His fine sea-size rig was cast out with a six-inch red and white bobber; two fathoms under was a hooked shrimp from a frozen bag he’d brought down. Lewis had a theory that with hurricanes — they’d had two just lately a hundred-fifty miles south — sea life pushed up into the high reaches of the river, then flooded even into this lake and Farte Cove. He considered himself an ichthyologist of minor parts and kept a notebook with responses to fish life in it. There were no entries or dates when he did not catch or witness interesting water life. Like a great many days in a man’s life, those days he’d just as soon did not occur at all. He wanted a lot of the exotic and a minimum of the ordinary.
Lewis turned and was deeply unimpressed by old Ulrich staggering onto the pier. This man featured himself a scientist or at least an aerocrat, though Lewis thought him a fraud afloat on a sea of wide misunderstanding. Ulrich was in the process of “studying” blue herons, loons and accipiters in flight and for some nagging reason was interested in the precise weight of everybody he met. He thought it happily significant that the old had lighter, hollower, more aerodynamic bones, such as birds had. Having been witness to the first German jet aircraft in the war, a specter he had never recovered from, he “drew on” this reflection time and again, apropos of almost zero, thought Lewis. Unfortunately, he had also been blown a goodly distance by Hurricane Camille in 1969. Ulrich was old then, but claimed also to be wiser in special “hurricane minutes” and inflicted this credential here and there, at any time, during his seminar at the end of the pier. There was no gainsaying the man with his “brief flight” and “hurricane minutes.” The body was preparing the elderly for the “flight of the soul,” said Ulrich. Why, he expected to weigh about thirty-five pounds when he died, just a bit of mortal coil dragged away protesting like a hare under an eagle.
Another annoyance to Lewis — who actually loved Ulrich; almost all the old loved each other at the end of the pier — was that Ulrich, eighty-nine, showed no signs of bad health even though he lit up one Kent after another. This, Ulrich attributed — wouldn’t it be — to a “scientific diet” such as that literally eaten by birds. The diet of birds was indicated come the senior years. A final annoyance was that Ulrich cherished the word acquit, as in “let me acquit myself” or “he acquitted himself well.” Though Lewis ignored this as often as possible, he wondered why Ulrich should think a person was perpetually on trial when he opened his mouth, especially given the blather that flew out Ulrich’s own. Ulrich, too, was interested in piscatorial life, though fish were “base and heavy,” mere “forage in the pastures of the deep.” Ignore, look away, pleaded Lewis to himself.
Many eutrophic lakes, their food chains unbalanced by man or nature, simply died. But this old oxbow had come back in the nineties. Bass, sunfish, perch, bluegill, gar, buffalo, carp, and now small alligators popped the surface. Big shad fled and recovered in shoals. Rare wading birds attended the shores and shallows. Hunted duck and geese veterans rested and paddled with only the great moccasins and turtles to fear. The water was a late-spring black, with sloughs going to tannin. Three unrecovered human bodies were somewhere out there, victims of March lightning. In a bad storm, the huge lake could imitate an inland sea, all three-foot whitecaps and evil sail-wrappers. It would also flood quickly and drive mink and nutria to the back roads, where one could make ladies’ coats from the roadkill.
Next, Sidney Farte, of the old cove family who owned the boat and bait house, came out, barely, humbled by shingles and roaring ulcers, giving a sniff of propriety to the pier, which he did not own but had watched for fifty-seven years through the replacement and repiling in the seventies. The man who’d had the benches and the rail fixed for the elderly was a kind man — Wooten — now dead and discussed only by that one inexorable trait of his, his kindness in little things and big. Nobody knew what experience had produced this saint, and his perfection attracted none of them, so terrible would be the strain, especially considering the fact that Wooten had not been stupid, not at all. Some said that he had been president of a small Baptist college, but for some reason nobody had ever directly put the question to him. There was a holy air about the man, no denying, that brooked none of your ordinary street questioning. Wooten never quoted anybody or any source. He spoke only for himself, and not very often. Such a man — well, even if something enormous and ugly had happened in his past, it would seem rude to know it. Wooten was a tiny man, maybe five-four, with snow-white hair that turned boyishly fore and aft in the wind. He stepped very softly. Next you knew, he was beside you, looking at what you were looking at in respectful quiet.
Ulrich had said that the lake was now Wooten’s college, but Wooten himself would never have expressed anything as pompous as that.
“The water looks so fresh and deep this morning!” Wooten would say, a curious sweet medicinal smell reaching you on his breath.
Sidney Farte did not care for his virtue, was made sullen by it, but did not dare attack “Cardinal Wooten” (as he called him under his breath) around the others. He was glad when the fellow passed on. Now Sidney could get back to the regular profanity of his observations. Sidney was having a bad time in his old age, but he rather adored his bad time. Also afflicted with serious deafness, he did not enjoy the reprieve from noise as other old people did, but hurled this way and that, certain that whispered conspiracies and revenges were afoot. The soreness in his chest predicted the weather, which Sidney inevitably pronounced rotten: tornadoes, more flooding and thunder, every kind of spiteful weather. A sunny day filled him with mild horror and suspicion. Sidney had endured lately a sorry, sorry thing, and all of them knew it. A male grandchild of his had won a scholarship to a mighty eastern university, Yale, and was the object of a four-year gloat by Sidney, who had no college. The young man upon graduation had come over to visit his grandfather for a week, at the end of which he pronounced Sidney “a poisonous, evil old man who ought to be ashamed of yourself.” This statement simply whacked Sidney flat to the ground. He was still trying to recover and was much more silent than in previous springs. Ulrich and Lewis both worried about him, used to his profanity as a sort of walking milieu against which they fished and breathed.
The other oldster of the core on the rail was late. This was Peter Wren, brother of the colonel who made Wake Island gallant against the Japanese and a chronic prevaricator whose lies were so gaudy and wrapped around they might have been a medieval tapestry of what almost or never happened. He had of course suborned the history of his brother and his constant perjuries held a real fear of the truth, lest the whole tissue of lies crumble when it came forward. It was getting where it seemed dangerous to risk even a simple declarative sentence about the weather or time of day, and Pete Wren was likely to misstate even that. “It’s really wanting to rain, you know. Must be near noon”—when the sky was full blue and the time was about ten, latest. People took him to be majorly misinformed, but it was not that: he lived in fear of rupture from the tangled web. So finally he came out with his expensive ultralight rig and crickets. Wren was a partisan of the bluegill, for which — it was heard — he held the state record, but he’d casually eaten the fish without registering it. He was breeding a special kind of mutant cricket in his wire keep that would take the record fish again. There were enormous bluegills in the lake, in fact, and even a liar could catch them. Wren had taken home a pound-and-a-quarter one late one evening, but he claimed it had interbred with a German trout and had disqualified itself.