L.V. Sadler

Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published widely in academics and creative writing.  Editor, poet, fiction/creative nonfiction writer, and playwright, she has a full-length poetry collection forthcoming and has published several chapbooks.  She has won The Pittsburgh Quarterly’s Hay Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Hemley Award, and Asphodel’s Poetry Contest and tied for first place in Kalliope’s Elkind Contest.

The following work is copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  

Fishing for Shekels

  

Granddaddy Bob missed my fifteenth birthday.  A big deal because he had never missed a birthday since I could remember having birthdays.  He didn’t forget to give me a present.  (A computer set up in my room at his house so that I could keep my journal going when I was there, which was often.  I input a lot about him and marked the quotes that I loved most with an asterisk.)  But we both missed not being together for the occasion.  And he was going to be leaving North Carolina and going all the way up to Massachusetts.  A friend of his, a cantankerous friend, Granddaddy Bob called him, had retired north just to prove how cantankerous he truly was, and suddenly called and wanted Granddaddy Bob to visit him because he was dying of cancer.  It was so unlike “Old Jack” to admit he was even ill, much less trying to kick the bucket, that Granddaddy Bob knew he was in a bad way and went.  I guess the occasion was sad, as one would expect, but happy, too.  Two old friends reminiscing, fishing, the one knowing that he’d not be forgotten by at least one other (who was likely to pass him on to his favorite grandson, if I do say so myself). 

      Granddaddy Bob’s absence was bad enough, but, worse, he was going to be fishing.  Our major sport.  (Puns came in second.)  He’d had a fish pond dug down behind his mill yard and had it stocked with catfish.  It was where he taught me how to fish and to swim before we ventured out into “the great world beyond,” as he called it, the North Carolina coast. 

      Our catfish were special, by the way.  They didn’t seem to know they were supposed to have had the pep and ginger bred out of them.  Not that they were as tough as their giant ancestors Granddaddy Bob had been privileged to go after when he was a boy and fished with various relatives on the Northeast Cape Fear.  But the current ones were highly unusual.  There’d been this great to-do on television and in the papers when “our” catfish learned to take Size 8 white marabou streamers on sinking lines with rattles and noisemakers.  And that wasn’t all.  They’d come boiling up like pike.  People had thought “something ‘fishy’ was going on, but they’d seen the cream on the whiskers right enough,” Granddaddy Bob said.

      I’d never fished any place else, except in the surf and sound of Topsail Beach, where Granddaddy Bob had a cottage, but he’d prepared me to fish anywhere, he claimed.  I was a fish nerd.  At school, I was called “Fly Rod,” not always kindly, as opposed to my buddy, “Hot Rod.”  Fortunately, most of my schoolmates didn’t have a clue about “dumbbell eyes” or my looking at them “walleyed.”  Granddaddy Bob and I would fish and talk about them.  How, as examples, they would have loved “strip fishing,” stripping lines into stripping baskets, and going for the “back sides” of islands.  Granddaddy Bob would warn me to keep a wire in place to “protect my tippet” and to keep up “both guard and bite guard.”  If things got really bad, he said, I could always flip them my anal fin.  And, no matter what, I was to keep “smallmouthed” to their “bigmouthed.”  They were just angling for a rise from me, but I must never make the first strike.  I vowed to refuse to let them get my “hackle feathers” up and smiled smugly because they didn’t have a clue about “brookies” or “setbacks” or “inhaling poppers.”  No, they were merely flounderingbottom-feeders who, at most, might someday re-do their roofs in fishscale tiles or purchase a pitcher plant to await the appearance of its fishtail nectary.  I, on the other hand, was learning about spinning (of yarns, too), fly rodding (and action), baitcasting, fishing top-water, roll casting, stream-reading, not to mention the “lay” of the water by seasons and therefore approach, natural presentation, forage fish, split shot, the color of my materials . . . .  Not that we had that much of a change of seasons, but I was prepared if the polar ice caps melted or moved our way.  I had advanced from “fishing” for crabs with a fish head on a string to using a fly rod (not a surf rod) for them and tying my own fly patterns.  Why, when I was “in form,” as Granddaddy Bob called it, my “crab,” the instant he reached bottom, would assume the defensive posture that lured his assailants.  And Granddaddy Bob and I read Hemingway, Zane Grey (whom we admired for his love of the West, too), and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin (who may not fish but were always at sea).  We knew the fly fishing tackle of the famous and the rods crafted by the likes of Kosmic and Payne.

      My classmates would have had another field day if they’d known that Granddaddy Bob never started to fish or even unload his gear without standing still first and looking off over the water and saying, as if it were a prayer, “.. . go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you open its mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it to them for me and for yourself.”  His “amen,” I suppose I could call it, was “Matthew 17.27.”

      Well, I wanted something to match that.  I went casting about in the Bible, as if the “shekel” was bait and I must search out the steps for finding the treasure.  All I caught, besides “fishers of men,” was “. . . Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear” (John 18.10).  I kept that to myself because it somehow seemed to suggest Daddy and merely stood quietly while Granddaddy Bob went through his ritual.

      At least I would benefit from Granddaddy Bob’s collecting data while he was in a new place.  (Well, everybody has to have something to be “into.”  How about all those baby boomers trying to find their first Barbies!  Granddaddy Bob and I happen to like to collect data.)  We had a gentlemen’s agreement to do that about wherever we were and whatever we read or experienced. 

      The richest lore he brought back this time was about LakeWebster itself.  His friend Old Jack lived in Webster, Massachusetts, which is near the lake.  It’s called “LakeWebster” because nobody can say or has the time to say its real name.  Which is Indian for “You fish on your side; we fish on our side; nobody fish in the middle.” and has fourteen syllables and forty-three letters and is spelled “Chargoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaug.”  Unfortunately, nobody could tell him what tribe’s language this was.  Granddaddy Bob and I both being much into Native Americans, this was troublesome.  It was so troublesome in fact that I added it to the “List of Mysteries” I kept in my computer journal.  It’s one I knew I must get around to solving while Granddaddy Bob was still here to enjoy the solution.

      But I mention the “LakeWebster” story because Granddaddy Bob always has a point, and I was waiting for the “point line.”  Which was that, often in the natural course of affairs, “familial” affairs especially, you have to settle, at least temporarily, sometimes a lot longer, for time and space and logic and jolts or whatever to set things right.  So, when all you were likely to do by trying to make peace was to make more war, back off and agree, “You fish on your side; we fish on our side; nobody fish in the middle.”  “From now on,” Granddaddy Bob said, “you and I, Zy Boy, will recognize and acquiesce to the need for a ‘dip in LakeWebster.’”  So a “dip in LakeWebster” became part of our secret vocabulary. 

      I should explain that the real “familial affair” bugging us was Daddy, who got into drugs, divorced (and worse) my mother and my brother Ryan and me, and is generally “estranged” from all of us, Granddaddy Bob included.  The best I could figure, he’d been a disappointment all around.  He was the only boy in the family and had come when Granddaddy Bob was “on in years,” having re-married after his first wife divorced him.  Granddaddy Bob would shake his head and say, “I don’t know.  I just don’t know.  Maybe we spoiled him.  Maybe it’s just that gar hole at the bottom of all the Slayters.  You have to fight it, Zy Boy.  It got your daddy.  You fight!  Don’t let the Slayter Gar Hole suck you down.  Keep busy.  Then reward yourself for keeping busy by going fishing.  You hear, Zy Boy!  Keep busy and fish.”  I didn’t say it to Granddaddy Bob, who could get very wrought up thinking about Daddy, but it seemed to me a case of his using aircraft nitrate cellulose taughtening dope as head cement.

      And at least my fifteenth birthday, which Granddaddy Bob missed, wasn’t as big as my sixteenth was going to be.  When Daddy was sixteen—and the same for my older brother Ryan—Granddaddy Bob had taken each of them shad fishing on the Roanoke River upstream of the rapids around Weldon.  White water.  Riffles.  You’d best stow all gear before the final run of water, the main set of Weldon’s rapids.  For Ryan’s “coming-of-age fishing trip,” they’d even done it in an inflatable raft.  I was hoping for a genuine Zodiac.  Granddaddy Bob didn’t say much about his trip with Daddy, the two of them now setting each other’s teeth on edge and all, but Ryan had caught a giant hickory shad that did its dead-level-best to fight like a tarpon.  They’d used green and white crappie jigs, but shad are apparently partial to any flies with pink in them.  Granddaddy Bob allowed as how most people used bass tackle to catch shad, but he favored micro spinning or light fly tackle because shad are such fighters and need to be allowed to show you what they have. 

      I was planning every inch of the trip Granddaddy Bob and I would have on my sixteenth birthday.  Down to the food.  Which definitely wouldn’t be Phillips’ Franks ’n Beans with pork rinds crumbled on top, Ryan’s choice.  Granddaddy Bob wasn’t as enthusiastic as I could have hoped, despite my promising better food and no Spam, but he was nudging ninety.  I kept trying to remember that so as to vaccinate myself against the time when he wouldn’t be with me in the flesh.  He warned me, too.  Or tried to.

      Why do bad things seem to come at once?  We were scarcely a month beyond the SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 Massacre.  People were losing jobs.  Businesses were closing. Many of the .coms were .bombs.  Granddaddy Bob was scared to look at the Stock Market reports on television and scared not to.  He said even his favorite pundit was afraid to make puns anymore—he meant PBS’s “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser” show—[Now look what they’ve done to him!] and that it was a sorry world when all the humor dried up like dead fishing holes.  He kept muttering that over and over.  “It’s a sorry world, Zy Boy, when all the humor dries up like dead fishing holes.  It’s not a world for me anymore.”  I wanted to run to him and hug him and tell him not to talk that way.  That it scared me.  All the world could go mad and dive in gar holes, but not Granddaddy Bob.  If the Granddaddy Bobs of the world disappear, the world will disappear, too.  And it won’t wait to dry up like dead fishing holes.  It will just be gone. 

      People were afraid to deliver the mail.  People were afraid to open the mail.  People were afraid to use their computers because of the viruses and worms and the next bioterrorism form they were going to evolve into.  I had a dream that the Flesh-Eating Worm, in a coat of many germs, climbed the line, then the pole, then bored into my brain and learned from it how to come out of my computer after me.  He said he had fished out all he needed to know.  That I might think I could fool him, as he had fooled all those fish, but he knew what he knew.  And that henceforth he would exchange ashes for beauty the world over and that I was responsible.

      I knew, but I did not know how it would be!

      When Grandmother Helen called to say that Granddaddy Bob had died of a heart attack, I was devastated.  You probably think that’s crazy because, I told you I’d been vaccinating myself against his death.  I knew he was moving toward ninety.  I saw him get frail and go light as a bird’s bones.  I saw the fort of his spirit breached.  I heard him just the way Grandmother Helen had—“It’s a sorry world when all the humor dries up like dead fishing holes.  It’s not a world for me anymore.”  Even a year earlier, Granddaddy Bob wouldn’t have given in to that despair.  His body betrayed him.  It went weak, and the spirit began to slip out through his pores.  A secret leak that probably even he didn’t know about.  And in the end, the Slayter Gar Hole got even Granddaddy Bob and would get me, too.  Talking about it, analyzing it, dealing with it, accepting others because of it.  All for nothing.  The Slayter Gar Hole had won.  No Slayter was proof against it.

      I was angry, too.  He’d left me with no coming-of-age fishing trip!  Even my sorry father had gotten that.  I’d been betrayed.  Granddaddy Bob was not there, would never be there again.  Except in my memory.  FACTFACTFACTFACTFACTFACTFACTFACTFACTFACTFACT.  FACTFACTFACTFACTFACTFACTFACT.  Fact that stretched from alpha to omega.  From North Carolina to Heaven.  From WhiteLake to . . . .  And then I thought a GRANDDADDY BOB THING.  Which was—“a dip in LakeWebster.  Alias that CHARGOGGAGOGGMANCHAUGAGOGGCHAUBUNAGUNGAMAUG thing.”  Just the look of the line-up of FACT’s and the line of Native American.  There was a lot more of Granddaddy Bob to think of than that.  All I had to do was call up “Find” and enter an asterisk.  I’d have a lot of Granddaddy Bob if not in the flesh, then in the word.  But oh how I wanted the word to be made flesh.  What would he say to that?  “Oh, Zy Boy,” he would say, “John 1.14—‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.’”  “Oh, Zy Boy, Zy Boy, you knew I would go.  Don’t take on about it so!  Romans 8.9, Zy Boy, ‘But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you.’  Busy yourself, Zy Boy.  Busy yourself!  And then fish as a reward.  Find your shekel in the fish’s mouth!”

      A remarkable person has passed from my life.  The world and I have lost him.  But, having had him, I may be of some value to the world.  I would not be surprised to feel him twitch my left ear lobe upon occasion, for he will have oversight, and I should be able, with some practice, to determine if the upcoming is positive or negative and to act accordingly.  One of the last things he came up with is that terror had made our terraunfirma and he was sorry to have to admit that his own terra was too infirma to do much about it.  I will try to do that in his stead.

      Just since Granddaddy Bob died, scientists have “set off another palpitation in The Great Mystery,” as he was fond of saying.  Now two subatomic particles can be linked so they must rotate in opposite directions.  If one is forced to spin clockwise, the other must spin counterclockwise no matter how far the separation is between them in space.  For this to be, they have to exchange information instantly.  I don’t know how yet, but that applies in some main way to Granddaddy Bob and me.  It’s our special version of Eng and Chang Bunker, North Carolina’s own and the original Siamese twins.  On one level, I’m pretty sure I know Granddaddy Bob’s address over there on the other side.  I don’t think where he was bound was a mystery to me or anyone else.  He served me angels’ food here.  He and the angels are eating at the same table now.  The biggest mystery remains, though.  How will I survive without Granddaddy Bob?

      But when I think that, a whisper comes at my ear like a fish teasing bait, “Keep busy, Zy Boy.  Then reward yourself with fishing.  Find your shekel in the fish’s mouth!”