“Christ’s sake!” his father said behind him. Davy felt the hard dry hands on his shoulders as he was pulled back, his teary eyes looking into the angry red face above him, the hard hand now pulled back as if to strike.
“I’m…sorry, father—” he blurted out, between sobs.
His father’s hand stayed, then lowered, and his father turned away, shaking his head.
“Nothing to be done about it now,” he said, ignoring the boy once more, but pausing to grab the old rig and let out the bail, dropping the sinker and thrashing worm over the side of the boat and into the blank cold waters, before thrusting the pole into Davy’s hands once more.
~ * ~
“Ho! A good one I’ll bet!” his father cried, straining against the sudden fight in his pole. He began to turn the reel’s handle furiously, half standing to stare over into the water, watching the tightened line for signs of the caught beast.
“A fighter!” he laughed—but then the line went abruptly slack. He sat down, scowling once more.
“And you, boy?” he called back, not looking around. “Checked your bait?”
Davy stared at the rod tip, saying nothing, and in a moment his father had forgotten about him, whistling once more, as he pulled his own hook from the water and cut a fresh blood worm in half to replenish it.
~ * ~
Off in the distance, at the hazy edge of the world, Davy heard the long, sad call of a foghorn. In the sky, the sun had turned a sour lemon color as it now sank toward the growing fog. At the limits of vision, gulls wheeled out on the water, diving one after another to hit the waves and then rise again. One of them clutched something long, black and struggling in its beak. Davy turned to stare again at the tip of his own fishing rod.
His father spat over the side of the boat. “Damned fog’ll be here in a half hour or so. Thought I’d get the whole day in but it was not to be.”
Without another word, he went back to his own equipment, checking the extra rod that laid in the oarlock before turning his full attention to his other pole.
A sudden tremble shot through Davy’s hands. The edge of his fishing pole flicked, and then the pole end bent down, straining toward the water.
The pole nearly leapt out of Davy’s hands before he tightened his grip on it. His fingers fumbled for the bail as line unraveled with a thin high screech. “By God, boy, you’ve got something!” his father shouted. “Keep the tip up, dammit! And don’t let so much line out!”
Abandoning his own pole, the old man made his way back to Davy, his face flushed with excitement.
“The way you’re holding that pole, he’ll get away, damn you!”
His father reached out angrily to take the rod from Davy’s hands.
At that moment the bale caught and the tip of the pole bent down into the water, lost in the waves. His father’s face flushed in surprise as he tore the rod from Davy’s hands and fought with the line.
“By God! What have you got on here, boy?”
Standing in a crouch, his father managed to get the pole out of the water and then loosened the bale to let out a bit of line.
“She’s deep, that’s for sure!” his father said. A smile came onto his features as he battled, one eye turned to the approaching fog and late afternoon.
“It’ll be close!”
Humming fiercely through clenched teeth, he began to inexorably reel the line in, letting the catch run when it needed to, but gradually drawing it up from the depths and closer to the boat. The sour-yellow sun was edging the horizon; the mists began to caress the rowboat with their tendrils. Davy shivered and drew deeper into his coat, but his father seemed oblivious now to everything save the thing on the end of the fishing line.
“She’s almost up, boy! Get the net!”
Roused from his chill, Davy moved to his father’s abandoned spot on the boat and lifted the wide net by its handle.
“Hurry, damn you!”
He turned back. His father’s angry face motioned him to hold the net over the side of the boat.
“Damned beast’s about up!”
Kneeling, Davy dangled the net over the side. Now, in the late afternoon, the water’s surface was a sickly, deep, impenetrable green. It smelled of salt and overly-wet vegetation.
Bile rose in Davy’s throat, but he held it down.
“Here it comes, boy—here it comes!”
From the soupy depths something became visible, twirling as it reluctantly rose. Davy held the net ready. The shadow became more distinct: a long, slender shape, heavy in the water.
His father peered over the side, squinting.
“Can you see what it is, boy?”
“Yes…”
The thing broke water. Its black, thin, slick head rose out to stare up at Davy with leaden eyes—
“Snatch it with the net, boy! Can you see—?”
His father’s voice suddenly turned full of disgust. The black thing’s head held suspended for a moment, mouth opening to show the embedded hook in its jaw, its head now seeming to expand in the air, to change shape, before there was a snap and it dropped back down into the sea. It’s shadow held for a moment, as if it might rise again on its own. But then it sank toward indistinction, the curl of its long sinuous length essing once before it was gone, back into the deep.
Davy turned to see a look of abhorrence on his father’s face. In one hand he still held the tip of Davy’s fishing pole; in the other, his long fillet knife.
“‘Twas nothing,” his father said, before turning away. “Just an eel.”
The fog closed in on them then, and, without another word, his father weighed anchor, and rowed for the island.
~ * ~
Davy’s mother waited for them at the pier’s end, at the base of the jutting finger of rock, near the small second boat, a dinghy. Wrapped in a shawl, her worried look made her a specter in the early evening.
“I was worried you—” she said, putting a hand on Davy’s father’s shoulder as the old man brushed by her. “Bah,” the old man said, continuing on, arms laden with fishing tackle as he went up to the house.
In the unseen distance, the foghorn cried out again. Davy’s mother opened her shawl to enclose Davy within it, within herself. He felt her warmth through his clothes, through the damp, salt wetness.
“Come to the house and sit by the fire,” she whispered into his ear, stroking his hair.
He nodded and, soothed by her words and warmth, followed her to the open doorway, a dim rectangle of orange light against the chill and dropping night. In a while he sat in his chair in the warm corner while his mother prepared supper, and his father smoked his pipe and drank his rye in silence, staring out through the open doorway at the storm that grew and battered the island.
~ * ~
Later, Davy lay in bed and listened to them argue. Outside, the night wind had picked up. A spray of cold, salt-scented rain hit periodically against the side of the house, washing the single window in Davy’s dark room.
A thin line of firelight flickered beneath the closed door. Beneath his pile of quilts Davy felt cold and damp. His body felt leaden, empty, numb. A dull chill went through him remembering the cold supper that had been eaten in silence, his mother’s barely-disguised, frantic fear as she hovered around him shielding him from his father’s arctic mounting rage.
“It’s not like I ever wanted ‘im,” his father said now, out in the main room beyond the door. His voice was gruff, tentative. He sounded like he was treading careful waters, knew it, but had decided to proceed anyhow. “And it’s not like he’ll ever be a help to me.”
“But he’s mine!” his mother answered, her voice a choked cry.
His father grunted, and a few moments, in which Davy could almost feel his mother’s fear through the door, passed.