Old Glory (15 page)

Beside me at the bar, a row was brewing among four stout men. They had the unlined faces of reddened boys under their caps. They were quarreling about their ages.

“You was two grades ahead of me in school. I remember.”

“Bullshit. You was in the same grade, you and him both.
I
was one grade behind.”

“Hell, Ivor, you know you’re a goddamn liar? You’re ten years older than all three of us put together!”

“I wasn’t even in school when you guys all grad-yoo-ated.”

“Now
that’s
the biggest sonofabitch lie I ever heard in all my life.”

I went back to the paper. The next issue carried a proud quotation from a daily newspaper published in Rochester, a city of fifty thousand people forty miles out to the west: Wabasha’s metropolis.

I hoped that there was a hint of satire in the use of the word “openly.”

The argument around the bar peaked. The red man sitting next to me said, “Okay, show your hands. Show your hands!” He spread his out in front of him and turned them over. The three other men followed. I looked at the eight hands on the bar top: they were gnarled, liver-spotted, twisted and lumpy with arthritis. I had taken their owners for men of about my own age.

“Hey, you, you don’t know none of us. Now, you judge which one’s the youngest!”

It was no beauty competition. I pored over the hands and settled,
arbitrarily, on Ivor as the winner. His hands looked as if they might be only about seventy-nine years old; the rest all seemed to be well into their eighties. My verdict was disputed.

“Know why he picked you, Ivor? ’Cause you ain’t done a real day’s work in your whole goddamn life. Shit, look at that pinky! Only use for that fuckin’ thing is maybe you could use it for a corkscrew.”

I reached the August 16 issue of the paper. Its giant, astonished headline ran:
FIRST FAMILY TO VISIT WABASHA! THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS COMING TO WABASHA
! Jimmy Carter, in a publicity stunt designed to revive his fading popularity in the Midwest, had engaged the
Delta Queen
to take him and his entourage on a trip down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to St. Louis. My eye was caught by the wonderful first sentence of the paper’s editorial comment:

My excitement was almost uncontainable as I hunted for a paper of a later date which would tell how the presidential visit had gone off; but I was interrupted in my search by a Legion official who wanted to know who I was and whether I was a bona fide Legionnaire.

“Don Carr,” he said.

“Jonathan Raban,” I said. “I’m not a vet, I’m afraid; I’m not even an American.”

“The Englishman. I heard there was an English guy in town. Pleased to meet you. Make yourself at home.” He had a shy, kindly face. He had hidden his mouth as best he could behind a soft white mustache which wobbled when he talked, giving it an oddly animal look, like a tame mouse. Whenever he spoke, he twisted his Masonic ring on his finger, round and round and round and round.

“I was just looking through the papers to see how Jimmy Carter went down in Wabasha—sorry,
War-bashaw.”

“Oh, gosh …” Don Carr said, with a visible fluster of sadness at the memory of it. He twisted and pulled at his ring. “Jimmy Carter shook my hand when he was here, and I just hate to say anything bad about him. Oh, gosh.”

“What happened?”

“Well … first there was all the Secret Service guys. I reckon there was more of them than there are folks in Wabasha County. They was posted up on every bluff. Sharpshooters. They was all over the Big Jo elevator. Everywhere. It looked like the Civil War was breaking out again. Then the President gets off the boat … and we’re all lined up to shake his hand … and you couldn’t hardly see the guy, he was tucked in so close with bodyguards. Gosh, they were big men. Great tall, broad fellows … When you got to see the President, he was like some kind of little dwarf beside those guys. He was smiling and smiling, and I was thinking, Gosh, this is History … the President of the United States, and he’s going to shake me by the hand. Then he comes up real close, and I get to see his eyes. He’s got this big grin on … and all them teeth and all … but it was the
eyes
I was looking at. You know, I was looking into his eyes when he shook my hand, and I could see behind that smile. He was stiff with fright. All he was thinking was someone was going to shoot him. Up on those bluffs above town … you get some nut up there … he could’ve picked off the President easier than a squirrel. This was the President of the United States, and … gosh, he was just a real scared man. I mean, I felt
sorry
for the guy. I
pitied
him. But I’m never going to be able to look up to Jimmy Carter after that, never again. Last time around, he had my vote. But he won’t get it next time. I couldn’t vote for a man I felt sorry for like I felt sorry for Jimmy Carter. Oh, gosh …”

His ring was giving him little consolation. His mustache wiggled unhappily.

“You know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do. You tell it very well, too. Did many people here feel the same way as you did?”

“Oh, there was a lot of folks was real disappointed after Jimmy Carter came to Wabasha. Everybody was wanting to look up to him and somehow he just seemed so
small.”

We were joined by a man who had the habitual sidewise twist of the head of someone who is deaf in one ear. I could see immediately why Don Carr and Jim Curdue were friends; they had the same dreamy mild-manneredness, the same air of moving in a world which bruised easily and must be disturbed as little as possible. Curdue spoke in a voice as soft as a whisper. Beside him, the stout men at the bar sounded
like fairground barkers. When he said that he was going fishing in the morning, I asked if he would mind taking me on as a student/companion. I said that I’d be happy just to watch; I wanted to learn the likely lies in the river, what depth to fish at, whether my postabstractionist plugs would work or not.

“Oh, no,” Curdue said; “I’d like that. I’d ap … pree … cee … ate it.” The way he drew each vowel out made me assume that he came from the South.

“I was born and raised right by here, up at Reads Landing.”

So his accent, like the architecture of Main Street, was a piece of Mississippi cosmopolitanism. Voices carried on the river, even ones as low as Curdue’s whisper. There were sounds in it which must have come from at least a thousand miles away.

He ran me back to the hotel in his gray Oldsmobile. I noticed that it was rigged with a Citizens Band radio.

“What do you call yourself when you’re talking on the C.B.?”

“My handle?” He said
hay-andle
. “Oh, mostly, I’m Garfish. Then some days, I don’t know why, I’m Gray Goose.”

We dragged Garfish’s jonboat down the stony shore to the water. It was a shovel-fronted metal punt, the commonest kind of Mississippi fishing boat. There were some errands to be done before we could go fishing. Jim had to visit his father at Reads Landing and deliver the mail and this week’s paper. We set off up the main channel into another windless, misty morning, with the forest black and dripping on both sides of us. The surface of the river was smooth enough to show the lines of the wing dams as long, dark humps on the current.

“Every dam here’s got its own name,” Jim said. “That one there we just passed, that’s McCann’s dam.”

“Why McCann’s?”

“Oh, it’s been called that from way back. Could’ve been a guy named McCann used to fish off there. Or maybe that’s where he drowned himself. Then there’s Noisy Dam—that’s over there. And Whistling Dam … Oh, all kinds of names.…”

We beached at the landing and tied the boat to a stake. Jim picked up a clam shell from the shore and showed it to me: it was less a shell than a brittle filigree of neat circular holes. “Know what that is? That’s from the old button factory. There was hundreds and thousands of pearl buttons came out of Reads Landing, once.” I saw that what I had taken for a pebbly beach was in fact a dump of perforated clam shells. They crunched underfoot: some still quite intact, others gone to a silvery powder. “Oh, back in Daddy’s time this was a real important
town; there was hotels, and churches, and bars all over.… Now there ain’t hardly nobody left at Reads Landing.”

His father’s house was a shack on the levee. It must have started out as a single room; then every few years someone added a new clapboard box to an end or a side, so that it gave the impression of having gone on a drunken ramble around the riverbank. We kept on passing odd corners of it and eventually reached a front door which was actually situated somewhere in the middle of a maze of peeling white paint and warped driftwood walls.

Daddy was eighty-six; Jim was well into his sixties. Both nearly deaf, they spoke in the same gentle whisper, lip-reading each other’s words. When I tried to speak to the old man, I shouted. Jim winced at the loudness of my voice, and his father didn’t understand a word.

Mr. Curdue, his side stiffened by a recent stroke, pottered in his drafty warren of knickknacks and notions. He found a coffeepot on a cluttered sideboard filled with framed brown photos, rag dolls and a comical ceramic whiskey bottle called a Wyoming Jackalope.

“Now, this’d interest you,” Jim said. “Daddy was on the last raft of timber that was made up at Reads and floated down to New Orleans.”

“Yeah,” said Mr. Curdue. “That was, oh, that must have been in nineteen and ten.”

“Ask him how much he remembers of that trip,” I said. Jim asked him, in a whisper.

“Oh, I remember it plain. Real plain. It was in nineteen and ten,” Mr. Curdue said, raising his voice to a shout for my benefit, and went off to his kitchen to brew the coffee.

“That was how Reads got big. They used to float the white-pine logs all down the Chippewa and make them up into rafts here, then take them down the river to New Orleans. All the forest now, that’s re-growth. When I was a kid, it was just like a stump field for as far as you could see. They’d cut down every last tree.”

When the lumber business died, old Mr. Curdue had become a professional fisherman. Jim had joined him, setting fish traps and seines across the river for catfish, walleyes, bass and panfish. He’d been a clam diver too, supplying the pearl-button factory with shells. He’d damaged his inner ear in a deep hole in Lake Pepin where the clams grew as big as dinner plates. Then he had been an oiler on a tow, working the Mississippi between St. Louis and Memphis—which was where, I supposed, he had picked up his long elasticated vowels.

“I’m too young to remember much,” Jim said. “Daddy’s the one you ought to get to tell you stories. But he has his good days and his bad days. He hain’t been feeling too well lately, not since he had his stroke.”

“I’m fine,” said Mr. Curdue, coming in. He appeared to be able to lip-read around walls and through closed doors. “You just worry too much. Always worrying and worrying.” He turned to me. “He’s been a good boy to me, Jim has. He just does too much goddamn worrying.” As they nannied each other along, the two elderly men looked more like a husband and wife than a father and son.

We floated out across Lake Pepin, following the gulls. Still and brown, gleaming faintly in the thin, diffuse light, the lake had the vacant gaze of an enormous animal’s eye. We watched the gulls map the underwater movements of the school bass, zigzagging slowly along the north shore. The lake was dotted with small flotillas of jonboats.

“They’re where the fish was
yesterday,”
Jim said. “Sometimes I reckon them gulls are a whole sight brighter than the fishermen round here.”

We joined up with the birds and cast out, our colored plugs sailing away in twin parabolas on either side of the boat.

“Let it sink deep. Count ten before you reel in.”

It was reprehensibly easy. We started to catch fish from the first cast. They hooked themselves with a careless snatch at the plug, and one could feel them thrumming deep down at the end of the line like an electric current. As I reeled them in from under the boat, they changed from one metal color to another, coming up, struggling, through the peaty water: first an indeterminate flash of dull pewter, then a powerful glow of polished brass, finally a brilliant threshing of pure silver as they came wallowing to the net. Killed, their lovely colors went instantly to a cracked gray glaze. Their spiny dorsal fins folded into a ragged heap on their backs. It seemed altogether too close a rehearsal of real life, this violently accelerated transition from excitement to shame.

“They taste real good broiled,” Jim said.

“I’m surprised you still enjoy doing it for fun, after being a professional fisherman.”

“Oh, I guess it’s just something that you never lose. I don’t know. Maybe it’s more just the being out on the water that I like now, more than the fishing. But I like fishing pretty good. I go out most days, so I must, I guess.”

We’d caught a dozen white bass. Their corpses lay in a dulled pile in a plastic bowl in the middle of the boat.

“You want to go try for a walleye?” Jim turned the boat around and headed back for the neck of the lake where it narrowed into river. On the way, we talked about my job.