Shad Run

by Howard Breslin

  “Where are we?” Lancey had an arm draped over the skiff’s round bottom, resting. The wind still lashed the river, dashed spray over them, but she judged the worst of the squall had passed. They always struck like lightning, never lasted long.

  “I don’t know,” Dirck said, ruefully. “I wasn’t watching.”

  “North of Poughkeepsie, anyway.” Lancey raised herself, peered toward the west bank. The rain drew a misty curtain in front of the shoreline; it was impossible to find a landmark. “About mid-river, I think.”

  “We were about the middle.” Dirck gauged the drift of the skiff on the ebbing tide. “And we’re not going to get to shore this way. We’ll have to swim for it.”

  Lancey looked at him. They were both clinging to the wreck with a hand hooked under the submerged gunwale, and an arm hugging the curve of the hull. He had less trouble hanging on because he was lighter clad. She saw that his jacket was gone, and guessed he’d discarded his shoes.

  Dirck mistook her silence for apprehension. He said, “If it’s too far for you, Lancey, we’ll stay right here.”

  “It’s not the distance.”

  “Well, then, why——”

  “I can’t swim dressed like this!” She was impatient with his obtuseness.

  “Take things off.”

  “No.”

  Dirck stared, puzzled by her cold tone. His own impatience was kindled by hers. He blamed himself for the accident, but it wasn’t the first craft upset by a river squall. After all, the Argo was his loss, and the girl could at least cooperate to save her own neck.

  “Lancey, use your common sense. We could drift like this for hours. Sooner or later we’ll have to swim.”

  “Later, then.” Lancey realized she was being stubborn. Dirck was right; it was senseless to postpone the inevitable. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to a decision.

  “Why wait? We’ll just get colder.”

  “I don’t care.” She bit her tongue after she spoke. The statement sounded so foolish. Feeling the leaden drag of her soaked dress she wanted to weep for its lost beauty.

  “Lancey,” said Dirck, as if humoring a child, “this is no time for proprieties, for modesty. I promise I won’t even look if that’s what——”

  “It’s not that, blast you!”

  “Oh.” Frowning at her vehemence, he sought the reason behind it. It wasn’t like Lancey to act skittish in an emergency. His voice quickened, stirred by a fresh idea. “Look, if—if it’s your laces or something—getting out of your clothes, petticoats, I mean, if you need help, why, I’ll do what I can.”

  She laid her forehead against the keel, and her shoulders shook. Laughter, tinged with bitterness, flavored her speech.

  “Haven’t you done enough, Dirck?”

  “For God’s sake,” he said, angrily, “I’m not just trying to undress you!”

  That brought her head up. The wind had lessened; the rain had slackened to a steady drizzle. Lancey spoke quietly, almost wearily, but her tone cut through the hissing murmur of the storm.

  “I’m not being a prissy idiot, Dirck. Whatever you may think. These clothes, this dress, they’re my best, and the dress was new! It’s not easy to—to give them up, to let the river have them.”

  “You needn’t. We’ll lash them to the skiff. I mean to recover the Argo.”

  “The Argo can be fixed. The dress——” Lancey’s shrug was a gesture of despair.

  “Then why risk your life for it?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I know I can strip it off, and easily make shore in my shift. It’s doing it, that’s hard!” She saw the impatient toss of his head, flared into anger. “First and last you’ve brought me naught but ill luck!”

  “Me?”

  “You! You’re my goblin, Dirck, an evil spirit that lures me into the river!” All her mixture of Dutch lore and fisherman superstition was fertilized by her resentment. “Somehow you’re a Jonah!”

  “Now wait, Lancey. I’ll admit I was careless, but——”

  “Careless!” Lancey knew she was being unreasonable, but she didn’t care. Emotions pent-up by the etiquette of the afternoon, heated by kisses, dampened by her ducking, came boiling from deep within her. “ ‘Twas wantonness upset us, and well you know it!”

  “Maybe,” said Dirck, grimly, “you think that was all my doing, too!”

  “You started it!” Honesty checked her bitterness, changed her tone. “Ah, no. Fair’s fair. It takes two, and my guilt’s as great as yours!”

  “Guilt,” he said, with a laugh, “is a harsh term for a couple of harmless kisses.”

  “Dirck,” Lancey said, “Dirck.” She beat her palm on the side of the skiff as if physically tapping her thoughts into shape. “Together, we—we curdle everything we do—like vinegar in milk. There is a curse, a hex, on our meetings. On the ice with Meda, at the inn, now here—”

  “Lancey, that’s nonsense.”

  “Is it?” She cast a glance northward into the mist toward the Catskills, and shivered. “Or is it that the bowlers in the mountains think we should each stay in our proper place?”

  “Well,” said Dirck, “you can’t call this river a proper place for anybody.”

  His calmness stopped her torrent of words. He doesn’t understand, she thought, but without irritation. The ridiculousness of arguing while chest deep in a rain swept river brought a fleeting smile.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said. “But so am I,” she cried silently. The wetness of her face tasted salty; she wasn’t sure whether from tears or tide. “We’d best swim.”

  The drizzle hung around them like gray vapor, hardly stirred by wind that had dwindled to a breeze. Lancey let go with one hand, reached into the river, twisting as she tried to raise a foot against the clinging weight of sodden skirts.

  Dirck, startled, grabbed her as her chin dipped under. “What’s the matter? You weakening?”

  “No. My shoes. They’re a tight fit.” Her fingers had touched a steel buckle before it slid away. Those, too, she thought, must be sacrificed. Her surrender was complete, but she would not forget who made it necessary. “I’ll have to pry them off.”

  “Wait,” said Dirck, nodding, “and hold tight.” He doubled suddenly in the water, diving.

  Lancey watched his hips break the surface, sink. She felt his hands fold her skirts along her calf, fumble lower, clamp around her shoe. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the gunwale to offset Dirck’s added weight. Her foot slipped loose with colder bouyancy.

  “One gone,” she whispered.

  A moment later Dirck rose out of the river beside her. His impetus carried him waist deep from the water, then he fell back in his own splashing. He blew out breath, sucked air.

  “You’re a crazy sturgeon,” Lancey said. “Get your breath.”

  “I—I’ll go down for the other shoe in a second,” Dirck said, panting.

  Then, Lancey heard the voices, and waved him to silence.

  “What is it, Lancey?”

  “Hush! Listen!”

  They both were still, tense, listening. Through the misty drizzle, flat across the water, came the sound of talk. They could not distinguish words, but they heard two men. There was the creak of a tholepin, the slap-splash of an oarblade.

  “Ahoy, there!” shouted Dirck. “Help!”

  “Help!” Lancey’s scream left her breathless.

  “All right, all right.” The unseen caller sounded annoyed. “Keep your hatch battened. We’ll find you.” He said something unintelligible, and someone else laughed.

  “I know that voice,” Lancey said. “That’s Pardon Cash.” She hailed again, joyful with recognition. “Pardon, it’s me! Lancey! Lancey Quist!”

  “Lancey!” Pardon seemed closer. The man with him swore a round oath.

  Dirck said, “That’s your friend Justin.”

  Nodding, Lancey thought it fitting that they should be rescued by fishermen. It seemed to prove the point she’d been arguing; she belonged
with her own kind.

  The rowboat nosed its way through the drizzle. Pardon Cash was rowing; Justin Pattison scowled down at them from the bow. His glare shifted from Lancey to Dirck.

  “Let her run, Pardon,” said Justin, and spat. He leaned over the gunwale, arm extended.

  Lancey grabbed his hand, reached for the gunwale. She heard Justin’s surprised grunt as he took her water-logged weight. They were both straining when Dirck’s shoulder boosted her from behind. She tumbled into the boat, lay panting on the bottom.

  “We ought to leave yon,” Justin said as he helped Dirck clamber over the side.

  “Well, thanks,” said Dirck.

  “Don’t get uppity,” Pardon Cash said. “You both deserve that and more. I never seed such half-assed sailing in my life. Couldn’t hardly believe it. There was that squall getting blacker and closer, and there, smack in its path, is a dinky, carpenter’s chip of a coracle with a kerchief sized sail! Lancey, you know better than——”

  “Don’t blame Lancey,” said Dirck, face scarlet. “We noticed the squall too late to lower sail.”

  “You should stick to horse riding,” Justin said.

  “You saw us, Pardon?” asked Lancey.

  “Aye. We’d pulled in to tie snug, but you stood out like a boil on a wench’s nose. Only Justin and me decided to make a drift this far north of the landing——”

  Lancey realized she was lying among a catch of fish. She shifted, pushed one from under her. Its silvery color caught her glance, and she scooped it into her hands.

  “Pardon!” Her voice rang with excitement. “This—this is shad!”

  “Aye,” said Pardon Cash. “Buck. They’re starting to run, Lancey.”

  Book Two: FLOODTIDE

  CHAPTER 14

  OUT OF THE UNCHARTED EXPANSE OF THE SOUTHERN OCEAN, where their presence was inconspicuous, the shad came north with spring. Each year the great schools of fish turned with the season, separated into regiments, swam in the same direction like a vast and purposeful army.

  All along the eastern coast of the North American continent, from Spanish Florida to English Canada, on the serrated shores of the newly independent states between, the phenomena occurred. As the rivers that flowed into the Atlantic grew warm the shad entered their mouths. Their appearance was decided by no calendar date, but by the temperature of the streams. Unerringly, men believed, the shad knew this, as they knew which entrance to select. Drawn to the fresh water of their own spawning, they pushed upriver to fulfill their natural cycle, deposit their eggs, replenish their kind.

  It was a series of successive invasions that increased in numbers as it progressed northward. The more southerly rivers knew the forays of the shad, but the major movements—the great runs that counted shad in thousands—started in the waters of Chesapeake Bay. Returning fish turned through that wide gateway in a mighty column, fought their way into and up the Indian named rivers: the Potomac, the Patuxent, the Susquehanna. Almost immediately another run started in the Delaware. Then, with a time lapse that varied as the weather, shad arrived in the Hudson.

  This was not the final magnet to draw countless spawners from the migrating silverbacks. The Connecticut received its share, and other coastal rivers as far north as the cliff-banked St. Lawrence. These runs, however, came later, especially where the water stayed cold until mid-summer.

  In the Hudson, as elsewhere, the buck shad, the male, appeared first, a numerous vanguard that seemed to test the dangers of passage for the following roe.

  The greatest danger was man. Centuries before the white men sailed cautiously up its unexplored channels, the red-skinned tribes along the river’s banks had noted the annual return of the shad. They hailed it as a fresh, ever-renewed, source of food, a change of diet, an occasion that supplied reason and dish for a feast. The warriors fished with every primitive implement they could contrive—spear, barbed hook of bone, rush-woven seines. No matter how many they caught and gorged upon, the shad still ran in myriad plenty.

  More resourceful, the white men used nets. If their method was old, brought from Europe, the prize it entangled was new—new in shape and taste. The hauls from the nets exceeded the Indians’ wildest dreams, but the running shad seemed undiminished.

  A hundred and three-score years had passed since the Europeans first settled on the Hudson. Much had happened in that time; the river had witnessed many changes. On both banks Indian villages and lodges had vanished, been replaced by towns of sturdier houses. Ships of trade and war had sailed these waters; cannon fired in anger had mocked the thunder from the mountains. Men had died, and shed blood, as they made history.

  The Dutch had vanquished the savages, and, in turn, had been vanquished by the English. These had ruled the land longest, only to be driven out at last by a rebellious people after a bloody struggle. The victors were a new, mixed breed, native born and immigrant, who called themselves Americans, New Yorkers, York Staters. They were part of a loose alliance of similar free states that were not yet a nation.

  But the shad ran upriver to spawn in the year 1788, as always.

  Lancey Quist, rowing behind her father, bent to the oars with grim purpose. She considered it her fault that Hendrick had yet to cast net in this year’s run.

  Her foolish accident with Dirck van Zandt had hobbled her father, given the other fishermen a head start. Hester, who had peeled off the soaked velvet gown in tight-lipped silence, had insisted on foot baths, rest, doses of steaming brews intended to ward off the ague.

  “You look like a drowned cat,” Hester said, “but you ain’t gonna be a sick one!”

  “But Pa needs me, Hester!”

  “He can wait. The shad’ll be coming for some time.”

  She’d never, Lancey thought, known her stepmother to be so adamant. A night and a full day passed before she allowed the girl to go outdoors. All that time the russet dress had hung, drying, before the fire.

  As the boat slid along the darkening river, Lancey recalled another conversation. She was glad that no one could see her face now. Night was gathering around them, draining all color from earth, water, and sky. Already the high west bank was a dark bulk against a shadow streaked tapestry from which the last sunless daylight faded. It was an hour of depressing hush that suited Lancey’s mood, made the remembered words tragic.

  “You might as well face it, girl. That dress won’t be the same.”

  “Hester, I only wore it once!”

  “I know. But velvet don’t take to drenching lightly. It’ll dry, sure, but getting its looks back will take a deal of doing.”

  “I’ve seen you hold a velvet ribbon over the kettle spout and—”

  “A ribbon’s handy small. A full sized dress is something else again.” The woebegone expression on Lancey’s face had softened Hester. “I’ll try, girl, but I can’t promise success.”

  “At least Dirck saved my shoe.”

  “Uh-huh. Right smart of him to tuck it in his belt that way. But how’d it happen that neither of you noticed that squall amaking? River bred and reared, the pair of you.”

  “We were—talking.”

  “Talking, eh? Well, I guess that’s close enough to the truth. Pigeons coo, and bullfrogs—”

  “Now, Hester!”

  “You needn’t glare at me, girl. There’s sharp talk and sweet talk. But any kind that could make you ignore a gathering storm is the kind that can loose the knots in a garter.”

  In a way, Lancey decided, Hester was right. Of course it hadn’t come to garters or anything like that, but she had let Dirck’s kisses befuddle her judgment.

  As always the rhythmic motion of rowing, smoothly repetitive, helped her thinking. She could trust Hendrick to set stroke and course, let her muscles work at the familiar task while she thought about something else. You couldn’t day dream and handle oars, but they seemed to quicken your mind for the solving of a problem.

  Lancey’s problem revolved around Dirck van Zandt. She felt that she’d settled it, but
couldn’t refrain from another last review of the arguments. They made her decision right and inevitable. No one, she felt, could help her reach that decision, and even Dirck would have to admit its correctness.

  They were, Lancey thought, ill matched for anything but casual friendship. She had never considered Dirck as a suitor, a prospective husband, a devoted swain. The gap between their lives was too great for that, as unbridgeable as the wide Hudson itself. A Lancey Quist did not, could not, swim in the same school as the van Zandts. Men like George Clinton and Justin Pattison could prate of rights, and being born equal, but women knew better. Patroons were not fisher folk. Like should mate with like.

  Oh, nonsense, said Lancey silently, who wants to marry him anyway? The fact that Dirck’s touch could make her stomach flutter, his kisses heat her blood to boiling, was beside the point.

  He was nice looking, clean, had wit and charm. The girl was proud of the way she coolly listed Dirck’s assets. He was, mostly, fun to be with, could make a stone laugh, turned even sinful dalliance into a pleasant romp. All the more reason for her to make sure that he kept his distance. Such pleasures, repeated, could lead to but one ending. She knew, guiltily, that in a moment of desire she might easily welcome such an ending, but she considered this a bodily craving that had nothing to do with love.

  You’re a wanton, Lancey told herself, and no better than Nell Bogardus, or any trollop. She’d been lucky to discover this in time; she was determined to take no more chances.

  Once more, the girl wished her older brother had not gone awhaling. She might not, she admitted, have sought his advice, but his presence would be reassuring. Ten Bush, after all, was a young man like any other. His quiet answers to a few careful questions might supply just the knowledge his sister needed.

  “This is far enough. Let her run.”

  Hendrick’s voice jerked her back to the present. Lancey shipped her oars, and they drifted. Sky and water were almost black now; the evening star was winking a welcome to a scattering of newly apparent fellows. From the boat the lights in the windows of Poughkeepsie houses looked like yellow flags strung haphazardly on the crest of the bluff. As yet there was no moon, and the only sound was the river current gurgling against the hull.