by Lamar Herrin
She had already poured the syrup, which ran down the clockface of the pancakes at each of the quarter hours. A stack of four, to start off. Because, depending on the day, the weather, the sunlight beyond the window, the flowers and the leaves and the birdsong out there, and depending on how sweet Mama Grace’s dreams had been, how many clicks of a camera had been directed her way before her husband discovered her from his pulpit and put an end to all that, there might be more. A stack of pancakes reaching up to heaven, a veritable chain of being, known as isums to the initiated and all for me. In exchange for which I would assume the obligations of any family’s firstborn once my childhood years had passed. I was being fattened up to take the weight of a family’s fate onto my shoulders. My life was being sweetened, and I was being made strong.
I told Molly her isums were worthy of my grandmother’s, and I commiserated with Walter since the second stack would surely pale in comparison to the one I’d just eaten. I owed him, I acknowledged, and I owed Molly, too. It was a twofold debt, which could be paid in full, Walter informed me, one combined with the other, once the fish began to jump into the boat.
And why would the fish ever want to jump into the boat? an uninformed Molly still wanted to know.
The day was clear, the wind was down, the water lay glassy and green, taking on the sun’s heat there near the surface where the minnows would rise to breathe.
I owed her an explanation, if for nothing else in return for the pancakes I’d just eaten.
The tedium of fishing—did Molly have any idea? It was legendary. It was the stuff of legend. Fishing with nets was one thing, but for most of mankind fishing meant sitting on the banks of a river with a pole between your legs, or off the side of a boat. Into that vastness you dropped a tiny piece of bait, or you cast a little demitasse-sized spoon with a hook attached. There was a world down there, and what you contributed to it was such a microscopic speck in the grand scheme of things that the chances a fish would swim by and take the time to nibble seemed prohibitive. You fished on faith, you baited your hook with faith, and after so prolonged a wait, after such silence from the gods, whose faith wouldn’t turn stale? A hook baited with stale faith, Molly, in a world down there full of wondrous sights, and what were your chances? You asked fish to come join you up top, and did you bait your hook with the most glittering of jewels? Did you even offer them isums? No, you offered them worms that drowned and stopped wriggling almost at once, or little minnows that swam around with a hook in their backs as though they were harnessed to a tractor-sized load. You devised little fish- or fly-like lures. You turned to artifice. You gave them a wiggle and a shine they’d never seen before and expected them to bite on the sheer novelty of the thing, as if they were teenagers larking down a shopping center mall. And it’s no contest, Molly. Oh, you get bites, you get strikes, fish get bored too and the law of averages is a law that no creature is exempt from, but the tedium is vast and can seem unplumbed, and you allow yourself to become mesmerized by a bobber that can’t help but move since there is not one speck of unmoving whatever in this universe of ours. Or you cast and you cast, and this time maybe that tug on your shiny lure is not a hook catching in a weed or log or bumping in a fitful skitter along the bottom, not this time, but you know better, every fisherman does, it all remains a mystery down there. We try to solve it, we even invent devices that will map out every inch of that underwater terrain, we can zoom in on all of its occupants, we can count the fish and take them one by one. But we can’t. There are structures down there, houses, barns, towns we flooded, and since we once walked those streets and took our sport in those fields, we assume it’s a domain that answers to us still. And it doesn’t. But the lure, the mystery, the close-at-hand otherness of what once was ours can be irresistible, so we keep dropping hooks into it, subjecting ourselves to a tedium as vast as the heavens if we only knew. Which we do, Molly. But at the first tug on a hook we forget. Fishermen—and not the ones seining through the seas with their nets—are no better than boys, blinded by longing and made pigheaded by faith, who never give up, who never learn. A nibble, just a nibble, and we continue to fish …
The little kitchen, once the epicenter of the cabin that had become this house, was now crowded with my friends. The production of isums had ceased. Walter was going hungry, and Elaine was standing just inside the door, perhaps drawn against her better judgment by the sound of my voice. They had gathered again around me, but if I were to reach out as though over a card table to take all their hands, would they shy back, or offer one provisional hand instead of two? I had lured them all the way down here, into this very nub of a kitchen, with no Buck Coggins beside me to assure them that it wasn’t all doom and gloom, that if you were part of the Whalen clan, with a dash of Pritchard blood to give you a preacher’s flair, hope was at hand.
And hope had a name. It was called “the jumps.”
There comes a time, Molly, I resumed my discourse, a right time and a right place, when if a fisherman’s faith has not faltered, has not flickered out, it may be made whole again and robust. The gods alone decide when to send up the fish to lure a doubting fisherman back to the fold. I say there comes a time, Molly, when the fish are so ravenous to feed that, just as you have given us isums to eat, the gods will send schools of minnows up to the surface of a lake so that the fish, beautiful green-striped bass, with capacious bellies and mouths as large as infants’ heads, likewise rise to the surface and put on a show. A one-price, all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, and, like most of us then, we lose sight of what our stomachs can hold and feed through our eyes. The minnows rise to the surface and the bass go back again and again, piling serving on serving, eating with sheer gluttonous delight, and in that they resemble us and in that we know them very well. Do they actually jump into the boat, Molly? Do fishermen jump into the lake? And the little minnows that aren’t eaten, what happens to them? The minnows dart off in every direction, then look for another school to join. At the instant the feeding ceases and the water flashes out smooth, the fishermen might grab the sides of their boats and hold on, as if they’ve been brought out of a dream. True, a fisherman may fall in, but a cold sodden fisherman sobers up fast. And do fish actually jump into the boat, you ask? Fish are leaping. When fish tire of feasting on minnows, they might leap to take flies out of the air. One might very well land in your boat. Even in your lap, Molly, and look up at you and mistake you for anything but what you are. You yourself could be considered bait. You fish the jumps and you might get jumped, but that would put you among the most fortunate fishermen of all, because then you’d have a hell of a fish story to tell. Finally—I shook my head and humbly confessed—it’s about the stories, Molly. It’s about what you and your fish can team up to get your listeners to believe.
Walter laughed because Walter understood. With her pancake flipper in hand Molly gave a deflated little laugh, then roused herself to see if I had something sensible to add. From the doorway Elaine professed that she now understood. Man and fish team up, you could even say man and fish mate, and what do they give birth to? Why, a shaggy dog. A wet, shaggy dog. Just don’t let him shake all over me!
We all laughed. We all ate pancakes, we took our time, I ate a second stack, the women, lingering over theirs, did too, and soon thereafter Walter departed and began to rummage through his tackle box. Looking over his shoulder, I observed him for a while before reaching over and deliberately closing the box. In the palm of my other hand I held out to him two of the spoons that Buck Coggins, one of the Buck Cogginses, someone in that line of descent, had loaned to me. The strictly silver one that Howie Whalen had favored and the classic daredevil spoon with the red stripe. They lay on my palm for an inordinate time while Walter studied them as though he were trying to fathom a shell game. Finally he looked up at me. I made it easy for him. I withdrew the red-striped spoon and left him the silver one. I said, You’ve come all this way. Be Howie Whalen for a while and you’ll catch some fish. He narrowed his eyes. He smelled a trap
. I shook my head. I’ve been being Howie Whalen practically all my life. Take your turn now, Walter.
We threaded line through the rods’ eyes and tied on our lures, Walter the silver spoon, I the red-striped one. We set our drags, neither too heavy nor too light. We checked through our tackle boxes. Other spoons, plenty of spinners, and some streamlined, minnow-like plugs. Walter had his long-snouted pliers with which he’d extracted a hook from a pickerel on day one. Knives, a stringer, bobbers of diverse sizes. Hooks, line, and sinkers.
We scanned the water. That we could see, not a boat was on the lake. Was the season over and had all the summer people gone home? It had the feel of a vast abandonment, an empty stage. A misty softness on the surface of the water, to the overhanging air, had begun to lift, and the lake was gathering to a slatelike smoothness on which the activity of its inhabitants might be writ clear. I allowed Walter to observe me as from its hiding place in a crevice beside the fireplace I retrieved a key. We said goodbye to the women. They could stand on the dock and watch us, but if on the trail of the fleeing minnows we passed out of sight, they would have to take us on faith. They managed to maintain a solemn air, as though we were whalers setting out on a voyage around the world. In the boathouse I retrieved a second key, left the speedboat suspended, and flipped the switch on the hoist that allowed the fishing boat to be lowered into the water. We stowed our gear. Walter took his seat in the prow of the boat, and in the stern I used a paddle to pole us out of the boat-house and into open water. To test it I turned on the electric motor, with its middle-C hum, turned it off, and ignited the outboard motor, not as Howie had to do when he’d first taken me out, by yanking on the starter cord of a smaller and noisier motor, but by flicking a switch. The propeller churned the water with a powerful, gargling restraint. I made a single-planed gesture to Walter to indicate the flat and endless reach of the lake. It had almost nothing in common with the lake we’d first canoed out on, which a little trailing arm of a glacier had dug out, and whose water was almost that cold. This was a lake that had created itself as a dam made narrow valleys into broad bodies of water and little streamheads into coves. It smelled of the silt that had never settled, of its algae, its fish, its boathouses, and the gas films from weekend motors that had yet to dissolve. It was powerfully impure, and even as a boy you understood when you set out on it that you might not be the same boy when you got back. A thrilling prospect for a boy.
I opened the motor and directed us out toward the center of our arm of the lake, then once in open water began to choke down. With his back to me, Walter sat up in the prow of the boat, searching, I knew from his erect neck and straightened spine, for that flashing front of ripples that minnows might make as they fled for their lives. I brought the motor down to an idling gurgle, then cut it off entirely, and for an instant we could hear the smallest of waves. Walter glanced back at me only once, reluctant to take his eyes off what lay about him. I sensed he wanted to ask me a question: Tell me again, just what is it exactly I’m looking for? But then he turned to face back out, exposing to me all that curly gray hair at the back of his head. An old friend. A trusted old friend, who might not scruple to set a trap for me at the poker table, but really nowhere else. And who would expect the same of me. I stood.
It didn’t happen at once. My cousin had taken me to the spot on the lake where it had seemed to happen again and again, but that was only the way memory worked. You remembered the moments that mattered, but the dailiness disappeared. Add up the truly memorable moments in your life and how long would you have lived? Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Howie Whalen, Little Howie Whalen when he’d first brought me out here, claimed a disproportionate share of my life for the actual moments we’d spent together. I looked out over the lake, and such was the greenness, such was the surface of that watery world, I might have been an infant still, first learning how to read a scribbling of foam on that cloudy green slate. Whalers in crows nests, I’d been led to believe, fell into just such suggestible trances. I gave myself a shake, started the motor, and moved us farther out into the main body of the lake, where I cut the motor again and scanned the water through a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc. Midday, and birds flew overhead, swallows, I assumed, small and split-tailed, then a landlocked gull of some sort, a potential competitor, but crossing, it seemed, from one shore of the lake to the other, and a crow taking far too much attention, making a lot of needless noise. The truth was, we were alone, entirely alone. I said what went without saying, You never know. You just never know.
We moved again. The heat of the day bore down. The body of water had broadened. We wouldn’t want to go anywhere near the dam, where a current would form, then quicken, so I turned us away and up into an area of the lake where the green noticeably lightened, red clay banks sloped into the water, entering streams passed through marshes, and we saw wading birds that would eat the minnows before the bass could. Again I cut the motor. The valley here was broad, the lake somewhat more shallow, and the heat hotter still. Walter turned back to me, mostly mouthing the words. Don’t tell me we forgot water! Don’t tell me that! And the beer and the Beam brothers, I answered him, and for a moment we looked at each other like children, too excitable by half, and shook our heads. When Walter resumed his lookout and, standing, I resumed mine, we both saw, where we hadn’t before, a slanting wing of ripples racing across the lake, and the effect was such that a whale, if we had been whalers, might have breached not a hundred feet in front of us. Walter made an urgent, revving sound down in his throat, and still standing, I took his cue, started the motor, and speeded us into what before we got there had already become an area of turbulence that any pleasure-boater would steer a wide berth around. I remembered in that instant what my cousin had told me. I could hear his voice, his quiet but authoritative drawl, as if he was used to people hanging on his words. Bass are territorial. You horn in on what they consider theirs, and they’ll fight you that much harder. You can catch them then if they don’t take the rod right out of your hands.
The jumps, I said, but under my voice, a word of recognition, as though welcoming an old friend. Walter held his spinning rod at the ready, from the end of which dangled Buck Coggins’s silver spoon. I could pull up short of the feeding area and, from that margin, we could cast into the melee of jumping minnows and bass lashing their tails, as any sensible fishermen would have done, but I found myself taking my cousin at his word. When Walter sensed what I was about to do, he jerked around, anxious disapproval mixing with a thrill-seeking excitement on his face, as if I were about to drive us off a cliff. What was I doing?! Stop short and cast in! We’d spend the rest of this sweltering day with nothing to drink looking for another chance like this! We were close enough now to see the dorsal fins, the lashing tails, and that glistening forest-green stripe as the bass rolled. The minnows were jumping like fleas, but they were little fish themselves, acrobatic and graceful for the instant they were airborne. It was worth stopping short just to take in the show, but I cut the motor only when we’d gone off Walter’s cliff, entered the melee, and were part of that hunting ground. The feeding was so unbridled, so furious, that I sensed it might not appear again in our lifetimes. Comets passed, went back to the heavens, then generations later passed again. Otherworldly combustion—it felt like that. I cut the motor and picked up my rod, I didn’t bother to direct my cast. I’d barely begun to reel in when a bass struck. I heard my cousin’s voice, Little Howie Whalen’s, going on. Get a bass angry and it’ll fight you to the end. With a whirring of gears the fish began to strip out line, and I’d be damned! For every foot of line it took out and for every second I wasted winding it back in I missed catching that many more. I was not a diehard fisherman, not the way my cousin had been, but here was a chance to even a score I hadn’t been aware existed, and I reeled in furiously so that I could cast again. Walter gave a shout when he had one on too. I got mine in first, fighting like hell as it came alongside the boat, mad, really mad, not just to be caught but to be caught
in the midst of a feast, because there were so many more minnows out there asking to be eaten in large-mouthed gulps, and when I unhooked it and threw it into the bottom of the boat, I discovered I was as mad as the fish was for having slowed me down. By then Walter had unhooked his and, following my example, thrown it down with the other, and for an instant, as the bass thrashed, we looked at each other, too eager to get back to the fishing to even register disbelief. We cast into the boiling water and hooked our seconds. Hold on! I heard Walter say as he tossed his, no smaller than his first, in with the others, while I was still struggling to reel mine in. Then I called out to him, Will you look at this! Look at this! Look, Walter, dammit! I demanded as I raised my second up over the edge of the boat. Only it wasn’t a second, it was a second and a third. Two fish caught on the same small treble hook. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I told you! Who’s gonna believe this? You’ll have to testify, you know! We’ll have to get a Coggins to believe it! But Walter had already turned back to what showed no sign of slowing down. He cast and then I did. A silver spoon and a red-striped one. The danger, the disaster, would be to cross each other’s lines and watch the feeding finish as we struggled to get untangled. Somehow we managed to avoid that. The water continued to boil, the bass struck, turned over, dove and came up again. A strike became a second strike and then a third until a fish was hard on the hook, followed by that mulish tug in reverse, then the darting and the ratcheting out of line. And the anger in it all was palpable, the outrage, to be rudely removed like this from a feast in progress, and if either Walter or I had fallen overboard, the bass might indeed have become piranhas and shown their teeth. I flashed on that pickerel and the little saw-blade teeth that Walter had kept out of my hand. It might have gone no further than that. Look the other way and not in that pickerel’s eye and I might have left Howie Whalen and his tragic kin and mine to their fates. But it was all coming to a head here, and I knew just as certainly as I knew that the isums in that first stack were mine alone to consume that it would never happen like this again. If I had Walter to thank, I thanked him, but when a fish struck that almost did pull the rod out of my hands, Walter was entirely offstage, and I got set to pit myself against all the wild dartings and furious soundings and bitter opposition I’d encountered in my life up to then, but now for the thrill of the thing, here for the taking, for the sport.