The Boat Fisherman
A story in six vignettes, by Noam Hessler
Dreams
It had been so long since he had seen Alexandria that he, the fisherman, had started to form a new picture of her in his mind. He knew she was old; at least seventeen now, perhaps eighteen, or fifteen. Years and ages were so far from the river now. Alexandria was far from the golden-haired little girl she had been when he’d left, started sending packs of wadded dollars and love via post, no longer left on the counter of the kitchen in the cabin. The fisherman had started to see her as her mother, when he dreamed of her; younger, yes, than she was now, but his wife too was far away. He could not begin to imagine her, though he dreamed of her eyes often. No oedipal thoughts were inspired by this image — the man considered himself sexless at this point. But when he saw Alexandria stepping into high school in the Tennessee heat, or working at a department store, perhaps a gas station, for extra money, he saw the woman he had pledged himself to and betrayed as consequences of that pledge so long ago.
His wife’s eyes were above the river; his first recurring dream. It moved low and slow and mucky, like a trickling drainage pipe shed of its corrugated metal exoskeleton. Within it creeping things moved and died and slept or prayed to gods that to the fisherman seemed hackneyed. The river did not speak to this: it simply expelled. A poet the fisherman had read in school had tried to take in the whole of His lost country, to process it as song. With that he had become nothing more than a system for producing sewage. He was the river; perhaps by turning himself into the river He had allowed Himself to become his country. The river expelled and it was the fisherman’s job to catch those expellations in nets or his wetsuit-clad hands. The river expelled but on its top it was tranquil. It was the fisherman’s job alone to reveal the discomfort beneath. His wife’s eyes were across the river; he could not reach her.
He was a dredger and a seller of scrap. Not a fisher of men but of their waterbound chariots. Sometimes he wore a wetsuit; on those hot summer days when sweat clung to his skin while he drank instant coffee on the porch of his shack, before he set out, he wore nothing at all and let the brown waters clothe him, his blowtorch and saw heavy in his hands. He sweat too in his bed, where he tumbled dreaming with his sheets as if they were a boneless wrestler and found himself bandaged by them, cold and damp. Disassembling sunken boats and taking from them treasures or bits of restorable metal was his trade, his prey still for him, the whole river a crab trap whose walls were clay and willow roots. His second dream — whales. A pod of them, sledge-headed, straddled by men. Sometimes in uniform, or in rags, or traveling clothes. Sometimes the whales were jet gray and bulletlike, heads like sperm whales, other times wide and humped, but they were always half remembered pieces of old nature books from the fisherman’s schoolyard days. Their tails rose from the water on occasion, slick backs straining to keep their riders afloat. The traveling men did not look at the fisherman, and he watched them, unsure if they were giants, the banks of the river two continents, or if the whales were small and insubstantial as the haze his mind had composed them from. His shack then a shack to house the whole of the world, himself a giant, the furrows carved by rainwater on the bank mountains he crossed, rubber-booted, with ease. A vile nightmare — each night he dreamt of whales he awoke with his eyes red, burning, tears on the bedspread, pillow torn from the bed by the movements of his neck. If men were to ride whales soon no man like him would ever work again.
A Snapping Turtle
There was a slight sandbar in the middle of the river about a mile upstream of his shack. Once it had held a reedy tree, perhaps once an oak, that stood branchless and dead. Many such trees litter flooded fields: they seem to passersby like families of telephone poles, killed where they slept by the still water surrounding them. The tree was no longer there; punky, longdead, it had been cremated by a lightning strike and the ashes of it were wrenched from the sandbar by the high winds of a hurricane. The hole into which it had ingratiated itself with the sandbar filled with water, clear and black, its surface so smooth you could see your refection in it.
On days when the river was lean or the fisherman simply wanted to not walk far from his home, or when the outgoing package was stuffed and there were rice and beans in the pantry, he would go and lie on the island and gaze into the pool. Aside from the men and women in the town downriver, who he relied upon for payment and were less than shadows, gaunt and drawling, he did not encounter civilization. As such he had no company besides his own refection, a mile up, in black waters. The river was too much a suspension of water and rust to give up the fisherman’s face. He would lay by the pool and look at the man laying back at him. There was sand in the wrinkles of his face and in his short scruff beard and his eyes were distant: the angle at which he laid prevented any eye contact.
One day the mirrored man was shattered; a finger rose from the black pool and pointed skywards. The fisherman laid, contemplating his wife and Alexandria, and lost himself and them as he watched it emerge. It was pale and pink, perhaps from years below the water. It was thin and pink and the angle from which he viewed it obscured its nail; almost a worm or antenna from some blind insect. Some small child or young man. Not dead — no corpse floats pointing heavenwards. For a moment the fsherman collapsed, and he dreamt. In his dream, a small dark room. A house at the bottom of a pool, in a second river that flows below the river. Campfires, sputtered by water, fishbitten grandfather clocks, a collection of magazines, newsprints — histories made illegible. A young man sits, long arms, too long, like someone from the carnival that used to play in grassy lots around Chattanooga, around his knees. His head is folded into his chest, he closes his eyes and tries to sleep. Beads of dew on his pale cave creature skin and the water making strands of his hair move and float as if pond scum. Tears on long brown eyelashes. Mussels encrusting a set of porcelain China. A war banner fluttering, smeared of all marking, the dyes drained out of its canvas. Radios, car tires, the wallpaper peels and shows the wood of the small dark room — patterned as irises. His eyes are closed and the water and the waters of his body are heavy on them. Lightning cracks the house and he does not move. On the crown of his head, a beam of light.
The fisherman awoke from his episode, the finger still reaching for help or for the sun above the water. He reached for it, and as his hand clutched the snapping turtle's tongue he was shorn of his left hand’s fingertips.
Blues Musicians
It was the first night the fisherman had allowed a troop of men into his home. The second night life had alighted there besides his own. The first — Alexandria, small. She fiddled with the books he used to keep on a shelf above his bed before the winds had shifted the nails that held it and his novels struck him. She fitted between the pages of Quixote, towards Borges, alighted on a book of sculptures made by freed slaves. A book published by the Works Administration that the fisherman’s father had shown to him when he was little; he had held the boy on his lap, his neck red and his black hair almost below his shoulders. Bounced him and showed him the ingenuity of those who had not been schooled in art but had mastered it all the same. She asked him about the artists in the book and he said he did not know them. A Bible that they read together before Alexandria left for the car, her mother waiting outside; she said she couldn’t bring herself to enter the shack, that she missed him and that the money didn’t wear the white suitshirt he had left in the laundry hamper on his last day. Night fell and, alone, he read Job.
The four men arrived on the doorstep — expectant, they stood under the wooden eve and glanced, eyes downcast, at where a doormat ought to be. They held their suit jackets in their hands — folded, the whites of their shirts stained clear by rain, clinging to drooping stomachs, ribs, biceps trained not by vanity but by the loading and unloading of musical equipment. One had gingerly wrapped his saxophone in his jacket and held it like a little bird or dying child. There was not quite enough room under the doorstep for the four, and so now and then one would elbow the others, they’d laugh, or groan at each other, then one man would draw the verbal short straw and go outside, all with the exception of one. His head was shaved and would have shone from the cut, removed of all hair, had several days travel not left it beginning to sprout again. On his back were a drumset lashed together and a bag of the last week’s clothes and over his right shoulder a bass in a wet velvet case. The muscles in his neck strained, he panted: so then he did not have to stand in the rain, and so he was the one to whom the half awake fisherman opened the door.
They had been chased out of Knoxville and had hoped to raft the Tennessee until they reached Chattanooga and, from there, set out hungry and perhaps fugitive towards a promised concert in a dance hall in Athens. Things had gone wrong; first they had found themselves losing the Tennessee, on full collision with the fisherman’s own river, and then their raft had been marooned on the sandbar with the snapping turtle. The fisherman could see it; the moonlight held to the metal frame of an automobile, upturned and beginning to pool river water. He asked where they had found it and the bassist said he could hardly remember but the cuts in their hands reminded them that they had had to fight for it, to turn transportation into transportation. The sleeves of the drummer’s shirt were red and folded with blood; he had gutted his arms like fish trying to climb out of the raft and now the fisherman dressed them with layered pages of his bible, starting from Genesis, which he loved least, and then tightened the paper bandages with fishing line. The drummer winced and shook his head almost to cry on occasion, and then his wounds were treated and he winced more. The automobile’s carcass was red but it glimmered in the moonlight. Perhaps the turtle would eat it. On the fisherman’s stovetop was a hideous iron pot containing a mess of unsoaked beans and a whole catfish from the icebox, all slowly boiling into oblivion. He had promised them food despite their rejections. Something in his voice, an insistence was not for them, he knew, and he knew they sensed it. He was unsure why he had given up The Book before his novels.
The beans softened and the catfish collapsed into a mess of bones and thin white fibers — he added salt as the bassist, newly freed of the band’s cargo, strummed and tried to get the water out of his instrument. Now it was not the drummer on the verge of tears but the guitarist, small and sharp-nosed. His eyes moved wide as he muttered to himself — his guitar was lost beneath the river — and commiserated with the others — the drummer’s instruments were present, more pristine than any of the others’, save the saxophonist, but he could hardly move his arms, much less play. He sat on the fisherman’s bed, head moved into his neck, trying to snore. The bassist thanked the fisherman for his hospitality for what was perhaps the fourth time, and asked him if he had ever played an instrument:
“Never. My daughter plays piano. My mother had always hoped I would; I was a young romantic with no talent.”
“You sing then?”
“No.”
The bassist scowled at the fisherman, and for a moment he was aware he was outnumbered. But then the bassist traced his eyes around the room with the speed of a locomotive and seemed to take stock of himself —
“I’m sorry for that, I really am. I’m not- we’re not, we’re never- Sir, you meet tonight four desperate men with a just cause. And yet I’m angry.”
“Angry?”
“That you cannot sing. I have a young song and none of theirs,” he gave hateful looks to the room; the drummer woke. “None of their voices catch it right; Roger’s guitar got it and then we lost it and lost the song with it.”
“Then I’m sorry I cannot sing-”
“Nor can I — try. May I exhaust your hospitality? This house is small and it will carry your voice just right.”
He explained the song; it was a love song to a woman that was the river, a blues piece. She was an angel, low and slow, cyprus-winged, and the song moved slow and then fast with such emotion that the bassist could not capture it. He recited the lines aloud, gazing at some absent horizon for the precise words as if in half-remembered prayer while the fisherman watched and the drummer moaned and whimpered in dreams. Blood was on the fisherman’s pillow and he paused and began to say the lines in conjunction with the bassist while the saxophonist ate from the slop on the stove with a ladle, pot still bubbling. Then the bassist began to intone the lines, which the fisherman matched, and then both were singing. The bassist’s voice crackled and dropped off like a sunken radio and the fisherman was alone with his voice. It gurgled and he could not seem to stop it. The shack boomed and the water outside fell and thunder clapped. The song was no longer blues, but some sad call-and-response. The sky bled and bits and pieces, chunks of words spilled out from the fisherman’s adam’s apple, for the bleeding musicians and the lost guitar and for all the treasures of the river and for Alexandria. Then the words left out the door, and the musicians fell to sleep, one by one, and the fisherman croaked and hummed and occasionally slipped in words of other songs or half-remembered hymns until it was the end and there was no word. Nightfall; the rain began to let up, and the musicians left without breakfast southwards towards town the next morning.
The Cathedral
He had gone out to find the guitar. It felt only right. Before he had been a dredger he had worked at a library in East Tennessee. Each summer they let out boxes of books on the curb to be taken, one last chance before they were hauled off to the community’s dump. The job sat uneasily with him; each book left out there pressed on his chest as their pages melted together and sealed, wet and heavy, from the driving rain. One night in late fall he had left the library late — a man had died in a bathroom stall and he had spent the day first answering frantic questions, then in a dazed panic, trying to scatter himself among the shelves as a hundred mindless reflections — and the rain kept its tireless watch upon the Earth. The flowers within the garden beds outside the library’s stone facade entrance had melted, gone limp and then almost liquid. Like cotton candy or bits of tissue paper.
His grandfather had spoken to him of God but it was his father who kept the stacks of treasure hunting magazines that lay in the East Tennessee house’s basement. He had started to reread them on those late nights, his wife already asleep, Alexandria at her breast. It was there that he found the river, learned of the treasurers held within it. And from that basement he hatched his plan to make the family rich. She had been there to help build the shack, his wife, though she never would step inside it after those long weeks of hauling wood and insulation up the deer trails and ruts of mud that passed for roads under the dull wheels of his pickup truck. The money had been good at first, quite good — coins, old confederate cavalry sabers, a ship’s manifest remarkably intact. Icons and faded photographs and tattered uniforms that ought have been consumed by time appeared to him as fresh as the catches from the river he used to supplement his dinner. Perhaps the silt sank into them and healed them, kept them whole: regardless, he sold them to antiques brokers in towns down the river. No uniforms, nor swords, nor coins or gems these days — the river had lost its will to cough them up, and offered usable steel instead. Jagged, a hard day’s work to carry.
What he had lost in money the fisherman retained in a sort of romantic solitude. His grandfather taught him of Christ and his grandfather had come East a failed soldier and a successful cattleman out of Texas — he too had tamed a wild land and brought the proceeds east to warm the hearts and fill the pockets of those he loved. He had brought a single cow back home with him; it had horns like the branches of trees, just as vital — the childhood dream of the fisherman’s, his ideal, had been a spring without leaves. Its hooves had found no match in the soils of the valley, and so they grew and curved and twisted until the beast could not walk and there was no option but to slaughter it. Such was the family lore. Increasingly to the fisherman it seemed he had nothing to bring home and fewer things still to come home to.
He could not find the guitar. The chassis that was once the musicians’ raft hung above the water and through it ran a cruel whistling. What he found below the waters: a hunk of ship in the shape of a serpent, a collection of boxes, filled with holes and the trails of worms; a weathervane whose top, a hen, perhaps a rooster, had been decapitated. He took these pieces of scrap to the top of the sandbar and laid them there, his chest heaving. He laid his hands on the ribs below his wetsuit and felt them strain for air. Nothing he had gathered had any monetary value and he at first thought to consign them again to the brown waters, but something about the potential of their composition stopped him. He began to arrange them, first digging a hole in the sand and plunging the weathervane into it, carefully gathering ground around its base to keep it still and skyward. He treated it gently, like an infant tree. The boxes were arranged half-submerged in earth; the scrap was laid on its side so that it slowly metamorphosed into a still set of choppy waves. A few days later he took chains upriver and hauled and set the upturned car so it would remain still on the island, careful to keep it on the wind’s path. He worked this project for several weeks. Even when he worked downriver the fruits of his hunts were taken not to the porch of the shack for pawning but to the island a mile past it. He stopped searching for valuables; instead he only took those things that took him, his mind, his eyes, for something beautiful. The criteria for what was grand and what wasn’t was unknown to him, even as he started to use his blowtorch and his saw to carve ideal shapes when his dredges offered nothing to appeal to him. When the river, when time could not make something beautiful, he took it in his hands to do so.
On the sandbar grew a forest of high metal walls and twisting bits of nailed wood, riverglass, boat’s steel ribs wrapped in abandoned clothes that tattered in the breeze and twisted like the tassels of a buckskin jacket. The mirrored hole in the sandbar lay at the center of this assemblage but it now required the fisherman’s active traveling to see it; he left space to lay next to it, to contemplate, to move the stumps of his fingers through the water.
One night after a ferocious thirteen hours of work he stretched himself across the sand, dug the heels of his boots into it. He was dressed only in his skin and then he was dressed in a coat of eroded rock and smashed shells from bygone eras. He slept, and when he awoke, the immense snapping turtle lay on the opposite bank of the pool gazing at him with lazy eyes that seemed to take in not just the fisherman’s architectural ambitions but too the sandbar for the first time. At first it stood as a fortress buoyed by legs and then it sat. There was algae across its body like grass, broken bits of its shell stuck out like leafless trees. A body fit to build a tiny house on. Perhaps if it would sit still, if it would yield to him its time and its benevolence. As it dumped itself back into the pool like a hunk of frozen water loosening from a bucket, with a loud splash, he began to pray.
His Family
He received a letter; it was the first time in some months he received anything back for his payments. The letter had been laying in the rain for some time on the porch of his shack. Who had brought it he did not know — usually he walked downriver to a small town to mail money, as he walked down with bags of junk to pawn. Perhaps it was the blues musicians, or a wildman, a thin layer of blonde hair coating his entire body. A new, recurring dream — the snapping turtle dragged itself from the church he had built around it, bloated, alighted on two legs on occasion or lumbered, crossed the river, letter in its teeth. Its eyes defended by scutes as if goggles.
The letter was smudged, completely illegible; the fisherman could not tell whether it had taken up the entire page or whether the short outbursts of handwriting had poured down it in the rainstorm. He stopped sending money.
Storm on the River
Yet again the hurricane came. It caught him unawares; the river had been still for days before, as it always was above the surface. No wind whipped the trees until the high force of the storm came and each one bent and some shattered, soaked to the bone with chill water from the sky which whipped through the woods like sprays of gunfire. He could hear a distinct howling around him, perhaps sirens from the towns to the south, perhaps not. Above all, the atmosphere made him want to swim.
He walked out from the porch of his shack, dressed plainclothed, and took no ginger step into the river. He walked through the grass around the bank and then through the bank, until there was no bank and he fell into the waters in full. He walked along the bottom until his body failed him and he began to float upwards and had no choice but to swim. He swam against the current. The river pushed him back, or down, over and over, as if to root him. If he had time to dream perhaps he would’ve dreamt of being found by another dredger, centuries later, and placed in an antique store along the coast for sale. No time to discern whether this would’ve been a dream or nightmare — it was almost immediately lost. As if a great hand the waters shoved him down into the muck and his face, his open eyes into a fat mass of stone. Perhaps the stone would make him into a flatfsh, something that could not dream.
He awoke on the beach among the metals he had hauled and arranged. He lay on his back, his right arm bent and twisted behind him. He had no way to see his face; the storm raged and the disturbances could now be seen on the river. The waters moved and rippled up and down, left and right, so that by reaching every direction they went no direction, an immense shag carpet or mass of brown-gray lichen. Light beamed down from the sky and provided an outline for each of black clouds above the fisherman, hundreds of them. The darkness blinded him and he stretched the fingers of his left hand to block it until all he could see was the jointlines of his fingers and the whorls of his prints. With the restoration of one sex he realized he had lost another; he could not hear. Or rather he could hear one sound: an immense ringing. He tried to divine certain tones from it and found them: a whistling, a low rumble, hooting pops, the lashing and screeching of metal against metal — the strings of the violin and the strummings of a waterlogged guitar and a child’s babbled singsong, the hymns of a bluesman and his own voice in conjunction though he did not open his lips. Each layer of the sandbar had been made to make music by one man, and now he was the sole one there to appreciate it. He stood up, dusted himself, and eyes down tried to find the black pool of water. He found it; it was still, and he laid on his back and draped out his arms and his legs in an attempt to eclipse it. The fisherman laid almost straddling this pool, listening to the music, as around him tones were lost and the wind began to uproot pieces of his cathedral into the air. They moved up, slow, linear, levitating, as if the wind had prompted them but had no other control of their movement. He laid here at the center of the river as everything was undone. He saw his wife’s eyes above him, so easy to reach. The hum ended, and an orchestra began to play.