Then he made an effort to push the woman out of his mind, to again think of nothing at all.  Instead a memory of fishing with his father sprang into focus.  It was in a mountain lake in Tennessee.  They camped there during the summer.  His father taught him to catch hatchery trout with hooks baited with corn.  It was the first time he had taken fish in an illegal manner.   He expected the game warden to appear at any moment and was nervous, but his father just laughed at his fears.

            But the memory, the experience that appeared in both waking and sleeping dreams, was not of taking hatchery trout on hooks baited with corn.  It was fishing in one of those deep, cold TVA lakes at dawn one morning, the water as clear as bathwater.  He could see the flash of minnows as the sun rose over the mountains to illuminate the water.  Then he saw the spotted bass, huge in his dreams, but big, surely it had been big, following the lure designed to represent one of those minnows, the lip on the front of it causing the lure to swim several feet under the water when he turned the crank on the reel.  A few feet away from him the fish paused, and he stopped reeling, the buoyant lure floating slowly to the surface, its treble hooks dangling.  But instead of rising to take the lure, the fish stared at him and then sank back leisurely into the depths of the lake, its solid form dissolving into the darkness.

            He had never told anyone about his experience with the fish.  He expected that he was eight or nine years old at the time.  It was the only part of him that was clear of the feeling of failure.  The beauty of it was like nothing else in his life.  What he could never understand was why this memory of his failure to catch a fish gave him so much pleasure.  He opened the ice chest and looked at the silvery sides of the river bass he had caught that day.  None of them was anything like that fish, although he suspected some were larger.

***

By the time he reached Frog Eye, the river was in shade both from the timber on the bank and the bluff itself. He thought no more of Ann McComb and the dinner she would eat by herself or his job prospects or even the fish from his childhood. Instead he imagined himself in his mother’s kitchen, eating slowly and carefully the largest of the bass that she had cleaned and cooked for him. When he had finished eating, sitting there alone while his mother sat before the TV in the living room, bits of laughter and music drifting into the kitchen, he would look down at those bones, perfect in their symmetry, and futilely embrace the memory of catching and eating this particular fish in a vain attempt to stop the wave of anger and despair that rose up in him.

 

Scott Ely‘s latest work is a novel, The Elephant Mountains.  Plumb’s Bluff, a novel, is forthcoming from Livingston Press. He lives in South Carolina with his wife, the poet Susan Ludvigson, and several dogs.