Big Fish (12 page)

There is a small couch, two chairs, and a brown hearth rug.

In the doorway leading to another room stands the girl. She has long black hair braided in the back, and still blue eyes. She can't be more than twenty. Living in this
swamp he would have expected her to be as covered in grime as he is now, but other than a streak of black ash across one side of her neck, her white skin and her cotton calico
dress could scarcely be cleaner.

“Edward Bloom,” she says. “You are Ed Bloom, aren't you?”

“Yes,” he says. “How did you know?”

“Figured,” she says. “I mean, who else?”

He nods and says that he is sorry to bother her and her family, but that he has come on business. He tells her he would like to speak to the owner of the house here—her father, mother?—and of the land the house is on.

She tells him he is doing just that.

“I'm sorry?”

“This is mine,” she says.

“You?” he says. “But you're just a—”

“Woman,” she says. “Near about.”

“I'm sorry,” my father says. “I don't mean—”

“Business, Mr. Bloom,” she says, faintly smiling. “You said something about some business.”

“Oh, yes,” he says.

And he tells her everything he knows, how he came to Specter, how he fell in love with it, and how he merely wants to have it all. Call it a flaw in his nature if you will but he wants it, all of it, and this apparently is a piece of land he had overlooked, that he would like to buy it from her if she wouldn't mind, that nothing will change, she can stay here forever if she likes, he only wishes to call this town his own.

And she says, “Now let me get this straight. You'll buy this swamp from me, but I'll stay in it. You'll own the house, but it'll still be mine. I'll be here, and you'll come and go as you please to one place or another because there's a flaw in your nature. Do I have that right?” And when he tells her that she does, that in so many words she has it right, she says, “Then I don't think so, Mr. Bloom. If nothing is going to change, I'd just as soon they not change the way things haven't been changing all this time.”

“But you don't understand,” he says. “In essence you will lose nothing. Everybody actually gains by this. Don't you see? You can ask anybody in Specter. I have been nothing if not beneficent. In every way, the people of Specter have profited by my presence here.”

“Let them profit,” she says.

“It's a small thing, really. I wish you'd reconsider.” He's about to lose his temper, or break down in sadness. “I only want the best for everybody.”

“Especially you,” she says.

“For everybody,” he says. “Including me.”

She stares at my father for a long time, and shakes her head, her blue eyes still and steady.

“I don't have any folks, Mr. Bloom,” she says.
“They've been gone a long time.” She gives him a cold, mean stare. “I've been fine here. I know things—well, you might be surprised at all I know. It's not like some big check is going to change anything for me. Money—I just don't need it. I don't need anything, Mr. Bloom. I'm happy the way things are.”

“Young woman,” my father asks, incredulous, “what is your name?”

“Jenny,” she says, in a softer voice than the one she has been using till now. “My name is Jenny Hill.”

The story goes like this: he falls in love with Specter first, then he falls in love with Jenny Hill.

L
OVE IS STRANGE.
What
makes a woman like Jenny Hill suddenly decide my father is the man for her? What does he do to her? Is it that fabled charm? Or are Jenny Hill and Edward Bloom somehow made for each other? Did my father wait forty years and Jenny Hill twenty to finally find the loves of their lives?

I don't know.

On his shoulders he brings Jenny out of the swamp, and they drive to town together in his car. He drives so slowly at times that it is quite possible to walk beside his car at a good pace and talk to him, or, as it happens today, for all of Specter to line the sidewalks to see what he has with him now, to see the lovely Jenny Hill.

From the beginning of his stay in Specter, my father has maintained a small, white, black-shuttered home not far from the town park, on a street as pretty as spring, with a soft green lawn in front and a rose garden to one side, and an old barn converted to a garage on the other. There is a red wooden bird perched high on a white picket fence, whose wings whirl when the wind blows, and a straw mat on the front porch with the word
Home
woven into it.

And yet he has never stayed there. Not in the five years since he fell in love with Specter has he ever spent the night at the only house in town where no one else lives. Until he brings Jenny in from the swamp, he always stays with others. But now, with Jenny installed in the little white house with the soft green lawn not far from the park, he stays with her. He no longer surprises the people of Specter with his shy knock at dusk (“It's Mr. Bloom!” the kids scream, and jump all over him like a long lost uncle). He has a place of his own to stay now, and though at first some feelings are hurt, and the seemliness of the situation questioned by a few, pretty soon everybody sees the wisdom of living with the woman you love in the town you loved to live in.
Wise:
that's how they thought of my father from day one. He is wise and good and kind. If he does something that seems strange—such as going to a swamp to buy some land, and finding instead this woman—then that's because the rest of everybody just isn't as wise and kind and as good as he. And so pretty soon no one thinks twice about Jenny Hill, not in any small-minded way, that is, but rather merely to wonder how she holds up when Edward is gone, which, even the most forgiving of those in Specter will have to admit, is generally most of the time.

They wonder,
Isn't she lonely? What does she do with herself?
Things like that.

Jenny takes part in the life of the town, though. She helps organize events at school and is in charge of the cakewalk each fall at the local fair the town puts on. After so long in the swamp, keeping her lawn nice and green is no problem for her, and the garden just seems to thrive under her hand. But there are nights her neighbors hear her wail from a place deep inside herself, and, as if he can hear her, too, the next day or maybe the day after that he will be seen driving slowly through town, waving at everybody, and pulling up finally into the drive of the little house, where he will wave to the woman he loves, who might be standing on the porch, wiping her hands on her apron, a smile as big as the sun on her lovely face, her head just slightly shaking, and a soft
Hello,
almost as though he had never left at all.

Which, in fact, is how everybody comes to see him after a while. So many years have come and gone since he bought those first tracts of land on the outskirts of town, and so many more since he became a common presence, that people actually begin to take him for granted. His appearance in Specter is fantastic one day, quotidian the next. He owns every inch of land in town, and has been over every inch of it on his own as well. He has slept in every home and has visited every business; he remembers everybody's name, and everybody's dog's name, and how old the kids are, and when a big birthday is coming. It is the kids, of course, those who grow up seeing Edward around, who first accept him as they do any other natural phenomenon, as any other regular thing, and it carries over to the adults. A month will pass without him here, and then a day will come, bringing Edward with it. That old slow car of his—what a sight!
Hello, Edward!
See you again soon.
My best to Jenny.
Come by the store.
And so many years began to pass in just this fashion, and his presence there becomes so ordinary and predictable that eventually it isn't as though he has never left, but as though he had never come in the first place. To everybody in that wonderful little town, from the youngest boy and girl to the oldest man, it is just like Edward Bloom has lived there all his life.

I
N SPECTER, HISTORY BECOMES
what never happened. People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction. Though they never marry, Jenny becomes his young wife, Edward a kind of traveling salesman. People like to imagine how they must have met. The day he came through town so many years ago and saw her—where?—with her mother in the market?
Edward couldn't take his eyes off her.
Followed her around all day.
Or is she rather the woman—the little girl?—who asked to wash his car for a nickel that day and who from that day on has set her sights on this man and told everybody who will listen,
He's mine. The day I turn twenty years old I'm going to make him marry me.
And sure enough, the day she turned twenty, she found Edward Bloom on the porch in front of the country store, rocking with Willard and Wiley
and the rest, and though they had yet even to share a sentence
together all she had to do was hold out her hand to be taken, and he took it, and they walked off together, and the next time anyone saw them they were man and wife, man
and wife, and just about ready to move into that perfect lit­tle
house near the park with the garden. Or maybe . . .

It doesn't matter; the story keeps changing. All of the stories do. Since none of them are true to begin with, the townspeople's memories take on a peculiar tint, their voices loud in the morning when, during the night, they might have remembered something else that never happened, a story good enough to share with the others, a new twist, a lie compounded daily. In the heat of a summer morning Willard might tell of the day—who could ever forget it?—when Edward was just a ten-year-old boy and the river (gone now, dried up, not there if you looked) rose so high that everyone feared that another drop from the black sky would wash away the town, another drop of rain falling into that mad river, and Specter would be no more. No one could forget how Edward started singing—he had that high, cool voice—and walking away, singing and walking away from town—and how the rain followed. How not another drop fell into the river, because the clouds followed him. He charmed the falling water, and the sun came out, and Edward didn't come back until the rain was somewhere near Tennessee, and Specter was safe. Who could forget that?

Is any man ever kinder to animals than Edward Bloom?
somebody might offer.
If there is one, show him to me; I'd like to see him.
Because I remember when Edward was just a teenager and he was just so kind to the animals, all of them .
. .

Edward isn't in Specter all that often, of course; once a month for a couple of days at best. Although the truth is that their rich new landlord arrived there one afternoon with a broken down car, one afternoon after forty years of his life had already gone by, the townspeople do what they've al
ways done—make things up—but now, instead of the simple
fish stories that had satisfied them before, it is the history of the life Edward Bloom never lived in Specter that engages them, a life they wished they had, and the life, finally, he came to live in their minds: as Edward Bloom re­invented them, so they reinvented him.

And he seems to think this is a pretty good idea him
self.

That is, he didn't seem to mind.

B
UT THAT'S ANOTHER STORY.
In this one, things don't go so well with Jenny. It has to happen, doesn't it? A young woman just out of the swamp, and beautiful, as beautiful as anybody ever is, left all alone for so long. Oh
the dark hours in which her youth is spent! She loves Edward
Bloom—and who can blame her? No one doesn't love him. But he, Edward, he has the key to her heart, and he keeps it with him when he's gone.

There is something a little strange about Jenny, everybody begins to notice. The way she sits by the window now day and night staring out. People pass by and they wave but she can't see them. What she's looking at is far away. Her eyes glow. She doesn't blink. And this time Edward's gone for a long time, longer than before. Everybody misses him, of course, but Jenny especially. Jenny misses him the most, and this brings out the strange parts.

It's something somebody might have mentioned to Edward when he brought her in, the differentness about her. But no one there seemed to know Jenny Hill or her folks. Nobody. Yet how had she lived out in that swamp for twenty years without a soul knowing? Can this be?

No, it can't. But maybe nobody mentioned this to Edward because it didn't seem right. He was so happy. She seemed like a nice enough young woman at the time. And she was.

But no longer. No one can see Jenny Hill all cold and hard at the picture window staring out and think
nice.
They think
, There's a woman who's in no mood to be nice.
And her eyes glow. Really and truly. People go by the house at night and they swear they can see faint yellow lights at the window, two of them, her eyes, glowing in her head. And it's kind of scary.

Of course, the garden goes to hell in a hand basket. Weeds and vines overtake the rose bushes, finally strangling the life out of them. The grass in the yard grows, rises and falls from its own weight. A neighbor feels like helping her out with the yard, but when he goes over and knocks on her door, she doesn't answer.

Then what happens happens too quickly for anybody to act, mesmerized as they are by the despair emanating from the little white house. But in a matter of days the vines
grow from one side of the house to the other, finally covering
it over until it's hard to know there is a house there at all.

Then it rains. It rains for days and days. The lake rises, the dam almost bursts, and water begins to collect in the yard around Jenny's house. Small pools at first but the small pools meet, grow, and finally encircle her. The edge of the pool spills out into the street, and washes in close to the house next door. Water snakes find the big pool and thrive there, and trees whose roots can't cling to the shallow soil fall. Turtles rest on the trees, and moss grows thick on their trunks. Birds no one has seen before come and nest in the chimney of Jenny's house, and at night strange animal sounds can be heard coming from that deep dark place, sounds that keep most of the town shaking in their beds.