by Lamar Herrin
He rolled out of his chair and hobbled into the bait shop like a man who, a lifetime later, was still searching for his land legs. The bait shop was shadowy, and I understood that this was a transaction best undertaken in the near dark. Coggins reached into a drawer and placed two silver spoons with treble hooks on the wooden countertop, whose scored and unvarnished surface you could read like Braille. I closed my eyes and ran my fingertips over it, the stories it told. When I opened my eyes, Coggins had placed two more spoons beside the first ones. That’s your classic daredevil, right there, he said, with the red stripe, but Howie Whalen was partial to the silver ones. I closed my eyes again, and this time, when I opened them, two keys had appeared. That one’s to the gate and that one to the house, but you ain’t forgot none of that, have you, Jimmy? And the boathouse. You know where that key is. Right where Big Howie Whalen always kept it. I nodded and reached into my pocket to pay the man, and Coggins waved me off. You bring them lures and keys back and next time they’ll be waitin’ for you. I’ll be waitin’ too. You’ll owe me a fish story.
We laughed. It was not easy to walk out on this man. He had stories to tell, too. I began to explain the circumstances, the friend I had waiting outside, when it occurred to me I had an additional favor to ask. Two ladies, I said, might very well be stopping by looking for directions to the Whalen house. One of these ladies had large dark and level eyes she rarely blinked. She had beautiful bones that time had sculpted in a beautiful way. Water, turbulent water, would flow around her as around the prow of a boat. The other woman would be the opposite, shorter, bouncier, curlier, a consumer of her energy and yours. These would be Yankee women, and they’d be looking for us. And, if he would be so kind as to give them directions, they too would be the Whalens’ guests.
Then I turned, with my lures and my keys, even though I knew before I reached the light at the doorway I would have to turn back. I couldn’t leave it like that after all these years. I owed this man. I imagined myself loading Buck Coggins down with shirts and pants, piling into his outstretched arms the postwar shirts and pants that our victorious soldiers had needed to reoutfit themselves as civilians, and I heard, more clearly than I had for decades now, the cascading wealth in my dear aunt’s laugh.
But it was condolences that were in order, and as I turned and began to offer them to this particular Buck Coggins on his father’s passing, and perhaps his grandfather’s as well, he met me with a look of such wise comprehension and incomprehension that I swallowed everything I had left to say. What passing? What death? Maybe in that world down there where push always came to shove, but not up in these mountains. I was looking at the father and I was looking at the son and at anyone else down that Coggins line of descent. Except there was no descent. Maybe down there.
Back in the car I displayed the lures to Walter as a jeweler might. His eyes lit up as if he saw the water frothing with bass. And the boat? The tackle? Everything else? His GPS trip-mapping woman had fallen silent. From this point on Walter looked for his answers to me. I held up the keys. And the toad was really out of it? Not as a toad, not as a figure of fable, even of fun, a figure to while away a long weekend with, but as a man named Leland Oldham who reputedly had little left except this house on a lake, where he might very well decide to throw up a last line of defense and make a stand, that man was out of it, that man who’d pissed it all away and might bring down as many as he could before he’d allow anyone to take back the little that was left, that man was really gone? Not “lit out for the territory, his pockets stuffed with what was left,” but really gone, gone so that we should experience no unease sleeping in his beds, so that we could count on a good night’s sleep, take it to the bank, as they say, where Leland Oldham would be persona non grata, before we woke refreshed and went out to have a fabulous day on the lake, and to silence Walter I held up the keys, swinging them before his eyes as a hypnotist might. Gone gone, I said.
Walter was a friend. And Walter had been an eager, appreciative, occasionally insubordinate listener. He stood now with his back to a cedar-red train car of a house that had once been a cabin, looked out a long dock to a boathouse with a swimming float attached, and across a lake of less settled, more turbulent water than he was used to, and said he recognized the place at once. I brought the chaise lounges out of storage, four of them, and told him he could no doubt imagine the rest that would in their heyday have extended the length of the house, and he said, Yes, it was getting clearer by the minute. There was the original cabin with its screen porch, just beyond it the catalpa tree with its cigar-green pods hanging down. Beyond it was a wall of something sweet, an entanglement of honeysuckle or blackberry brambles or wisteria vines. Yes, yes. We sat down, we reclined. The mountains across the way, the mountains at our back, the humid haze in the sky, boats on the water, returning to or setting out from the launch ramp at our end of the lake, our finger of the lake, the chugging and choking down of their motors, their exhaust mixing with the smell of fish, thickening it, creating the illusion of a lake thronged with fish, which was not an illusion, you only had to know the when and the where and the how.
Walter couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. I told him to close his eyes and breathe down that fish-heavy air. He’d done the driving for much of two days. He could afford to go off guard and leave it to me. He smiled, he settled, he didn’t disagree that we’d need to conserve our strength for the fishing that lay ahead, and the last thing he said as he began to drift off was, So here’s where they brought you when you were a boy. Paradise … he mumbled with both a dubious and an envious little laugh that never quite got out of his mouth.
For a moment—impossible to say how long—I was alone. Then Molly and Elaine drove up to the gate, which they waited for me to open. I made a tamping-down motion with my hand, for I could sense that Molly was about to lay on the horn. It was Molly’s nature to rouse everybody out of odd-hour sleep. She was an empty-nester who’d never stopped waking her children up. There’d been three, and at last a grandchild, and if anybody could pick up on the spur of the moment and drive seven hundred miles south and arrive at a gate bursting to get in it would be Molly Kidman. I liked her. All of us fed off her energy, different from my sister’s because Molly’s obeyed no design, and all of us knew when to run off and hide. I began to open the gate slowly, my left palm flat against the side of my face, my head inclined, miming sleep. In the passenger seat, Elaine, of the unblinking gaze and a measuredness so natural to her that you could feed off her too, smiled. Molly, round blue eyes and graying red hair cut short as a helmet, made one more horn-threatening gesture with her right hand, and I allowed my left cheek to fall into my left palm as I closed my eyes, and we held our pose. Then I let these Yankee women inside and walked them around the house to where they could see for themselves that Walter Kidman had indeed fallen asleep in his chaise lounge. There was a lake out there, and, although late in the season, the afternoon had yet to cool. I left Molly with her decision to make and went back to the car, a van, to bring in the sacks of groceries I had noticed in the cargo area. I heard Elaine following me—I knew her step. But no one had spoken, not really, until we were at the car and then, at my back, at my ear, Elaine said, You wanted me to come, didn’t you? I felt that you did. I turned and kissed her, and her eyes, in a pleased, unstartled way, flared. We’re back at the start, I said. It’s the Molly and Walter show. And Elaine replied, But this time we’ll know what to expect. We’ll be on guard. We laughed very quietly, and I kissed her again. Then Elaine helped me take the groceries through the cabin’s front door and into the small original kitchen, where my first memory would always be of my grandmother standing tall before a cast iron skillet turning isums, building a stack, while I waited down below, never more like a dog, to be the first served. Back before Little Howie Whalen had yet to demonstrate prowess at anything other than pouting when he didn’t get his way. Here. On this spot.
Elaine read my thoughts. Or she saw something in my eye, or the s
hine on my lips. She said, Walter told Molly to be sure to bring pancake mix. She’d forgotten, when he’d warned her not to, so we had to stop a second time on the way.
The Walter and Molly show, I repeated.
Elaine smiled. I think it’s your show, too, Jim.
We plugged in the refrigerator and put away the supplies. I left the pancake mix—and it was not Aunt Jemima I saw pictured on the box, only in my mind’s eye—out on the counter. There was no meat of any sort, but other than that we had enough to last us for days. In addition, there were three bottles of New York State wine. Two six-packs of beer in case the weather got too hot.
So we really are supposed to eat fish, I said.
I don’t know, Jim. Have you caught any yet?
I shook my head. We took our time getting here. Walter had a number of WPA sites he wanted to take me by. It was as if he was trying to convert me, or fortify us both against a prolonged stay down here. Or maybe he was propitiating the gods, who would then look favorably on our fishing endeavors.
Roosevelt died down here somewhere, didn’t he? In the arms of his mistress? Or was it in the train coming back?
Somewhere, I said. With the whole world at war, it was somewhere down here. The South is snaky, I reminded her.
Jim …
One more kiss, Elaine.
She kissed me with her wonted poise, laying her lips on mine.
Now, I said, let’s go out and see our friends.
They were reclined side by side in the chaise lounges and Walter was in the act of telling his wife the Pritchard story as it flowed into and mixed currents with the Whalen story and brought us to where we now sat. For Elaine’s benefit, although she didn’t request it, he started over. The War, which was where Elaine and I had left off, with FDR’s death, although she didn’t mention that. The story was long, even when abbreviated, and at some point Walter suspended his narration so that Molly could bring out cold beer. He narrated with a deliberate and selectively detailed authority that any judge and jury would credit. He was bringing the ladies he’d brought south up to date and to this spot on the map. He was not pleading a case, at least not overtly, although of course he had his favorites, my aunt Rosalyn as she stood at the foot of her son’s boyhood bed holding a tray of shaving utensils, for once not laughing, not piling our arms full of clothes, and my raucous aunt Lily, back from the war, the self-proclaimed boomerang babe. And Little Howie watching wheels turn within wheels in that small Dominican town of his, Bella something, and with his trusted tape measure measuring me for a suit, soon to be cut by that oldest employee with the hanging hazel pools for eyes, and Ellie—Ellie the little girl whose eyes were golden and attracted the attention of one warty, wheezing toad, at which point the sun sank below the ridgeline before us, the day’s heat stole away and left us in a wind-stilled, ember-cool warmth.
It was time to eat. We sat on the small screen porch and ate an enormous salad, first course to a second course that would have to wait until the fish rose out of the lake to join us. We sat at a card table—old maid, hearts, gin rummy, canasta, but never poker that I remembered. Poker was a man’s game, a war game, as was the clinking of chips, the rattle of dice, as was the panicky skitter of a little ball around a roulette wheel before it came to rest. Soldiers coming home. Troopships. Demobilized, decommissioned, newly outfitted. Shirts and pants.
Sedate, civilian life.
Old maid, hearts, gin rummy, canasta.
I cast direct glances at my three friends, one of whom had been my wife. Sitting where Pritchards and Whalens had once sat back in the pretoad days, which could never be measured in years. It had lasted forever, and then it was as if it had never been. I closed my eyes and managed to get my hands in all of theirs, as though we were joined in a séance. I gave thanks. As little Howie Whalen himself might have, I promised fish for the following day. I squeezed, and the first to break free was Molly, who had been left hanging on what she assumed was the precipice of my life story. Then Walter, who had no choice but to gratify his wife, who had made a long trip on short notice with no WPA landmarks to set her course. I opened my hands on Elaine’s and allowed Elaine to slip free too, but she stayed near.
Thank you, I said. A sentimental moment. I am a lucky man.
No, no, Walter protested, it’s a great occasion, it’s a trip we’ve had coming for years.
I could show you things, I said.
Not necessary, Walter said. You’ll need to rest for tomorrow.
A boy’s things. I mean I could show you where they’d been.
Peace, Jim, Walter said. He raised his hand as though to hold me off, or to offer a benediction.
Peace, I repeated.
The peace that passeth understanding, Walter said. The only kind worth settling for.
Fellows! Molly broke in, feigning a limit she had reached. Why so solemn! Let’s go back out and sit in front of the lake. What’s the matter with you? Do you want to waste an evening like this?
Behind the screen’s mesh, it was true, the water was turning a duskier and duskier shade of orange. These were minutes that wouldn’t come again, that, maybe, were worth driving eight hundred miles for. Insects struck the screen, insects wanting in, a disorientation typical of a southern summer’s evening, except we were late into the season. A last boat passed, an overlarge fishing boat, rumbling as it choked down. A sheet of sound then struck up, crickets and katydids and cicadas in full chorus, which you learned to talk under and for periods of time never heard. A fish striking you would hear, and if the strike was loud enough, everything stopped. That was a voice from the world under water, and for the initiated it spoke in code. There were hungry splashes, defiant splashes, playful splashes, then attention-getting but noncommittal splashes intended to put you on alert.
At times voices reached you from across the water, a child’s high-pitched plea, a man’s curse or booming laugh, a woman patiently, a woman doggedly, calling her family in.
And dogs, family pets, barking back and forth as the night drew on.
Silence. The small waves stirring on the shore, the very quiet slosh of waves trapped inside a boathouse.
Elaine said, We should. We shouldn’t let this evening pass.
Walter said, Let’s do it. I’m bringing out the Beam brothers in case anyone’s interested.
Molly said, Who are they?
A big southern family, Walter said.
Borderline, I said.
One by one, filing out, we took our seats before the water. We reclined. The stars had yet to appear. The sky was a mix of colors, deepening as we sat there, the blue thickened to the aurora borealis of a bruise. The yellows, the oranges, the reds, the mauves, before a backdrop of blackness with an endless depth of field that might never appear as long as stories continued to be told on the ground, from chaise lounge to chaise lounge. Walter, the interloping Yankee, took it all on himself. Jim, our Jim, the family’s firstborn—with, you’ll remember, his preacher-man grandfather and his Gibson girl grandmother—was one year old when the dying grandfather says, No, no, take the little angel away, don’t let him see what it all comes to. Little Jim is taken away. Fast forward, Little Jim, our Jim, the first of his generation, is called down to the deathbed of the youngest of his mother’s generation, his favorite aunt, to be set the task of rescuing the last of his own generation, a cousin young enough to be his daughter, whose eyes in the right light could be golden, eyes that cast a golden glitter and attracted a toad. If it sounds like a knot, it was, a knot of kinship that Jim neither cut through nor untied, although he tried. The toad—as Jim’s aunt Rosalyn described the man, a toad with a scraggly goatee—came from a family of toads, while Jim, our Jim, came from a clan of church-founding and church-attending folk but with an eye out for beauty, nonetheless. And, such is the way of the world, the toads won. The toads squatted there and flicked flies out of the air. They ate to the point of satiation. They were of one mind. Beauty was all in the flies. Where we now sit became toad-land.
Until the toads overbred, ate all the flies, squeezed out of the little girl with the golden eyes every last cent she possessed, and then the toads lost. At which point it became a matter of who had the best memories to preserve, the toad who had ruined it all or the first of that generation whose grandfather had spared him the sight—and remember, the grandfather for whom our Jim was named had been a very handsome man, and his wife had been a very beautiful woman, and someone had to keep that memory bright. And that was when Jim, here with us now, along with our good friends the Beam brothers, told me the story, which in effect brightened the memory and won it all back from the toads. You’ll see. Tomorrow the fish will be lining up to bite on his hook.
Walter, with eight hundred miles behind him and his case rousingly argued, proposed a toast. To our liberator! To James, our hero!
