by Boyd Craven
“Oh no you don’t,” I told him.
“Just making sure big dummy asshole don’t get no huge idea and forget he is holding up Irish John from very fine buzz.”
“Hey, I thought all islanders loved rum; why the Johnny Walker?”
“Lots of rum in the islands, so much rum you can’t find good liquor,” he said, pointing at the bottle with the fillet knife.
“So it’s something different?” I asked him.
“Do you not like Johnny?” he questioned.
“Wait, you like it because your name is John?” I asked him.
“Irish John is me,” he said proudly and then stretched, sheathing the knife.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it came from Scotland.
Chapter Six
The wooden framework that Irish had built over the fire had spring in it. It was loaded up with fish and sagged some, but it didn’t break. He started a small fire using driftwood, and then headed off into the brush. He came back with the bottom of his shirt pregnant with chunks of wood. He dumped those in the sand and headed into his hut and came out a few moments later with a well-used and scorched pizza pan nearly eighteen inches across. He handed it to me, and I was surprised to see it had holes punched in three different spots and a small chain, slightly larger than what jewelers would use, was connected from those holes to a point where the three came together.
“Irish fries on ‘dis, or uses it for his smoked meats,” he said. “Come, watch, not going to stay up all night; we take turns.”
I watched as he hung the pan a good six to eight inches over the fire.
“You go load crab traps with gunk. Irish get wood ready.”
I had been doing that, and we had been chumming the sea a bit with the offal of the mullet to bring in the crabs with smaller bits. Still, I loaded the traps with the largest pieces I could and threw them out into the water as he had shown me before. The traps were in the tall sawgrass where he’d pulled them out before, not too far from where the woman and her kids had landed. After rinsing my hands off, I walked back to the camp, noting that night was falling.
Irish John had tightly wrapped the large wooden frame with what looked like an old piece of canvas, leaving a small opening at the top. The bottom of the canvas was buried in the sand, making it difficult for the smoke to escape.
“Trick is, not too much heat, but lots of smoke,” John told me, pulling a flap back that he had made by overlapping the frame.
A small fire had been built on the bottom. The old man was faster than I was with a Bic lighter! I saw he had lined the bottom of his fire pit with stones, whether to hold in the heat or to keep the fire off the moist sand, I wasn’t sure. It was much smaller than the usual cookfire, and the pan was right over that. From a cooking pot, he pulled a dripping piece of wood out and started loading the pizza pan by hand. The water sizzled, and the wood started smoking, little wisps of the scent hitting my nose.
“Applewood?” I asked him. “You don’t grow that out here!”
“Ahhh, but Irish John, he saves all ‘tings the sea brings to him. I will show you soon. First, though, you come with me, and I show you applewood for smoking.”
Looking at the chest that was half-emptied now, I knew there was no point in getting too far ahead if there was nowhere to put the fish. So instead, I followed Irish, grabbing the bottle of Johnny as I walked by, ignoring the half-inch that had been filched while I was on the beach.
“Big dummy asshole,” Irish complained, noting me noticing.
“Old booze hound,” I growled back, but there was no malice in it, just me joking.
“You got ’dat right!”
We were on a very narrow path that took us past the area that was used as a latrine, then turned sharply in the direction of the rocky part of the island. I followed him, cursing every time he would pull a branch back, letting it slap me in the head. I had to duck down under some brush and crawl in one spot as we got through a tight squeeze, and when I stood up, I saw something that surprised me, surprised me a lot. Six blue barrels with lids were sitting underneath a camouflage tarp, the tarp tipped toward a seventh barrel. In the shade of the tarp sat five bottles of regular Clorox bleach and half a dozen wooden crates, produce crates. I walked over and lifted the lid on one, before taking a drink of the potent whiskey.
It was full of canning jars. I flipped open the lid on another, which held rings and lids.
“John, what is this place?” I asked him.
“Water catchment and rainy-day fund,” he said. “Now, ‘dis is big damned secret. Nobody knows. Everybody thinks Irish John is crazy. Maybe so, but I am not so ‘living on the edge’ as they say. Irish John knows he can survive, because he’s been doing the survive ‘tings his whole life.”
“So what are we getting from back here?” I asked him.
“How many crates you carry?”
“All at once, or…?”
“Yes.”
I lifted one, testing the weight. “Probably two at a time. They’re not too heavy for me, but more than that and I wouldn’t be able to see.”
“Seeing is overrated, but Ball jars don’t grow on trees. If they did, they would be a strange fruit, no?”
“Yeah, that’d be pretty weird,” I told him. “Where did you get all of this?”
“Bounty from sea, trade… and ‘dere is a woman from church who is sweet on Irish John,” he added the last with a bit of hesitation.
“Huh. Well, if you can push the crates of jars out of that narrow spot, I’ll start carrying them back to the hut. I don’t know if I’ll fit through that gap with two of these stacked up.”
“That’s because you’re a big—”
“Dummy asshole?” I finished.
“Maybe not asshole. Not now. You just big. Your mother must have been huge woman!”
I grinned. “She said when I was born, the doctor told her there was supposed to have been twins, but it looked like I had eaten the other one. I was born by C-section because I was too big to come out the natural way.”
“I believe,” John said, digging through crates.
I took one crate and backed out of the narrow spot, and when John pushed another crate through, I stacked it and walked back to camp. We did that for half an hour until Irish wanted to check on the fire. I flopped down and made sure to take one more swig of the Johnny, my head buzzing comfortably.
“You want fancy meal, or smoke fish good?” Irish asked me.
“I’m dying to try some,” I told him. “Oh, yeah, where did you get the applewood at?”
Irish slapped his forehead and cursed. He took off. I thought about following him, but I waited. Five minutes later he had a shirt full of apple chunks that he dumped in the sand, next to the pot full of water he’d used to soak the last ones.
“In barrel under tarp. One is full of apple chunks. Irish traded one year, and when rich man take tree down, I got to keep all wood chunks. All Irish had to do was cut it down. Makes damn fine smoke.”
“It’s the best. When I was a kid, apple is what my father would use.”
“Where is father of yours? Why you stay with Irish John when you had no job, and not father?”
“It’s a long story,” I told him.
“We have ’da time.”
We did.
By the end of the night, Irish and I were quite drunk, and we had kept the fire and soaked chunks of applewood going. I told him my story, and he told me his. We bonded the way two men from different parts of the world, different generations, and different upbringings could: over a drunken night of stories, over-sharing and deciding that the other guy wasn’t so bad after all. I knew Irish had been warming up to me, especially the way he let me handle the family who wanted to camp on the island, but by the end of the night he’d taken to calling me ‘Son’, more of an honorary title rather than something to call me. It sounded better than ‘big dummy asshole’, which almost turned into an endearment.
The sun was coming u
p when I leaned up against the rough trunk of a palm and closed my eyes. It seemed like they were only closed a few moments when I felt something hit me in the hip. My eyes shot open, and the first thing I noticed was the sun was up, and it had moved across the sky.
“Irish John’s head hurts; only one thing good for that,” he said.
I stood up and stretched, feeling the kinks from sleeping in the rough. “What’s that?” I asked him.
“Crabs and smoked fish. You go pull the crab traps, and I pull the smoked fish down and pile it up for next step.”
“Sounds good,” I told him and stole the pot he had been using to soak the wood chips.
He nodded and then started opening the canvas wrap he had carefully made over the racks of mullet. I headed to the beach and pulled the traps in, watching a small shark dart from the shallows to deeper water. I could see other fish as well. The ocean almost looked like glass and, with a start, I recognized a boat coming our way in the distance. It was Franklin’s charter. Somebody on the upper bridge waved. I waved back and started hauling in the traps, pulling the rope hand over hand until the trap was lying next to me on the sand.
It wasn’t until I had all of them up that I started pulling the crabs out. Something John had shown me about the blue crabs was the males had a section on their exoskeleton that was long and narrow on the bottom. The females had a larger wide one, shaped more like a large, rounded guitar pick. If it had that, or if I wasn’t sure and there was an orange foam on the bottom of the crab, those were eggs, and I had to throw them back in the water.
This time around, we didn’t get as many crabs as my first night there, but I put all the largest ones I kept in the pot and then coiled up the rope and hid the traps from sight again. As the fishing charter came near, in the channel for the deep water, the airhorn sounded. I waved again and carried the pot back to the camp.
The canvas had been taken off, folded, and set aside. The fire had burned down to embers, and half charred chunks of apple were on the tin, but the mullet… They were almost blackened with the smoke, yet they were pliable as Irish John pulled them off. He stacked them on a broad leaf, probably the other side of the one we had used last night when we loaded it, and he saw me watching.
“Get knife an’ start cutting these tall enough to fit jars. Discard nub by tail and tail itself. Pack jars till this much from top,” he said, using his fingers to indicate an inch.
“I can do that,” I told him, grabbing a produce crate full of jars. It wasn’t long before I had used up a third of the jars that I’d dragged out, and he’d finished, indicating a pile of fish not to pack. I was more than happy.
“How many ‘dem crabs you got there?” he asked me, looking at the pot behind me.
“Six. I threw the females back in the water.”
“Good, good. You want to start carving more fillets for ‘da smoker, I’ll be cooking the breakfast. Next time you go throw fish carcasses in water, look for driftwood. Tide and morning boat passage pushes it this way. If you need Irish John’s boat, go ahead. Driftwood is important sea resource.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
I had only kept half an eye on him, but he had taken down the middle portion of the frame to cook breakfast. He put the pot of crabs plus fresh water over the fire, adding sticks until the flames crackled over and around the pot. I started making piles of fish again, repeating the process from yesterday and chumming the water and resetting the crab traps. I had a feeling the way he was trapping crab wasn’t quite legal, as I didn’t see a name and address tag, nor a buoy for his trap, but Irish John didn’t have a license either.
He was cracking the crabs open and scooping the meat out onto a flat carved piece of wood or bark, and on one trip, my second trip to dump offal, I rinsed off and came back to see him scraping mullet fillets into the pot the crabs had been boiled in. I peeked and saw the mullet and crab meat intermingled. I reached in for a piece, to have my hand slapped.
“Is not ready. You wait,” Irish said.
I had one more load to take out for the crabs and small fish and, as I was rinsing myself, I saw a long shape bobbing in the water. I looked at John’s canoe and instead walked over to the small boat Franklin had loaned me for this trip and pushed it out. I fired up the motor and soon was beside the piece of driftwood, only it wasn’t just a piece. It looked like a log had been cut as somebody had been doing tree work and the wood had fallen into the water. It was easily fifteen inches across and more or less straight.
My plan had been to pull whatever it was into the boat, but I soon realized the log weighed more than I could pick up, so instead I made a loop with the anchor rope and dragged it back to the shoreline. I killed the pusher’s motor and coasted, feeling the heavy weight stop us a bit, then I hopped out and pulled on the rope itself until the log ended up beached in the sand. I untied it and dragged my boat up further so the tide wouldn’t take it, and tied it off again.
When I headed back, Irish John had food all set up and was already hanging fish on the rack he had put together while I had monkeyed with the log. I saw now what he’d been using as a platter was in fact a thick piece of bark, but smooth on the inside, and it was piled with little rolled taquitos, made with large spinach or kale leaves.
“You eat, you did harder work, Irish John can do ‘dis part. Important you watch. I ate, so food is yours.”
I reached over, hesitating. I wasn’t much of a health food nut, and I vaguely remembered a girlfriend trying to get me to eat a spinach wrap something, and it had grossed me out so badly I’d ordered new food. Still… when in Rome… I bit into the first piece. Smoky fish and succulent crab meat were intermingled with what tasted like a raspberry vinaigrette, chunks of blackberry... and despite all that, it had spice to it. The wrapper tasted vaguely like lettuce, but overall, the flavor knocked my socks off. John watched me eat for a second and nodded his head.
“Is not horrible food, no?”
“Oh Irish,” I said around a mouthful, “this is the best…” I slowed down so I could chew and savor the first wrap.
“Yes, I told you more than once now. The sea provides all. Is good and free way to live. You do not need to have big moneys, fancy house, or noisy smelling cars to get much of luxury in life. All you need is ‘dis,” he said, pointing to the side of his head, “and what life some call horrible, becomes luxury.”
I thought about that as I ate the second wrap, watching him stringing the fish up. Knowing John, the berries and vinegar were grown and made right here on the island. Hell, I wondered if he was hard up enough that he made his own wine or hooch? I doubted it, I hadn’t seen evidence of that in his hut nor at his cache where he had a water collection system set up.
“What is on the plan today then, if I’m not doing the heavy work?” I asked him.
“You’ll be ‘da canner.”
“I’ve never canned before.”
“You will be a good canner after today,” he said.
The smoker was reloaded with the last of the fish, Irish had me wander off down the beach past the traps and then pointed into the tall stuff and told me to get his canner. I thrashed in the tall grass, the sea lapping on the shore behind me. That is when I saw it. It looked like a washing machine drum. I pulled on it and it came easily, much lighter than I had expected.
“This?” I asked him, dragging it by the edge out into the sand.
“Yes, is good fine canner. Can withstand much and it has coating that makes it not rust. No cook food in it, but perfect for canning.”
I rolled it down to the water and washed the mud and grit off it the best I could, then emptied it and used both hands to carry it back, following John.
The jars I had packed had to have water in them, and from the boxes of supplies I brought, salt was used. He said it took more than a pinch, less than a spoon and I watched as the pinkish colored salt was added to each jar before the lid and ring was put on. Then we packed each jar into the bottom of the ‘canner’ until we
had a double row of them. Two cooking pots of fresh water were used to bring the level up to the second level of jars and while he was going back to get a third pot, I tried to remember something from my childhood.
My mother had used a pressure cooker I had thought, for meats and stews. I remembered my father hunting when I was small, but it was something I had never gotten into, but I seemed to remember my mother canning venison one year.
“Irish John,” I asked as he was pouring in the third pot, “aren’t you supposed to can meat and fish with a pressure cooker?”
“Bah, everybody say ‘dat,” Irish told me. “My way works for me,” he said, pointing to his chest. “I not sell fish. I eat fish. Even if Franklin boss send too damn much this time.”
“You think maybe he was helping you put back for hard times? Why he sent me to help?” I asked him.
“Probably. He ‘tinks Irish is a charity case. If I need something I don’t have, I work, trade or barter. In ‘dis case, sometimes people give it to me. I’m not charity case, but I ‘tink they feel better if they think they are helping Irish John. Part of me wonders if they are jealous of life I live?”
“I tell you what,” I said, snatching the last roll I hadn’t eaten, wondering if he had wanted it, “you eat like this every day, you’re going to have people beating on your door to come stay with you.”
Irish shuddered and shook his head. “You and Franklin, you two are okay. Other people bother Irish John. I teach you some of my tricks. Someday, Irish not going to wake up, and I have no sons to share with.”
I wasn’t expecting that, and it hit me in the stomach. I had lost my father and I had thought a lot about mortality, but I hadn’t thought about it from the other end of the spectrum.
“So, you want to teach me your ways?”
“Yes, so someday big dummy asshole can write about Irish John. Tell people what a fantastic and magnificent asshole I am!” he said with a laugh.