Hush Little Baby (18 page)

“I want to fish,” Drew says.

And I nod. Why not? Here, in this moment, anything seems possible.

41

W
e walk to the general store a block away, and Fred sells us a pole, some bait, and a small notebook so I can sketch, then we return to the river to try our luck at fishing.

Drew casts his line just as Fred instructed, and I’m amazed how quickly he’s caught on. School’s been a complete wipeout for Drew, every report card for the past three years a testament to his lack of attention and motivation. But as Fred explained how to tie on the hook and how to cast and how to reel in the line, Drew was completely focused.

The string quivers as Drew slowly winds the spool, its rippling trail disappearing as quickly as it appeared, leaving no evidence of where it had been.

Addie loses interest in minutes, but Drew is mesmerized. He casts, reels, and casts again. His patience and determination are a mirror of my own, and for the first time, possibly ever, I recognize myself in the reflection.

He turns to give me the thin smile I love, and his contentment is contagious, his heart touching mine and we are united.

There have been times when we’ve been close, but the tumultuousness of my life has been so distracting that it seems I’m always more occupied with keeping my balance than doing anything more.

“In the wrong spot for that lure.”

Drew and I turn to the voice, and I get nervous. Poorly executed blue tattoos cover sinewy forearms that protrude from a worn black shirt that advertises Johnnie Walker Black. The man walks toward us with a pronounced limp. His Wrangler jeans are low on his hips and don’t have a belt. The elastic of plaid boxers peek from the top. He wears a baseball cap, the embroidered number 48 dark with age. He’s probably in his early thirties, but his life’s been harder than that.

“If it’s trout you’re after, need to move to where the water’s running stronger.” He gestures with his head downstream, half a smile screwing up his mouth and erasing my fear.

“Thank you,” I say as I gather my notebook and shoes, and as I turn to pick up the bag of snacks I brought along, the water splashes behind me.

I whip around, but Addie’s already floating past me, her arms flailing as she heads for the rapidly moving water downstream. I stumble across the rocks to catch her, but she’s moving faster than I can run.

The cold snaps my body awake as I splash into it, and a moment later, the current catches me, and my efforts to get to Addie are overtaken by my efforts to stay afloat. I catch a glimpse of her in front of me and thrash to move in her direction, but I’ve never been a strong swimmer and my jeans and sweatshirt pull me down, my lungs screaming as they fill with too much water and not enough air. The shore is to my left, and Addie is drowning in front of me. My left hip slams into a rock, and for a moment, I forget to swim and sink below the current. When I break back to the surface, Addie’s gone. I scan the water frantically, then crash into another rock, my head dizzying with the impact. I roll to my back gasping for air, and panic takes over my body as I realize what’s happening.

Water covers my face and fills my lungs. The river carries me forward, and I no longer fight it. The current’s too fast, and I don’t have the strength.

A yank on my hood snaps my momentum backward, and precious air rushes into my lungs as my head breaks above the water. Rocks and boulders bruise and scrape me, and then I’m facedown on the shore.

I cough and spit, then push to my knees and vomit into the bushes beside me, wishing I was still in the river and not in this moment.

“Mommy?”

My head snaps up.

Addie shivers in front of me, her face so white that her freckles seem to have multiplied.

“Oh, baby.” I pull her to me, unsure the miracle is true, her body so cold I now know it isn’t imagined.

Over her shoulder, our savior shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot. His jeans and T-shirt drip, and his hat is gone, revealing a thick head of mud-colored hair.

“You okay, ma’am?”

Awkwardly I unwrap Addie’s shivering body from mine, and on trembling legs, stand. I stumble, and the man’s hand shoots out to catch me by my elbow.

“One dip in the Nichi in a day’s enough for me,” he says with the same sideways smile he gave earlier.

I throw my arms around him, and he opens his wide, unsure how to handle my embrace.

“Thank you,” I say against his cheek, fresh tears running down my face.

“Your little one’s quite a
qmeye
.”

“Excuse me?”

“Little fish, it’s a Salish word.”

It’s then that I notice that although his hair is Caucasian, his skin is dark and his nose is wide. He’s at least part Native American.

“Except fish have gills and know how to swim,” I say.

Drew walks up beside us. “Can you show me where to fish?” he asks the man, as though we’ve all just returned from a relaxing swim in the river.

“Drew, I’m sure this man would like to go and get dry and that he’s quite done with helping us.”

“Come on, Drew,” the man says, ignoring me. “I’ve been fishing this river since I was your sister’s age. I’ll show you where you can catch your ma and sister some dinner.” He starts off downstream, and Addie and I trail behind still shivering from the fear and the cold. As we walk, the two geese from earlier fly low along the river back upstream.

*  *  *

The rock he leads us to holds the day’s warmth, and Addie and I strip our dripping sweatshirts and lay spread-eagle to soak up the heat from the granite and the rays of the afternoon sun at the same time. We lay together, our fingers clasped, thin smiles of having survived something harrowing on our faces, until Addie drifts to sleep.

Above us, at the tip of the outcropping, Drew and the man fish. The man is quiet and patient and only speaks when necessary. Soon I stop listening to the river, the whip of the line as it’s cast, the man’s gentle teachings, and I, too, am lulled to stillness.

“I got one.”

I bolt upright and so does Addie. And sure enough, a fish maybe six inches long flaps wildly on the end of Drew’s line.

The man’s crooked grin spreads wide on his face as he takes the small fish in his hand and gently pulls the hook from its gasping mouth. He lifts it toward the sky, whispers words I don’t understand, then, bringing his arm down in an arc, releases the fish back into the river.

Drew’s face melts from euphoria to crushing disappointment. “Why’d you do that?” he says.

The man looks at him earnestly. “Every animal has the right to grow up,” he says quietly. “You’ll catch another. One that’s already lived.”

The man’s a stranger, yet he’s familiar, and as I watch him beside Drew, I think of what it would have been like had I had a brother. I can almost hear my dad in the man’s gentle voice.

The man rebaits the line, and Drew casts again. Moments later, he’s rewarded with a fish twice the size of the first. This one, after the man holds it to the heavens, is set in the tall grass to die in the shade.

42

T
he sun fades along with the heat, and though our clothes are dry, cold has seeped into our bones. We gather our belongings, and the man uses a piece of line to tether up the catch—three trout and one smallmouth bass.

He extends them toward me.

“Thank you,” I say, “but we can’t keep them. We’re just passing through.”

He ignores me and turns to Drew. “Ever cleaned and cooked a trout?” he asks.

Drew shakes his head.

“Then follow me.” And without further discussion, he sets off with the four fish, Drew traipsing after him. I’m caught between commanding Drew to come back or taking a leap of faith and following.

Today the world is different from what it was a week ago, and the decision—inconceivable only days earlier, an unfathomable breach of bourgeois decorum and common sense—is now not only logical, but certain, and I follow my son, who follows a young, tattooed Native American through the woods of Washington to cook the dinner they caught in the river.

*  *  *

We emerge where we started in the backyard of the Flying Goat Kitchen.

The man marches up the steps and opens the screen door that leads to the kitchen.

“Goat,” he yells as he steps in and holds the door open for us to follow.

The kitchen is empty except for the enormous amount of clutter—mixers and stoves and ovens and pots and pans and racks and sacks and spoons and spatulas with barely a foot’s space to move.

“Pipe down,” squawks from somewhere beyond the milieu.

In response, the man lays the fish beside a sink, picks up two pot lids, and using them as cymbals, bangs them together making an insane racket. This causes Addie to squeal with delight and grab two cymbals of her own. Drew grabs a pot and a spoon and makes a drum.

A large onion flies through the pickup window that leads to the dining room and beans the man on the back of his head.

“Ouch.”

“Now shut up.”

The man, clanging away, marches like a drum leader through the kitchen and toward the onion launcher.

We parade after him into the dining room, and the man uses his pot lids as shields to ward off two more onion attacks before the person belonging to the voice notices us and halts her assault, her arm poised mid-motion from hurling a third onion.

“We’ve got company,” the man says. “Goat, this is Qmeye and Cixcx,” he says, calling the kids by their nicknames, Little Fish and Hawk. He pronounces the words Kmayay and Sissix. He hesitates as he contemplates me, tilting his head and screwing up his face. “…and Ntamqe.” My name is pronounced Tomkay.

The woman could be sixty or a hundred and sixty. She’s dark and tiny as a raisin, and her eyes are set so deep all I see is folds of skin. Her thick black hair, woven with gray, is braided and coiled on top of her head like a sleeping rattlesnake, and in her hand is a knife that glints orange with the setting light through the window. With it, she expertly carves the onion she previously had planned to throw at our escort.

“I’m not cooking,” she says, not giving us another glance.

“Not asking you to, but I thought you might want to join us.”

“I’m not cleaning.”

“Not asking you to.”

“What you making?”

“Trout and grits.”

She grunts and grabs another onion, and we back up and return to the kitchen.

“Ntamqe,” the man says, “do you cook?”

“Does cereal count?” I answer.

“You and Little Fish can cut the lemons and mince the garlic. You also need to grab some rosemary, thyme, and olive oil. There’s a garden behind the house, and the pantry and the walk-in are in the back.”

The man has already turned to the sink, and Drew remains at his side.

Addie and I head to the garden, which turns out to be a tangle of deliciousness, a large yard of everything from tomatoes to corn to pumpkins to blueberries. A greenhouse is in the corner. I pull two garlic bulbs from the earth and walk to the greenhouse.

Soil, water, and foliage fill the air to bursting, wet heat trapped in the glass and stewing the half barrels that are planted with herbs and potatoes and warm weather crops like lettuce and spinach and kale.

I find the rosemary without problem, but struggle to find thyme, unsure if the pretty green sprigs I pick are the herb I’m supposed to pull.

When we get back to the kitchen, Drew holds the knife.

I freeze at the sight, but breathe when I see how careful he’s being and how attentive he is to the man.

“Behind the gill and straight through,” the man coaches.

The knife must be very sharp because, in a single stroke, the head is sliced off clean.

The man takes over and slits the belly from tail to gill.

He sets the fish back on the cutting board. “Now you need to clean out the insides.”

The Drew I know would refuse this chore, he’d wrinkle his nose and back away and cross his arms in protest and disgust. But the Drew at the sink doesn’t hesitate. He pulls open the slitted belly of the fish and with his finger guts the organs and dumps them into the sink.

“Good, now score the bloodline.”

Drew picks up the knife and makes several cuts deep in the fish. When the man nods, Drew sets down the knife and places the fish in a tub of water beside him. With a toothbrush, he scrubs the spine of the fish until the blood is washed from its body.

Addie and I approach with our offerings.

“Little Fish, you put the aluminum on the pans,” the man says.

Addie sets to work lining the two pans that are beside the man with great care.

“Ntamqe, mix the thyme and rosemary with garlic, lemon, and olive oil. Keep the lemon wedges and sprigs for the carcass.”

Like my children, I respond to his gentle directions, eager to do my job well.

I reach for a bowl above the sink and feel the man’s eyes. Self-consciously I realize my shirt’s pulled up, showing the skin below my bra. When I look at him, however, his eyes are not admiring my body, but instead stare at my exposed ribs. I quickly grab the bowl and lower my arm, but it’s too late. His eyes have changed. The bruise is a week old, a faint jaundice blotch, but the shape is unmistakably that of a fist the same size as his own, and his reaction is the same as Jeffrey’s and Connor’s—an expression of pity and rage that sets my skin on fire and makes me want to cry and scream and apologize and run and slap him and hug him all at the same time.

He laughs. “You definitely don’t cook, Ntamqe.”

I follow his eyes to the cutting board beside me, and he walks to where I am and lifts a sprig of what I thought was thyme. He rubs it between his fingers and toothpaste fills the air.

“We almost ended up with peppermint trout,” he says.

Embarrassed for both the moment before and the moment we are in, I rush from the kitchen and back into the garden, this time determined to get it right.

*  *  *

Half an hour later, we sit in the dining room at a table beside the window that Addie set for us. When Goat stands to join us, she’s only half-straight. Her body is twisted and stooped, and as she hobbles toward us, I realize she’s on the older side of my estimate, and I wonder about her relationship to the man. She’s too old to be his mother; maybe she’s his grandmother, or possibly even his great grandmother.