He paddled while I threw a number of times and, in my fury to have one on, messed up again and again with a backlash, a miscast, and a wrap, my lure around a limb six feet over the water next to a water moccasin who raised its head and looked at me with low interest. I jerked the line, it snapped, and the hand-painted lure of all Uncle Peter’s effort was marooned in the wood. I was a wretched fool, shaking with a rush of bile.
“Take your time, little Pete. Easy does it, get a rhythm for yourself.”
I tied the other lure on. It was a bowed lure that wobbled crazily on top of the water. I didn’t think it had a prayer and was still angry about losing the good one, which looked exactly like a minnow. We were near the middle of the pond, but the middle was covered with dead tree stumps and the water was clear a good ways down.
A big bass hit the plug right after it touched the water on my second cast. It never gave the plug a chance to be inept. It was the first fish I’d ever hooked on artificial bait, and it was huge. It moved the boat. My arms were yanked forward, then my shoulders, as the thing wanted to tear the rod out of my palms on the way to the pond bottom. I held up and felt suddenly a dead awful weight and no movement. The bass had got off and left me hooked on a log down there, I knew. What a grand fish. I felt just dreadful until I looked down into the water when the thrashing had cleared.
The fish was still on the plug in ten feet of water. It was smart to try to wrap the line around the submerged log, but it was still hooked itself and was just sitting there breathing from the gills like some big thing in an aquarium. My uncle was kneeling over the gunwale looking at the fish on the end of the line. His fedora fell in the water. He plucked it out and looked up at me in sympathy. I recall the situation drew a tender look from him such as I’d never quite seen.
“Too bad, little Pete. There she is, and there she’ll stay. It’s almost torture to be able to look at your big fish like that, ain’t it? Doesn’t seem fair.”
Uncle Peter didn’t seem to enjoy looking in the water. Something was wrong, besides this odd predicament.
“No. I’m going down for it. I’m going to get the fish.”
“Why, boy, you can’t do that.”
“Just you watch. That fish is mine.”
I took off all my clothes and was in such a hurry I felt embarrassed only at the last. I was small and thin and ashamed in front of Uncle Peter, but he had something like fear or awe on his face I didn’t understand.
“That fish big as you are,” he said in a foreign way. “That water deep and snakey.”
But I did swim down, plucked up the fish by its jaws, and came back to throw it in the boat. The plug stayed down there, visible, very yellow, as a monument to my great boyhood enterprise, and I wonder what it looks like now, forty years later.
My uncle had the fish mounted for me. It stayed in our home until I began feeling sorry for it after Peter’s death, and I gave it to a barber for his shop. The fish weighed about nine pounds, the biggest I’ll ever catch.
I was not the same person to my uncle after that afternoon. I did not quite understand his regard of me until my father explained something very strange. Uncle Peter was much the country squire and master of many trades, but he could not swim and he had a deathly fear of deep water. He had wanted to join the navy, mainly for its white officers’ suits, but they had got him near a deep harbor somewhere in Texas and he’d gone near psychotic. He seemed to expect great creatures to get out of the sea and come for him too and it was past reason, just one of those odd strands in the blood about which there can be no comment or change. Since then I’ve talked to several country people with the same fear, one of them an All-American linebacker. They don’t know where it came from and don’t much want to discuss it.
When television appeared I was much enamored of Howdy Doody. Some boys around the neighborhood and I began molding puppet heads from casts you could buy at the five-and-dime. You could have the heads of all the characters from the “Howdy” show in plaster of paris. Then you’d put a skirt with arms on it and commence the shows onstage. We wrote whole plays, very violent and full of weapons and traps, all in the spirit of nuclear disaster and Revelations, with Howdy, Flubadub, and Clarabelle. I couldn’t get over my uncle’s interest in the puppets when I brought them over and set up the show in his workshop.
The puppets seemed to worry him like a bouncing string would worry a cat. He looked at me as if I were magic, operating these little people and speaking for them. He had the stare of an intense confused infant. When I’d raise my eyes to him, he’d look a bit ashamed, as if he’d been seduced into thinking these toys were living creatures. He watched my mouth when I spoke in a falsetto for them.
I still don’t know what the hell went on with him and the puppets, the way he watched them, then me. You’d have thought he was staring into a world he never even considered possible, somewhere on another planet; something he’d missed out on and was very anxious about. I noticed too that he would dress up a little for the puppet shows. Once he wore his fedora and a red necktie as well.
A number of years went by when I did not see my uncle much at all. These were my teen years when I was altogether a different person. He remained the same, and his ways killed him. I don’t know if the dead man in his past urged him toward the final DT’s and heart attack, nor will I ever know how much this crime dictated his life, but he seemed to be attempting to destroy himself in episode after episode when, as he would only say afterwards, the high lonesomes struck him.
The last curious scene when I recall him whole was the summer right after I turned thirteen. We were all around the beach of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where we’d gathered for a six-family reunion of my father’s people. The gulf here was brown, fed by the Wolf and Jordan rivers. It provided groaning tables of oysters, shrimp, flounder, crabs, and mullet. Even the poor ate very well down here, where there were Catholics, easy liquor and gambling, bingo, Cajuns, Sicilians, and Slavs. By far it was the prettiest and most exotic of the towns where any of the families lived, and my Uncle Max and Aunt Ginny were very proud showing us around their great comfortable home, with a screened porch running around three sides where all the children slept for the cool breeze from the bay. All over the house were long troughs of ice holding giant watermelons and cantaloupes and great strawberries. Something was cooking all the time. This was close to heaven, and everybody knew it. You drifted off to sleep with the tales of the aunts and uncles in your ears. What a bliss.
Most of us were on the beach or in the water when Uncle Peter went most bizarre, although for this I do have an interpretation that might be right. He had been watching me too intently, to the exclusion of others. He was too around, I could feel his eyes close while I was in the water swimming. He was enduring a sea change here at the sea, which he was supposed to be deathly afraid of. I believe he was turning more urban, or more cosmopolitan. He’d been to a Big Dutchman convention in Chicago. Somebody had convinced him to quit cigarettes, take up thin cigars, get a massage, and wear an Italian hat, a borsalino hat, which he now wore with sunglasses and an actual designed beach towel, he and his wife sitting there in blue canvas director’s chairs. He had been dry for over a year, had lost weight, and now looked somewhat like Versace, the Italian designer. If this was our state’s most European town, then by God Uncle Peter would show the way, leading the charge with his Italian hat high and his beach towel waving.