The Lives of Rocks (25 page)

It was almost kind of restful, standing there in the ocean without all the noise and excitement. Or it was for me, anyway. How was I to know then that Otto, standing right next to me, was looking at the same ocean in an entirely different way? That he wanted another jubilee right away, and then another, and another.

“That fucking boy,” he said, speaking of the blue boy. “We weren't hurting anything. The ocean is filled with fish,
overflowing
with fish,” Otto said. “The whole world could eat that many fish every day, and the new fish being born into the ocean each day would be filling their places faster than we could eat them. We could drag one giant net from here to China, and by the time we had crossed the ocean the waters behind us would have filled back in with fish, so that we could turn around and go back in the other direction, filling our nets again and again.”

I saw that it was important for him to believe this, so I said nothing. But there was nothing in the ocean that day, and neither, I am told, was there ever another jubilee at Point Clear. We were witnesses to the last one. We were participants in the last one. I do not think we were to blame for its being the last one, and neither do I think that if people had
listened to the blue boy things would have turned out differently. I think there are too many other factors, but I also think there was too much gluttony, and not enough humility.

I can understand the nature of gluttony. I think it is the nature of the terrible truth these days—that there is not quite enough of almost everything, or anything. Or maybe one thing—one gentle, unconnected thing—though what that thing might be, or rather, the specificity of it, I could not say.

 

We left for home on the third day following the jubilee. We wrapped all our leftover fish in plastic bags and newspapers and put them in boxes with ice in the trunk and drove through the night to stay out of the day's heat. The ice kept melting, so fish-water was trickling out the back the whole way home. Every time we stopped for gas, we'd buy new bags of ice. But we got the fish home, and into the deep freeze. They lasted for about a year.

Otto has been living in New York City for more than thirty years now. I still live in Texas, along the Gulf Coast, and miss him, and it has been a long time now since we've been out in the woods, or the ocean, together. Our parents eventually died, without seeing another jubilee, though we went back to that same vacation spot again and again for many years afterward. All that remains of the jubilee is my own and a few others' dimming memories of it.

When I remember the jubilee, and those days of childhood, what I think about now is not so much the fish made so easily available to us, or the music of the big band, or the candlelight feast, but rather the way all of us converged on one place, one time, with one goal, even if that goal was to serve ourselves, rather than others.

Even if we were ferocious in our consumption, we were connected, that night, and those next few days. We were like a larger family, and there was bounty in the world, and the security of bounty, and no divisiveness or hierarchies, only the gift of bounty, all the bounty that the land and the sea could deliver to us, and with us never even having to ask or work for it.

It was like childhood. Nothing, and no one, had yet been separated from anything else—not for any reason. I am glad that I saw it, and though this in itself might seem a childlike wish, I find myself imagining some days that we might all yet see it again.

 

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R
ICK
B
ASS
's fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir
Why I Came West
was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.