A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  He got down and lifted the black box which Mr. Lamb somehow planned to use as his telephone, and found it was very heavy, as though it contained unalloyed lead. He set it down, bound the loose copper leads around it once, grabbed it up, and shuffled toward the boat, which Mr. Lamb had managed to seesaw onto its side, letting the water slag off into the lake. The smell of the water seemed intensest when the wind was low, and each time the sun moved from behind the cloud and burned on the surface. The lake was long and cigar-shaped, and the water was the color of liver and looked thick and creamy. It was making him feel lightheaded just to be there.

  “Help me now, son,” the old man said, letting the upended gunwale rock down and starting to give it a stern hoist toward the lake. His face instantly purpled and the artery in his forehead bulged like a snake. He had a panic, right then, that the old man might just explode if something wasn’t put in his way fast.

  “Lemme,” he said, setting the box on the mud and quickly giving the gunwale one menacing jerk that wrenched it out of the mud and the old man’s grasp and flung it halfway into the water.

  Mr. Lamb simply stood back and looked at the boat and the distance it had cleared in one short flight, and muttered, “You gotta family to raise, son,” and then hustled around and grabbed up the black box and made for the boat. “Now I’ll get in and you push us off,” the old man said, tiptoeing out over the seats and throning himself backward in the bow end so that his pants cuffs gapped six inches above his skinny ankles, while he pondered the effects of his tussle with the boat. “Get in, get in, Newel, goddamn it!” he shouted.

  He dropped the painter rope in the well behind the seat, gave the boat another, less conspicuous heave, and the Traveler sagged out through the weeds and stobs of the shallows and coasted serenely into the open water, where the reflection of the sun dulled the surface and seemed to locate the light somewhere in the water itself.

  Mr. Lamb straddled around on his seat and began making a meticulous survey of the west arm of the lake, a hand on his black box and another shading his eyes against the sun. He began to worry about just what the old man was going to do once he picked out whatever it was he was hunting for, and he wondered if it was going to be the cause for some more ranting and gyrating. He slumped silently in the weighted end of the boat, fingering the loom of the paddle and waiting for the old man to say what to do.

  Mr. Lamb sat another minute in the shade of his hand without speaking and perused the bank as if he were waiting for something to identify itself and deliver up a potent sign.

  Ahead, in the dreamy shallows on the north boundary of the lake, he could see a family of mud turtles sunning themselves along the high side of a half-submerged oak log, unperturbed by the commotion on the water. The woodpecker struck another plock back of where the boat had been fastened, and he sat motionless in the sunshine, fingering the warm tongue of the paddle, watching the old man’s face twitching up and down the length of the slough, the boat drifting aimlessly west, pushed by the movement of stale air out of the woods. Mr. Lamb sat another minute, watching, for all he himself could tell, nothing at all. The old man had put on his spectacles and was staring intently along the bosky sides of the lake, until all at once he snapped his head around with a venomous leer and pointed toward where a hummock of mud and sticks had been heaped out of the water to make a fat gluey mound. “Row me right over to there,” he said in a loud whisper.

  “Where the mound is?” he said, attempting to point out the mound with the blade of the paddle.

  The old man looked at him impatiently. “That there’s a beaver house,” he whispered, and fell into unwinding the copper wires from around the box and pressuring the little gold thumbscrews more securely into their terminals.

  He began to try, as he shouldered the boat across toward the beaver mound, to feature what quirk of the cut-off process had caused the formation of the lake, which was probably, he felt, a twelfth the size of the lake they had come across with Gaspareau, and apparently completely stagnant. From the appearance of the water, the slough was kept active entirely by rain and by the floods that eddied up once a year, then receded, leaving the lake replenished with trapped water. He tried to recall if he had seen evidence of a lake on the aerial map, but could only remember the contour of the island, a large blotchy teardrop imprint, bounded by the river, but nothing else. It seemed possible that the picture had been taken when the lake was dry and the ground mossed over, though it seemed equally feasible that the old man had schemed and cajoled and managed to delete the lake from the picture by design, the same way he had scourged the entire island from the official map of the Corps of Engineers.

  A few yards above the beaver house, he could make out a number of white plastic jugs of the character used to contain antifreeze, floating bottom-up in a more or less circular pattern around another jug, which appeared to be impaled on a stob a foot and a half out of the water, the whole arrangement situated fifteen yards from the marshy beginnings of the woods.

  “Right there,” the old man whispered, pointing at the impaled jug and the four others circling it. “Row me to that boy there.”

  Mr. Lamb raised the box and resituated it on the well between his feet and smiled at him over his shoulder.

  “What is that?” he said, jiving the paddle until he could feel the bottom seize on the blade.

  “Huh?” the old man said, not hearing him right and directing his good ear around into better line with the sound.

  “What is all that?” he said.

  “That’s Landroo’s fish feeder,” the old man said, snorting as if the idea of a fish feeder were perfectly ludicrous.

  “What does it do?” he said, worrying some of the cold marl off the blade with his fingers and getting a potent smell of the bottom, which was foul and smoking and made his stomach heave. He pushed the paddle back quickly and splashed his fingers in the eddies.

  “You see,” Mr. Lamb whispered, “Landroo’s a cane-pole fisherman, like any upstanding nigger would be. And back up behind his little house, he’s got him what appears to be a toolbox built, with a hinged door over the top of it. Except it ain’t a toolbox at all.” He stopped and studied the white jugs as they slid toward him, as though he felt he’d explained the feeder as much as it needed explaining.

  “But what the hell is it?” he said, hauling up another annoying bolus of blue smoking gunk and slapping it back in the water stoutly.

  “What?” the old man said, frowning, having forgotten the conversation entirely and become reengrossed in stealthing up on the jugs.

  “The box,” he said, raising his voice. “The hinge box at Landrieu’s house.”

  “That thing,” the old man said, as if it were a perennial joke. “That’s his worm farm and his cricket farm and his roach farm, and his everywhateverelse kind of farm.” He snorted. “That’s one reason Landroo never cared much for John Carter, that and all the Cain Johnny raised over there in Stovall at their baseball. John was always getting Landroo’s crickets and throwing them in the fire, and Landroo didn’t like that cause he bought them crickets in Helena and paid money for the buggers, then old Johnny would come along and toss a bunch in the fire and sit there and listen at them pop, and that’d be old Landroo’s money poppin. And it made Landroo mad as hell, don’t think it didn’t.” The old man began tampering with the box as if he were planning to spring it into action momentarily and wanted to have it in a state of absolute readiness. The boat was making a way imperiously, closer in to the bank now than to the jugs or the beaver lodge. “Anyway,” Mr. Lamb said, distracted momentarily by his box, to which he administered a tentative crank with the wooden handle on its side. “Anyway, anyway, Landroo likes to fish with all his worms and roaches and doodads, except he don’t like to spend all day out in the hot sun. So he went out and got him a regular lath peach crate and filled it up with sweet hay and tied it up with baling wire, and took it all and tied him some sash weights to it and hauled it out here and dropped it where that m
iddlest boy is, and rigged him up floats out of them Prestone jugs, and glommed a bunch of worms and roaches and crickets on a treble hook and knotted one to each of them jugs and set ’em out beside his hay bale, and them fish can’t hardly wait to get hooked up. And he’ll come out here every two or three days and paddle over here and check his ‘trotlines’—that’s what he calls them, though they ain’t true trotlines in any sense.”

  He began to think that if there were already fish hooked and waiting to be pulled up on Landrieu’s fish trap, why was it necessary to do anything more than get them out and go home, and forget about doing any telephoning, whatever that was. He looked at the back of the old man’s head for a long moment.

  “Why can’t we just borrow a couple of Landrieu’s fish?” he said, frowning up at the floating jugs.

  “Cause they ain’t ours,” the old man snapped, and bent his head around and looked at him in surprise. “I’ll tell you, though,” he said, smiling strangely, “Landroo’s a comical old coon. When he comes out here, he won’t go right to where them jugs are at. He’ll rig him up a cane pole and take a bunch of whatever he likes that day, worms or roaches or whatever’s he got in his ‘farm,’ and start down there in them dead falls and nigger all the way up to here.” The old man grinned at him in amazement as if Landrieu were a living mystery to match all mysteries, never divining Landrieu might take some considerable pleasure in the leisurely divertissement of fishing, before he got down to the actual business of taking in the fish. “He likes to go down there and just sit a long time, watching them spatterdocks,” the old man said, grinning to prove he faithfully liked Landrieu, but was entitled to exercise his private jurisdiction as Landrieu’s chief critic and adviser. He got himself almost completely turned around, his eyes big and round and his face turned red. “And he says to me, ‘And all at onct then, Mr. Mark, them crappies commences to hist straight up in the air snatching them little skeeters off them pads and making all kinds of noise, ah-sha-sha-sha-ah-sha-sha-sha, boiling that water like two hogs on a mudhole.’ And I said to him, ‘Well, what did you do then, Landroo?’ And he said, real sheepish, ’Oh, Mr. Mark, I just eased on in there real sweet with my boat and laid my little gob of worms on top of one of them pads and one of them big suckers snatched that hook off there like God snatching back a palsied baby.’”The old man was thoroughly regaled by his own story. “But I’ll tell you,” he wheezed, “Landroo might be a real fisherman, but I had to carry him to Helena one evening with a treble hook in his forehead, bout stuck clear to his brain. One of them big crappies took a swipe at his worm on one of them lily pads, and Landroo got excited and jerked the thing back too quick and it hit him in the head like a roofing nail. And the son-of-a-bitch wouldn’t let me touch it. I said, ’Landroo, I’ll get a pair of needle-nose pliers and have it out in two shakes.’ And he said, ’No, suh, take me to the emergency room.’”Mr. Lamb looked at him, gravely questioning Landrieu’s far-reaching concept of an emergency. The old man turned and eyed the beaver house as it slid by the boat.

  As soon as the boat slipped past the beaver house, Mr. Lamb held his finger to his lips and waved his other hand to signify he ought to quit paddling now and let the boat propel itself toward the jugs.

  He watched the beaver house ease by, wondering if there were beavers sitting around inside or if they had heard the howling and shouting and made a fast exit. He scanned up the vestige of submerged bank, thinking he’d see a big beaver hurrying off into the denser woods, but he saw only a fat sparrow twitting and sputtering in a jungle of dead boxberries, creating a racket with his wings as though he had gotten inside the bush by misadventure and now frantically couldn’t figure how to get out.

  Mr. Lamb gave the sparrow a grieved look and swiveled on his seat and drew the black box closer between his legs, holding both lead wires in one hand, and deliberately began cranking the handle. The boat began to sidle slightly, taking more of a broadside approach to the jugs than a nose-first approach. All the turtles lined along the limb of the deadfall began craning their necks to find out what was going on, though none of them seemed to think enough of the commotion to move from where they were. One finally became uneasy and wobbled to the opposite end of the log, but Mr. Lamb didn’t notice and none of the turtles seemed to want to leave for the bottom just yet. He stayed as still as he could in the back of the boat, the sun shining on the crown of his head, and let the paddle lie across his thighs so that it dripped back into the slough

  Mr. Lamb gave the box several more rigorous cranks, then separated the twin wires to each hand, holding each by its rubber sleeve that had been stripped ten inches from the tip.

  When the boat finally drifted by the first of the encircling jugs and sliced into the middle water, Mr. Lamb turned and gave an inflamed look and in a loud stage whisper that made the one nervous turtle dive for the bottom, said, “I’m just going to make a local call.” The old man’s eyes squeezed together as if he could barely keep back the heaves, and he promptly jammed both wire ends over the side and into the water like an old picador administering the pic to a motionless bull.

  And the total effect was nothing.

  Both of them peered at the water, anticipating something unforeseen to happen, but nothing did. He expected the current traversing the plus-to-minus terminals to get shorted through the boat and deal them both a sound shock. But instead he felt nothing, though he experienced a strange thrill when he saw the old man’s eyes and had tightened his ass in case the box was wound up a lot tighter than he thought.

  Mr. Lamb, however, had clearly reckoned on something formidable. He glared at the water, the two discharged wires dangling from his hands, searching the surface fiercely as if he expected the surface to get suddenly thick with stunned fish. But the water stayed the same. The turtle came climbing slowly out and strained along the spine of the log and found itself a suitable location and began to take in whatever else was going on.

  The old man turned and scowled back at him, as if he were personally responsible for the sabotaging, then jabbed the cords back in the water and waggled them as if he were hoping to attract whatever fish were in the area of the hay crate near the surface so he could spear them. “Shit,” the old man said, again employing the stage whisper and staring at the ends of the wires. “It ain’t a good day to fish.” He turned and gave him another belligerent look and started cranking at the box again, the two inert leads squeezed side by side in his left fist.

  This time Mr. Lamb cranked a much longer time, The boat sidled in until it gently tapped the impaled jug, then sat silently in the slack water. He kept his paddle across his thighs and patted his warming crown, and watched the old man get redder behind the ears the longer he cranked the telephone. Mr. Lamb turned and fired back another irritated look while whirring the crank, and he recognized the look then as the face of dead-out desperation, frozen on the old man’s face as a fierce grimace which would not relent. Mr. Lamb looked at him with the expression of a man trying to pump air into a blown-out tire while staring enigmatically into the face of someone holding an ice pick. It was, he thought, the look of unrecognized betrayal.

  The boat, with the old man’s increasing gyrations to perturb it, began to waffle precariously and send lap waves heaving under the jugs, causing them to strain against their string anchors, and making him get a grip on the gunwales and begin inspecting the timber for a place to cling when the boat eventually swamped. Waves were licking up into the trees and rising under the deadfall where the turtles were sitting silently, staring back at the boat. He felt now he should do something to save them.

  All at once Mr. Lamb stopped cranking, his ears grown scarlet, and sweat thickening the collar of his flannel shirt. The old man turned and gave him a defiant look, then grabbed for the wires in his other hand as if someone else were holding them out to him and had placed them just an inch out of his reach, so that by some miscalculation he grabbed onto both spiky ends at once and discharged the entire stored-up quotient of telephoni
c electricity directly into his body.

  “Oops,” the old man said in an obvious surprise, and threw up both his hands, dropping the cords into the water and pitching straight over backward into the middle of the boat, making a loud whumping sound on the chinky curvature of his spine, his eyes wide open as if he were about to instigate another imitation of Landrieu but had somehow gotten sidetracked. He did not hit his head. The rocker effect of his spinal curve mediated the blow so that his head only lightly touched the slatted bottom of the boat the way an acrobat’s head passingly touches the mat at the start of a somersault. His skinny ankles stayed draped over the front of the forward seat on either side of the box, and his arms flailed out to the sides partially over the gunwales. He stared at the old man for a moment, his paddle still laddered over his thighs, expecting him to jump up and start cursing. But once down, the old man didn’t move again.

  He crouched forward on his knees, losing the paddle, and sending the boat into even greater flailing gyrations. He pressed both his hands against the old man’s cheeks, which were warm and sentient, though his eyes were open and unblinking and his chest was relaxed. He stared into the old man’s face, welled in between his thighs, and yelled at him so that a tiny flower of spittle sprouted on the old man’s cheek and began to slide toward his ear.

  “Mr. Lamb!” he yelled, his voice careening through the rank woods and disappearing. “Mr. Lamb!” he shouted, as if the old man were at the opposite end of the lake and could not hear him.

  The old man’s blurry eyes turned pale and glaucous and his face became famished, the color of the sky. He sat back and stared at the face, shaded in the thick well of his thighs, until the adroitness of the old man’s death refrigerated his own insides and left him with a very businesslike feeling of needing to act efficiently and without excess of energy, and to become as unquestioningly useful as he could to anyone within a hundred miles. He pressed his hands again onto the old man’s cheeks and found that they were warm, but less warm than before, which seemed to him more or less correct. The idea crept into his thinking that perhaps in the fraction of a second between the time the old man had completed the circuit of the telephone and the time his eyes had frozen open staring straight up at the sky, his face becoming white as sugar, then gray, he could have done something, could have sealed his mouth over Mr. Lamb’s and blown for all he was worth and inflated his cavernous old lungs and started his heart to thumping by the simple gale force of all his own lung power concentrated inside the old man. But then, he felt assuredly, there simply hadn’t been the time. A year ago he had sat in Beebe’s apartment on Astor Place and watched a football player die of heart failure, draped over the thirty-five-yard line, and later the announcers declared the player was dead before he hit the ground, maybe even in the locker room hours before. If this was so, he supposed, the boat still teetering under him causing the old man’s face to wag back and forth against his knees, then this old man was dead before he even got in the boat, since nothing could’ve worked such a devastation on him in so short a time, unless it had gotten started some time earlier. And without divine prescience of whatever it was starting, he had been helpless to assist the old man at all.