The Fish House
(I first published this essay in 2006, but I wrote much of it decades earlier.)
We'd stick close to him, as we wended our way along the path through the woods at the edge of camp, following the circle illuminated ahead by the Coleman lantern. I tried to keep my arm stiff enough to not spill too much water out of the sloshing pail filled with our catch, while swatting mosquitoes with my free hand. Our shadows danced over the birch trees, their white dark lightening the night every bit as the stars above.
My sisters and I usually went along with him on these nightly excursions to "help" him prepare our dinner. When the door of the smelly little building slammed behind us, and he hung up the lantern from an overhead hook, we probably weren't much help, but we did provide him company.
And I, as usual, provided him an excuse to try and teach me how to clean fish. In our family, those summers, this was actually a pretty essential skill, much like how to get the car started when it broke down, or the outboard engine on our small rented boat going again when it flooded.
He poured the fish out on the metal and wood table top, with a large hole in the center, underneath which was a garbage can filled with the remains of others' catch. We had the usual array of perch, sunfish, croppies, bass, and an occasional pike.
The fish were usually still alive when we laid them out on the table, and some still flopped. These he stilled with a quick blow to the head from his pliers. "That's what you do about that," he said. Then he scaled each fish, before cutting it's head off and proceeding to produce fillets that my mother would be cooking up soon afterward.
One of my sisters shivered at the fish heads in the garbage can, their eyes still wide and glassy. "Can they still see?" she asked.
Dad was too engrossed in teaching me how to clean each type of fish to answer. Over the years, however, I almost never cleaned any of them, because he did too good a job. I just watched, my mind drifting out toward the sounds of the forest around us. There were raccoons, skunks, possums, rabbits, deer, bear and lots of other animals in those years.
Like most kids I knew, I was scared that a bear would corner us sometime way out on the trail. We liked to gather blueberries, which led us straight into their habitat, so it wasn't an entirely baseless fear.
***
Twenty years later, I was carrying a pail filled with fish out on our long dock one summer's night, as my oldest child tagged along with me. In a phone call earlier that night I had learned of Dad's heart attack. He was a day's drive north of me, and I was waiting now for the follow-up, to find out how serious his condition was from the doctors, and to set my plan to drive there and visit him the following day.
I turned on our battery-powered lantern, and laid out our catch -- sheepshead, mackerel, sea trout. Several flopped so I bashed them over the head with a stick.” Those eyes, Daddy, can they still see?" asked my daughter.
Not nearly as efficiently or successfully as my father would have done it, I proceeded to fillet our dinner. Some mosquitoes came after us. Off the dock something big jumped and splashed. My little girl shivered and edged closer to me and our little circle of light there in the wide blackness of the bay, under an enormous sky filled with the Milky Way.
Inside the house, the phone was ringing.
***
Photo: My father and i fishing together in Florida a few years before the night described above.
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