All the Days and Nights

by William Maxwell

  4. The fisherman who had nobody to go out in his boat with him

  ONCE upon a time there was a poor fisherman who had no one to go out in his boat with him. The man he started going out with when he was still a boy was now crippled with rheumatism and sat all day by the fire. The other fishermen were all paired off, and there was nobody for him. Out on the water, without a soul to talk to, the hours between daybreak and late afternoon were very long, and to pass the time he sang. He sang the songs that other people sang, whatever he had heard, and this was of course a good deal in the way of music, because in the olden times people sang more than they do now. But eventually he came to the end of all the songs he knew or had ever heard and wanted to learn some new songs. He knew that they were written down and published, but this was no help to him because he had never been to school and didn’t know how to read words, let alone the musical staff. You might as well have presented him with a clay tablet of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But there were ways, and he took advantage of them. At a certain time, on certain days of the week, the children in the schoolhouse had singing, and he managed to be in the vicinity. He brought his boat in earlier those days, on one pretext or another, and stood outside the school building. At first the teacher was mystified, but he saw that the poor fisherman always went away as soon as the singing lesson was over, and putting two and two together he realized why the man was there. So, one day, he went to the door and invited the fisherman in. The fisherman backed away, and then he turned and hurried off down the road to the beach. But the next time they had singing, there he was. The schoolteacher opened a window so the fisherman could hear better and went on with the lesson. While the children were singing “There were three sisters fair and bright,” the door opened slowly. The teacher pointed to a desk in the back row, and the fisherman squeezed himself into it, though it was a child’s desk and much too small for him. The children waved their hands in the air and asked silly questions and giggled, but, never having been to school, the fisherman thought this was customary and did not realize that he was creating a disturbance. He came again and again.

  People manage to believe in magic — of one kind or another. And ghosts. And the influence of the stars. And reincarnation. And a life everlasting. But not enough room is allowed for strangeness: that birds and animals know the way home; that a blind man, having sensed the presence of a wall, knows as well where to walk as you or I; that there have been many recorded instances of conversations between two persons who did not speak the same language but, each speaking his own, nevertheless understood each other perfectly. When the teacher passed out the songbooks, he gave one to the fisherman, well aware that his only contact with the printed page was through his huge, calloused hands. And time after time the fisherman knew, before the children opened their mouths and began to sing, what the first phrase would be, and where the song would go from there.

  Naturally, he did not catch as many fish as he had when he was attending to his proper work, and sometimes there was nothing in the house to eat. His wife could not complain, because she was a deaf-mute. She was not ugly, but no one else would have her. Though she had never heard the sound of her own voice, or indeed any sound whatever, she could have made him feel her dissatisfaction, but she saw that what he was doing was important to him, and did not interfere. What the fisherman would have liked would have been to sing with the children when they sang, but his voice was so deep there was no possibility of its blending unnoticeably with theirs, so he sat in silence, and only when he was out in his boat did the songs burst forth from his throat. What with the wind and the seabirds’ crying, he had to sing openly or he would not have known he was singing at all. If he had been on shore, in a quiet room, the sound would have seemed tremendous. Out under the sky, it merely seemed like a man singing.

  He often thought that if there had only been a child in the house he could have sung the child to sleep, and that would have been pleasant. He would have sung to his wife if she could have heard him, and he did try, on his fingers, to convey the sound of music — the way the sounds fell together, the rising and descending, the sudden changes in tempo, and the pleasure of expecting to hear this note and hearing, instead, a different one, but she only smiled at him uncomprehendingly.

  The schoolteacher knew that if it had been curiosity alone that drew the fisherman to the schoolhouse at the time of singing lessons, he would have stopped coming as soon as his curiosity was satisfied, and he didn’t stop coming, which must mean that there was a possibility that he was innately musical. So he stopped the fisherman one day when they met by accident, and asked him to sing the scale. The fisherman opened his mouth and no sound came. He and the schoolteacher looked at each other, and then the fisherman colored, and hung his head. The schoolteacher clapped him on the shoulder and walked on, satisfied that what there was here was the love of music rather than a talent for it, and even that seemed to him something hardly short of a miracle.

  IN those islands, storms were not uncommon and they were full of peril. Even large sailing ships were washed on the rocks and broken to pieces. As for the little boats the fishermen went out in, one moment they would be bobbing on the waves like a cork, now on the crest and now out of sight in a trough, and then suddenly there wasn’t any boat. The sea would have swallowed it, and the men in it, in the blinking of an eye. It was a terrible fact that the islanders had learned to live with. If they had not been fishermen, they would have starved, so they continued to go out in their boats, and to read the sky for warnings, which were usually dependable, but every now and then a storm — and usually the very worst kind — would come up without any warning, or with only a short time between the first alarming change in the odor of the air, the first wisps of storm clouds, and the sudden lashing of the waters. When this happened, the women gathered on the shore and prayed. Sometimes they waited all night, and sometimes they waited in vain.

  One evening, the fisherman didn’t come home at the usual time. His wife could not hear the wind or the shutters banging, but when the wind blew puffs of smoke down the chimney, she knew that a storm had come up. She put on her cloak, and wrapped a heavy scarf around her head, and started for the strand, to see if the boats were drawn up there. Instead, she found the other women waiting with their faces all stamped with the same frightened look. Usually the seabirds circled above the beach, waiting for the fishing boats to come in and the fishermen to cut open their fish and throw them the guts, but this evening there were no gulls or cormorants. The air was empty. The wind had blown them all inland, just as, by a freak, it had blown the boats all together, out on the water, so close that it took great skill to keep them from knocking against each other and capsizing in the dark. The fishermen called back and forth for a time, and then they fell silent. The wind had grown higher and higher, and the words were blown right out of their mouths, and they could not even hear themselves what they were saying. The wind was so high and the sound so loud that it was like a silence, and out of this silence, suddenly, came the sound of singing. Being poor ignorant fishermen, they did the first thing that occurred to them — they fell on their knees and prayed. The singing went on and on, in a voice that none of them had ever heard, and so powerful and rich and deep it seemed to come from the same place that the storm came from. A flash of lightning revealed that it was not an angel, as they thought, but the fisherman who was married to the deaf-mute. He was standing in his boat, with his head bared, singing, and in their minds this was no stranger or less miraculous than an angel would have been. They crossed themselves and went on praying, and the fisherman went on singing, and in a little while the waves began to grow smaller and the wind to abate, and the storm, which should have taken days to blow itself out, suddenly turned into an intense calm. As suddenly as it had begun, the singing stopped. The boats drew apart as in one boat after another the men took up their oars again, and in a silvery brightness, all in a cluster, the fishing fleet came safely in to shore.

  5. The two women f
riends

  THE two women were well along in years, and one lived in a castle and one lived in the largest house in the village that was at the foot of the castle rock. Though picturesque, the castle had bathrooms and central heating, and it would not for very long have withstood a siege, no matter how antiquated the weapons employed. The village was also picturesque, being made up of a single street of thatched Elizabethan cottages. The two women were friends, and if one had weekend guests it was understood that the other would stand by, ready to entertain them. When the conversation threatened to run out, guests at Cleeve Castle were taken to Cleeve House and offered tea and hot buttered scones, under a canopy of apple blossoms or in front of a roaring fire, according to the season. The largest house in the village had been made by joining three of the oldest cottages together, and the catalogue of its inconveniences often made visitors wipe tears of amusement from their eyes. The inconveniences were mostly felt by the servants, who had to carry cans of hot water and breakfast trays up the treacherous stairs, and who, when they were in a hurry, tripped over the uneven doorsills and bumped their heads on low beams. Guests at Cleeve House were taken to the castle and plied with gin and ghost stories.

  One would have expected this arrangement, so useful to both women, to be lasting, but the friendship of women seems often to have embedded in it somewhere a fishhook, and as it happened the mistress of Cleeve House was born with a heavier silver spoon in her mouth, and baptized in a longer christening gown, and in numerous other ways was socially more enviable. On the other hand, the money that had originally gone with the social advantages was, alas, rather run out, and it was without the slightest trace of anxiety that the woman in the castle sat down to balance her checkbook. Weekend guests at the castle tended to be more important politically or in the world of the arts — flashy, in short. And the weekend guests at Cleeve House more important to know if it was a question of getting your children into the right schools or yourself into the right clubs. In a word, nobby. But how the woman who lived in the castle could have dreamed for one minute that she could entertain a member of the royal family and not bring him to tea at Cleeve House, to be amused by the catalogue of its inconveniences and the story of how it came to be thrown together out of three dark, cramped little cottages by an architect who was a disciple of William Morris, it is hard to say. Perhaps the friendship had begun to seem burdensome and the duties one-sided. Or perhaps it was the gradual accumulation of tactful silences, which avoided saying that the woman who lived in the village was top drawer and the woman who lived in the castle was not, and careless remarks, such as anybody might be guilty of with a close friend, which frankly admitted it. In any event, one does not go running here, there, and everywhere with a member of the royal family in tow. There is protocol to be observed, secretaries and chauffeurs and valets have to be consulted, and the conversation doesn’t threaten to run out because what you have, in these circumstances, isn’t conversation in the usual sense of the word. But anyway, the mistress of Cleeve House sat waiting for the telephone to ring, with the wrinkles ironed out of her best tablecloth, and her Spode tea set brought down from the highest shelf of the china closet, and the teaspoons polished till you could see your face in them, and her Fortuny gown taken out of its plastic bag and left to hang from the bedroom chandelier. And, unbelievably, the telephone did not ring. In the middle of the afternoon she had the operator check her phone to see if it was out of order. This was a mistake, because in a village people are very apt to put two and two together. By nightfall it was known all up and down the High Street that her in the castle was entertaining royalty and had left her in the big house to sit and twiddle her thumbs.

  Not that the mistress of Cleeve House cared one way or the other about the royal family. No, it was merely the slight to a friendship of very long standing that disturbed her. And for the sake of that friendship, though it cost her a struggle, she was prepared to act as if nothing unusual had happened when the telephone rang on Sunday morning, and to suggest that the mistress of Cleeve Castle bring her guests to tea. The telephone rang on Monday morning instead. To anyone listening in, and several people were, it was clear that she was speaking a little too much as if nothing unusual had happened. However, the invitation — to drive, just the two of them, in the little car, over to the market town and have lunch at the Star and Garter — was accepted. And because one does not entertain royalty and then not mention it, the subject came up finally, in the most natural way, and the mistress of Cleeve House was able to achieve the tone she wanted, which was a mixture of reasonable curiosity and amused indifference. But it was all over between them, and they both knew it.

  They continued to see each other, less often and less intimately, for another three or four months, and then the woman who lived in the largest house in the village finished it off in a way that made it possible for her to carry her head high. The husband of the woman who lived in the castle had, unwisely, allowed his name to be put up for a London club that was rather too grand for a man who had made a fortune in wholesale poultry. Even so, with a great deal of help from various quarters or a little help from the right quarter, he might have made it. There were two or three men who could have pulled this off single-handed, and when one of them came down to Cleeve House for the weekend, it was the turn of the mistress of the castle to sit and wait for the telephone to ring. On Monday morning, the nanny of the children of Cleeve House (who were really the woman’s grandchildren) took them to play with the children of the castle, as she had been doing every Monday morning all summer, and was told at the castle gate that the children of the castle were otherwise occupied. Though they had not been in any way involved and did not even know the cause of the falling out, the children of the castle and the children of Cleeve House were enemies from that day forth, and so were their nannies. The two husbands, being more worldly, still exchanged curt nods when they met in the High Street or on the railway platform. As for the two women, they very cleverly managed never even to set eyes on one another.

  Weekend guests at Cleeve House were taken for a walk, naturally, because it was one of the oldest villages in England, and when they saw the castle, with rooks roosting in the apertures of the keep, they cried out with pleasure at finding a place so picturesque that near London. When the mistress of Cleeve House explained that she was no longer on friendly terms with the castle, their faces betrayed their disappointment. And with a consistency that was really extraordinary, people who were staying at Cleeve Castle sooner or later came back from a walk saying, “The village is charming, I must say. But who is that fascinating grey-haired woman who walks with a stick and lives in that largish house on the High Street? We’re dying to meet her.”

  CITY people get over their anger, as a rule, but it is different if you Uve in a village. For one thing, everybody knows that you are angry, and why, and the slightest shift in position is publicly commented on, and this stiffens the antagonism and makes it permanent. Something very large indeed — a fire, a flood, a war, a catastrophe of some sort — is required to bring about a reconciliation and push the injured parties into one another’s outstretched arms.

  One winter morning, the village learned, via the wireless, that it was in the direct path of a new eight-lane expressway connecting London and the seacoast. The money for it had been appropriated and it was too late to prevent the road from being built, but the political connections of Cleeve Castle working hand in glove with the social connections of Cleeve House could perhaps divert it so that some other village was obliterated. After deliberating for days, the woman who lived in the castle picked up the telephone and called Cleeve House, but while the telephone was still ringing she hung up. The injury to her husband (what a way to repay a thousand kindnesses!) was still too fresh in her mind. There must be some other way of dealing with the problem, she told herself, and sitting down at her desk she wrote a long and affectionate letter to a school friend who was married to a Member of Parliament, imploring his help.
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  After considering the situation from every angle, the woman who lived in the largest house in the village came to the only sensible conclusion, which was that some things are worth swallowing your pride for, and she put on her hat and coat and walked up to the castle. But when she came to the castle gate, the memory of how her grandchildren had been turned away (the smallness of it!) filled her with anger, and she paid a call on the vicar instead.