Fishbone's Song (3 page)

Then eat them. One bite. And all the time thinking you'd done something wrong. Bad wrong.

By killing one small frog.

And then back to the woods.

Only knowing more now, this time, knowing that hunting is not just to kill. Hunting is watching. Watching to know. Watching to learn to see and know and learn. A way to get food, but more, more than that a way to learn, to know. A way to be.

A hunter.

A watcher.

The spear was not enough, not fast enough for chubs. Once in a great while we would stretch an old seining net across a part of the creek down where it pools and net twenty or so to salt and smoke. They tasted good smoked, smoky and oily and salty. Each fish was about the length of Fishbone's hand spread out, with fat and slick and oily meat. But he
didn't like to net them too often because he said we would take them all out with the net and not have any fish. But any I could catch alone we could cook in the pan and have with sliced potatoes, picking the meat carefully off the bones.

But they didn't bite. I tried with some line and a small hook I found in an old box in the shanty shed at the rear of the cabin. Dug a few worms and hung the line off an old piece of willow and they came to it. You could see them gather around bait. But they just nibbled and nibbled at the worm until it was all taken off, broken away from the hook.

So I couldn't spear them and we only netted them almost never, and they didn't take a hook, and you can, I figured, get hungry something awful just watching and learning about things but never taking any food. Well, true fact is there is always food here from what the man brings once a month when he comes to check on things. Can always make biscuits and gravy with flour and bacon grease and
lord only knows how many cans of beans there are stored in shelves in back of the stove. And cans of some meat called Spam. Fishbone said he lived through some hard times when he was small, where the onliest thing he had to eat were lard sandwiches on week-old bread. With a little salt. Said sometimes his mother would find a way to buy flour and yeast and make bread or biscuits to have with gravy. Burned brown gravy made from flour and lard usually on the week-old bread from the bakery. Penny a loaf, he said, and they couldn't afford that. Lard and old bread. Three times a day. So now he kept cans of beans and some Spam. Just in case, he said, just in case it came on hard times again, but he wouldn't use any of it unless it happened. Hard times. I couldn't just open a can of beans or Spam whenever I felt a little lean in the belly, he said. Go out, he said. Earn it.

So I needed a faster way to hunt and I thought on it and decided that I could make a bow and use
cane arrows—straight and light—if I could find the right wood for the bow. I tried elm, using an old leather bootlace for a string first, but it either bent too much and was too weak, or if thicker wouldn't bend at all. Messed around with other wood I didn't know the name of and finally settled on dried willow. There was a stand of old dead and dried water willows that grew when there was a heavy runoff from the long mountains one year, then no runoff again, so they died and stayed there, straight and clean from knots or splits. I picked a piece a little thinner than my wrist and whittled on it with the kitchen knife until it was rough tapered. Then Fishbone showed me how to scrape and shave wood with a piece of broken jar glass from the junk pile where it seemed like we threw stuff away until we needed to use it again.

Bow was about as long as me. I read in one of the books all about a crook a long time ago named Robin Hood. Was really good with a bow. Said
he could shoot one arrow into a target and then another so it split the first arrow down the middle, but I found later that there probably wasn't a man like him, that it was all based on an old tombstone behind a church in England that said:

Here lies Robyn Hode

'Nere was an archer so giud

Period. There never was any more about him anywhere, but people started making up stories about him based on the tombstone. There was nothing else you could hang on to as true about the whole business. Good. Fun to read. Only made up.

But in the book they said a wooden bow cut and trimmed to the right shape was called a stave and that's what I had. A stave. Until I cut notches in the ends for string and hooked them up with the leather lace. I shortened the string until when I held the bow in the middle, the string was back away from the center of the bow about the distance of my spread hand. Cutting, tapering, and shaving
was slow, but I'd sit of an evening with the oil lamp flickering in the soft night air moving through the slats in the walls and listen to Fishbone tell his song-stories, sipping his 'shine from the jar and making word pictures in my head.

Something made them slide in there, the song-tales. Slide into my brain so they seemed alive, real inside me in some way so I could almost hear the colors, smell the sound.

Sing-song stories of old times, sad songs of the hard times and lard sandwiches and wearing one pair of Oshkosh bibs until they were more patches than bibs, all-over wear-holes and fixed with pieces of cotton flour sacks. And baby sister wearing pullover shift dresses made from the same flour sacks. And patches on them as well, so many she had a nickname of that: Patches. Same baby sister dying of the croup, of the coughing croup hacking so long and deep you could hear-feel it in your whole body every time she coughed, night after night, day after
day, until finally the end of it, the end of it. The end of her coughing and the end of her, of Patches. Buried wrapped in an old piece of binder canvas with the wooden slats still riveted to it. Shiny brass rivet heads against the straw-polished old wood strips. Buried in the same flour-sack shift dress, buried with a handful of wildflowers held in her hands, wildflowers she loved to pick and smell. Buried in a hand-dug grave by the back of the house. Buried forever. Buried.

Sad songs. So sad he had tears, not 'shine tears but real ones when he told it. Sang it with the foot-shuffle beat on the porch boards and old voice cracking, thinking of burying her. Patches. Had blue eyes, and red-blond hair, and a smile all the time, and they were all buried with her. Part of the song. Blue eyes and hair and smile. All buried.

Arrows were easier. The bow had a nice snap to it, not heavy to pull but zippy. The string made a thrumming sound, lower than the bottom string
on the old guitar when I plucked it good and taut. And cane from along the creek bank down where it edged the swamp was dry and light. I cut five of them a little longer than my arm and on the front end carved a point as sharp as a needle. On the rear end I gouged out a shallow notch for the bowstring, and by pinching the end of the arrow shaft with my fingers, I could pull it back over a foot. Not all the way back to the cheek or the chin but a good way toward them. From eight or ten feet away on the mud side bank of the creek, the cane stuck in nice. Solid. In about a hand width. I tried a farther shot or two, but without feathers on the shaft, the arrow tended to head off sideways and I couldn't hit anything even close to what I aimed at.

But for then, for a seven- or six- or eight-year-old boy who was just starting to hunt, it was good enough, and I started working the creek for chubs. They would sit on the bottom, or near the bottom, with their nose up into the current, and the
water only a foot or two deep, clear as glass. Just sit there, holding themselves in place, and I picked one, leaned out so I was almost over him, not three or four feet away, pulled the bow—I could almost taste him dusted in flour and cooking in the bacon grease—aimed carefully . . .

And missed.

Shot over his back a good foot and the cane arrow stuck in the bottom. Or almost stuck. The bottom was gravel and mud, mixed, and the arrow hit a stone and broke.

But I had another arrow. Had four of them. And there were chubs all over the creek bottom and I stepped barefoot out into the water, closer and closer to another one, just holding his place, leaned over, drew the bow . . .

And missed again.

And broke another arrow.

This time I heard a snort and turned to see Fishbone sitting in his rocker on the porch,
watching me, his shoulders shaking, and I saw he was laughing. Almost to himself except that now and then he would make that snort and he took a sip of 'shine and said water bends things.

What do you mean, I asked.

Bends things you look at. Bends where things are, bends what you see, bends how you see.

But I can see the chubs right there. They're right there in front of me.

No they're not, not like you see them. They're lower than they look. Try aiming just below one, like you were going to shoot under him.

Sounded silly but Fishbone almost never said anything silly. Or wrong. Or wasted. Never seemed to waste a word or a thought. Didn't talk much but when he did, when he did, it was better to listen. So I waded in the shallows near the bank in the soft mud squirting up between my toes, found another chub, leaned over, guess-aimed the width of my hand below him, and let go.

Missed again. But closer this time, much closer, so that the cane shaft almost rubbed against him on the way by, and he jerked away to the center of the creek into deeper water. Fishbone said, did you hit him, and I said no, but so close I might have got a scale.

I was down to one cane arrow, which was not a problem because the bank was filled with cane and it was easy to cut with the kitchen knife.

Another fish was sitting there in the shallows, and I moved and stood near and almost over him. I'd seen the big herons and other hunting birds go after fish and frogs the same way. Just stand and stand without moving, without even twitching. Watching, waiting, waiting until the fish or frog had almost forgotten they were there. Had gone back to just being a fish or frog, just being what they were . . .

And then strike.

Sharp beak down, swift and down and through them. Hardly ever missed, almost no splash, and
almost never missed. Then up, flip the frog or fish up in the air, and catch it and swallow, zip and gone.

I drew the arrow when the chub was still, had forgotten I was there—I could have been a tree trunk—drew it back slowly, so slowly, aimed at the bottom edge of the chub, and released, clean and gone. The needle-sharp point of the cane caught him halfway up his side just in back of the gills and pinned him to the bottom.

Got him, I said to Fishbone, and I held him down, wiggling, with the arrow, and reached down the shaft, took him in my hand and said, again, got him clean.

Good, he said from the porch. That's one for me, now get one for yourself and we'll wrap them in flour and slice up some potatoes and melt a mite of grease and we'll have a good bite of food before dark. When the stove is hot, we'll make a pot of coffee and have hot coffee sipped through sugar lumps for dessert.

He loved sugar lumps. Not a lot of them but now and again a lump of sugar between his gums, and he'd suck coffee through it. Said it settled his guts. Sometimes he'd do the same thing drinking 'shine. Just hold a sugar lump there in his gums and sipped the 'shine right through it. Never said if it settled his guts that way, but he sure liked it. He'd let me have coffee with water to thin it down the same way, through a sugar lump. Said I was too small to drink straight stove coffee the way he made it and no 'shine at all. Once when I was being the worst part of a know-it-all and he wasn't looking, or maybe was and let me do it as another lesson on how it wasn't good to be a smart mouth—once I drank a full cup of strong coffee through a sugar lump held in my teeth and I was up all night and must have peed ten times. I think I was six then or maybe seven or five. Didn't like it much and I have never tried it with 'shine. Tried that sip of 'shine plain one time, just enough to touch my tongue, and
it burned so bad I thought my mouth was on fire. Still don't see how Fishbone can sit there and sip it steady from a jar like he does and it never seems to hurt him much. I did that and it would turn my brain to mush. 'Course I'm still young, maybe ten or eleven or twelve depending on which true story about how I came to be with Fishbone. Maybe you had to be older to take the 'shine and strong coffee even when they're sucked through a sugar lump.

Didn't seem to hurt him much, the 'shine—mouth or brain or body—but then he's old; old, he says, as dirt. That may be why. Like leather or hard wood or rust iron. Just plain tough.

But it sure makes his songs come easier. The 'shine.

Third Song: Barefoot Blues

Two-dollar shoes,

two-dollar shoes.

Pinch my toes, make me sing the blues.

Can't do nothing,

but moan and wail.

Man come along and throw me in jail.

All for stealing,

them two-dollar shoes.

Can't do nothing but sing them blues.

S
ometimes it was not hunting and it was more like going into something. Something you knew. Something you wore like part of you, like the trees and grass and the water in the creek and ponds and the brush were your clothes, your skin. You. It was all you.

Tried to tell Fishbone about it, how it felt now that I had come into it, knew more about it. At first I thought it didn't go in his thinking. He smiled a bit. No teeth smile; had his eyes closed like he was seeing something in there, in his thinking, and hadn't heard a word I said.

But I was wrong. Usually I was. Wrong. When it came to thinking that I was out ahead of Fishbone, I was almost always wrong.

It can all be like that, he said, everything about you, your life, what you do, what you did, what you're going to do. Everything you see, feel, hear—everything you do. Everything you are. Your life, all your life you'll wear it, he said, if you do it right, right in how you see and know your own right, know it in how you think yourself.

Everything, all that you are or ever going to be, will be like a cloak, he said and smiled—just as a cloak of many colors.