by John Metcalf
“Evening,” said Forde. “Any luck?”
The man nodded and stirred the sodden newspapers with his foot.
“Couple,” he said.
“Carp?” said Forde.
The man nodded.
Forde propped himself on one of the boulders that sat either side of the small spit, boulders placed there, presumably, to keep vehicles away from the crumbling bank. Stones, broken concrete blocks, rubble. Rushes at the tip of it.
“Do you mind if I sit for a bit? Such a soft night.”
The man was intent on threading worms.
“They had themselves a free feed,” he said.
“Where are they?” asked Forde. “I mean, what does this little breakwater do?”
“Moves the current out just a bit in a curve, see? and that makes a small, slower-moving backwater—can you see there? Where the water’s moving with less surface on it?”
“Right,” said Forde. “So that’s where they’re lying.”
“That’s it,” said the man. “Where they don’t have to fight water as much.”
As he bent back over the rig, the left side of his face was lit in the naphtha glare and Forde saw that the flesh was tight, immobile, shiny. As so often, Hemingway flashed into him mind, one of those imaginative feats that now crammed his mind, Hemingway’s description of the mutilés de guerre …
…an almost iridescent cast about the considerably reconstructed faces, rather like that of a well-packed ski run… crammed brilliances that shone, fragments that earlier in his life had opened up verbal possibilities, sudden vistas of verbal splendour.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” he said, “but I couldn’t help noticing—”
“My face, is it?”
“A fire?” said Forde.
“Sort of.”
“I’m sorry if I—”
The man shrugged.
“Years ago,” he said.
“What happened?”
“Well, the long and short of it, I was making fries for my boy, Donny—in the rushes there—and the chip pan, the fat caught fire, to this day, I don’t know how that happened, it was on a gas burner but still—anyway I got in a panic, there was flame up the wall, and I opened the kitchen window over the sink to chuck it out—there was a walk alongside the house up to the back door—well, most of it went out but the pot hit the window frame and some splashed back on me but what went out hit my wife. As fate would have it, she’d been coming up the side path with a bag of groceries.
“Christ!” said Forde. “How awful!”
“She died, Mary did, the burns, but the shock as well, the doctors said. Her heart gave out. They had her on morphine and she didn’t last long, thank God!”
“I am so sorry,” said Forde.
“You learn to live with it.”
He cast out again.
“Easy casting,” he said, “with this weight of lead on it. Strip off a few lengths of line and it’s just lobbing it into place. The lead keeps it on the bottom where they’re feeding.”
He wound the reel until the line was taut and propped the rod against the stool.
“We do alright though, me and Donny. He’s a bit…” the man nodding meaningfully. “Good-hearted, though. I’m on the pension but we do odd jobs here and there helps us out. I had a proper business before. Painting. Donny does the roller but I still do the cutting. I can’t do a full day now because my arm got some of it and I was wearing an old workshirt—nylon or rayon or whatever, you know, flammable, and some of it must have melted into the burn and it was infected and they had to cut some muscle away… but we do alright, Donny and me. Has something of Mary’s looks, Donny has.
I don’t sleep so well so we come down here most nights, soon as the ice goes out.”
“Pain?”
“No, not now. Just, well, thinking about things. I can’t sleep for thinking about things. One minute you’re just jogging along, everything’s like it always is, and the next the whole world’s changed. What must you make of that?”
“It must be very hard.”
“But what are you doing in a suit and tie? Down here sitting on my rock?”
“I was at a fancy dinner but I got bored and I had a row with one of my sons.”
They sat and watched the river.
“That’s a beautiful old reel you’re using,” said Forde, “Years since I’ve seen a wooden one. They call them ‘fixed spool’ reels now but I can remember when they were the only reels there were. I had one just like that when I was a kid. For sea-fishing, that was. Imagine! They sell reels like that in antique shops now.”
“Are you from England?”
“Yes, years ago.”
“I thought I could hear it, that accent.”
“A long time now,” said Forde.
“I’ve never been over there. Nottingham’s where my dad was from.”
He ran his fingertip along the edge of the reel.
“This was me dad’s. About the only thing of his I have left. Someone—I don’t think it was him—someone had painted it with marine varnish, like on yachts, but it had gone scabby so I sanded it down and treated it with linseed oil and brought it back up and it came up beautiful, the grain. And a drop of machine oil under the spool…”
“And the beauty of them, too,” said Forde, “is there’s nothing to go wrong or break.”
“I never was sure,” said Ken, “what wood it was. What do you think?”
Ford squatted.
“Oak?”
“The grain’s not right for oak. Oak’s big, isn’t it? The patterns of it, I mean.”
“And it’s not a foreign hardwood,” said Forde, “not like mahogany or teak, say. Could it be elm? That’s a hard one.”
“You know what I’m thinking,” said Ken. “I don’t know why it’s in my head but I think it’s maybe boxwood. Could he have said that? Or else why’s it there? And ‘heartwood,’ that’s in my mind. I wouldn’t have said that, but he might have.”
“Ah?” said Forde. “Could well be because that’s got a tight grain, hasn’t it? Very hard. They use it for carvings and making prints.”
“That’s my guess, anyway,” said Ken.
“And you’re not using nylon line.”
“No, real old-fashioned, I am.”
“Lovely to see a reel like that,” said Forde.
A companionable silence fell.
The wooden reel moved memories in him.
He saw himself as a boy of nine or ten.
He fished religiously. Most evenings he rode down to the river Stour. Heart-pounding evenings poaching in a private fishing club’s waters for roach and bream. Endless, timeless summer evenings. An evening when all the boys went mad as a big pike was spotted from the bridge, boys running, shouting, pointing, getting rods into the water, irritating mothers calling bedtime and boys’ names in the hot, deepening dark.
Sometimes he cycled for miles to watch lampreys gathered under the bridge over the stream that ran through the grounds behind Christchurch Cathedral. Sometimes at low tide, he’d jump, mud-spattered, from tussock to tussock across the Christchurch saltings to reach Mudeford and the Black House and watch salmon fishermen laying nets at the estuary’s narrow mouth, watch them sometimes hauling in a fury of roiling silver.
And sea fishing.
He saw himself as a boy of nine or ten scrunching along the pebbles, scavenging along the tideline of sea-wrack, the tangles of kelp and bladderwrack. He always left his bike at the cliff top and walked miles past the promenade and the beach huts, walking towards a ruined old jetty that was fringed with weed. At its end, where once a beacon stood, beds of kelp sloshed and swayed. Cormorants voided white on the crumbling concrete.
He liked going out in subsiding storms, a solitary little figure exulting in the wildness of the
booming wind, the immense roaring, waves smashing, spray and spume driving inland to the very base of the cliffs.
Scattered above and below the wandering line of sea-wrack lay seashells—limpet, mussel, periwinkle, whelk and cockle, painted top and paddock. Razor shells. The white shields of cuttlefish, whelks’ egg cases like coarse sponge, mermaid’s purses.
He once had found in the flotsam a torso, nippleless breasts, broken thighs, a manikin.
Sometimes among the tarred rope and grey driftwood branches that looked to him like ancient antlers, among the broken crates, a Brasso tin, the cracked crab shells and hollowed bodies of birds, great baulks of timber lined with grey-blue goose barnacles stinking in the sun.
This would have been in the year before his father had moved to a new church, a new circuit, as he was supposed to do every five or six years. This would have been then, yes, when he was nine, the year before they’d moved to Beckenham, where he was destined to meet Jimbo.
Sometimes on the trudge over sliding pebbles, he’d sit and attack stones with the hammer he carried along with his rod and knapsack of tackle. He chose larger pebbles, especially those with yellowish areas of discolouration; they broke more easily and sometimes harboured the perfect fossils of sea urchins. The cliffs themselves sometimes yielded ammonites.
He would sit for hours on the broken jetty, casting out over and beyond the kelp beds. He was never bored. He watched his rod-tip, watched waves chasing, watched the sea’s shifting planes, the flight of gulls and cormorants.
Often he would hold the taut line between delicate thumb and forefinger feeling its tensions and its easings, its vibrations, feeling a frisson of anticipation from the living line’s minutest quivering, feeling its connection to that world beneath the water where the lugworms he had dug were being touched, nosed, nudged by whatever he would raise from the depths into the struggling air—wrasse, sea bass, flounder, soles…
The invisible Donny shouting.
Pebbles sliding, crunching, commotion in the rushes.
“I’ve got one on!”
“I hear you,” called Ken.
A rachet clacking.
Then Donny’s voice, “aaaah!”
“What?”
“It’s only a little fucker.”
“Well,” called Ken, “you’re only a little fucker yourself.”
*
Down river, below the bridge, a boat was approaching, a blaze of lights, sounds of music.
One of the tourist boats, thought Forde, that were advertised aggressively on the stretch of sidewalk above the locks beside the Chateau Laurier, sandwich boards, brochures pushed onto passers-by by youths in nautical, peaked caps.
Romantic River Cruise
Free Champagne
Dance to the Music of the Bytown All-Stars
As the boat drew closer, Forde began to hear that the All-Stars were a Dixie outfit.
He could imagine the music being played by men now growing old, men who’d brought the Trad Revival to Canada from England in the late fifties and early sixties, men who were part of the large influx of immigrants, the professionals and skilled trades who’d been needed then by such enterprises as Canadair in Montreal. He’d heard such a band in his first months in Canada, a band with an expatriate following.
It was not, he thought, inconceivable that the Bytown All-Stars were their sons.
The boat forged nearer, cresting the current.
The All-Stars launched into Darktown Strutters Ball.
Forde thought suddenly of the oleaginous Hoagy Carmichael.
I’ll be there to catch you in a taxi, honey
Better be ready ‘bout half past eight
Now baby, don’t be late
I wanna be there when the band starts playing
Remember when we get there, honey
Two-step, I’m gonna have them all
Gonna dance out of both my shoes
When they play the ‘Jelly Roll Blues’
Tomorrow night at the Darktown Strutters Ball.
Christ!
As the boat churned in towards its mooring, the band tackled Tiger Rag, the tune’s only distinction being that it was the first or second recording in the history of jazz, five young white men from New Orleans, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, recorded in New York by Victor in 1917. The personnel clicked through Forde’s memory: Nick LaRocca (trumpet), Larry Shields (clarinet), Ed Edwards (trombone), Henry Ragas (piano), Tony Sbarbaro (drums).
A frenzy had seized the Bytown drummer—highhat, cymbals, wood blocks, rim shots, Chinese gongs, bong-bells, bass drum bombs, heralding, Forde hoped, a conclusion. The crew had cut the boat’s lights leaving the deck lit only by the tiny multi-coloured fairy lights strung along its lines.
Jiggling, gyrating, the dark mass heaved.
So many years ago, thought Forde, gazing across the river, so many years ago, in the innocence of Jimbo’s bedroom, listening to Tiger Rag, the first jazz record they’d ever heard, a version of the bloody thing by the long-forgotten Bob Crosby and the Bob Cats, a 78-rpm disc of acetate that had started him on a convoluted path that seemed now to have set him bemedaled on a boulder.
CEAZER
SALAD
The review of Chamber Music had appeared in the Saturday edition of the Calgary Clarion, which arrived in Ottawa at Magazines International on Wednesday. The tone of the review was hostile and oddly aggrieved. The reviewer—“a Calgary writer”—suggested that Albertans, commonsensical and down-to-earth as they were, would only be repelled by the book’s so-called sophistication, a sophistication which might be lauded by Brahmins in the East but which was elitist and effete. “Tony” had been one of the reviewer’s words. He went on to attack Forde’s contempt for his readers, as evidenced in his pretentious use of the word “ziggurat,” and the book’s alleged humour which he, Calgarian, found brittle if not epicene.
Forde rattled the pages of the Clarion.
“‘Picasso COMMA the famous Spanish painter COMMA.’ Well, I suppose you can’t go far wrong assuming ignorance in Albertans.”
He smacked the sheets with the back of his hand.
“Christ! Here’s an amazing one. ‘Napoleon COMMA the Emperor of the French COMMA.’”
The sections, Sports, Classified, Wheels, Entertainment, fluttered down the wall to the floor.
“‘Brahmins,’” said Forde. “‘Brahmins!’”
Sheila, who was taking a day off, pulled the lapels of her bathrobe closed and, dipping the brush into the varnish, concentrated on the spread fingers of her left hand. Whenever she took what she called mental health days she sat around in her old terrycloth robe and painted her fingernails and toenails and turned the radio on. She did not listen to the radio. She knew what anguish its bland bonhomie caused him and he was convinced that she turned it on not only to assert her presence but to persecute him.
“One wonders,” he said, “why they didn’t feel compelled to go on and on and ON. ‘Emperor of the French COMMA who lived in olden times COMMA and died in exile on St. Helena COMMA a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean.’”
Sheila tapped the lid of the marmalade jar with a knuckle.
“Please,” she said.
“‘Unlikely,’” said Forde, “‘to be of interest to Western readers.’”
“Do you think this’ll still be good, Rob?”
“Hah!” he said. “What,” he demanded, “would be of interest to Western readers? Eh?”
“It’s turned very dark,” said Sheila, “almost black.”
“Think of the headline that would engage the inhabitants of Buttfuck, Alberta…”
“Can it go bad? Do you think? With all the sugar?”
“ANOTHER COW,” said Forde, “FOUND DEAD.”
“Mmmm…” said Sheila.
“What a sad sad
dump. I hate Alberta. The whole bloody landscape littered with fun-loving Mennonites and oil pumps on the nod. Bulging, my Lovely, bulging with huge Ukrainians internationally wanted for Nazi war crimes. People dressed up in silly cowboy hats. And boots everywhere that look like skin disease.”
“What?”
“Boots. Lizard-skin boots. Or ostrich or snake or some fucking thing. Nasty pimply boots. Remember Ed Lacey? He was teaching in Edmonton and in a letter—now here’s a turn of phrase—he called Alberta ‘that bleak latrine.’”
The acid peardrop smell of the nail polish suddenly brought to him the balsa-wood aeroplane kits of his childhood. Spitfires, RAF roundels. Messerschmitts, swastikas. The clear glue smelled of peardrops and had always been called “aeroplane dope.”
Dope! thought Forde.
He watched Sheila fanning her nails with an envelope.
“Did you know—this is absolutely true—there’s a town in Alberta called Dog Pound?”
“Home, he sang, home on the range…
“And home to the Aryan Nation and the Northern Guard and home, my winsome marrow, my Dunmow Flitch…”
“Who he?” said Sheila.
“What? Where was I? Home to Jim Keegstra and the whatnames, you know, the Heritage Front, and to sturdy Survivalists standing on guard against the encroachment of turban and curry. Yes, my old fruit, when you think about it, it’s not very surprising they’ve got a Eugenics Board. And a Sexual Sterilization Act. And as to the daily round,” he said with a wide gesture of his arms, “the amenities, life’s little pleasures and refinements—well, there’s hardly anything, just to take one example, hardly anything you’d recognize as a restaurant. There were, as I recall, muffins.”
He paused.
“Crullers.”
Paused again.
“The occasional perogi. But precious little of the old haute cuisine. The supermarkets there sell packets of stuff called Tuna-Extender. And when they’re not eating Tuna-Extender they eat steaks. They all have barbeques, propane barbeques with dials and switches like airplane cockpits. And they take their gobbets of Alberta Grade A marbled beef and incinerate them on their propane barbeques which is the cause of the yellow dome that sits pudding-shaped over Calgary and which is visible from as far away as Drumheller.”