Once all the boats were out around the buoy marking the main reef, it was business as usual. The three big boats started their circling, spreading the purse net; Steve and I rowed south, the other rod boats rowed north. At the south end of the valley there is a small inlet, nearly filled by a reef made of concrete. Between the concrete reef and the larger reef offshore is a channel, one used by faster fish when the nets are dropped; rod fishing usually gets results when the nets are being worked. Steve and I dropped our anchor onto the main reef, and let the swell carry us in over the channel, almost to the curved white segments of the concrete reef. Then it was out with the rods. I knotted the shiny metal bar that was my lure onto the line. “Casket handle,” I said to Steve, holding it up before I threw it over. He didn’t laugh. I let it sink to the bottom, then started the slow reel up.
We fished. Lure to the bottom, reel it back up; throw it in again. Occasionally the rods would arc down, and a few minutes of struggling ended with the gaff work. Then it was back to it. To the north the netters were pulling up nets silver with fish flopping after their lost freedom; the boats tilted in under the weight, until sometimes it seemed their keels would show and they would turn turtle. Inland the hills seemed to rise and fall, rise and fall. Under the cloud-filmed sun the forest was a rich green, the cliff and the bare hilltops dull and gray.
Now five years before, when I was twelve and Pa had first hired me out to John Nicolin, fishing had been a big deal. I had been excited by everything about it—the fishing itself, the moods of the ocean, the teamwork of the men, the entrancing view of the land from the sea. But a lot of days on the water had passed since then, a lot of fish hauled over the gunwale: big fish and small, no fish or so many fish that we exhausted our arms and wore our hands ragged; over steep slow swells, or wind-blown chop, or on water flat as a plate; and under skies hot and clear, or in rain that made the hills a gray mirage, or when it was stormy, with clouds scudding overhead like horses… mostly days like this day, however, moderate swell, sun fighting high clouds, medium number of fish. There had been a thousand days like this one, it seemed, and the thrill was long gone. It was just work to me now.
In between catches I dozed, lulled by the swell, waking up when my rod jerked into my stomach. Then I reeled the fish in, gaffed it, pulled it over the side, smacked its head, got the lure out and tossed it over again, and went back to sleep.
“Henry!”
“Yeah!” I said, sitting up and checking my rod automatically.
“We got quite a few fish here.”
I glanced at the bonita and rock bass in the boat. “About a dozen.”
“Good fishing. Maybe I’ll be able to get away this afternoon,” Steve said wistfully.
I doubted it, but I didn’t say anything. The sun was obscured, and the water was gray; it was getting chill. The fog bank had started its roll in. “Looks like we’ll spend it on shore,” I said.
“Yeah. We’ve got to go up and see Barnard; I want to beat the shit out of that old liar.”
“Sure.”
Then we both hooked big ones, and we had a time of it keeping our lines clear. We were still working them when the blare of Rafael’s bugle floated over the water from the netters. We whooped and got our fish aboard without delay, slapped our oars into the oarlocks and beat it back to Rafael’s boat. They parceled some fish out to us, as some of the boats were about foundering under their load, and we rowed into the rivermouth.
With the help of the Nicolin family and the others on the beach, we pulled the boat up onto the sand and took our fish over to the cleaning tables. Gulls soused us repeatedly, screeching and flapping. When the boat was empty and pulled up to the cliff, Steve approached his father, who was shaking a finger at Rafael and lecturing him about some twists in the line.
“Can I go now, Pa?” Steve asked. “Hanker and I need to do our lessons with Tom.” Which was true.
“Nope,” old Nicolin said, bent over and still inspecting the net. “You’re going to help us fix this net. And then you’re going to help your ma and sisters clean fish.”
At first John had made Steve go to learn to read from the old man, because he figured it was a sign of family prosperity and distinction. Then when Steve got to liking it (which took a long time), his father took to keeping him from it. John straightened, looked at Steve; a bit shorter than his son, but a lot thicker; both of them with the same squarish jaw, brown shock of hair, light blue eyes, straight strong nose… They glared at each other, John daring Steve to talk back to him with all the men wandering around. For a second I thought it was going to happen, that Steve was going to defy him and begin who knows what kind of bloody dispute. But Steve turned away and stalked over to the cleaning tables. After a short wait to allow his anger to lose its first bloom, I followed him.
“I’ll go on up and tell the old man you’re coming later.”
“All right,” Steve said, not looking at me. “I’ll be there when I can.”
Old Nicolin gave me three rock bass and I hauled them up the cliff in a net bag. A gang of kids splashed clothes in the water, and farther upstream several women stood around the ovens at the Marianis’.
I took the fish to Pa, who jumped up from his sewing machine hungrily. “Oh good, good. I’ll get to work on these, one for tonight, dry the others.” I told him I was going to the old man’s and he nodded, pulling rapidly at his long moustache. “Eat this right after dark, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and was off.
The old man’s home is on the steep ridge marking the southern end of our valley, on a flat spot just bigger than his house, about halfway to the peak of the tallest hill around. There isn’t a better view from any home in Onofre. When I got up there the house, a four-roomed wooden box with a fine front window, was empty. I made my way carefully through the junk surrounding the house. Among the honey flats, the telephone wire cutters, the sundials, the rubber tires, the rain barrels with their canvas collecting funnels, the generator parts, the broken engines, the grandfather clocks and gas stoves and crates full of who knows what, there were big pieces of broken glass, and several varmint traps that he was constantly moving about, so that it was smart to watch out. Over at Rafael’s house, machines like those scattered across Tom’s little yard would be fixed and in working order, or stripped for their parts, but here they were just conversation pieces. Why have an automobile engine propped on sawhorses, and how had he gotten it up the ridge, anyway? That was just what Tom wanted you to wonder.
I kept going up the eroded path that ran the edge of the ridge. Near the peak of the spine the path turned and dropped into the crease south of it, a narrow canyon too small to hold a permanent stream, but there was a spring. The eucalyptus trees kept the ground clear of underbrush, and on a gentle slope of the crease the old man kept his beehives, a score of small white wooden domes. I spotted him standing among them, draped in his beekeeping clothes and hat. He moved pretty spryly—for a man over a hundred years old, I mean. He was ambling from dome to dome, pulling out trays and fingering them with a gloved hand, talking all the while, I could tell, despite the hat that hid most of his face. Tom talked to everything: people, himself, dogs, trees, the sky, fish on his plate, rocks he stubbed a toe on… naturally he talked to his bees. He shoved a flat back into a hive and looked around, suddenly wary; then he caught sight of me and waved.
“Get away from the hives, boy, you’ll get stung.”
“They aren’t stinging you.”
He took off his hat and waved a bee back toward its hive. “They don’t have a lot of me to pick at, now do they. Besides they won’t sting me; they know who’s taking care of them.” The long white hair over his ears streamed back in the wind, mixing in my sight with the clouds; his beard was tucked into his shirt, “so I don’t eat any of the little sweeties.” The fog was rising, forming quick cloud streams. Tom rubbed his freckled pate. “Let’s get out of the wind, Henry my boy. It’s so cold the bees are acting like idiots. Perhaps you’d have some tea with me.”