by Jim Harrison
I'm not superstitious, but it makes one wonder if we ever should have had a part in killing anything, but then I don't dream of dead trout, and trout fishing is where I spent most of my time. If you remember, I was fishing when I was struck by lightning. It was the one thing I could do by myself that made a contribution to the family. After we started picking berries together, I taught Edith how to fish, which pleased her parents. There's not much that is offered as food in the world that surpasses a mess of fresh brook or brown or rainbow trout caught in the wild. It was the one sermonette my dad allowed us to laugh at when he would repeat the parable of the loaves and fishes every time we had a fish dinner. The fact that we had at least thirty fish dinners between late spring and the end of the fishing season in the fall did not deter Dad. We had to eat outside unless the weather was ugly because Jesus had spoken to the multitude on a hillside. We were limited to homemade bread, the fish and salt, though Mother in a flight of daring began prebuttering the bread in the kitchen. Dad pretended not to notice because he loved butter and always helped Mother churn it. We had two Jersey cows in a shed, and everyone knows they yield up the best cream for butter.
I should have told you that when Karl disappeared, Dad began writing our congressman to explain that Karl was barely fourteen and had, no doubt, enlisted in one of the services. Mind you, this event was not so extraordinary at the time. I mean, the age fourteen was rare, but with Karl that was a chronological mistake. The country, especially rural areas, which are the best sources for aggressive cannon fodder, was in a patriotic frenzy. Out in the sticks, there was the added incentive of seeing the world. If you have to cut logs or milk cows every morning at daylight, you'll leave town even if you're going to get shot at. At the time, if you waved a flag in front of a farm boy, he'd think first of his nation's honor, then a pliant hula girl.
Ted finally drove Dad all the way down to Lansing, where they had to wait three days to see our congressman, who had a pronounced aversion to what he called “hicks.” The memory of being told about this indignity has given me a permanent aversion to politicians. They tend to waffle between jokes and lies and can never seem to simply talk. The test is the quality of the language, and they have simply invented their own. I think Karl somehow had kept Dad healthy, and in Karl's absence, Dad's health began to decline. Well, Karl was located in England and sent home but never arrived. He escaped in New York without difficulty and switched from the navy to the army and ended up with MacArthur in the Philippines, though, of course, MacArthur didn't know it.
God, I can remember a hot summer day before Karl returned and Edith left my life forever. She already knew that they were going to leave, because with the war winding down there wasn't much left to the scrap metal business, It was a hot day in August in the middle of a prolonged drought, which made the flyless woods fine to walk in but the fish hard to locate. It's a rare year that warm water is a problem up here. Trout don't care for water much above sixty, and they'll travel up and downstream to seek the cooler waters of swamps or locales where there are feeder creeks, seeps or springs. Edith recalled an area on Karl's trapping maps, a marked place where he trapped his first otter near a big spring. It was a ten-mile hike, so we left just after dawn. Violet made us a fine breakfast and hugged us good-bye. We packed a loaf of bread, a blanket, a knife, compass, matches, and extra sinkers and hooks in my rucksack. Your best bait in August is grasshoppers and crickets, and Edith could catch them like a martin or swallow. Violet had become a big sister to Edith, who shared our lessons. That summer we were reading the Anne of Green Gables series, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and several novels by Dickens, which we especially loved because so many of Dickens’ young people were outcasts like ourselves.
“Don't you two waifs make any babies.” Violet waved good-bye.
“Jesus, Violet. Don't say that!” My face turned hot, and Edith covered hers and ran around the side of the house.
“It's not the time to playact, Corvus. If a young girl has a baby, it makes her life impossible. Just be careful, that's all I'm saying.”
We were glum on the first part of our long hike to the spring. In fact, we felt like we had been both found out. We were in that advanced stage of impassioned, amoral smooching where only a dainty pair of undies saves a fragile hymen. Sometimes we would open-mouth kiss for over a half hour by my pocket watch. We were going to get married at sixteen and get a job taking care of a rich man's lodge. There would be lots of books and a fireplace, and the world that so totally ignored us would be held at bay. I was already pretty handy, having built three large martin houses for the lawyer's wife, and Ted had promised to put me to work when I hit fourteen.
“Do you suppose Violet ever had a boyfriend?” Edith asked. “She's twenty-seven, so she must have had a boyfriend.”
“She seems to know what she's talking about.” I put my arm around Edith, who after a full hour of walking was still embarrassed. We paused to take a rest and within minutes were involved in the usual delicate wrestling. There was still dew on the grass, and a marsh hawk made several passes above us, no doubt puzzled by these entwined bodies. We ended up a hairsbreadth from sin and began laughing with delight about our close call. When I think it over, I wonder if everybody's true sexuality isn't private and secret, somewhat in the manner that their actual religion is private and full of peculiarities and secret pacts. It fits their need to survive, for the character of their individuality to survive. This sexuality doesn't yield in any healthy sense to sociological engineering.
I've gone astray. I can see it clearly—how we stopped to fill a small onion sack with hoppers, then began stalking the spring, which had to be just ahead according to Karl's map. It pays to sneak up on trout, then you can catch several before they become even mildly disturbed. We crawled toward the creek along a little ridge and under a blanket of ferns. We were puzzled by a splashing sound and something like puppies yapping. It was a large otter, probably the mother, and a small one. It appeared she was teaching the baby how to fish. They were having a wonderful time. Then a certain shock dawned on us: We had never seen so many fish in one place. The creek in the long drought had dried to not much more than a rivulet, but the spring below us formed a large pool, full of clear water and pale green weeds. The trout were shooting around in clumps to escape the otter, flinging themselves through the water between thick streamers of weed, sometimes out of the water in frantic jumps. There was a small brushpile that saved the trout with enough composure to stay there. Then the otters paused to feed on a dozen fish they had tossed up on a sandbar. I whistled, and the otters scattered, loping up the remains of the creek to a small lake that the map placed just above us to the northeast. It was our turn to catch some fish.
But first we did a little dance. We were simply dry-mouthed and giddy from our luck in seeing such a strange phenomenon. When we calmed down, we decided to take our time. If we caught a lot of trout we'd have to head home right away so they wouldn't spoil. We made our way around to the other side and to the sandbar where the otters had thrown their fish. For the first time Edith took off all of her clothes, and we swam around looking at the fish. The water was so crystalline you could almost see them clearly, and if your movements were slow and easy, the trout calmed down, and the little ones would come close to your face. When we got too cold from the spring, we lay on the sandbar and inspected each other's total nudity somewhat gravely. We started kissing, with Edith on top of me, and then she pushed hard against me, then backed away just in time. We were a little frightened at first, but finally felt betrothed and very serious. We caught a few trout and roasted them, eating them with salt and bread, then dozed on the sandbar, entwined like those on their honeymoon. When we woke we said our prayers, for some reason, including my usual “Oh, Jesus, bring my brother Karl home safely from war.” We made a prudent catch, not wanting to be bullies with the trout, which were entrapped there by the drought.
About halfway home, it began to turn cooler, and when we came to the firs
t big clearing we could see a front coming in from the northeast, black with turmoil and lightning. We began trotting along to try to beat the storm, and we almost made it. About a mile from our house, there was a vast field full of stumps that had been used off and on as a pasture. It was late afternoon, and the sky just before the storm had turned yellowish and scary. It was the same kind of day that I had been hit by the lightning. Edith was just ahead of me, and we were nearly at full run, with her long legs kicking up under her cotton skirt, which was whipped sideways by the gale. I caught up with her and asked her to kiss again, but she pulled my ear with a smile and we ran even faster, reaching our gate as the sky let loose with a deluge.
Don't you wonder about these first affinities? I'm sure nearly everyone in the world has had them, with all their frightening intensity, which comes from our vulnerability at that age. We “love” before we know how to protect ourselves, pure and simple. The trout might have collected in the spring like that only once in my lifetime, and the storm on the way home allowed them to leave, I'm sure. The idea that things only happen once used to bother me. One day when the house was empty, Edith put on lipstick and a pair of earrings, and we did what we imagined were the foxtrot and the jitterbug. Dancing was forbidden in our home, though I'm sure the girls learned the minute they left. We promised each other that our lives together would be without rules. Now I can see her knees and bottom and eyes. Life is unbearably vivid, don't you think? I hope I'm not presenting this as a deathbed scene, another thing that only happens once! It's just the nature of being alive. I took my entire savings of seventeen dollars and had Violet buy a selection of ribbons, rings and a necklace from the dime store for Edith. The last time I saw her was in the forest that cold October day. Now I can feel her small, cool, pointed breasts against my cheeks and lips and forehead.
I might be weeping a little, but I'm not unhappy. It's what we all go through, isn't it? It seems that way to me. Well, Karl returned the December of my twelfth year, in 1947, driving a new Chevrolet coupe. He was brutalized and melancholy from war. If you look at a boy between fourteen and nineteen nowadays, it's hard to imagine Karl doing what he did. He gave me a commando knife with dried blood on it, a Japanese sword, a canteen, and a regulation compass. Curiously, it seemed to us, he never spoke much of the war, except to say he had gone back to the navy with the army's permission because he had been trained as a diver in England. In fact, he was still in the navy, and his job was diving down to ships that had been wrecked in harbors or on reefs. He brought out some bodies, but mostly identification tags and documents.
“I like it down there,” he said. “You don't see anyone you don't like. And Corve, I've got to get you to the ocean to see the fish. I've seen sharks with heads as big around as my Chevy, and fish in schools of millions. From the ship, I saw a whale you couldn't fit curled up in this house.”
Karl took an apartment for a month or so above Brother Fred's hardware store. The town's eyebrows were raised considerably by his affair with the lawyer's wife, which was conducted right out in the open. The lawyer had returned an officer, but a hopeless drunk, having never left the country. Karl had become a hard drinker himself, which added to his later problems. I take a drink now and then myself, but I always noticed that hard drinkers lose their elasticity. If they're in a bad mood, they stay in one; if they're depressed, they stay depressed because they can't quite figure out what to do when they're drinking, due to the sedative nature of alcohol.
Karl did a marvelous thing during the first big dinner after his coming home. It was close to Christmas. Laurel and Ivy came up from Detroit with their husbands, who were also fresh from war but less abused by it. It was Karl's nature to make sure he was in the thick of things. Lily and her husband came up from Naubinway with the first grandchild, named Rexton after the father's hometown. It was strange to be an uncle; it made me feel somehow more significant. I held the baby a lot, somewhat in the same manner that other boys hold puppies. Ted came over from Marquette with a fine-looking girl friend. Dad lifted the household rules to the extent that the men were allowed to take a drink in the pumpshed, and everyone was allowed to play pinochle and Tripoli in the living room. After the utter penury of the Great Depression, the war had brought prosperity to our family. We were much admired in town for the number of new cars parked in the yard. There was a nervous moment when the lawyer's wife dropped off a big roast ham, but Dad treated the situation with elaborate courtliness. Despite the fact we are a melting pot, the social stratification of a small town is rigid, and the lawyer's wife was the only upper-class person to enter our home other than the doctor who had given me pills for my seizures five years before.
Well, Dad could never resist an audience, so one afternoon he insisted on a family prayer service. We all had to kneel on the cold linoleum in the living room. There was much giggling, murmuring and whiskey breath. I was with the men in the back row, with my mother and four sisters and Ted's girl friend in front of us.
“We got to send this geezer a rug.”
“I'm supposed to be a Catholic,” said another brother-in-law.
“That's quite the row of fannies in front of us,” said the drunken fisherman. Lily turned around and stared him into silence. It seemed to me my sisters had their husbands well in hand.
Then Karl came in from outside, red-eyed and mean-looking. I had overheard him talking to Mother about Dad's declining health. The problem was arteriosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, the early stages of what they call Alzheimer's disease nowadays.
“Will you pray with us, Karl?” Dad asked, his voice a little weak, as if waiting for rejection. Those of us who knew Karl felt an unbearable tension.
“Of course I will, Father.” Karl knelt beside Dad and stared straight ahead, while we let our breath go.
“Almighty God,” Dad began, “to put it straight, we thank Thee for delivering our family more or less in one piece. I thought, O Father, that I saw Armageddon right around the corner, but now it seems things have let up. I saw the slaughter of Thy chosen people, the children of Israel, and I thought, O Lord, how long before you end this carnage?” He paused to catch his breath. Laurel sent us her copies of Life magazine, and Dad saw the horror of what is now known as the Holocaust in Biblical terms. “When you allowed your children to die under the fist of the Antichrist, I says this surely must be the Abomination of Desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel. But now you have returned us home more or less in one piece. You have returned my beloved son, Karl, for whom I prayed without ceasing. We didn't know where he was. He just showed up and made our hearts glad, safe from the yellow plague of the Japanese that sought to destroy us. Can you say something to us, Karl?”
Our eyes were supposed to be closed, but I peeked at Karl, who had taken on that weird, inventive look he had when he took Edith and me out in the swamp to see the giant skull.
“Yes, Father. I can tell you folks a little story about how I came to Jesus. I was down in the South Pacific in a lull in battle on a bright, sunny day. The dread kamikazes had sunk one of our destroyers out in the harbor, and it was my job to go down there and take a look. The water was as clear as the air after a norther down there, and the great ship had found a peaceful grave on the bottom. I opened the main compartment, and there in front of my light, which shone around the room, were a hundred drowned men trapped in the sinking. The captain was in front of them, with the Bible still clutched in his hand. I drew them out, one by one, and sent them upwards, floating slowly to the surface where I could see the bright ring of the sun. One after another, I sent them upwards. It was like what you call the Rapture, when we go straight to Heaven. I left the captain and his Bible for last. I looked him straight in his sightless eyes and said, ‘It wasn't all that bad, was it?’ then let him go to float up to the sun. Anyhow, that's how I came to Jesus.”
“Amen!” Dad yelled, hugging Karl and beginning to weep. “Amen. I knew it would happen. Praise Jesus. Amen!”
“Amen,” we said,
swept away for a moment in Father's joy.
Afterwards Karl and me took a ride in his Chevy. His avowed intention was to get some venison, though the deer season had been over several weeks.
“Did I do okay?” he asked.
“You did a real good job. Was it true?” I was shivering and holding Karl's pistol, which was blue and impressive, a service automatic.
“How can anything be true during a war? Bodies bloat so much their clothes burst unless the wreck's real deep where the water is colder. Never saw a body in the Pacific that wouldn't float upwards.”
We shared the unspoken lore of Lake Superior, where the bodies of drowned sailors never float to the surface; the water near the bottom is always too cold for the bodies to deliquesce and gain buoyancy. For some reason, sailors want to be buried on land, say back near the Indiana farm where they started.
“I mean, is it true you came to Jesus down there underwater?”
“No. That was for Dad.” He drank from a pint he had in his coat pocket, and the whiskey mixed with the vapor of our cold breath. “Once our ship stopped at the deepest part of any ocean on earth and the captain let us swim. I wish it had been night. I was the only one to free dive as deep as possible. It was like the reverse of floating upwards into the night sky. That's my religious experience.”
“You're scaring the shit out of me, Karl. You wouldn't get me to do that.”
“Take a drink if you got a hair on your ass.”
I took my first drink of whiskey and liked it. We jacklighted a doe and Karl shot it, throwing it in the trunk. On the way home, we stopped to show the deer to the lawyer's wife, and right there under the streetlight the deer jumped out of the trunk. It started to trot a bit wobbily toward the main part of town. We chased it, and Karl shot the deer in the head again, right on Main Street. I helped him drag it back to the car so he wouldn't get blood on his uniform. The screaming of the lawyer's wife didn't help the situation. Karl and I were laughing, mostly at the embarrassment of not making a clean kill in the first place. Wouldn't you know but the constable showed up?