Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘By the time we have the net hung all the way across, the flood tide is in full flow, pushing and pressing against the net and bellying it out in the spaces between the poles. We go on back to the barge and leave the net to take care of itself for the duration of the tide. If enough shad to amount to anything come up the river in the tide, some of them are bound to hit it. They’ll either hit it head on and stick their heads in the meshes and gill themselves or they’ll hit it sideways and tangle themselves in it and the tide will hold them against it the way the wind holds a scrap of paper against a fence. In this part of the river, the tide runs from three and a half to six hours, according to the time of the month and the strength and direction of the wind, and it runs faster on the bottom than it does on the top, and it’ll trick you. When we judge it’s getting on toward the time it should start slowing down, we go back out to the row in the shad boat and get ready to lift the net. Quite often, we’re way too early, and have to stop at the first pole and sit there in the boat with our hands in our laps and bide our time. We might sit there an hour. If it’s during the day, we sit and look up at the face of the Palisades, or we look at the New York Central freight trains that seem to be fifteen miles long streaking by on the New York side, or we look downriver at the tops of the skyscrapers in the distance. I’ve never been able to make up my mind about the New York skyline. Sometimes I think it’s beautiful, and sometimes I think it’s a gaudy damned unnatural sight. If it’s in the nighttime, we look at that queer glare over midtown Manhattan that comes from the lights in Times Square. On cold, clear nights in April, sitting out on the river in the dark, that glare in the sky looks like the Last Judgment is on the way, or the Second Coming, or the end of the world. Every little while, we stick an oar straight into the water and try to hold it there, to test the strength of the tide. We have to time things very carefully. We want the net to stay down and catch fish as long as possible, but if we wait too long to get started the tide will begin to ebb before we get across the row, and belly the net in the opposite direction, and dump the fish out. I sit beside the outboard motor and handle the boat, and I usually have three fishermen aboard. When I give the signal to let’s get going, two of the fishermen stand up side by side in the stern, and one unties the net at the first pole. Then, while one holds on to the top of the net, the other pulls the bottom of it up to the top – that’s called pursing it. Then they start drawing it into the boat, a little at a time. The third man stands a few feet farther back, and helps wherever he’s needed most. We proceed from pole to pole, untying the net and drawing it in. As it comes aboard, the men shake it and jerk it and twitch it and seesaw it and yank it this way and that, and the fish spill out of it and fall to the bottom of the boat. The men tear a lot of holes in the net that way, but it can’t be helped. As the net piles up in the stern, the fish pile up amidships. When we get to the end of the row, if we’ve had a good lift, we’ll have over a thousand shad piled up amidships, bucks and roes all jumbled together, flipping and flopping and beating the air with their tails, each and every one of them fit to be cooked by some great chef at the Waldorf-Astoria and served on the finest china, and the boat’ll almost be awash. I must’ve seen a million shad in my time, and I still think they’re beautiful – their thick bodies, their green backs, their silver sides, their saw-edged bellies, the deep forks in their tails. The moment we draw in the end of the net, we turn about and head for the riverbank. We beach the boat, and all four of us grab hold of the net – it’s dripping wet and heavy as lead – and heave it onto a kind of low-sided box with four handles on it called a net box. We carry this up on the bank, and spread the net on the net rack. Then, while one man starts picking river trash out of the net and mending it and getting it ready for the next flood tide, I and the two other men unload the fish and sort them and weigh them and pack them in wooden boxes, a hundred or so pounds to a box. The roes bring a much higher price than the bucks, and we pack them separately. I write my name on each box with a black crayon, and below it I write “A. & S.” That stands for Ackerly & Sandiford, the wholesale firm in Fulton Market that I ship to. There’s always some trucker over here who understands shadfishing and makes a business every spring of trucking shad to market. Joe’s uncle, old Mr John Hewitt, used to do it years ago, first with a dray, then with a truck. In recent years, a man named George Indahl has been doing it. Usually, about the time we get through boxing a lift, one of his trucks comes down the little one-lane dirt road that runs along the riverbank up where I anchor my barge, and the driver stops and picks up my boxes. Then he goes on down the line and stops at the next shadfisherman’s place, and keeps on making stops until he has a load, and then he high-tails it for South Street.’

  ‘South Street is the main street in Fulton Market, Frank,’ Mr Hewitt said to Mr Townsend. ‘Most of the fishmongers have their stands on it. There’s an old saying in the market, “When the shad are running in the Hudson, South Street is bloody.”’

  ‘My place on the riverbank is kind of hard to get to, although you can see it from the bridge,’ Harry continued, ‘but the first few days of shad season, every time we come in with a lift, we find a little crowd standing there. They’re mostly old men. They stand around and watch us bring the fish ashore and sort them and box them, and the sight of the shad seems to do them good. Some are old men from Edgewater and Fort Lee. Others are old men I never see any other time. They show up year after year, and I say hello to them and shake hands, but I don’t know their names, let alone where they come from. I don’t even know if they come from New Jersey or New York. Several have been coming for so many years that I tell them to wait until the others have gone, and I give them a shad, a roe shad. They’re well-to-do-looking men, some of them, and could probably buy me and sell me, but they bring a newspaper to wrap their fish in and a paper bag to carry it in, and the way they thank me, you’d think I was giving them something really valuable. One of them, who’d been showing up every spring for years and years with his paper bag all neatly folded in his overcoat pocket, didn’t show up last spring. “The poor old boy, whoever he was,” I said to myself, when I happened to think of him, ‘he didn’t last the winter.’ Day by day, the little crowd gets smaller and smaller, and after the first week or so only an occasional person shows up, and things settle down to a routine. Not that they get dull. Lifting a shad net is like shooting dice – you never get tired of seeing what comes up. One lift, we may get only two or three fish all the way across; next lift, we may get a thousand. One lift, we may get mostly bucks; next lift, roes may outnumber bucks three to one. And shad aren’t the only fish that turn up in a shad net. We may find a dozen big catfish lying in the belly of the net, or a couple of walleyed pike, or some other kind of fresh-water fish. A freshet brought them down, and they were making their way back up the river, and they hit the net. Or we may find some fish that strayed in from the ocean on a strong tide – bluefish or blackfish or fluke or moss-bunkers or goosefish, or a dozen other kinds. Or we may find some ocean fish that run up the river to spawn the same as shad, such as sea sturgeon or alewives or summer herring. Sea sturgeon are the kind of sturgeon whose roe is made into caviar. Some of them get to be very old and big. Going up the river, they keep leaping out of the water, and suddenly, at least once every season, one of them leaps out of the water right beside my boat, and it’s so big and long and ugly and covered all over with warts that it scares me – it might be eight, nine, ten, or eleven feet long and weigh a couple of hundred pounds. We get quite a few of the young ones in our nets, and now and then, especially during the latter part of the season, we lift the net and there’s a gaping big hole in it, and we know that a full-grown one came up the river sometime during the tide, an old-timer, and hit the net and went right through it. Several years ago, an eighty-one-pounder hit the net sideways while we were lifting it, and began to plunge around in it, and it was as strong as a young bull, but the men braced themselves and took a firm grip on the net and held on until it wore itse
lf out, and then they pulled it aboard.

  ‘The bulk of the shad go up the river between the middle of April and the middle of May. Around the middle of May, we begin to see large numbers of what we call back-runners coming down the river – shad that’ve finished spawning and are on their way back to sea. We don’t bother them. They eat little or nothing while they’re on their spawning runs, and by this time they’re so feeble and emaciated they can just barely make it. If we find them in our nets, we shake them back into the water. Shad keep right on coming into the river until around the end of June, but during May the price goes lower and lower, and finally they aren’t worth fishing for. In the last week in May or the first week in June, we pull up our poles and move our barges back to the flats.

  ‘The young shad stay up on the spawning grounds through the summer. In October and the early part of November, when the water starts getting cold, they come down the river in huge schools and go out to sea. Way up in November, last year, they were still coming down. One morning, a week or so before Thanksgiving, I was out in the flats, tied up to an old wreck, fishing for tomcod, and all of a sudden the water around my boat became alive with little shad – pretty little silver-sided things, three to five inches in length, flipping right along. I dropped a bucket over the side and brought up half a dozen of them, and they were so lively they made the water in the bucket bubble like seltzer water. I looked at them a few minutes, and then I poured them back in the river. “Go on out to sea,” I said to them, “and grow up and get some flesh on your bones, and watch yourselves and don’t get eaten by other fish, and four years from now, a short distance above the George Washington Bridge,” I said, “maybe our paths will cross again.”’

  Mr Townsend and Mr Hewitt and I had been listening closely to Harry, and none of us had paid any further attention to the young girls jumping rope on the riverbank. Shortly after Harry stopped talking, all of us became aware at the same moment that the girls turning the rope were singing a new song. Just then, the girl jumping missed a jump, and another girl ran in to take her place, whereupon the girls turning the rope started the new song all over again. Their voices were rollicking, and they laughed as they sang. The song began:

  ‘The worms crawl in,

  The worms crawl out.

  They eat your guts

  And spit them out.

  They bring their friends

  And their friends’ friends, too,

  And there’s nothing left

  When they get through …’

  Harry laughed. ‘They’ve changed it a little,’ he said. ‘That line used to go, “And you look like hell when they get through.”’

  ‘“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. They play pinochle on your snout,”’ said Mr Townsend. ‘That’s the way I remember it. “One little worm who’s not so shy crawls up your nose and out your eye.” That’s another line I remember.’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ said Mr Hewitt. ‘It’s getting cold out here. We’ll all catch pneumonia.’

  ‘You know what they used to say about pneumonia, Joe,’ Harry said. ‘“Pneumonia is the old man’s friend.”’

  ‘A lot of what they used to say,’ said Mr Hewitt, ‘could just as well’ve been left unsaid.’

  Stooping, he stepped from the deck into the passageway of the barge and walked past the galley and into the bunkroom, and the rest of us followed. There is a bulletin board on the partition that separates the bunkroom from the storage quarters beyond. Tacked on it are mimeographed notices dating back ten years concerning new shadfishing regulations or changes in old ones – some from the Corps of Engineers, United States Army, and some from the Division of Fish and Game, Department of Conservation and Economic Development, State of New Jersey. Also tacked on the bulletin board is a flattened-out pasteboard box on which someone has lettered with boat paint: ‘OLD FISHERMEN NEVER DIE – THEY JUST SMELL THAT WAY.’ Tacked on the partition to the right of the bulletin board are several Coast and Geodetic charts of the river and the harbor. Tacked to the left of it are a number of group photographs taken at shad bakes run by Harry. One photograph shows a group of fishmongers from Fulton Market lined up in two rows at a shad bake on the riverbank, and Mr Hewitt himself is in the second row. The fishmongers are looking straight at the camera. Several are holding up glasses of beer. All have big smiles on their faces. Mr Hewitt went over to this photograph and began to study it. Mr Townsend and I sat down in chairs beside the stove. Harry opened the stove door and punched up the fire with a crowbar. Then he sat down.

  ‘Oh, God, Harry,’ said Mr Hewitt after he had studied the photograph awhile, ‘it was only just a few short years ago this picture was made, and a shocking number of the fellows in it are dead already. Here’s poor Jimmy McBarron. Jimmy was only forty-five when he died, and he was getting along so well. He was president of Wallace, Keeney, Lynch, one of the biggest firms in the market, and he had an interest in a shrimp company in Florida. And here’s Mr John Matthews, who was secretary-treasurer of Chesebro Brothers, Robbins & Graham. He was a nice man. A little stiff and formal for the fish market. “How do you do, Mr Hewitt?” he used to say to me, when everybody else in the market called me Joe, even the lumpers on the piers. And here’s Matt Graham, who was one of the partners in the same firm. A nicer man never lived than Matt Graham. He went to work in the market when he was fifteen years of age, and all he ever knew was fish, and all he ever wanted to know was fish.’

  ‘I used to ship to him,’ said Harry. ‘I shipped to him when he was with Booth Fisheries, long before he went with Chesebro. I shipped him many a box of shad, and he always treated me fair and square.’

  Mr Hewitt continued to stare at the photograph.

  ‘This one’s alive,’ he said. ‘This one’s dead. This one’s alive. At least, I haven’t heard he’s dead. Here’s Drew Radel, who was president of the Andrew Radel Oyster Company, planters and distributors of Robbins Island oysters. He died only last year. Sixty-five, the paper said. I had no idea he was that far along. I ran into him the summer before he died, and he looked around fifty. He’s one man I can honestly say I never heard a bad word spoken about him. Here’s a man who kept books for companies all over the market, the same as I did. He worked for Frank Wilkisson and Eastern Commission and George M. Still and Middleton, Carman and Lockwood & Winant and Caleb Haley and Lester & Toner and Blue Ribbon, and I don’t know how many others – a real old-fashioned floating bookkeeper. I ate lunch across from him at the front table in Sloppy Louie’s two or three times a week year in and year out, and now I can’t even think of his name. Eddie Something-or-Other. He’s still alive, last I heard. Retired. Lives in Florida. His wife had money; he never saved a cent. Grows grapefruit, somebody said. If I felt I had to grow something, by God, it wouldn’t be grapefruit. This man’s alive. So’s this man. Dead. Dead. Dead. Three in a row. Alive. Alive. Alive. Dead. Alive. And here’s a man, I won’t mention his name and I shouldn’t tell about this, but a couple of years ago, when I saw in the New York Times that he was dead, the thought flashed into my mind, “I do hope they bury him in Evergreen Cemetery.”’

  He turned away from the photograph, and came over and sat down.

  ‘And I’ll tell you the reason that particular thought flashed into my mind,’ he said. ‘This fellow was the biggest woman chaser in the market, and one of the biggest talkers on the subject I ever heard. When he and I were young men in the market together, he used to tell me about certain of his experiences along that line out in Brooklyn, where he lived. Tell me – hell! he told everybody that would listen. At that time, Trommer’s Brewery was the finest brewery in Brooklyn. It was at the corner of Bushwick Avenue and Conway Street, and out in front of it was a beer garden. The brewery maintained the beer garden, and it was a show place. They had tables in the open, and a large restaurant indoors with at least a dozen big potted palms stood up in it. During the summer, they had a German orchestra that played waltz music. And directly across the street from the beer garden was
the main gate of Evergreen Cemetery. After a burial, it was customary for the mourners to stop in Trommer’s beer garden and drown their sorrow in Trommer’s White Label and rejoice in the fact that it was the man or the woman they’d left out in the cemetery’s turn to go, and not theirs. On Sundays, people would take the streetcar out to the cemetery and visit the graves of relatives and friends, and then they’d go over to Trommer’s beer garden for sandwiches and beer. Now this fellow I’m talking about, he used to dress up on Sundays and go out to the cemetery and walk up and down the cemetery paths until he found some young widow out there by herself visiting her husband’s grave, and she didn’t have to be too damned young, and he’d go over and get acquainted with her and sympathize with her, and she’d cry and he’d cry, and then he’d invite her over to Trommer’s beer garden, and they’d sit there and have some beers and listen to the music and talk, and one thing would lead to another.’