by Lamar Herrin
Walter said, Okay, I get it, the times, the times. But what about the fish?
And I said, Sorry to disappoint you, Walter. But this isn’t a fish story.
Howie Whalen? Little Howie Whalen?
Not really. Not yet. If it had been, it all might have turned out differently.
And not Phil Hodge?
No.
All right. I’ll play along. Let’s say I’m half hooked—I could still get off. A splash more?
I allowed him to pour me more bourbon. I took a deep breath, breathing the mustiness of the house down. And to be clear, I said, the WPA workers did or didn’t build this cabin?
They were around, Walter said, they were active in the vicinity. Down at the other end of the lake there’s a bridge with their names on it. They had to sleep somewhere when they were doing the work.
I’ll give you that.
Amazing, he said, shaking his head. They were everywhere. And they built things to last.
Not everywhere. Not so much in the South, I said. At least not as much as up here.
No?
You’ll have to look a while down there to find a bridge or a park or a dam or anything with a WPA plaque on it.
Wouldn’t that be someone like your uncle’s fault?
For the record, Big Howie was no uncle of mine. Rosalyn fell for him, that’s all.
Rosalyn had been a Pritchard, one of the Pritchard girls. My last name was McManus, first name Jim, neither little nor big.
Aunt Rosalyn, who never stopped laughing, Walter reminded me.
Oh, she stopped, all right, I said.
And another silence fell. I listened for sounds from cabins up the lake, and didn’t hear them. No clatter of after-supper noises, no voices raised or held in check, no music, no cars pulling in or pulling out. No owls in the trees. No loons on the lake although I’d been told there were loons and, once I heard them, I’d never forget their mournful wails. Just the amplified sparseness of insect sounds and the lingering echo of a fish that had splashed no telling when.
Actually, it’s a funny story I was going to tell you, I said, if you’re willing to take it that way.
If you are, Walter corrected me.
You’re a northerner, I advised him. Try seeing it through Phil Hodge’s eyes.
To begin with, Phil Hodge had never seen kudzu. He’d seen tumbledown shacks and abandoned farm buildings and billboards whose last images had blanched out or peeled off with the years, but he had never seen those odd-angled eyesores rounded out in great transformative swells of spring green. Phil Hodge didn’t talk a lot, but until he got used to the kudzu, he couldn’t help himself. He could call to mind any number of half-abandoned factory towns up in Massachusetts where they should plant this stuff, even though that far north he knew the kudzu would never survive. I told him he was right, and added that the kudzu was lovely to look at, but unless you trimmed it on a daily basis it would swallow you along with everything else. Plus, it was snaky.
A good number of those half-abandoned towns up north had lost their factories to some of these right-to-work southern towns we were passing through, and then those southern factories had built newer versions of themselves on the outskirts of town. These newer plants were single-story, football-field-sized affairs, so low-slung they reminded me of bunkers. The loading docks were serviced by trucks and not by trains running on spurs of track alongside.
I caught myself trying to re-create my boyhood days in these towns for my friend Phil Hodge, and stopped. I refused to wax nostalgic. Instead I told him about my aunt Rosalyn and her family. Big and Little Howie, and their daughter Ellie, barely four. But I didn’t really tell him much about them, either. Remember, we were going fishing. I spent time describing the lake up in the mountains, where I assumed after staying a night with the Whalens we would spend the four days we had left, reliving my boyhood visits and catching fish. Fishing the jumps. That we could do. I had never fished the jumps without Little Howie in the boat, but I could see him so clearly, could remember every move he made—the timing, when to go still, when to roar in—that I convinced myself I could take his place. He was a very handsome man, Little Howie, with blue eyes and black hair like his mother and, utterly unlike his father, something Greek—the high-bridged nose, the sculpted brow and jawline—to the cut of his face. As far as fishing the jumps went, Little Howie’s message had been clear: Don’t be bashful or proud, be patient, go still, then get there quickly and feed as hungrily as the bass.
But this is not a fishing story, Walter reminded me. Am I to understand you never wet a line?
If I answer that question, I said, I may lose any hope for suspense I ever had.
Well, wait a minute! Walter stopped me. For the record, you did catch fish. There was that lake on the way back north you said you and Phil Hodge stumbled on. In fact, I think your expression was a “stringer full” of fish.
But not, I said, fishing the jumps.
When you were lying in the tent, Walter went on with his recollection, and this Phil Hodge had you back on the brink of a nuclear war …
And you were a boy, Walter. What do you remember about the Cuban missile crisis?
What do I remember? I remember in the house some … tension but some excitement, too. It all sounded like a movie my parents had missed the ending of … a lot of questioning, second-guessing … something like that.
Well, here’s what I remember. I thought we were in for it. The Kennedys were young and glamorous and untested. The Bay of Pigs, what we knew of it, had been a disaster. Khrushchev was as wily as they got, then when the time came to pound his shoe on his UN desk, he could do that too. Probably the only reason Phil Hodge was on and off that plane so many times was because nobody in Washington knew what they were doing. I was in college, worrying about some term paper I’d been assigned to write. A bunch of us had crowded around a blurry black-and-white television outside the administration building, and I remember thinking, No sense beginning that paper now. Which was no small consolation, believe me. It was a clear fall day, and I took a deep breath of clear fall air. Meanwhile …
Your friend Phil Hodge is getting on and off that plane.
Which I guess was his assignment.
We both drank at that moment, and in the motor-free silence that followed I had a recollection of Phil Hodge as we cast little floating-minnow lures called Rapalas in and around the shoreline brush of a lake some three hundred miles north of the one where we would not wet a line. I saw Phil Hodge hook his first fish—a smallmouth, almost three pounds, we would later learn—and turn to me with a look of such profound relief I could call it wild, maybe even a savage sort of relief, all the more so since Phil Hodge had a New Englander’s long-boned face with eyes that, before they revealed any clear-cut emotion, would narrow their line, as his mouth would, and leave you guessing. But with a fiercely fighting three-pound smallmouth on the hook, his eyes had flown open and his mouth had dropped wide, and it was as if he’d become a believer, after all the disbelief he’d been asked to stomach until then.
What you also have to keep in mind, I reminded Walter, is that new lake with its twelve-hundred-mile shoreline that passed very close to the Whalens’ town. Built eight to ten years earlier—just the right time span for a first generation of bass to come of age. We would have our choice, Phil Hodge and I. For old times’ sake, that lake of my boyhood up in the mountains, and our own boat, our own quarters. But for sheer poundage and thrill count, I said, we might want to fish the lake whose bright red clay banks and cloudy jade waters we’d been driving along for some miles by then.
The Whalens lived in a forest of pines, flowering bushes, and ornamental hardwoods, which the road wound back among. No straight broad avenue with live oaks arching over it, and no columned plantation house waiting to receive you. The Whalen family house was single-storied—I don’t even remember a basement—with rooms seemingly added onto rooms at random, and each with its picture window. From wherever a Whalen sat, a ca
r winding in on the drive would be visible. Later, of course, cameras could be mounted at every turn in that drive and intruders identified in a flash, but these were turns among azalea bushes and flowering dogwood trees, and this was that sweet medicinal aroma of pines that relieved me of my political differences and took me straight back to my boyhood, where Aunt Rosalyn would always meet me at the door. I was the oldest of her nephews and nieces, and she was the youngest of my aunts. When she was attending college, she’d lived with my parents for at least one year—a year that I was a toddler—and it was to my parents’ house that Howard Whalen had come courting. I had been unwitting witness to it all. Big Howie Whalen—then fit and freshly barbered and in his dashing good looks almost a match for my aunt—in a manner of speaking had to get my consent before he could go off and woo my aunt. He brought me toys. He bucked me up as a champ, I was a helluva fine fella, and I must have consented to his importunities and blessed their union. They had never ceased to exclaim over me as if I was the linchpin to all their good fortune, there from the start. So I could expect Aunt Rosalyn to meet me at the door when I drove up the long winding drive with my Yankee friend in tow.
I had not seen her since her son’s wedding, only a couple of years after her daughter Ellen had been born. Aunt Rosalyn was now in her mid-forties. When she opened the door and stood before me for an instant, I had to take hold of myself: tiny folds of flesh had gathered around her eyes; wrinkles fanned out from the corners of her mouth; her hair was showing strands of gray. She seemed just perceptibly to list to one side. I registered the thought that the birth must have been hard. Then Aunt Rosalyn laughed, a more congested laugh than I remembered, and I opened my arms to give her a hug.
Her laugh carried over to mock alarm. What is that? she exclaimed.
For an instant I thought she meant Phil Hodge, whom she knew I was bringing with me. I was about to reply, Just a harmless and well-behaved Yankee who wants to fish. But she was pointing at my face and giving me time to play dumb. I shook my head and smiled.
Better not let Big Howie catch you with those whiskers on your face, she cautioned as she reached out and stroked my cheek. Does Esther know you’re growing those things?
Esther was my mother, who had half-mothered her youngest sister, too.
I said, You know, I can’t be sure but I don’t believe she does. Can’t it be our little secret, Rosalyn?
She laughed. Not if Big Howie finds out. Then, as if it had never ceased to be the human comedy, nothing more, nothing less, she laughed again.
I glanced over at Phil Hodge with his freshly shaven cheeks and the clean part in his hair. I had never played poker with Phil Hodge, I told Walter, but, amused or disapproving, he certainly knew how to keep a straight face.
It was then that my littlest cousin Ellie ran in, Ellie who had no memory of me, of course, but who couldn’t wait to reach up—I had to bend down—and stroke my beard.
I identified myself as her first and oldest cousin, and her as the prettiest little cousin I had. We were kissing cousins, I concluded, and kissed her on the cheek.
She was indeed pretty and surely a little more adventurous than she allowed her well-behaved self to be. She had large hazel eyes, of a brown so light as to appear golden.
She giggled at the scratchy touch of my beard, or that was the little show she performed. Then she retreated halfway behind her mother, as though inviting me to play ring-around-the-rosy until I caught her. I glanced up at Rosalyn and in that moment found it impossible to accept the fact that my aunt had given birth to that little girl. This was a strange sensation. With Phil Hodge at my side, whom I’d invited down there, I experienced a moment of … generational disorientation. Wasn’t I the child and Rosalyn not my aunt? I reached out and did something I didn’t recall ever doing: I patted my aunt Rosalyn flush against the cheek. I put my mouth to her ear and murmured, You have a beautiful little girl. Then, so close to my ear that her laugh sounded like a husky growl, she whispered back, Jimmy, you better not let Big Howie catch you with those whiskers on your face.
When Big Howie drove in in his latest Cadillac and planted himself in the room, the first thing he said was, Who’re you trying to look like, ole Uncle Abe?
And I responded, No, I think I was going more for Robert E. Lee.
For my efforts I got Big Howie’s booming laugh and Phil Hodge got his first impression of how Big Howie Whalen could fill up a room with his all’s-forgiven bonhomie while off in a corner he calculated his advantage.
And you boys wanna catch some fish.
If you and Little Howie haven’t fished them all out, I said.
Little Howie’s got all those diapers to change. He hasn’t got a minute free for fishing. I’ll tell you who is the fisherman, though.
Little Howie had married before he finished college. Obeying a summons, I had made a quick trip back from California to be one of his groomsmen—his hunting and fishing and football buddies filled the other spots. His best man, of course, was his father. His bride was his high school sweetheart and maybe the only other person in town whose beauty rivaled his. I’d been not so much dazzled as astonished that a town so small could produce such a pairing. Little Howie had wanted family among his groomsmen, and he’d wanted—as he always had from me—my astonishment. The man who caught fish almost at will was now changing diapers. A natural.
There she stands, Big Howie said, and signaled to his daughter as though cuing her to come onstage. Best fisherman—he corrected himself—best fisherwoman in the family.
Little Ellie was peeking out from behind her mother now, reluctant, it seemed, to step forth and take her bow. I flashed on her sitting up in one of those Bassmaster swivel seats. Anyone there to witness the feat would give a headshake of incredulity, quickly followed by a humbled nod. Of course she could land a fighting fish practically her own size. She was a Whalen.
The question, I said, is whether we should go up in the mountains or stay down here and try this new lake out. What’s your best guess on that? I asked Big Howie.
My best guess? Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we? Now, that would surely depend on …
He said this weightily and trailed off as only Big Howie could, waiting to see whether you caught a ride on his train of thought or remained behind, stubbornly stranded, and became an object of charity, which was never without its strings.
And Walter reminded me: If I’ve got this right, you’d been something like their mascot, their good luck charm, Big Howie Whalen came a-courtin’ and you, you little angel, gave your blessing. Am I to understand all that had worn off?
Certainly worn thin, I said, and I remembered Aunt Rosalyn standing submissively off to the side but with a subtly intrigued—call it “gamesome”—smile on her face. And little Ellie standing out beside her now, maybe even more gamesome than her mother, those near-golden eyes of hers expressing an impending delight, while she maintained a soldierly little bearing and waited me out.
And Phil Hodge? Walter said.
Dumbfounded, he’d tell me later when, beholden to nobody, we’d caught all the fish we wanted and begun to savor the last laugh, but not until then.
All because of “it depends,” Walter said. Did this Big Howie tell you what it depended on?
Oh, that almost went without saying, although it did take him a while. First we had to go through family stuff. My parents, especially my mother, who for the sport of it occasionally liked to go toe to toe with Big Howie. My father, who had come off the road and opened a business of his own, which compared to the Cadillac-powered Whalen Apparels barely crept along. My sister, perhaps engaged to the wrong man. My love life or the lack of it, which brought out a wistful sigh or two from my aunt. And so on. Other aunts and uncles and cousins—down there you don’t start climbing the family tree unless you venture out onto every limb. Aunt Rosalyn kept worrying that Phil Hodge might be bored by so much trivia, and Phil Hodge, a very measured man, at least until he caught that first smallmouth
, assured her he wasn’t. We steered away from politics—we tried. If Big Howie had insinuated that everybody north of the Mason-Dixon Line was soft on communism, our ace in the hole would have been that commie missile site that Phil Hodge had been trained to jump onto and take out. Except …
Except, Walter said, still alert in spite of the bourbon, you didn’t hear that story until you’d gone three hundred miles back north.
True, and it’s hard to imagine Phil Hodge volunteering it there at the dinner table.
And your little cousin Ellie? She sat through it all?
She was her father’s daughter. If Little Howie had been the town’s favorite son, it now had a favorite daughter. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, Walter. Big Howie Whalen was much admired in town. He didn’t exactly take the WPA’s place, but he helped fix things up. He donated money for parks. The library. Outfitted the town’s baseball team. Kept the Little League going. And he kept an eye on race relations, too. In his plant he had blacks working alongside whites—Well, not exactly “alongside.” Whites did the design work, the tailoring and the sewing, blacks the pressing and bundling. For the most part, civil rights marchers went somewhere else. He was given civic awards—and he made sure that I as a Yankee convert saw all the news clippings, all the photographs and plaques. I was just hoping he wouldn’t pull them out and force them on Phil Hodge. And he didn’t. He might have even been a little wary of Phil Hodge. He didn’t know just who he had seated at his dinner table. He knew me, or he thought he did. He knew me from a baby on up. And, it seemed, I wanted to take this Yankee friend of mine fishing in one of his lakes—
Twelve hundred miles? Three states? His lake? And I assume he only owned his little portion of that one in the mountains.
A sweet little portion—but true enough.
And not all the fish, not all the bass and certainly not all the minnows.