came from the flash of foam the fish left as they struck the surface. We walked out that long dock to the boathouse where we still had a choice of boats, and I chose the fishing boat, the Bassmaster, the one with the electric motor that made such a quiet purring sound not even the fish could hear it, and out we went, to enjoy the lake and the midnight hour when you might never know what abominations had been committed back on land. Leland Oldham professed from what he called the depth of his being that he wished it had always been like this, when everything was given and nothing left to be desired. Then, with a certain trepidation, but with the frustration and the fondness, too, with which a parent talks about a misbehaving child, he named his wife, Ellie, and still with his back to me told me of a time when they’d been out on the houseboat and Ellie, who, as everyone knew, couldn’t hold her liquor, had fallen overboard, and he, Leland Oldham, had jumped in and saved her life. It seemed he was always jumping in and saving her life, the youngest of the youngest of the Pritchard girls, although that was not what he called her, but for me that was all that it took. A paddle to the back of the head, the anchor tied around an ankle, man overboard with no one to jump in and save him, and it was done. When the moon rose I was back where I belonged, and that night I slept where I’d slept as a boy, and slept well, and was still sleeping as Walter moved up behind me where I stoo
d on his dock extending out into his small lake. It was as if he were whispering in my ear, but that was the effect of this hot heavy day when all sounds were quiet and close, as if meant for individual ears alone. Jim, Walter said, here’s what I want to do. I want to go fish the jumps. I want you to take me out on that lake and show me what Howie Whalen, Little Howie Whalen, showed you. I want to get in the car and drive down there with you the way you drove down with Phil Hodge after he didn’t jump into Cuba and unbeard the Castros. We’re clean-shaven, Jim, but I don’t want to go meet your family. I want to go fishing, down south in that lake. I want to fish the jumps. Can we do that, Jim? Is that asking too much? Your story’s not done yet. It didn’t begin with Ellie. It began with you and your cousin out in that boat and the water boiling with bass. Let’s end it there. Let’s go south.
I did him the courtesy of not turning around. I didn’t have to turn around to see the look in his eyes, the shining expectation, no different from when at the poker table he believed he held the winning hand. Followed by that little leap of pleasure when he turned over the winning cards. You didn’t mind losing a hand every so often to Walter Kidman, because with your chips in his stack Walter was happy to share his pleasure with you. We were playing poker, no more than that, and, fine fellows all, our chips were making the rounds.
I made a deliberating sound. And don’t even ask, Walter said, my docket is clear.
I made another such sound, and he continued, We will need to tell the women something, you’re right about that. Unless we invite them to come with us. Or we could meet them down there, for a big fish fry. Why don’t we all go, Jim? Why don’t we end your story for you the way it should be, with your most fervent admirers onstage?
And I made a last sound. Deeper, farther down in my chest, in a more private cavity there, a sound Walter would have heard before as clients of his placed their fates in his hands, just never from me. And this time his reply had something of Byron Wainwright’s cello in it, the way Wainwright, a rank amateur but an old and lonely man, could draw out one long and passionately bowed chord. There will always be toads, Jim. Toads are something like the missing link, except they’re never missing. They tell us how far back we go. There’s not a garden in the world without its toad. Not a flower that’s bloomed without a toad squatting beneath it. Our only choice is to forget them. Or catch them and use them for bait. Let’s go fishing!
VI
WALTER DROVE. He took control—it was his pleasure and his particular pursuit—and he called his wife to explain our change of plans, plans that would include her and their good friend Elaine Sinclair were they so inclined. Then he drove. Soon thereafter we were stopped before a broad-winged stone building topped by a glassed-in cupola in the town of Poughkeepsie, a post office, one of many and one of the best that the WPA workers had either built or restored, but in this case FDR himself, concerned with the state of these old stone buildings along the Hudson, had been there to re-lay the cornerstone. Then we were back on the road, presently entering the forested hills of Pennsylvania and rising into an area that had been stripped of its first growth of hemlock, then of its second growth, which had been burned in the iron foundries there. Trough Creek, the creek that ran through those hills was called, and along its bluff ravens nested. Long before the WPA arrived to reclaim it all, and lay roads and bridge the creek and build a park lodge, Edgar Allan Poe had come to hear the ravens and be inspired, Walter thought I’d be interested to know.
We skirted Poe’s death state and entered the state of his upbringing, except that this part of Virginia was West Virginia now, and we stopped before another WPA production, a pinkish limestone building with a bastion-like façade, a county courthouse in the town of Beckley, before swinging down into what remained Virginia and entering a tunnel on its Blue Ridge Parkway with its arch-stones wedged in so tightly the Romans might have built it. But the WPA had, and all the other tunnels on that parkway, men with pickaxes and very few power-driven machines, so that more and more men might be employed. This could go on, and it spoke for itself. We emerged into North Carolina and came at last to a stop before a structure that back in the New Deal day had been a field of play for some of the very best in the game. It wasn’t all courthouses and post offices and tunnels hammered out of rock. There were beautiful national parks, and there were parks in which to play the national game, in this case a baseball diamond with a wooden grandstand roof called Hick’s Field. Of course, FDR had been a fan. Had he given this ballpark to the WPA to build, to then give to Eleanor to name and pass on to her lover? FDR, Walter didn’t deny it, had been a devious man.
And Walter had his own agenda in making this trip. But he turned his cards up on the table. Show him some kudzu. Show him some lakes brimming with bass. Sit him down to the table and it wouldn’t all be black-eyed peas and cornbread, greens and grits with red-eye gravy. He’d eat his stack of isums, too. I could either share his boyish enthusiasm or call him on it.
He drove. The kudzu appeared, but not those fresh burgeoning swells of spring green that Phil Hodge had seen and fallen for, as if nothing within reach of his imagination could so beautifully cover such a multitude of sins. The kudzu was beginning to brown out. It lay there no less thickly but with none of its rampant aggression, as if confessing that its day was past. We were on and off interstates, and once off them it wasn’t hard to find local color and local incongruities—a dog-trot house that hadn’t seen a speck of paint in years, a deeply shaded yard without a blade of grass strewn with rusted tools and parts of disassembled cars, dogs plopped there, an overgrown ditch, a mailbox badly off plumb, ramshackle outbuildings of no apparent purpose built at odd angles to each other, the house itself built close to the road as if to say, stop in, neighbor, and take a load off, or slow down, neighbor, just a little more and I’ll blow you away, a weather-grayed, swaybacked house raised over a black crawl space on slabs of rock and concrete, the staircase leading up to the front porch knocked askew, partially detached, some rotten risers, the porch itself without a swing, a glider, a rocking chair, or a plant, a stage onto which no one had stepped for years. But sitting up there, on the porch’s edge, bent over his long legs with his feet at rest on a slanted step, was an old man in faded overalls and a meal-colored shirt, an old man with nothing less than a cell phone held to his ear, who seemed to stop speaking just as we passed and shot us an angry look. As if we’d interrupted his business. As if he’d seen one curiosity-seeker too many. As if, with our northern car and northern ways, we didn’t have a clue. Walter said, Look at that, would you! Who hasn’t got coverage these days! That alone is worth the trip! And I said, Walter, We don’t need this, you know, we could go back. We’ve got Byron Wainwright. Think of it that way. And Walter replied, But you’ve got the fish. This is a fishing trip, Jim. A fishing story and a fishing trip, and damn it, this time we’re gonna catch our share!
He had a GPS trip mapper. Once he’d passed his WPA sites, Walter had a device that would tell him where to turn and turn again, the practiced voice of a woman so flat and incontrovertible it didn’t occur to you to disobey. You switched her off, and she was the same woman, the same authority without appeal, when you switched her back on. I gave Walter the number of the road up into the mountains, the name of the town closest by, and then, in a petty act of defiance, I gave him the boat dock and bait shop and lunch counter and the name of the owners back when I was a boy. It was only when our trip mapper intoned the name of Coggins’s dock and tackle shop with exact directions of how to get there that I gave in. When Walter, pushing other buttons, activated his speakerphone and passed on the Coggins coordinates to his wife, who was already on the road, I knew for a certainty that we were going to be four. At that point I acknowledged the authority of the trip mapper and attended to her words as I might those of an oracle who had our best interests at heart.
Turn right, turn left, right and left, proceed up into those hills. Be patient, you’ll wind and wind. Your memory will betray you. Old la
ndmarks will have disappeared. The road will narrow, threaten to become a path. A raggedness will have set in. Have faith, the faith of a fool, of a pilgrim whose day has passed. Yesterday’s holy site is today’s hole in a wall. Choke down your sadness, beat back despair. Be alert for the first flash of water beyond the trees. There! Have faith, it will come again. Continue to wind, a hairpin curve, then another. Screw up your faith. A second flash, shimmering, radiant, quickly and cruelly gone! Pioneers want a vista, a prospect, a broad green world. You are not a pioneer. Piece these glimpses together. Soon you can roll down your window and smell gas on the water and the water-soaked pilings and the bilge and the boating trash and the staleness of old dock mats. And the stench of boatyard fish. A last turn and you will see boats in their slips, rocking with a tremens all their own. Moored, at the mercy of the little waves. A ticking and a slopping sound you almost never hear unless you’ve been away for years and just come home. Pull in. Coggins’ Boatyard, Tackle and Bait Shop, Lunchroom and Pickup Grocery Store. Journey’s end. Turn off your motor, sit and wait for the rest of your party to arrive.
Walter said, I’m assuming we can rent a boat here. Tackle and lures. What was it you said Little Howie caught those fish in the jumps on, a silver spoon?
A daredevil spoon, which I doubted were made anymore. Wait, I told Walter, and got out of the car.
I went looking for a Coggins and found one, seated at a table at the back of the lunchroom. There were novelties, distractions. There was a large and shiny new aluminum freezer. There were plastic accessories and plasticized menus spotted down the length of the counter. There were signs, ice-cream-on-a-stick signs, cola signs, photographs of meals that looked air-brushed. The Coggins I came to seated at the back of the lunchroom did not smell of fish and bait and boat motors as in years past. He smelled of yesterday’s pizza, as the whole lunchroom did. But with those deep creases across his forehead and the tight fissure of his mouth, he was a Coggins. That was a Coggins’s burnt bald head. And he sat the way Cogginses had always sat, round as a boulder, as if an erratic had come to rest there, as if glaciers had ever reached this far south. He didn’t doubt himself for a minute, he’d known me at once. I was Jimmy. I was Little Jimmy Whalen, come back to these mountains. He didn’t ask how long it had been, because it had been yesterday. I asked him how they were biting, and he replied they were still out there, waiting for a Whalen to come catch them. Still fishing ’em in the jumps? A Whalen might, he said. On those daredevil spoons? If you could find them anymore. He wouldn’t happen to have a couple of those still around, would he?
