9
Fishing
Two weeks later, a tall, emaciated figure glided silently into the dining room. Darkened eyes sunk in bony eye sockets; high, rounded forehead; forceful nose with delicate nostrils; thin lips; closely cropped black hair that revealed a small, well-drawn skull. The carving knife was two inches away from my right hand, but I dared not grab it. The intruder hesitated for a second, then brutally pulled back a chair and sat on it, spreading her knees.
It was McCabe. It had to be. She, a convention from this point on because she was more than that, and also less, had not yet mastered her new body. Every time she jerked her skinny frame about, as if it was still a hundred pounds heavier, I concentrated on my plate, afraid to show any awareness of her change, or her unexplained absence. Fear was the first and most enduring feeling the new McCabe provoked in me. At the time, I thought that it was compassion, fear of breaking the frail reed, the pitiful sack of bones topped by the incongruous half-mute pinhead. Now I see that it was fear not for, but of her, of what she could do to me. Had I recognized it earlier I might not be dying now under this moldy bed. It was, at the beginning, like being confronted with a body snatcher. I even felt sentimental about the old pig McCabe, whom I might never see again. I wished I had gotten to know her better.
The new McCabe ate voraciously and silently, unlike her logorrheic predecessor who forever pecked at her plate. I hardly heard her voice, beyond her short but courteous greeting at the beginning and end of each meal. It was old McCabe’s voice and it wasn’t: equally deep but stripped of its boom and reverberation, perhaps because it was filtered through a thinner frame. The burden of conversation was now entirely on me. None of old McCabe’s hobby horses resonated with her. She smiled tentatively across the table and once put her fork and knife down for a few seconds to indicate that she was listening. But her darkening eyes were pulled back irresistibly to the half-eaten steak on her plate. Conversation was made insubstantial by the intensity of her hunger. “Burning desire” became not a figure of speech at our dinner table, but a physical fact. I often expected her gaze to turn to ashes the meat on her plate, the tablecloth, even my hands, if I left them on the table. She ate noiselessly, so if I didn’t say a word, absolute silence would set in. In that silence I stared at her hands as she cut her steak and held my breath as she lifted each piece to her mouth. I always expected the piece of meat to fall back on the plate because she never stuck the fork in deep enough, but it never did.
She never mentioned her absence or her metamorphosis. Neither did I. We both pretended that nothing had changed. Or perhaps it was just me who pretended. I have no proof that she was aware of her transformation, although I tested her indirectly many times. Once I asked her if she still liked her deerskin moccasins. (Old McCabe had worn them every day. She owned half a dozen pairs, specially handmade for her at the Reservation Penitentiary in what used to be Arizona.) She furrowed her brow and tightened her lips in cartoonish concentration. “I’m not sure,” she finally said. The next day she wore moccasins for the first and only time. They fit her narrow, elongated feet perfectly, as if they had been made for them and not for old McCabe’s E-wide hooves. Her clothes also fit her new frame. They were not unlike fat McCabe’s clothes (I spotted Moschino leather pants and Dolce and Gabbana sweaters), but they looked worn. It was impossible to tell if they were the same clothes, only altered, or altogether different ones. I doubted she would own an identical set several sizes smaller. Unless she had bought them, planning to lose weight in Elmira. This seemed the only logical explanation. That was a favorite word of mine, “logical,” constantly abused to mask my intellectual laziness and moral cowardice, and in this case, pure fear.
It occurred to me that this McCabe might like the outdoors more than her heavier predecessor, who had huffed and puffed on our excursion on foot through Elmira. I organized an elaborate fishing trip on the Wanetka River, which would culminate in a picnic by Wanetka Falls. McCabe nodded in what I interpreted as acceptance, and one morning we drove out at sunrise to a point about twenty miles upstream, with the Judge’s old canoe on top of McCabe’s leased armored Land Rover and a food basket Petrona had prepared the day before.
With her bony frame slumped on the passenger seat and her eyes half-closed, McCabe seemed at ease for the first time since her return, maybe even modestly content. We drove in silence as the cratered pavement turned into gravel, then packed dirt, then rutted tracks, and back to pavement, only to resume the cycle in typical post-Reconstruction county-road fashion. Stealing road funds had always been an Elmiran passion, even when I was five, and this road felt buttery-smooth (until it disintegrated in winter, thus requiring spring re-buttering). Reconstruction was a frenzy of thievery, here more than anywhere else. With road monies now a quaint memory, it was every man for his own patch: gravel for the rich and absent (all of Round Hill), packed dirt for the local gentry still clinging to their revivalist dreams, mud and disintegration for all others, according to their means. Only downtown Elmira had two blocks paved with stolen federal military-grade pavement. I swerved right to avoid a boulder. McCabe gasped. “Look,” she said, pointing at a flock of birds flying in a V formation ahead of us. I shot her an open-mouthed glance. “Green-winged teals,” she added, clearly amazed that I didn’t know. “Going to winter on the Gulf Coast.” It was the first full sentence that had escaped her lips. She talked about the migration of gadwalls and teals for the rest of the trip in a deliberate way, often pausing to find the right word, or correcting herself whenever she felt she had been inaccurate.
In another era, McCabe’s sudden eloquence would have been considered a miracle. Now it almost landed us in a ditch, when I lost control of the car, stunned by the unexpected, if tentative, flow of words. I had concluded by then that McCabe had become autistic. My awe soon turned into suspicion. I slowed down to a crawl for the rest of the trip, so I could record in my mind every single word she said, to analyze it later in my room, sitting at the Judge’s desk. Was McCabe’s past muteness and sudden interest in ornithology a deliberate front, a diversionary maneuver to cover whatever she was up to? (I did not think yet to add: or whoever she had become—or, worse, whoever she may have always been under the head-to-toe Moschino leather.) Or was it an outpouring of forgotten memories, unguarded by her now emaciated body and crumbling willpower?
“The Biloxi Marsh is their promised land,” she said with sudden emotion. “Men never conquered it.” I glanced at her and thought I saw tears in her eyes, but it was such a fleeting image that I cannot be sure. We were on a dusty stretch of the road with less than perfect visibility. Her voice was calmer now, almost dreamy, like someone reminiscing about their childhood. “On Christmas Day, 1624,” she said, “Pedro de Horta built a settlement at the southern tip of the marshes and left there a garrison of eighty men. When he returned from New Spain, what we call Mexico, a year later, he found only a man—a blacksmith named Álvaro Ejido—and a dog. Both were dying, curled up in a cot inside the soldiers’ mess room, a round mud-walled shack with dry grass roofing. Ejido pointed to where his seventy-nine companions had been buried, first in neat rows marked by wooden crosses, then in trenches for six or eight, and finally in a deep pit, layer upon layer of corpses, separated by thin layers of mud. The last two had died within hours of each other, about a week before Pedro de Horta’s arrival. By then, Ejido was too weak to bury them. Their rotting bodies still lay on their cots, in the larger, rectangular mud-and-grass shack that was the soldiers’ barracks. Pedro de Horta was afraid the men had died of the plague, so he ordered the entire compound to be burnt down, along with Ejido and the dog, now both dead, and the two rotting soldiers. Pedro de Horta chose two marranos—not pigs, but insincerely converted Jews—to carry out his order, because he was not going to risk the life of a born Christian. The marranos, always eager to please so that their original sin and subsequent duplicity might be overlooked in the New World, or at least not passed on to their children, covered their noses and mouths with their shirts and piled enough grass on top of the four corpses (counting the dog) to set a good fire….”