Grandpa didn’t pay any attention to him. He threw the harness over the back of the second mule and buckled it on. He picked up his cane and led the mules out into the lot and began hitching them to the wagon. Uncle Burley got up and followed him.
“You’ve got the lead mule hitched too short.”
“I was working mules before you were born,” Grandpa said.
“Well,” Uncle Burley said, “Nathan and I think we’ll go fishing for a few days.”
Grandpa said he didn’t give a damn if we fished the rest of the year, and Uncle Burley said he hadn’t thought about that but we might do it.
He sent me to the house to tell Grandma we were going. Then we went to the smokehouse and got a side of bacon and a tin can full of salt.
It was a fine brisk morning, cool and bright, the wind in the north. The leaves on some of the bushes beside the road had begun to turn yellow. I knew we wouldn’t think of summer again; it was easier to imagine cold and fire in the stoves and snow.
When we came over the brow of the hill we stopped and looked down at the river. The corn in the bottoms had ripened and turned brown; the tobacco patches were naked now that the crop had been put in. The river lay green and quiet between the rows of trees.
“Poor old Chicken Little,” Uncle Burley said.
I turned to look at him; he stood there watching the river as if he didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud.
Chicken Little Montgomery had fallen out of a boat and drowned the week before, but this was the first time I’d heard any of our family mention it. None of us had ever been friends with the Montgomerys, and we’d never spoken of them. But now that Chicken Little was dead you noticed the silence. All of us felt uneasy about his drowning. He stayed on our minds as if our dislike for him while he was alive had somehow made us guilty of his death.
“Wonder if they’ve ever found his body,” Uncle Burley said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
We went on down the hill, and up the bottom to Beriah Easterly’s store.
Beriah and Gander Loyd were sitting on nail kegs in front of the store, looking up toward the top of the hill. Beriah saw us coming and called, “Morning, Burley.”
“Morning, Beriah,” Uncle Burley said. “Morning, Gander. I hear you got married.”
“It’s a fact,” Gander said.
Beriah pointed up at the top of the hill. “A lot of buzzards up there this morning. Must be something dead.”
We looked at the buzzards for a minute. Then Uncle Burley and I went into the store and Beriah got up and came in after us. He went behind the counter and propped his elbows on it, waiting to hear what we wanted.
Uncle Burley ordered two pounds of line and a hundred hooks, five pounds of meal and three sacks of Bull Durham.
“Going to do some fishing, are you, Burley?” Beriah said when he came back with the line and hooks.
“Thinking about it,” Uncle Burley told him.
“Pity about Chicken Little, wasn’t it?” Beriah said.
“It was,” Uncle Burley said.
“You know they never found his body. They gave him up.”
Beriah sacked up the things we’d bought and handed the sack across the counter to me. “Looks like we’re going to have some more fishing weather.”
“Could be,” Uncle Burley said.
“Well, I hope you all have luck.”
Gander was still sitting on the nail keg when we came out. Uncle Burley nodded to him. “Give my respects to your wife, Gander.”
“Thank you, Burley,” Gander said. He got up and went into the store.
When we were on the road again Uncle Burley said, “Gander’s out awfully bright and early for a bridegroom.”
“I didn’t know he was married,” I said. “Who did he marry?”
“Old Gander outdid himself, from what I hear. They say he married a young woman. And a pretty one too. Her name was Mandy something or other.”
When we got to the camp house Uncle Burley shoved the door open and we went inside. “Well, here we are,” he said.
He told me to open the windows, and he got a broom and swept the floors. We took the bedding down and spread it over the beds. After we got everything clean and in order we sat outside to talk and look at the river. There was a breeze blowing and a few spots of sunlight came through the leaves onto the porch; it was quiet and comfortable. We’d gone a few days without rain and the river had cleared, although there was still some current. It felt good to have nothing to do but be there.
“I don’t see how Gander ever persuaded a pretty woman to marry him,” Uncle Burley said. “That one-eyed old pup. She must be blind in both eyes. I wonder if she’s looked at him yet.”
“He’s not very pretty,” I said.
Uncle Burley laughed. “His face would stop an eight-day clock and run it backwards two weeks.”
He lay down on his back and pulled his hat over his eyes. After a minute he laughed again. “Your grandpa sure did ventilate the kitchen,” he said. “Damned if he can’t be outrageous sometimes.”
“It’s hard on Grandma,” I said.
“And everybody else,” Uncle Burley said. He sat up and put his hat back on, folding his arms across his knees. “But I tell you, there’s no give in him. And no quit. You’ve got to admire that. He’s been a wheel horse in his time. He’s worked like the world was on fire and nobody but him to put it out. It’s a shame to see him getting old.”
I nodded. Grandpa had been hard on all of us. He’d kept himself stubborn and lonely, not allowing any of us to know him; we saw him and he saw us through his loneliness. But his loneliness and stubborness humbled us too. We had to admire him.
At dinnertime Uncle Burley lit the coal oil stove, and I filled the water bucket at the spring behind the house. We fried some bacon and a pile of corn bread and sat down to eat.
Uncle Burley raised his hat and said,
“Oh Lord, make us able
To eat all that’s on this table,
And if there’s some we haven’t got
Bring it to us while it’s hot.”
After dinner we found the boat where Uncle Burley had hidden it in a patch of horseweeds and turned it over and slid it down the bank to the river. And then we got the bait box and the fish box from under the porch and tied them in the river by the boat.
We climbed the bank again and sat on the edge of the porch to rest.
“Well,” Uncle Burley said, “we got her fixed. We’re in business.”
When we’d rested Uncle Burley said we’d better be thinking about catching some bait if we were going to fish. He said there ought to be plenty of perch up in the creek, and we could try them for a start. He found the minnow seine and I got a five-gallon bucket from under the stove in the kitchen. We started upstream toward the mouth of the creek.
Uncle Burley carried the seine on his shoulder, whistling a tune and watching the river.
“Do you think we’ll catch any fish?” I asked him.
“The river’s full of them,” he said. “We ought to. If we get another rain to stir the water and freshen it a little, we ought to have good fishing.”
We caught a bucketful of perch up in the creek and carried them back and put them in the bait box at the river. It was getting late by then. Uncle Burley said there wasn’t much use in trying to fish that day, so we made another meal off the bacon and corn bread.
As soon as supper was over we set a lantern on the table in the bedroom and started getting our fishing gear in shape. We rolled the hanks of line into balls so they’d run out without tangling when we put them in the river. Uncle Burley got out a ball of lighter line and we snooded the hooks, cutting the line into pieces about a foot and a half long and tying the hooks to them.
It was comfortable work to do after supper. We were full and a little sleepy. A couple of owls called in the woods. Frogs were singing.
The next morning we finished breakfast by sunup. We loaded the lines and hooks and
a baiting of perch into the boat and started up the river. Uncle Burley rowed. The red sunlight slanted through the trees on the bank and down to the water. A soft wind was coming up the river, rippling it, and the reflections of the trees were speckled and pointed in the water like big fish. Two or three herons flew from one snag to another, keeping ahead of us. We went past Jig’s boat, but it was quiet and we didn’t call him.
When we got to the bend where Uncle Burley wanted to fish I tied the end of one of the lines to a willow, and let it unwind as Uncle Burley rowed across to the other bank. We found another willow on that side and fastened the line, then tied on the weights—a small rock near each shore and one in the middle. We pulled ourselves back across on the line, and I tied on the hooks and Uncle Burley baited them.
The sun was getting hot when we finished putting the lines out. Uncle Burley said it would save a lot of rowing if we stayed there for the rest of the morning; we’d run the lines at noon and maybe get a mess of fish, and then go in. He pulled the boat into the shade along the bank and we tied up to a snag.
We made ourselves comfortable and watched the river, talking about how many fish we might catch and what kind and how big. Uncle Burley remembered all the good ones he’d ever caught and what he’d caught them on and what time of year it had been. Finally we ran out of talk, and he lay down in the bottom of the boat and went to sleep.
I watched the sun climb up toward the top of the sky. A few birds were singing, and I could see a mud turtle sunning himself on a log. King-fishers flew over the willows, calling, tilting down to the water after minnows. After a while it got hotter and the river quieted down. The only things moving then were the clouds and the water.
The surface of the river was still. You could see every leaf of the trees reflected in it. The white glare of the sun glanced so brightly it hurt your eyes; and in the shade where we rested the water darkened, rippling a little as it passed the boat. The whole calm of the river moved down and past us and on, as if it slept and remembered its direction in its sleep. And somewhere below the thin reflections of the trees was Chicken Little, hidden in that dark so quietly nobody would ever find him.
After a while I propped my back against the side of the boat and went to sleep too.
It was nearly noon when Uncle Burley woke me. We ran the lines and took off four or five little catfish, and then rowed back to the house to cook them for dinner.
That afternoon we caught another bucketful of perch, and ran the lines again after it began to cool off. We took six nice channel cats on that run and baited the lines up fresh. Three of the fish made enough for our supper, and we put the other three in the fish box to keep them alive.
It began to rain at supper time, a slow drizzle at first, then hard and steady against the roof and windowpanes. It sounded as if it had set in for the night. When supper was over we sat in the bedroom and talked and listened to the rain fall.
I’d about made up my mind to go to bed when Uncle Burley picked up the lantern and put his hat on. “I feel my luck working,” he said. “Let’s go see what we’ve caught.”
“At this time of night?” I said.
We waited until the rain slacked up a little, and went down to the boat. It was dark. The rain fell out of the black sky and splattered our clothes and sizzled on the lantern globe. Uncle Burley set the lantern in the front of the boat and we shoved off. We stayed in close under the trees. The lower branches caught in our light and we guided by them.
We ran the first line and took off two white cats and three channel cats, all of a good size. I rowed to the other line and Uncle Burley began raising it. We went about fifteen feet from the bank and I saw the line jerk in his hands. It pulled him off balance and he turned the line loose and caught himself on the other side of the boat.
He wiped his hands on his pants and looked at me. “We got a fish, boy.”
“Can you tell how big?”
“Pretty near too big.”
I rowed to the bank. He caught the line again, and I held the lantern up so he could see. The line tightened in his hands, cutting back and forth through the water. It was still raining, and pitch-dark beyond the light of the lantern. Uncle Burley knelt in the front of the boat, working us slowly toward the fish. He had his underlip in his teeth, being careful.
We heard the fish roll up on top of the water, his big tail splashing out in the dark toward the middle of the river. He went down then, and Uncle Burley had to turn the line loose. We played the fish for what seemed an hour, running out, losing the line, and rowing back to the bank to start all over again.
Finally we wore him out. He came to the top of the water, and Uncle Burley held him there and pulled the boat out to him. He was a white cat, the biggest I’d ever seen. Uncle Burley hooked his thumb into the fish’s mouth and ran the fingers of his other hand into the gills. I caught the tail and we hauled him over the side of the boat. He flopped down at our feet and lay there with his big red gills heaving open and shut. Uncle Burley was breathing hard, and the thumb he’d hooked in the fish’s mouth was bleeding. He sat down and looked at the fish while he got his breath, then he grinned at me. “He’s a horse, ain’t he?”
We were drenched with rain, and by the time we got back to the house our teeth were chattering. We stripped off our clothes and hung them on the chairs to dry. Uncle Burley lit the stove and we stood in front of it until we were warm. When we went to bed the rain was still coming down, rustling through the trees and rapping the tin roof. We lay snug and awake for a long time, remembering everything that had happened.
After breakfast the next morning we went down to the river. We’d tied the fish to the back of the boat with a piece of strong line, doubled and looped through one of his gills. Uncle Burley lifted him out of the water. We were surprised again to see how big he was.
“What’re we going to do with him?” I asked.
“We’ll get Beriah to put him on ice for us so he’ll keep,” Uncle Burley said. “You can cut slabs of meat off of him as big as steaks, and just as white as snow.”
When we’d finished looking at the fish Uncle Burley let him back into the water so he could breathe. He jerked his head against the line like a horse jerking against a hitch rein.
“There’ll be a lot of fine eating on that fish,” Uncle Burley said. “We ought to have a fish fry. We’ll get Big Ellis and Jig and Gander to come down tonight and have a feast. We’ll have to let Beriah in on it too, so he’ll be willing to furnish some ice.”
As soon as we’d baited the lines we took the fish out of the water again. We tied him to one of the oars and started up the road, carrying him between us, holding him high to keep his tail from dragging.
“We’ll cook plenty of corn bread,” Uncle Burley said, “and maybe get hold of a watermelon. It’ll be a supper they won’t forget for a while.”
Beriah was sitting in front of the store again, and when he saw us he came out to meet us. “Lord amercy,” he said. “Look what a fish.”
“We’re going to use him for bait,” Uncle Burley said. “We’re going to try to catch one big enough to eat.”
Beriah held the door open for us and we carried the fish inside and stretched him out on the floor in front of the counter.
“Lord amercy,” Beriah said. “You’ve caught the granddaddy of them all.” He knelt down beside the fish and patted its head as if it were a dog. “You don’t see a fish like this more than once in a lifetime, Burley.”
When I saw how Beriah admired our fish I was prouder than ever and so was Uncle Burley.
“Don’t it make your mouth water just to look at him?” Uncle Burley said.
“There’s some fine eating on him, all right,” Beriah said.
“I’ll tell you what,” Uncle Burley said. “We’ll clean him and you can put him on ice for us, and then we’ll all get together tonight and have a big fish fry.”
“Nothing could suit me any better,” Beriah said. “But, Burley, you all don’t want to dres
s that fish yet. Keep him a while so people can see him.”
They looked at the fish. Uncle Burley leaned over and picked up the line again and held it, as if he were going to lead the fish out of the store.
“He’ll spoil.”
“No, he won’t. We’ll keep him alive. Hell, Burley, you don’t want to treat him like an ordinary fish. People don’t get a chance to see a fish like that every day.”
Beriah went to the back of the store and opened the cooler. “Bring a couple of those crates,” he said.
He began to take the bottles out of the cooler and we brought the crates and helped him.
“Now, what’s the matter with that, Burley? He’ll stay alive a long time in that cold water.”
“I reckon he will,” Uncle Burley said.
Beriah picked up the fish. “Lord amercy,” he said.
We helped him lift the fish into the cooler, and then we stood there looking in.
“Why, that’s a regular aquarium,” Beriah said. “I just wish it had glass sides on it.”
Uncle Burley laughed. “Well, we could caulk up the candy counter and put him in that.”
Beriah and I laughed too, and we looked at the fish again.
“Well, he looks comfortable enough,” Uncle Burley said. He shut the lid and turned around. “We’ll be seeing you, Beriah.”
Beriah sat down on the bench beside the cooler. “Aw, stick around a while, Burley.”
Uncle Burley didn’t say whether he’d stay or not, but I could see that he was relieved when Beriah asked him to. He opened the screen door and started out.
“When did you all catch him, Burley?”
Uncle Burley stopped and turned around. “Last night.” He stepped back inside and let the door close behind him.
“Last night?” Beriah said. “You all caught a fish like that in the dark?”
“Well,” Uncle Burley said, “it wasn’t a lot of trouble.”
Beriah kept asking questions; and while Uncle Burley answered them he moved back into the store. He walked to the counter, and to the cooler again, and finally sat down on the bench with Beriah and propped up his feet. He’d tell only as much as Beriah asked for, and then he’d wait for another question.
Nathan Coulter Page 9
