The Bottom of the Harbor

by Joseph Mitchell

  “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 mossbunkers 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 itself 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 d
ead 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 showplace. 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.”

  Mr. Hewitt leaned over and opened the stove door and spat on the red-hot coals. “To hear him tell it,” he said, “he was hell on widows. He knew just what to say to them.”

  “Did this gentleman ever get married himself?” asked Mr. Townsend. He sounded indignant.

  “He was married twice,” said Mr. Hewitt. “A year or two before he died, he divorced his first wife and married a woman half his age.”

  “I hope some man came up to her in the cemetery when she was visiting his grave and got acquainted with her and sympathized with her,” Mr. Townsend said, “and one thing led to another.”

  Mr. Hewitt had lost interest in this turn of the conversation. “It’s highly unlikely she ever visited his grave,” he said.

  Mr. Townsend shrugged his shoulders. “Ah, well,” he said. “In that case.”

  Mr. Hewitt got up and went over and scrutinized the photograph again. “I look a lot older now than I did when this picture was made,” he said, “and there’s no denying that.” He continued to scrutinize the photograph for a few more minutes, and then returned to his chair.

  “When I was young,” he said, “I had the idea death was for other people. It would happen to other people but not to me. That is, I couldn’t really visualize it happening to me. And if I did allow myself to think that it would happen to me, it was very easy to put the thought out of my mind—if it had to take place, it would take place so far in the distant future it wasn’t worth thinking about, let alone worrying about, and then the years flew by, and now it’s right on top of me. Any time now, as the fellow said, the train will pull into the station and the trip will be over.”

  “Ah, well,” said Mr. Townsend.

  “It seems to me it was only just a few short years ago I was a young man going back and forth to work,” said Mr. Hewitt, “and the years flew by, they really flew by, and now I’m an old man, and what I want to know is, what was the purpose of it? I know what’s going to take place one of these days, and I can visualize some of the details of it very clearly. There’ll be one twenty-five-dollar wreath, or floral design, or whatever they call them now, and there’ll be three or maybe four costing between twelve dollars and a half and fifteen dollars, and there’ll be maybe a dozen running from five to ten dollars, and I know more or less what the preacher will say, and then they’ll take me out to the Edgewater Cemetery and lay me beside my parents and my brothers and sisters and two of my grandparents and one of my great-grandparents, and I’ll lie there through all eternity while the Aluminum Company factory goes put-put-put.”

  Harry laughed, “You make the Aluminum Company factory sound like a motorboat,” he said.

  “I don’t go to funerals any more,” said Mr. Townsend. “Funerals breed funerals.”

  “My grandfather used to like the word ‘mitigate,’” Harry said. “He liked the sound of it, and he used it whenever he could. When he was a very old man, he often got on the subject of dying. ‘You can’t talk your way out,’ he’d say, ‘and you can’t buy your way out, and you can’t shoot your way out, and the only thing that mitigates the matter in the slightest is the fact that nobody else is going to escape. Nobody—no, not one.’”

  “I know, I know,” said Mr. Hewitt, “but what’s the purpose of it?”

  “You supported your wife, didn’t you?” asked Harry. “You raised a family, didn’t you? That’s the purpose of it.”

  “That’s no purpose,” said Mr. Hewitt. “The same thing that’s going to happen to me is going to happen to them.”

  “The generations have to keep coming along,” said Harry. “That’s all I know.”

  “You’re put here,” said Mr. Hewitt, “and you’re allowed to eat and draw breath and go back and forth a few short years, and about the time you get things in shape where you can sit d
own and enjoy them you wind up in a box in a hole in the ground, and as far as I can see, there’s no purpose to it whatsoever. I try to keep from thinking such thoughts, but the last few years almost everything I see reminds me of death and dying, and time passing, and how fast it passes. I drove through Shadyside the other day, and I noticed that some of those factories down there are getting real smoky-looking and patched up and dilapidated, and the thought immediately occured to me, ‘I’m older than most of those factories. I remember most of them when they were brand-new, and, good God, look at them now.’ And to tell the truth, I’m pretty well patched up myself. I’ve maybe not had as many operations as some people, but I’ve had my share. Tonsils, adenoids, appendix, gall bladder, prostate. I wear false teeth, and I’ve worn them for years—‘your dentures,’ my dentist calls them; ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to him, ‘I know what they are, and you know what they are.’ And the last time I went to the eye doctor he prescribed two pairs of glasses, one for ordinary use and one for reading, and I can’t really see worth a damn out of either one of them. I’ve got varicose veins from walking around on wet cement floors in Fulton Market all those years, and I have to wear elastic stockings that are hell to get on and hell to get off and don’t do a damned bit of good, and I’ve got fallen arches and I have to wear some kind of patented arch supports that always make me feel as if I’m about to jump, and I’ve never known the time I didn’t have corns—corns and bunions and calluses.”