by Mark Slouka
It had probably come up from the river with the big rain, he’d said. It would be years before I’d remember a circle of lamplight stamped from the darkness, a horizon dark as dream, my father dragging a fish with scales like silver dollars into the sudden air—years before I’d be old enough to believe that life, like water, will sometimes engineer its own logic, adjust itself to fit the form of our desires.
genesis
It began with the lake, I suppose, long before I was born. By 1914 it was already a sanctuary, a forty-acre stillwater pond created not by god on the fourth or fifth or any other day, but by a one-armed veteran of the Spanish-American War named Simon Colby, an impassioned fisherman who, local legend had it, could drop a plug into your pocket at thirty yards without your ever knowing it, his fat, work-callused thumb feathering the drum of that level-wind reel as gently as a father touches the hair on his child’s head. Growing tired of his daily four-mile walk to Wall Pond and the domestic arguments it inspired, Colby, not untypically, decided to build his own.
A tall, rangy man with tobacco-stained fingers and a walnut-sized Adam’s apple always bobbing the length of his neck like an agitated cork, Simon Colby had early on acquired something of a reputation throughout rural Hutchinson County as an intemperate man, a man whose life seemed to be forever careening from crisis to crisis. “Like a level on a horse’s ass,” proclaimed old Herman Washburn, who even then seemed given to the kind of country aphorisms doomed to pass into TV and myth. “Always thirty degrees off plumb.”
A fighter, a lover, a man of enormous industry when inspired and biblical laziness when not, Colby, Washburn claimed, returned from the war late January 1899. Leaning back on his three-legged stool early one morning in 1951, Washburn explained the chronology of Colby’s return, at length and in detail, to my father, who, like everyone else visiting Washburn’s store, could only wait patiently while his goods, hostage for the length of the telling, gathered dust on the plywood counter.
“Now here’s the thing, Mostiky,” said Washburn, who, having never quite succeeded in getting his tongue around our Czech surname, Mostovsky, had simply whittled it down to size. “Bein’ from Europe and all, you probably never heard of the Spanish-American War.” My father, who should have known better, started to point out that he had, in fact, heard about it, that he’d read about it in books, of which Europe still contained a few, and that …
“Anyway, we had us a war with the Spanish,” continued old Washburn, “short as it was. Now here’s the thing. Colby goes down in March, you see.” (And here Washburn raised the thumb of his right hand, knobbed with age, and bent it back with his left index finger, counting.) “Shafter’s boys kick the Spaniards’ ass in July.” (Right index finger.) “Santiago falls on the seventeenth.” (Ring finger.) “But Colby”—and now the right hand, unbound, rose briefly as though releasing a dove, the gesture unintentionally graceful, a mixture of wonder and alcohol-inspired exaggeration—“Colby doesn’t get back till the following January. What took him so long?”
Here Washburn, pausing for emphasis, finally brought a delicate, silver flask from behind the counter and raised it to his withered lips. “Well may you ask,” he said, grandly. Then, leaning forward: “Sonofabitch walked. Said he didn’t like the company so he got off the train in Macon. Half a year later, there he is, walkin’ up the Croton Road through a January blizzard. Now of course Jack’s is empty on account of everyone bein’ at the dance, so he has a drink or two by himself, then walks two miles straight to the barn, out on the dance floor, grabs … Look behind the rakes for Chrissake! … grabs Mandy Sullivan ’round the waist as she’s dancin’ with her beau at that time, man name of Frank White, god rest his donkey soul, and kisses her full on the lips right then and there in front of everybody.
“Now, far as anybody can figure out afterwards, Colby’s never seen the girl before; her family come to town while he was gone to war. No, she just happened to be the finest-lookin’ woman there—damn near anywhere, you ask me—and the nearest one to the door when he comes stompin’ in, black hair fallin’ in his face, and grabs her without even bothering to knock the snow off his coat. It would’ve all passed in fun (and I still say that’s how Colby meant it), if the Sullivan girl had just seemed a little more shocked by it—if she’d pushed him away or smacked him or any goddamned thing—or if poor old Frank had only laughed and taken it all in stride.”
Here Washburn, holding forth from behind the counter, looked over the small line of customers waiting patiently like acolytes at the temple gate, and sadly shook his head. “Trouble is, you see, Frank White never took anything in stride a day in his life. A big man—all hair and muscle and not much else. I’ve talked to people say they saw him smile, but I don’t believe it. Always looked like he had a plug up his ass to me.
“So anyway, they go outside in the snow, White in his shirtsleeves, Colby still wearing his boot-length army-issue coat. White takes a pose like Great John L. the day my daddy saw him go seventy-five rounds at Rickburg—he has fists like this—and tells Colby he can apologize or eat shit. Colby laughs in his face, says: ‘Look here, Franklin, here’s what I’m gonna do. First, I’m gonna kick your ass with one arm behind my back. And then’—it seemed to come to him at the spur of the moment—‘then I’m gonna marry your girl.’ Whereupon he steps in, lets loose a haymaker with his left—and misses. White, meanwhile, unleashes one of those hams of his and damn near takes Colby’s head off. This goes on until someone stops to wonder why Colby’s right sleeve keeps flapping like a shirt on a line, but by this time he’s not much to look at. White, the last to know he’s been beatin’ on a cripple, rushes over to where Colby’s tryin’ to get up after paintin’ the snow with his face. He starts to blubber and apologize, but there’s Colby, lyin’ on his back, lookin’ up quietly into the falling snow. There’s a little bubble of snot goin’ in and out at his nose and he’s workin’ his mouth like he’s huntin’ for something with his tongue. ‘Get your suit, Franklin,’ he says, spittin’ out a tooth. ‘You can be my best man.’ ”
Leaning forward once more, Washburn took another sip from the flask, for all the world like some huge, bald-headed bee at a wavering blossom. “Now you’re probably wonderin’ why I’m tellin’ you all this. I mention it, Mostiky, to give you some sense of Simon Colby. A mind like a C-clamp. Decided he’d walk from Georgia to New York just for the hell of it? He done it. Decided he was gonna marry this girl in spite of the fact he couldn’t pick her out of a crowd of three and her with a two-armed boyfriend twice his size—a month later by god they’re married. And remember this—building that lake of yours meant a whole lot more to Simon Colby than walkin’ from Macon or marryin’ Mandy Sullivan ever did.”
We knew the rest of the story, of course. Everybody did. Summoning his older brother, John, one fine summer afternoon five years after his return from the war, Simon Colby supposedly led the way up the grassy rise already known as Cobb Hill. Below them lay a gently undulating meadow abruptly pinched off at one end by the rising hills. Thirty white-spotted Herefords, comprising the brothers’ modest herd, grazed as though spellbound in the slanting light along Polson Brook; one, having crossed the water, lurched awkwardly onto the undercut bank, heaving up its oddly human buttocks. A few, seemingly deep in thought along the pasture wall, seemed to have forgotten their purpose.
Simon Colby, blind to the bucolic splendor of it all, looked on the scene with mild disgust. John, god-fearing and sullen, annoyed at being dragged away from his work in the barn, said nothing, determined to wait his younger brother out. Minutes passed. A woodpecker hammered in the afternoon silence. A cow, chewing its cud patiently, turned to look at the men on the hill. At long last, having searched for words and found none, Simon scratched his stump with his left hand, sighed, and delivered himself of a line destined to go down in Lost Lake history. Years after he himself would be buried on Cobb Hill, only a few yards from where he now stood, it would be repeated as a miracle of succinctness and resolu
tion. “Better get your cows, John,” he said.
A man of vision, Simon Colby was constructing the first of twenty-three rough wooden cabins before the waters of Polson Brook had begun to shove against the boards of the new dam. The stones for the foundations he acquired by dismantling, over a period of twelve years, a full half mile of pasture wall, which he loaded and hauled over broken field and hardpack with the help of a very young Herman Washburn and, most particularly, young Washburn’s horse and cart. Living out of an old U.S. Army tent (his decision to sell off half the family herd and flood the pasture for a fishing hole apparently having gone over badly at home), he had the first stone rectangle in place before the remaining Herefords, clustered head to head on a soggy rise as though plotting revenge, fully realized the permanence of their situation. By the time the grass had disappeared forever under the waters, Colby and Washburn had raised the walls, built the chimney, finished the roof, and shingled it. By October Colby had rented the finished product to a city man named Winston Reed for the unheard-of sum of one hundred dollars a year. A few days later, Simon Colby folded up his tent and returned home, a vindicated (and forgiven) man.
Some eleven years later, on a cool, sun-shot day in June, Simon Colby, Herman Washburn, and a nineteen-year-old Italian immigrant named Ludovico Mazzola finished the twenty-third (and last) cabin, and rested. Sitting on the spine of the roof, passing a celebratory bottle, Colby looked over his domain, to the stone chimneys rising here and there among the trees, to the cove where a lone swimmer, like some pale fish gasping for oxygen, slowly made his way, and declared himself satisfied. “Well, that’s done,” he said. Young Mazzola, who had the slightly wild good looks and guileless charm of a faun, and who forever seemed to be marveling at his own good fortune, murmured a benediction in Italian. Washburn drank.
The date was June 28. The year, 1914. I like to think of them sitting there, as in a photograph never taken, utterly unaware of the forces about to be unleashed on the world—unaware, like weary sunbathers drowsing in the sun, of the wall of cloud rising quickly from the east. What were they doing, at the precise moment the bullet left the barrel of Gavrilo Princip’s gun? What were they thinking as the crowd, voices rising and ebbing with the summer wind, milled along the sun-warmed cobbles, unaware that in the coming instant the curtain of civilization, like a moving background caught on a nail, would be torn down the middle?
Herman Washburn, it seems, was thinking about nothing more essential than getting the bottle back from Simon Colby. Colby, tentatively probing an aching molar with his tongue, was thinking about a bass he’d lost the night before. Ludovico Mazzola, sitting slightly lower down the slope of the roof, meditatively sucking a cut on his hand, was recalling with no small wonder the night before at the children’s dock, where—suddenly, unexpectedly—he’d had the Greenwoods’ oldest daughter, Polly.
The morning wore on. The sun crossed an open patch between the leaves. The whiskey descended the neck of the bottle, then the waist, dispersing its warmth through the arms and legs of the three men who one after the other rose and walked down the sloping shingles away from the lake to piss off the side of the roof. Around noon, Mazzola climbed carefully down the stone chimney and tossed up a small leather sack with sandwiches to Washburn, who missed, lunged, and nearly followed them over the side, to the great hilarity of all concerned, himself included.
Had anyone been listening that morning, they would have heard a conversation whose margins kept getting wider, a conversation, that is, with the trajectory of a happy life, or a child’s descent into sleep: at first, three voices, often overlapping, punctuated by bursts of laughter; then long, satisfied pauses, a sentence here and there, an occasional belch; finally (except for a brief, halfhearted argument over a hammer), a long, luxurious slide into silence and slumber.
Those still looking for signs of god’s benevolence (or proof of his disgust) need look no further than our ignorance of where our lives will lead. Ludovico Mazzola, tasting his own coppery blood in the sun, couldn’t know that he was fated to spill the rest of it into the plowed fields of the Argonne only four years later, or that the woman he’d had the night before would become his wife, delivering some nine months later the child they’d conceived (despite her assurances about the prophylactic properties of water) the night before, or that that child, an uninspired student and second-rate carpenter, would inherit some of his father’s early good fortune and open a small hunting and fishing store on a rural dirt road literally weeks before the powers that be in Albany would decide to turn it into an interstate artery, thereby bringing in a steady supply of commuters and cash and boosting the Mazzola family fortunes for generations to come.
Colby and Washburn, for their part, could not have guessed that they’d outlive their smiling apprentice by nearly half a century, or that Washburn’s love for the bottle would remain the one true passion of a long and garrulous life, or that Colby, some thirty years later, would first rent a cabin to a Czech immigrant named Rheinhold Černý, and then another, some months later, to another, younger émigré from Czechoslovakia named Mostovsky—my father.
Innocent enough in conception—a forty-acre fishing hole with a float like a wooden rivet at its center—Colby’s lake was the start of something, of many things, he could never have anticipated. Like a water hole on the savanna, like the original garden, bloodless and pure, it soon drew unexpected guests, and in this it was typical of all the things men dream and do. Dismantling one wall, he erected another; flooding one world, he exposed a dozen more. It could not have been otherwise.
portrait—a sketch
He’d start out every evening just after dinner, moving the heavy wooden boat slowly east along the shoreline with a single oar he pulled out of the oarlock and moved in small, effortless circles with his left arm, locked and strong. I’d never seen a fly fisherman before. I’d watch the line loop the air in a long, tight script, the rod curved with its weight, his right arm lifting it sharp behind his head, letting it rise and stretch, then sending it out to the open spots between carpets of weed, the black pockets between deadfalls, the rectangles of shade under sagging docks.
He was old—seventy, maybe more—tall and straight, with gray hair cut close to his head and a face that always seemed to be listening to something difficult to make out but not unexpected. Everything about him—the patient set of his mouth, his eyes, the way he’d put down the oar and loop the line between the thumb and little finger of his left hand—was slow and deliberate and perfect and in such complete and incontrovertible contrast to the frenzied chaos of tangled lines and snagged lures that marked my hours on the water that I watched him as if mesmerized, sensing something special and mysterious, determined to learn whatever secret there was to know.
“Hey, mister, what’re you using for bait,” I’d say with the callow familiarity of youth, automatically using the generic term we had for anything tied to the end of a line. And he’d always answer the same way: “I’m not using bait, son, I’m using a lure.” He’d show me a little homemade popper with a spooned-out face and dry fly hackle tied around the shank of the hook. He seemed to have five or six of these and nothing else. I never saw him change lures. I never saw him fish with anything else.
It didn’t matter to me that a good part of the time he didn’t catch a thing. It certainly didn’t seem to matter to him. On good days he’d put two fish on a simple rope stringer he’d hang from the steel brace below the oarlock. If he caught more, he’d let them go, slipping out the single hook, holding them gently upright under the water till the lactic acid wore off and the gills started to pump and they swam slowly off his hand, then flashed into the dark. He kept nothing under a foot long, nothing much bigger.
I was there the time he dropped the floating lure beside a small finger of branch sticking out over the surface. The instant it smacked down like some fat, wind-spun moth, the water beneath and around it shifted almost imperceptibly. He twitched it and the water boiled briefly and was s
till. I watched from thirty feet away—we had just passed. He waited, until I thought for sure whatever it was had gone, then twitched it again and the lure disappeared in a great splash and his rod was bent deep to the water. He brought it to the boat, slowly, carefully, a great, thrashing slab of a fish that broke the water only once, wallowed heavily, then went deep. I watched him slip the hook, as he did with all the others. He held it up for my benefit.
“He’s huge,” I said, barely breathing.
“A good fish,” he agreed. “A pretty fish.” He laid it belly-down on his palm in the water. It lay fanning quietly, then swam off.
It didn’t take long for me to start despising my heavy fiberglass rods and the bulky reels and the arsenal of treble-hooked lures, each in their little compartment in the tackle box I lugged on and off the boat each day like some water-bound traveling salesman. I begged a cheap fiberglass fly rod for Christmas and by May I was back, whipping at the water, flinging mad loops around my ears, wrenching at the rod to loosen the poppers I invariably sank into the branches of lakeside trees just beyond my reach … By June I’d given up, returning to my Mitchell reel and the old familiar lures. That fall I started high school. I didn’t pick up a fly rod again until after our first son was born.
He and his wife didn’t come back to the lake that summer, or any other. Summer rentals were like that sometimes. It was years before I thought I understood the rough poetry of the man, the expression on his face when he looked across that small water—mildly amused, almost wry—as though to say, “It’s not quite the way I planned it, not quite where I thought I’d be, but good enough, it’ll do …” and began to suspect that living appropriately sometimes requires a drawing back, a slow renunciation of much that mattered, once.