Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  Anyway, we gathered our fly rods, clippers, flashlights, pliers, bait cans, and a five-gallon bucket. I filled my Coleman lantern and oiled its pump, and under the disapproving eye of my wife and daughter, Pete and I took off down the mountain. If Ozzie couldn’t go, we’d hunt night crawlers on his lawn and go in our boat.

  As we approached Ozzie’s farm, I had the usual twinge of hesitation. Ozzie’s wife, Gisela, was a strange and formidable girl. He married her when he was forty and she was twenty-six, thinking, he told me, that he was getting “about the nearest thing to a good squaw I could find hereabouts.” “Some squaw,” I’d said then. She was a very pretty girl. She came from a large, poor family, and he figured she’d be a good, quiet, hardworking type. Alas for poor Ozzie; what he got in that gamble was a good, hardworking, ambitious, intense, explosive girl who wanted to come up in the world and drag old Ozzie along with her. She disapproved of idle hands, and idle hands were what Ozzie had cultivated most of his life. Before his marriage he worked occasionally in the woods and did odd jobs—-just enough to pay the taxes on his farm and make payments on his Jeep. Now he commuted by car pool to the ball-bearing factory in Sommerslee and was making payments on a Ford, a new kitchen complete with dispose-all, a new septic system, a vacuum cleaner, a living-room set, a drilled well, a forced-hot-air furnace, a TV, and other things. Once he listed them all to me, his voice growing smaller and smaller under the enormity of these commitments.

  She couldn’t keep him from going hunting and fishing, but she had the power to make him sad, and when Ozzie was sad, no one was sadder. He was a big, pale man with large ropy muscles full of knots, green eyes, and very even, horn-yellow teeth. He always wore the standard green workman’s uniform and an old checked hunting cap.

  Gisela, who met us at the door, was still a very handsome woman, narrow-waisted and small-boned, with soft black hair and sharp blue eyes. She smiled pleasantly until she divined our purpose from our clothes, and then her smile turned frozen—a smile of her inner sense of the inevitability of sloth, decadence, and innate worthlessness. In spite of this she let us into her clean and shining kitchen.

  Ozzie sat there at the Formica dinette set looking out of place, trying to smile. I nervously suggested horned pouting.

  “I don’t know,” he said furtively, and at that moment we both hated ourselves. Gisela, still smiling that inside-out smile, went to the sink and carefully wiped a Teflon frypan. Pete stood carefully near the door.

  “Well,” I said, “we’d like to hunt a few night crawlers on your lawn, anyway. Pete and I’d like to catch a few fish—maybe down on the Fowler River.”

  “No size to ’em there,” Ozzie said. “I could show you a place they run to a pound or better.” A quick look toward Gisela, and his face turned blank, stunned. “Goddammit,” he muttered.

  “Well,” I said soothingly, “we’ll pick up a few night crawlers, if you don’t mind. Good night, Gisela.” She didn’t turn, but I did. Pete was already outside the door.

  Night crawlers are quick and wary beasts, and even though we held red cellophane over our flashlight lenses (they aren’t supposed to be sensitive to red light), it took a lot of concentration to get them. These were nice, muscular worms running to about six inches, and we seldom found one with his whole length out of the ground. The important thing was to figure out which end was anchored, and grab him at the right end before he snapped back into his hole. We’d picked up twenty or thirty by the time we heard the barn doors slide open and the Jeep start. Ozzie drove out with the boat in the truck bed, and we quickly transferred our gear to the Jeep. Without a word we were off.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Ozzie said, finally, and added, “Oh, pardon me, Pete.”

  “That’s okay,” Pete said.

  Ozzie was sad, and we didn’t say much, even when we left the gravel road and groaned through the transfer box up a brushy tote road. Ozzie was very gentle with machines, and we took the rocks and sloughs in low-low for about a mile.

  “There,” he said finally, although I could see nothing but leaves in the headlights. “Down there’s Pickle Pond.” We descended, then, into a bowl surrounded on three sides by steep cliffs. At the shore the black water was silent, and a long shaft of ledge ran down at a steep angle into darkness. “Deep,” Ozzie said. I lit the Coleman lantern, and its hissing white light made us a room in the darkness. We got the boat into the water and put our gear in it. He’d thought, of course, to bring the cooler and a few bottles of cider, and I put our beer and ginger ale in it with the cider. Ozzie had a huge can of night crawlers he’d gathered surreptitiously a few nights before, so we had plenty of bait. As we shoved out toward the middle of the pond, he sighed and said, “Fish now, pay later.”

  My hands were trembling as I strung my rod with sinking line and short leader. I said we used fly rods for horned pout, which might cause some purists to blink. My feeling about the fly rod, however, is that it has evolved not merely as a tool to catch fish, but as an excruciatingly sensitive instrument made to communicate the wild energy of a fish straight to your quivering brain—an extension, in fact, of your very nerves. This magnified return is desired as much for its own sake as for the help it gives in making a proper strike, so why not experience horned pout this way too?

  Ozzie anchored out in the pond in about ten feet of water, and we lowered our angry worms down into the black until they touched bottom, then raised them a little, each according to his own mysterious calculations. We waited, while the lantern hissed and moths danced across the smooth water. The lantern’s whiter light set us out as though we were suspended in space. The water was as black as the night, but if we looked very carefully across to the cliffs and woods we could pick out the muted glimmer of a branch, or a damp slab of ledge. In between was nothing except the miracle of our suspension and the bright moths dancing past on surface tension.

  Pete said, “I got a bite!” in a hushed voice. “See? See?” His rod tip bent, came back, bent again—a motion not caused by anything human. Something down there worried his hook, something alive down there near the bottom. “He’s eating it!” Pete said, and struck, not too hard. Then his rod bent again, and shivered.

  “By God, he’s got one!” Ozzie said happily. “Old Pete got the first one!”

  “Don’t yank him, now,” I said, unable to keep my mouth shut. Pete tended to resent such advice. He reeled him in and carefully lifted him over the gunwale. He was a nice size—not a pound by any means, but a good horned pout about ten inches long. They’re nearly all head, but this one would have some good meat on him. He grunted—a sort of dull, clicking, gutty sound—and Pete stuck his fingers into the wide mouth. With the black barbels hanging down, the horned pout looked like a dark, piscine Fu Manchu. “Look at him bite me,” Pete said proudly. This is something I’m a little squeamish about, but Pete doesn’t seem to be. The beady eyes gleamed while Pete worked the hook out, and a drop of blood came to the lips before Pete dropped him into the bucket. “See?” Pete said, and showed us where the skin of his knuckles was slightly chewed. I use a pliers, myself, explaining that it’s hard enough to hold the fish without getting impaled by one of the three barbs. Actually, I don’t quite like to stick my naked fingers into any wild mouth.

  After that they began to hit, and we all brought them in. In a lull we broke out the cider, and a ginger ale for Pete. Pretty soon the cider was gone and we’d started on the beer. Time doesn’t seem to pass at night on horned pout water, it is gone as soon as you think about it. We’d nearly filled the big bucket with fish, we were covered with slime, bits of worm, and fish blood, and suddenly it was one o’clock. We didn’t have our limits—that would have meant 120 fish among us—but we had plenty. Ozzie was laughing and carrying on. “I goochy geechee geechee goochy gotcha!” he’d say, and strike a fish he’d divined as having just sucked the hook in far enough. “Oh, man! What a mess of fish we got!”

  But as he rowed back toward the Jeep he grew morose again. Fish now, pay lat
er. There is something indefensible, at best, about a man slightly woozy from hard cider, covered with blood and stinking slime, who carries a bucket of gasping fish into an immaculate kitchen. He didn’t say much as we drove back to his farm, but he insisted that we come in and he’d show us how easy it was to skin horned pout.

  “She’ll be in bed, don’t worry,” he said. “Maybe she won’t be asleep, but she’ll be in bed. She don’t like horned pout in any way, shape, manner, or form.”

  When I tried to get out of coming in, he said, “Don’t worry! I ain’t going to use you as no lightning rod. But if a man can’t clean a mess of horned pout in his own goddam kitchen, what the hell good is it?”

  So we went in with the bucket. Ozzie got out his folding knife and grabbed the first unlucky horned pout, who quivered and flicked his tail—just the tail sticking out hopelessly below Ozzie’s big hand.

  “Now watch,” he said, and an expression of grim pleasure and determination held his pale face firm. The other horned pout seemed to watch from the bucket. He used the barbs for leverage, his fingers firmly around them below their points, and cut the tough skin all around the head just above the dorsal barb. The fish quivered and complained. “Now!” Ozzie said fiercely, and with firm strength inserted the blade under the dorsal barb and peeled it and all the black skin down to the tail. The flayed horned pout flopped some more, and still flopped as Ozzie cut off the head and flicked out the bared guts with a thumbnail. “Done! Simple as pie!”

  But it wasn’t simple. Pete and I poked and peeled and dropped fish on the floor while Ozzie efficiently dealt with ten to our one.

  “You got to be firm with ’em,” he said, intensely proud of his skill. “When you get the knack, it’s easy. I never even got stuck once.” As he said this he gathered heads, skin, and guts together on the drainboard and pushed them into a garbage bag.

  “Let us help you clean up,” I said, but he waved the offer away. Then we all glanced toward the door to the dining room, thinking of Gisela, that force. Ozzie may have blanched a little.

  “Never mind,” he said, and with the garbage bag full, he went to shape it, somehow—a gesture anyone will make with any unshapely package—patting it together. Kipling once wrote that there is one wound that will make any grown man cry—a bullet through the palm of the hand. One of those disembodied heads, in any case, proved at that moment what a horned pout’s spines are for. Ozzie didn’t cry, but he did nothing but breathe for a while.

  Finally he straightened up and grinned. “Ain’t it the way, though,” he said. “No matter how careful you are, by God, one’s going to get you good. I never seen it fail.” In his voice was great affection for those barbs. He sucked reflexively on his palm for a moment longer, and then we all began without argument to clean up the rest of the mess.

  Soon Pete and I left. We stank of fish, too, and in my bones, at least, was that sated weariness caused by perhaps too much slaughter in the getting of our meat. At least we wouldn’t have to go through that process in the morning. Our fish lay neatly bare in a plastic bag, ready for the seasoned flour. I had the feeling that after a shower and a long sleep I’d meet the demands of civilization a little differently—perhaps with a little more respect. Slaughter as therapy? I wondered if Pete felt something of this, or if, in his natural state—a kind of brave acceptance of everything—it was something he hadn’t yet had to discover about us all.

  The Snows of Minnesota

  THE FIRST snow came on a warm gray evening—little balls of snow the size of pinheads, at first. Jimmy Paulson held out his palms to them, and they bounced, stuck, and each with a tiny sting melted away into a point of moisture no bigger than a bead of mist. The air was full, right up past the houses and the bare, silent maple trees, full of these quick, floating little balls of snow, and Jimmy was suddenly happy, as he had always been at the first snow when he was at home. Then he remembered that he was not home anymore, but in Leah, New Hampshire, in the yard of this strange old house more than a thousand miles away from Duluth, from his friends, Harold Johnson and Paul Krause, even away from himself as he really was, the person he had once earned the right to be. Was it snowing in Duluth? Did this same gentle storm cover the lake, and Park Point, and the North Shore where the dark woods came down to the lake? No, probably not. He knew better—that in between this dense sky and the sky of Minnesota were clear, empty spaces impossible for him to cross.

  He knew that his family had left their home and come across to this place of old houses and fat trees because his father had been transferred—a word that seemed dishonorable, even dangerous. It had been explained to him that this had really been a promotion for his father, and that the family could now afford this big, dark house on a quiet street. A dead-end street, his mother had said with happiness in her voice; a safe street. But still, “transferred,” this action done upon them all, seemed totally without their consent, and made them all smaller and tenderer, diminished in the world. Where was the lake, the fresh, blue water of Lake Superior? They told him the Atlantic Ocean was not far away, and they would drive over to see it sometime. But that would be an old salt sea, briny and green, not the great lake he desired. It was as if he needed the lake in order to breathe, and ever since he had moved to New Hampshire he felt that something was wrong with his body. He was short of breath, and didn’t want to eat. Once he had vomited for no reason, and cried for no reason.

  In school, his classmates talked with hard, dry voices, and said words like “modren” for “modern,” and “idear” for “idea.” They put r’s where none belonged and left them off where they should have been, and had strange, stiff ways of moving, as though they were being watched by enemies. The school playground was nothing but hard dirt and worn tree roots that came to the surface and froze, helpless under the grinding feet of the children. No one spoke, or could know how to speak, in the close and funny language of his friends, Harold and Paul, who perhaps right now walked through another snow, and jumped over barberry bushes now powdering in the soft Duluth evening. Those brave and funny cavaliers. This was to have been the winter of the fifth grade, when their ages changed from one digit to two, and they would become the princes of boyhood. Ten. “Ten,” he said out loud, and the word was lost in the dark street where the snow, now changing into soft flakes, seemed against the bulk of his family’s new, but old, old house to be a snow that had happened back in history sometime, long before he was born.

  He went into his house quietly, hearing his mother in the kitchen, and went up to his room, where most of his things still sat in boxes. Some were toys, like Mr. Machine, now much too young for him. Arranged around the room in odd piles were his books, now stacked more by size than subject matter, so that a book on tunnels was on top of The Wind in the Willows, and his dictionary lay on a Sears, Roebuck catalogue. His best airplane models had suffered minor damage, and he could have fixed them easily, yet a bent landing gear or a broken tail now seemed a fatal injury, as though it had been a disaster of flight, and the plane had crashed. His paper wasp nest was partly squashed, and lay next to a plastic globe of the world that was smudged at the point of Lake Superior, where his finger had so many times pressed against Duluth. Again the sickish tiredness came over him, and he sat on his bed staring at the striped wallpaper, his eyes sliding quickly out of focus, wishing to be where he could not be.

  His father’s new car came down the street and turned into the driveway, muffled by the snow, and the garage door rumbled down and locked with a thump before his father’s heavy steps came into the kitchen.

  Harry and Ruth Paulson had noticed the change in their son, and had worried about it, and talked it over. It was a difficult adjustment for him, they agreed. Harry went to hang his coat in the hall closet, and came back into the kitchen. “Is he home yet?” he asked hopefully. They both hoped Jimmy would find a friend and come home late for supper one of these nights, the way he frequently had back in Duluth.

  “I don’t know,” Ruth said. She mi
ssed Duluth, too, and her friends there, but she’d been so busy fixing up the new house she hadn’t had much time to think about it. What people she’d met seemed quite friendly. Everybody moved these days; she’d read that one out of three American families moved every year. But that, she thought, did not alter the fact of her son’s sadness. She would try to make this house into a home for him. She would scrape it, and paint it, and buy pretty curtains for the windows. They would all sit in the long living room, on the new furniture, and look at the fire. She had a lot to do, but she would do it. And when the house was perfect, then they would all begin to live in it.

  “He’ll snap out of it. You’ll see,” Harry said.

  “I think he’s home,” Ruth said.

  Harry went upstairs to see, and found his son sitting on the bed, his coat still on.

  “Jimmy,” he said.

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  “You feel all right?”