by Thomas Lynch
That September we went back to the Pere Marquette to fish the salmon run. I explained, I suppose, how they went upstream to spawn and die—how everything in nature replicates itself then disappears. I thought he might have further questions on this theme and figured the river was a good place to discuss them. But he was more concerned with the relative attractions of Mepps spinners, Little Cleos and the assortment of streamers and flies he had brought with him. He caught two beauties, two big fresh males, fishing deep gravel between two sunken logs at Gleeson’s Landing.
I have a picture of his boyhood in my mind that shows him standing upright between these two huge fish he is trying to hold aloft that weigh near half as much as he does. Half-wince, half-grin, his face is all effort and capability. Behind him it is late September—scrub pines, cedar and winter oak—the air is golden with possibilities, the river is silver, the smell of leaf fall and blood sport is everywhere and he is happy because we are taking his trophies home to show his mother. And I must be nearby holding the camera, trying to keep this moment permanent, in tact, coaxing him always “Smile, Tommy, smile!”
I used to think that it was trying to replicate this moment, this very picture, there between his trophies, that has kept him fishing ever since. That perfect autumn before his mother and father were divorced, the river thick with chinook and coho, his grandparents still alive, there in the bronze light of that September, still years before a girl he loved in school would grow into a woman and leave town and marry someone else, there in his waders, nine and smiling, the blissful ignorance of a boyhood undisturbed by love and grief, sex and death, the heart’s divisions between catch and release.
But I was wrong. It was not my son who was trying to save it. It was me. It was my image of his childhood—that innocence—my hopeless efforts to spare him heartache, my own stupidity, my own daft fears of this life’s opposites. He was never afraid of these things. Like everything in nature, he was laboring to know them better.
I am the age my father was when I was my son’s age. Figure that: halfway between the middle half-century between those two. Sometimes it seems that we repeat ourselves. Time seems a constant game of catch and release. Dream and vision, memory and reflection—each is an effort to hold life still, like paintings of fruit and flowers on a table. There is no still life. My son’s youth, my age, my father’s death—each is a marvel of time and motion. Each becomes the other, endlessly.
And, like everything in nature, salmon bear their share of existential lessons. In the autumn all they do is spawn and die. They return to the exact water of their own making undistracted by the smaller details. They do not feed. It is not hunger that makes them crush a caddis or stone fly in their bony jaw; it is rage.
“Imagine,” Tom once told me, “you’re getting it on with the one true love of your life, your one and only. And this is quite literally the one you will die for, and you’re making progress and someone keeps ringing the doorbell with a pizza you never even ordered, and you’re trying to stay focused because you’ve come a long way to do this and you’ve never had any practice and you’re only going to get this one shot and then it’s curtains and the goddamn doorbell keeps ringing and someone shouting at you ‘Pizza’s here!’ and all you can think of is how you’re not hungry and didn’t order anything and you’re busy at the moment with the meaning of life and now this asshole’s banging on the door shouting ‘Pizza!’ and you’d do anything to make him disappear because you’ve really got important things to do here and he keeps on ringing and banging and shouting until all you can think of to do is kill him. I tie my flies,” he said, “not to look like pizza, but to look like the delivery guy.”
Such wisdoms as these ought not be forgotten.
The hens find home gravel, fanning it clean with their huge tails before they deposit their abundant roe among the stones. The bucks find spawning hens, behind whom they hold in the current waiting for the moment of their ejaculation. The hens’ dance makes the bucks dance wildly until, crazy with the kind of blind desire young men relate to and old men remember, they spend themselves entirely. By this point in the process, they have begun to die. Their fins whiten, their bodies darken, they get toothy and tired and make for the slow backwater pools and shallows.
The English poet laureate Ted Hughes, who died himself one recent October, and knew some things about death and desire, wrote it well when he wrote in “October Salmon” thus:
That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient
In the machinery of heaven.
Boys, of course, know sex when they see it. So do girls. And they know death. And standing in the Pere Marquette, my son has seen a lot of each. The river in October is full of the sweet air of desire and putrefaction—silver fish, full of life’s aching, making their fierce way upriver. Dark fish, their duties spent, float belly-up downstream, lodge in the log jams, rotting, dead.
We must all be steady in our wounds, loyal to our doom, patient in the machinery of heaven.
Having taught him to fish, now he teaches me. He rows me down the river, through the deep holes and gravel runs, and shows me what to cast and where to cast it.
He works the river for a living now. He has a drift boat, a regular clientele and hard-won expertise. He ties his own flies, packs shore lunches for his customers, ties their knots and nets their fish, and coaches them, as he still coaches me, on the intricacies of pattern and presentation and the river bottom, on the structure of currents that can’t be seen, the epic poise, and on the catching of salmon and their release.
Y2KAT
By the time you read this the cat will be dead.
So long have I longed for the truth of that utterance that I have grown mad-anxious with the longing for it. But the sweet odor of truth is in it now, oozing from the little pores of the sentence like frankincense. By the time you read this the cat will be dead. Can you smell the truth and beauty of it there?
Though the cat is not presently dead, here in the exact moment of these contemplations, in the coincidence of my writing such matters down, consigning the details of my dark hopes to a text, as it were; nonetheless, by the time you read this the fact will have bloomed, fully fledged in the corpse of a cat who will be dead, as I said, by the time you read this. It has been, as final, finished details always are, cut in stone.
About which more, alas, anon.
For now let me say, simply and for the record, that I’ve hated the cat. And that I hate the cat. Furthermore, I am, at this very moment, hating the cat and tomorrow will be hating the cat some more. There is no tense or participle or variation of the verb to hate that does not apply to my relations with the cat.
By this time next week I will have been hating the cat for all but a few months of all but a few years of the last two decades of the last century of the second millennium. It is the only century my dear dead parents lived in, the only one that several loyal dogs of my acquaintance took breath from, the only millennium that Joyce or Yeats or Edna St. Vincent Millay were alive in. Ted Hughes did not outlive it or Frank Sinatra or Mother Teresa. They’re all dead. John Lennon, Roy Rogers, Roy Orbison, Princess Di. Remembered quite rightly but nonetheless dead.
And the cat, as I write this, is still alive? Is there no one else out there to share my outrage? That a much-despised gray angora should occupy two millennia whilst Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. only one? Either way, if, by the grace of God and the luck of the actuarial draw, I am allowed to draw breath in the new millennium, to be, as it were, a citizen of the Old Age and the New One, I have made it my duty to vouchsafe the cat does not. It is the least I can do—a self-imposed debt to history and the future. You can take it to the bank, bet the ranch, let it ride—if I’m alive for a few more months, by the time you read this the cat will be dead.
SOME FELLOW WITH too much time on his hands once opined that the world is divided into those who hate cats and those who love them. Would that things were just so simple. We cou
ld quit the Balkans and Belfast and other border wars. All the imbroglios of distrust and distemper that infect the planet could be flushed into history if all that divided the species were cats. But let me say from the get-go that my hatred for the cat is not so simple as that. It is not the feline in general but this cat in particular that I hate (have hated, am hating, will hate, etc.). That it is a cat is only incidental to the fact that it is hateful. The ability of our species to abhor particular members of a subspecies whilst otherwise approving of the sort at large is well established. The point is also worth making that my hatred for the cat is in no way tied to species elitism, or animal harassment, or any all-encompassing prejudice against four-legged sorts. Nothing like that. Why, only last month (and I have witnesses), whilst visiting my cottage in West Clare, I was caught frying rashers and black pudding for a stray cat that visited every morning during our stay there. I set out fresh bacon and fresh milk and a bit of cheese and, in the evenings, a bit of fresh mackerel from the several dozen of same I’d liberate from the sea every day, as is my habit and custom there. I even began to call the cat by little familiar gender-indifferent names the way my late cousin Nora, from whom I’d inherited the house, was known to call her mousers. “Tippins” and “Blackie” and “Pookie” and such noises as that, because a hungry cat around a country house is no bad thing, especially near the changing of seasons, when the local rodentia are enthused about establishing cushy quarters behind the old cooker and fridge and in the press, where the back boiler keeps the bedclothes and linens warm.
So it can be said outright that I approve of the feline in the larger sense and only hate this one fat, old, lazy, gray she-cat; this one and only good-for-nothing beast that has, for lo! these past two decades now, refused to call it quits of my house. It will not die or run away or get lost like any normal cat would do.
Which is why I hate this cat. Though my hating of this cat neither increases nor decreases the statistical likelihood of my hating another cat, or loving another cat. My hatred for this cat in particular is unrelated to my associations, whatever they may be, with cats in general.
And maybe I belabor this point, but I want it on the record once and for all that I don’t hate cats. I want the record clear on this because once I wrote a passionately unflattering poem about a former spouse, the mother of my children, in the months that followed our divorce years ago. However well crafted, this malediction, which appeared in my first slim volume of poems, was the reason for a damning little comment from at least one reviewer to the effect that “Mr. Lynch apparently does not like women.”
Nothing, I want the record to show, could be further from the truth. Must one’s distemper with one woman mark him or her ever as a Woman Hater? Remember the cat we are after talking about?
THE SPIRIT OF the thing was, to be sure, unfortunate. These were bad old times for all of us.
There I was, dumped in my mid-thirties when my wife fell in love with a man from her video-production class at the community college. It is, I suppose, fair to say that before falling in love with him she fell out of love with me, with the idea of being the wife and homemaker—two thankless jobs, then as now—with the whole Leave It to Beaver, Love Conquers All, early Joni Mitchell vision of things that had brought us together twelve years before. Gone were the dreams of suburban bliss, secure income, a family and a social life. Gone were the satisfactions of safe and certain, albeit predictable, sex.
She wanted something “more.”
There’d been signs I’d chosen mostly to ignore, distracting myself with work and writing, playing with the kids, while she seemed to be growing distant from us. She flew east to visit a woman friend and ended up in the island home of an older man she’d had a crush on as a girl. There were more trips east. Phone bills inflated. Afraid of the answers, I didn’t ask questions. By the time the fellow from the community college started calling, I was really the last to know.
In the parsing of intimacies fashionable then, she loved me but was no longer, and furthermore maybe never really had been, in love with me. It was all a mistake she’d rushed into, she was sorry. She really didn’t want to hurt me, but I was like a weight around her neck dragging her down, keeping her from realizing her full potential. There was talk of “spreading her wings,” and she really reckoned she had just “outgrown” me and the marriage. It sounded like the cover copy on Cosmopolitan. I said I thought for the sake of the children we ought to seek counseling, what with four little lives hanging in the balance.
We found a husband-and-wife team in the university town nearby. They’d written a book and came highly recommended. There were personality assessments and lots of multiple-choice tests. We had a few joint sessions that mostly ended with her stomping out. “Sabotage,” the shrinks called it. We persevered. It wasn’t that I’d done anything wrong, it was just that I was fairly boring. I paid the bills, helped with the kids, was sexually attentive, but too routine. I didn’t hit or scream or bully or sleep around. Neither did I excite or inspire or make her weak with desire the way the fellow from the community college did. She was spending more and more time on the phone, out late with “friends,” ever busy with “lab projects” at school.
We divided into individual sessions. She talked with the wife. I talked with the husband. We did more questionnaires. He told me that she was already “psychologically divorced” and that I shouldn’t hold out much hope for repair. He told me that there were women out there who would give anything for the kind of love and loyalty I offered. I didn’t believe him. I felt like shit.
There’s this memory I have of working on a sonnet while she sat at the table in the next room cursing at an overdraft notice from the bank. She’d established a separate checking account so that what was mine was ours and what was hers was hers. Hers was apparently overdrawn. She was badmouthing the checkbook and punching the calculator and seemed to be trying to tell me something. She was sometimes violent with animate and inanimate things.
“If you want help with that, all you need do is ask me,” I said.
Weeks with the shrink had taught me to talk like this.
“It’s all here if you want to help,” she said.
I said that I didn’t really want to help. I had the checkbook at the office and the checkbook for the Rotary Club and the checkbook of our household accounts to keep balanced, so that I really didn’t want or need another set of books to juggle.
“But if you want help,” I told her, “all you have to say is, ‘Please, help me,’ and, of course, I will.”
“Okay, fine, then, please,” she said, and I went to take a look.
She had added something instead of subtracting. The miscalculation amounted to seventy-five dollars and overdraft fees. When I pointed this out to her she looked at me with cool contempt. I had found the problem. Now what was I going to do about it? What was clear to me then was that if I bailed her out, if I gave her the money, I’d be the asshole who did. If I didn’t, then I’d be the asshole who didn’t. Either way I was going to be the asshole.
By midsummer things had gone from bad to worse. We agreed to go on a long-planned family vacation. We’d paid the deposit and reserved the cottage on the lake the year before, when we’d been happy there. Bad as things were, I still held out hope.
One night, after the kids had gone to bed all sunburned and ignorant of what was looming, I told her that her relationship with her “friend” really hurt me, that it was making me crazy, and that if we were going to work on the marriage, at the least we should not confuse matters with other liaisons. I told her that I could abide playing the cuckold but I couldn’t abide having to play the fool as well.
When she left the next afternoon after preening all morning, ready and willing and perfumed, I knew she had arranged to meet her lover. I sat on a log on the beach with the children, watching the lake and knowing it was finished. I got a sinker from my tackle box and, with a bit of shoelace, fashioned it into a kind of necklace. When she returned from h
er assignation, I asked her to walk with me down the beach. I gave her the little necklace and said she’d convinced me. I told her that I would think of our marriage as dead and always think of us in the past tense and that I’d never weigh her down again. The next day we assembled the children in the cottage and told them all the ordinary lies failed marrieds must tell the ones they’ve failed the most—how everything was going to be all right and that even though Mommy and Daddy didn’t love each other anymore we both loved them more than anything in the world and how it wasn’t “about” them, and everything would be all right, and they wouldn’t have to move and of course Mommy and Daddy still “liked” each other and everything would be all right.
They were ten, nine, six and four when it happened. The day sits like a lump of coal in their lives, sometimes smoldering, sometimes dark and cool, but always there, always ready to be reddened by forces still out of our control.