Roy leans back, poises, pulls the rope with a short powerful chop. It catches with a throaty roar and this changes everything. The pleasant man in the bow is taken by surprise and knocked off balance as the boat skews against the dock. But now the boat seeks open water and the fishermen sit quickly about and settle themselves, their faces serene now and full of hope. Roy Smith is seen to be a cheerful florid man, heavy-set but still youngish. The water of the bayou boils up like tea and disgorges bubbles of smoke. The hull disappears into a white middle distance and the sound goes suddenly small as if the boat had run into cotton.
A deformed live oak emerges from the whiteness, stands up in the air, like a tree in a Chinese print. Minutes pass. An egret lets down on his light stiff wings and cocks one eye at the water. Behind me the screen door opens softly and my mother comes out on the dock with a casting rod. She props the rod against the rail, puts down a wax-paper bundle, scratches both arms under the sleeves and looks about her, yawning. “Hinh-honh,” she says in a yawn-sigh as wan and white as the morning. Her blouse is one of Roy’s army shirts and not much too big for her large breasts. She wears blue Keds and ladies’ denims with a flyless front pulled high over her bulky hips. With her baseball cap pressed down over her wiry hair she looks like the women you see fishing from highway bridges.
Mother undoes the bundle, takes out a scout knife and pries loose the frozen shrimp. She chops off neat pink cubes, slides them along the rail with her blade, stopping now and then to jiggle her nose and clear her throat with the old music. To make sure of having room, she goes out to the end of the dock, lays back her arm to measure, and casts in a big looping straight-arm swing, a clumsy yet practiced movement that ends with her wrist bent in, in a womanish angle. The reel sings and the lead sails far and wide with its gyrating shrimp and lands with hardly a splash in the light etherish water. Mother holds still for a second, listening intently as if she meant to learn what the fishes thought of it, and reels in slowly, twitching the rod from time to time.
I pull on my pants and walk out barefoot on the dock. The sun has cleared the savannah but it is still a cool milky world. Only the silvery wood is warm and raspy underfoot.
“Isn’t it mighty early for you!” Her voice is a tinkle over the water.
My mother is easy and affectionate with me. Now we may speak together. It is the early morning and our isolation in the great white marsh.
“Can I fix you some breakfast?”
“No’m. I’m not hungry.” Our voices go ringing around the empty room of the morning.
Still she puts me off. I am only doing a little fishing and it is like any other day, she as much as says to me, so let us not make anything remarkable out of it. She veers away from intimacy. I marvel at her sure instinct for the ordinary. But perhaps she knows what she is doing.
“I wish I had known you were going to get up so early,” she says indignantly. “You could have gone over to the Rigolets with Roy and Kinsey. The reds are running.”
“I saw them.”
“Why didn’t you go!”—in the ultimate measure of astonishment.
“You know I don’t like to fish.”
“I had another rod!”
“It’s just as well.”
“That’s true,” she says after a while. “You never did. You’re just like your father.” She gives me a swift look, which is unusual for her. “I noticed last night how much you favor him.” She casts again and again holds still.
“He didn’t like to fish?”
“He thought he did!”
I stretch out at full length, prop my head on a two-by-four. It is possible to squint into the rising sun and at the same time see my mother spangled in rainbows. A crab spider has built his web across a finger of the bayou and the strands seem to spin in the sunlight.
“But he didn’t really?”
“Unh un—” she says, dragging it out to make up for her inattention. Every now and then she wedges the rod between her stomach and the rail and gives her nose a good wringing.
“Why didn’t he?”
“Because he didn’t. He would say he did. And once he did! I remember one day we went down Little Bayou Sara. He had been sick and Dr Wills told him to work in the morning and take off in the afternoons and take up fishing or an interesting hobby. It was the prettiest day, I remember, and we found a hole under a fallen willow — a good place for sac au lait if ever I saw one. So I said, go ahead, drop your line right there. Through the tree? he said. He thought it was a lot of humbug — he wasn’t much of a fisherman; Dr Wills and Judge Anse were big hunters and fishermen and he pretended he liked it but he didn’t. So I said, go ahead, right down through the leaves — that’s the way you catch sac au lait. I be John Brown if he didn’t pull up the fattest finest sac au lait you ever saw. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Oh he got himself all wound up about it. Now isn’t this an ideal spot, he would say over and over again, and: Look at such and such a tree over there, look how the sunshine catches the water in such and such a way — we’ll have to come back tomorrow and the next day and all summer — that’s all we have to do!” My mother gives her rod a great spasming jerk, reels in quickly and frowns at the mangled shrimp. “Do you see what that scoun’l beast—! Do you know that that ain’t anything in the world but some old hardhead sitting right on the bottom.”
“Did he go back the next day?”
“Th. No indeed. No, in, deed,” she says, carving three cubes of shrimp. Again she lays back her arm. The shrimp gyrates and Mother holds still. “What do you think he says when I mention sac au lait the next morning?”
“What?”
“‘Oh no. Oh no. You go ahead.’ And off he goes on his famous walk.”
“Walk?”
“Up the levee. Five miles, ten miles, fifteen miles. Winter or summer. I went with him one Christmas morning I remember. Mile after mile and all of it just the same. Same old brown levee in front, brown river on one side, brown fields on the other. So when he got about a half a mile ahead of me, I said, shoot. What am I doing out here humping along for all I’m worth when all we going to do is turn around and hump on back? So I said, good-by, Mister, I’m going home — you can walk all the way to Natchez if you want to.” It is my mother’s way to see life, past and present, in terms of a standard comic exaggeration. If she had spent four years in Buchenwald, she would recollect it so: “So I said to him: listen, Mister, if you think I’m going to eat this stuff, you’ve got another think coming.”
The boards of the dock, warming in the sun, begin to give off a piney-winey smell. The last tendril of ground fog burns away, leaving the water black as tea. The tree is solitary and mournful, a poor thing after all. Across the bayou the egret humps over, as peaked and disheveled as a buzzard.
“Was he a good husband?” Sometimes I try, not too seriously, to shake her loose from her elected career of the commonplace. But her gyroscope always holds her on course.
“Good? Well I’ll tell you one thing — he was a good walker!”
“Was he a good doctor?”
“Was he! And what hands! If anyone ever had the hands of a surgeon, he did.” My mother’s recollection of my father is storied and of a piece. It is not him she remembers but an old emblem of him. But now something occurs to her. “He was smart, but he didn’t know it all! I taught him a thing or two once and I can tell you he thanked me for it.”