“Mom,” Claude shouted as he dashed onto the patio, “we caught seventeen fish. One of them was huge, it had to be a grandfather, dad said. I’m gonna go dig for more worms so we can go fishing again tomorrow.”
Claude ran off, and Gail turned her attention to her husband, climbing the cement stairs with a large metal tub.
“We had a good day,” he beamed. “Look at all these fish.”
“My word,” Gail said. “How in the world are we going to eat all those?”
“Well,” Jackie said, “cook the big ones, and use the little ones for fertilizer.”
Gail knew there was no way in hell she was saving a dozen dead fish for two weeks so she could haul them to Rhode Island to fertilize her garden, but she said nothing. She asked Jackie to pick out the best ones and leave them near the sink so she could prepare them for a fry, which he did. At supper, Jackie announced they were only eating the fish Claude had caught, and Claude spent the entire meal telling his mother, and reminding his father, of the details of the adventure.
The next day, Claude rose early to finish digging for worms. At noon, when he’d filled a large paper cup with nightcrawlers, he returned to the cabin.
“Are we going fishing again today, dad?”
“Not today, Claude.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got to go with Armand and meet some of the men from his union.”
“What’s so important about that?”
“Well, Claude, when you’re in a union with someone, it’s like having a brother. You’ve got to treat them as if they were your own flesh and blood. If you had a brother, you wouldn’t let him down, would you? Of course you wouldn’t. And it’s the same way with me. I can’t let my union brothers down. They need me, so I have to be there for them. Like I said, you have to treat them as if they were your own flesh and blood.
“Don’t worry, we’ll go fishing first thing tomorrow morning.”
A rap came on the screen door in the kitchen. “Hey Jackie,” Armand said, showing his French-Canadian roots by emphasizing the second part of Jackie’s name over the first. “You ready?”
“I got the booze,” Jackie said. “You got the cards?”
Armand held up a deck. “Deuces never looses. Lez go.”
Claude watched them walk down the cement steps and cross by the Johnson’s boathouse to the Fecteaus’ other dock. He saw them climb into Armand’s big powerboat, saw Armand step out, and saw Armand cup his hands near his mouth.
“Hey Blanche,” he heard Armand call. “Throw me down the stairs, the boat keys.”
The next morning, Claude jumped out of bed at seven to go fishing. He checked on his father at eight, at nine, and at ten, but still Jackie slept. At eleven, Gail told Claude to wait on the porch. She went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her, and when she re-emerged closed the door again.
“Your father was out a little late last night and had a little too much to drink,” she said. “I don’t think he’s up for fishing. But come on, I’ll go with you.”
Claude ran for his cup of nightcrawlers and struggled into his life preserver.
“All set,” he said.
“Good,” his mother said. “What do you say we fish with tackle today instead of these worms?”
“What’s tackle?”
Gail lifted a small metal box from beneath the boat seat. “Fake worms. They’re just as good as real ones.”
Claude agreed, though it took some cajoling to get him to free his cupful of live worms. In the end Gail convinced him that if he set the worms free, they would eat and get fatter, and then he’d catch bigger fish once he dug them up again.
Gail rowed a few hundred yards and stopped.
“Not here, mom. Farther out.”
“But there’ll be good fish here.”
“No, no. We’ve got to go out there.”
Gail gave in, and rowed toward the center of the lake. When they arrived at an acceptable site, she tied a lure to her son’s line.
“All set,” she said. “Cast away.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll set my lure in a minute.”
“But we have to do it together.”
“All right,” she said. “Give me a second here.”
Claude did, and soon mother and son had lures in the water. But unlike Claude’s first fishing excursion, no fish bit. After a half an hour, Claude began inventing nibbles.
“Be patient, dear,” Gail said. “You’ll catch something soon enough.”
As she spoke, her line ticked a little.
“See? It looks like I’ve got one.”
“All right!” Claude yelled. “Pull him in.”
“Nope. First you have to tug, just a little, to make sure the hook is in its mouth. There. Now I can let it run. Once it tires itself out some, I can bring it in.”
Ten minutes later, Gail leaned over the side of the boat and netted a small trout. She reached through the netting and with a quick pull removed the hook from the fish’s mouth. She lifted the net and smiled to her son, then dropped the net to the water and the fish swam free.
“What are you doing?” Claude screamed. “He’s getting away! What are you doing!”
“Honey, he’s too small to keep. The tiny ones, you have to let them go.”
“Dad didn’t let them go,” Claude mumbled.
Gail heard him, but said nothing. A few minutes later, she hooked another one.
“Ooh, Claude,” she said, “I think this one’s a biggie. Here, come take my pole.”
“But it’s yours.”
“I know, but I’ll help you bring him in. Here, take it.”
Claude obeyed his mother, but since it was her pole he didn’t feel right about it. He didn’t like it when she stopped him from yanking. He didn’t like it when she told him to only crank when the line felt loose. But when the trout came into view, he forgot it all and leapt to the side of the boat.
“Look at the size of that one!” he shouted. “It’s the biggest fish in the lake!”
“It’s a big one, all right,” Gail said.
“Let me do the net this time,” Claude said.
“All right, but be careful. Take it slow. You don’t want to hurt it.”
Claude scooped the fish from the water and plopped it on the bottom of the boat.
“Claude! No!”
Gail grabbed the net and set it atop the trout. When the fish wriggled she slid the frame beneath it, lifted it over the side of the boat, and held it in the water.
“Now take the lure out,” she said, “but be careful. Grab the fish firm, and get the hook by pulling it straight back.”
Claude removed the hook, and when his mother held the net high even managed a smile.
“It’s a beauty,” Gail said. “Here, take the net. You caught him, you should be the one to let him go.”
“Let him go? The hugest fish in the lake? We just caught him, why would we let him go?”
“Honey, we couldn’t eat all the fish you caught the other day. Plus we’ve got steak for dinner tonight. We’re having steak, potatoes, and a nice salad. Killing this fish doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for it. And just think, if we throw it back maybe someone else can get a thrill from catching it tomorrow.”
She offered the net again to her son but he turned away. She lowered the net and the fish swam away.
When Claude saw the empty net he slammed her pole to the floor of the boat. “This stinks,” he said. “I wanna go home. Now.”
Gail rowed her son to the cabin, and found Jackie awake. Although Claude remained outside, digging worms proper with his trowel and pail, he soon heard his father’s familiar holler.
“What are you trying to teach that boy, anyway? There are thousands of fish in that lake; nobody’s going to miss a dozen or two. It doesn’t make sense to go fishing if the goal is to come home without any fish. You don’t have to be Einstein to figure that out. You go fishing to catch fish. Teaching
him to fish is part of teaching him to be a man, at least it’s supposed to be. Isn’t it? You want your son to be a man, don’t you?”
From a distance, Claude never heard his mother’s side of these exchanges.
“No he doesn’t,” Jackie yelled. “A real man doesn’t come to the edge of a conquest and quit. A real man comes to the edge of a conquest and conquers.”
Claude dug where he’d buried his worms.
“Well excuse me. I had a little too much to drink with the boys. Was I supposed to ignore Armand, the man who got us this cabin to begin with? Is that what I should have done?”
Claude only found thin worms. He wondered if the big ones were hiding from him.
“Well yes, of course that’s what you should have done. Of course you did the right thing. But Jesus, Gail...Oh, all right! All right!”
Jackie burst through the back entrance, bounding up the little stairway as the spring whipped the screen door shut behind him.
“Claude!”
“Yeah, dad?”
“Look, I wound up staying later with Armand and his brothers than I expected, and having a little more to drink than I thought I would, and losing a lot more at the poker table than I’d hoped, and, well I won’t go into it but for chrissakes when you get to be drinking age you’ll know what I mean. Tomorrow you get yourself a bucketful of nightcrawlers and we’ll go fishing again first thing in the morning, just you and me, and we’ll catch everything we can, so that at the end of the day we’ll have a pile of fish so high they’ll be able to see it all the way from Portland. Whaddya think, is it a deal?”
Claude’s face broke into a wide smile. “It’s a deal.”
#
As he grew older, Claude spent less time watching his parents play cards and more time by himself, fishing, listening to the radio, or playing one-person games of baseball, in which he pitched a tennis ball against the wall of an old shed a few hundred yards behind the Fecteaus’ other cabin; a light bulb hanging from the shed’s frame allowed him to play after dark, which he did whenever the Red Sox had an off day or played in the afternoon. Once he turned twelve his parents let him fish on his own as long as he kept the boat near the cabin. When he hit fourteen they let him fish wherever he wanted so long as he returned before dusk.
During the summer between Claude’s junior and senior years in high school, just after he’d gotten his drivers license, Claude worked up the nerve to ask Marie Fecteau to a movie, but she laughed and said she’d rather die than be seen with him at a movie theater, so for twelve long days Claude did little but fish at the far end of the lake and hide in his bedroom. The next year, he asked his parents to let him stay in Rhode Island instead of going to the lake. They reluctantly agreed.
When Jackie died, Gail didn’t want to go to the lake by herself, and told Claude and Joan to take the cabin instead. Although Joan loved the idea of bringing Jamie to Maine every summer, Claude refused the offer. The following year, with his father’s death not so fresh in his mind, Claude reconsidered and called Armand to ask for the two weeks in August, but they’d long been scooped up, at the full rate, by someone else. However, Armand said he had some rowdy people in the Memorial Day slot who always left the place a mess, and he couldn’t stand them, particularly the wife, so he told Claude he’d tell them not to come back and Claude and Joan could have the cabin each Memorial Day weekend if they wanted it. They said they did.
Chapter 8
Once everything had been transferred from the car to the cabin, Claude and Jamie changed into their bathing suits and went swimming. Joan and Connie made a pot of coffee, loaded the firepit with charcoal, and set some lawn chairs on the patio.
“This place is beautiful,” Connie said.
Although the day was warm, both women wore pants. Joan rarely wore shorts, or went swimming, because she was ashamed of her fat thighs and the bright blue veins that ran up and down her legs. Connie maintained more of the figure she and her sister shared as young women, though her backside had widened considerably since her husband’s death. Connie was taller than Joan, and let her hair go gray, whereas Joan relied on monthly salon appointments to remain a brunette.
Connie sipped some coffee, then set her mug on the rail. “What was up with Claude and work? Is everything all right?”
“The usual stuff,” Joan said. “Claude thinks because he’s in a union he doesn’t have to work. His boss thinks that every time he catches Claude goofing off he has to yell louder than the time before.”
“If you collect a paycheck, you should put in a good day’s work,” Connie said.
“I know,” Joan said. “But it’s not all Claude’s fault. His boss doesn’t know anything about being a manager. He’s always in meetings, and really doesn’t even know what’s going on in his own department.”
“According to Claude.”
“According to Claude,” Joan said. “But I’ve heard the same thing from Frank Dombrowski and Scotty Williams when they’ve come over. Claude’s been in trouble before, and he usually seems to know when enough is enough. He can get by when he has to. But I wish he’d get a new boss, because if he did I think he’d really be all right.”
“He must have some seniority at the company,” Connie said. “Can’t he bid to another position?”
“Not really. To do any of the big-paying jobs, the ones where you work with electricity, you have to pass a test, and Claude can’t pass it. I bet he’s taken it a dozen times. The only other jobs are clerk, meter reader and janitor. Well, you know Claude’s not the paperwork type, so clerk’s out, plus it’s the lowest-paying position in the whole company—fourteen dollars an hour, or something. We both know why he’ll never be a meter reader again. And janitor, well Claude was too proud to be a janitor. Me, I could have cared less, it was more money so go ahead and take it is the way I saw it. But Claude stood up to his father and caused a big rift.”
“Lou thought that was going to be a big turnaround for Claude. He thought that was an important moment in his life.”
Joan finished her coffee. She reached into her purse and pulled out a cigarette. “Forgive me. I haven’t been able to quit these entirely. I’m down to three or four a day, but I just can’t get down to zero. Here, switch seats with me.”
The sisters traded places and the wind blew Joan’s cigarette smoke away from Connie.
“I guess it was an important moment in his life,” Joan said. “just not the way nobody thought it would be. What Claude did really hurt Jackie. It wasn’t Jackie’s fault Claude got bit by the fleas, and it wasn’t Jackie’s fault Claude started calling in sick about every other day. He heard the whispers, and when that janitor position opened up, Jackie didn’t do anything wrong, technically, he just went to the two other people who were interested and asked them to withdraw their bids so Claude would get it, and they agreed. Just a guy asking a favor, that’s all. Gail said when Claude threatened to quit rather than become a janitor, Jackie was in a tough spot.”
“He should have let Claude quit.”
“You didn’t know Jackie. He pulled the strings and got Claude in stores, but it wasn’t easy. He had to call in a lot of favors and bend a lot of rules. It was really the beginning of the end for him.”
“Was the beginning of the end any prettier than the end of the end?”
Joan laughed. “A little. But not much.”
“That time at Jamie’s birthday party, that was awful. Completely obnoxious. I mean at a wedding or a ballgame I could understand it, but at a little girl’s birthday party you don’t expect the grandfather to be knocking down drink after drink and starting shouting matches with anyone who says hello. The weird thing was, I was having such a nice chat with your mother-in-law when all that erupted.”
“Yeah, Gail got to be an expert at making the peace,” Joan said. “She really deserved better. Especially after Jackie got voted out as president, she had a rough time. She said the union was everything Jackie lived for. He hated going back to underground
lines, climbing into manholes all day and working all slouched over in the damp and the dark, with rats running around everywhere. He kept trying to mount comebacks in the union, but could never get enough support, and eventually running and losing and running and losing became too hard for him, so he just climbed inside a bottle and stayed there.”
“Like that’s any more dignified.”
“Plus Jackie really couldn’t afford to retire when he did. He was only 56. But by then he was so far out of the union loop he couldn’t wait to get out. When he retired, me and Claude insisted on paying Gail for watching Jamie —you know, to help out —but even then I bet Jackie drank half of what we gave them.”
Joan dropped her cigarette to the floor of the wooden patio and crunched it with the toe of her shoe. She slapped her thighs and stood up. “I brought some banana bread. Want some?”
Connie nodded. Joan took the two empty coffee mugs. When she returned, she carried a tray with two full mugs and four slices of banana bread. After she set the tray down, she stretched, and looked out over the water, watching Claude and Jamie float and twist in two large inner tubes, Claude flopped stomach down on his and Jamie leaning back in hers, dipping her hair in the water and hoarding whatever rays she could get from the intermittent sun. Joan sat. She stirred her coffee.
“Gail was so sweet,” she said. “Always a smile. Always said the perfect thing when I was feeling blue or Claude was in a mood. Always knew how to get Jamie to do her homework, or make friends with a girl who was teasing her, or spruce up her outfit so the other kids would think it was cool. She could look at Jamie’s face and know the problem without even asking.”
“Well, aside from you she probably knew Jamie as well as anyone,” Connie said. “Even Claude.”
“What do you mean?” Joan said. “Claude and Jamie are together constantly.”
“I know,” Connie said. “But I wonder if he really knows her. Sometimes it seems the only things they do together are things Claude wants to do. I can’t remember once when I saw him doing something Jamie would like but he wouldn’t.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Joan said. “They play cards together, and Jamie likes that. They fish together. They watch a lot of movies together.”
The Jig of the Union Loller Page 7