The Man Who Loved Children (57 page)

The house rang with all this great lore, for now Sam was in his fishy element; and, from long hearing and training, his sons and daughters were as expert with the hook, line, and sinker, as they were with the brace-and-bit and plumb-and-level. The boys were only at home half the day, being out with the men of the bay, getting information and swapping eagerness. Although friends had long since ceased to come to Sam’s house, Saul Pilgrim, the author of the interminable serial, had patience and pity and, without false pride, he would sneak in and out of Spa House, without meeting its lady and without asking for a meal. He would come into the dark narrow hall (very different from the broad thoroughfare of Tohoga House) and, while Louie took his hat, would begin poems and conundrums,

Oh, do not bring the catfish here,

The catfish is a beast I fear,

Don’t bring him here at all!

and,

If I were born a Pelican,

I’d do my best to be a Man;

If I were born a Man, I’d wish

I might associate with Fish;

If I were born a Fish—but then

What use to wish? Men must be men.

and very solemnly to Louie he would ask, “Do you know Latin? Well, translate this:

Isa belli haeres ago

Fortibuses in aro

An be sidem forte trux:

Si voticinem! Pes an dux.”

When Henny would come gloomily downstairs, he would murmur politely and make himself scarce till she had passed. Then he and Sam would sit down over some tea or coffee and biscuits, and it would be nothing but flannel bait, white-line peelers, green bait, beach casting, mine bilge pollution, Cono-wingo Dam shad, rainbow trout, and
Tetraplurus albitus.
In the days just gone Saul Pilgrim had got information for his columns from Sam, and Sam still could put him right on the technical and formal side, for Pilgrim had but a messy, literary mind and scattered experience. The children would sit around for a while, casting in questions and hearing strange things-how, sure as the calendar, the blue tuna turned up in the Bahamas on May fifteenth each year and then worked north, arriving in Nova Scotia on July fifteenth, and then disappeared entirely from view for nearly a year, though they were sighted cruising round the Atlantic end of the Mediterranean, and then, sure as the calendar, would turn up again in the Bahamas on May fifteenth; how they were hunting him by boat and by plane; of the great deeps off the Bahamas, when the sea, suddenly shelving from four hundred to four thousand fathoms, looks like a low-lying island and fatefully attracts unwary planes at nightfall; the mystery of what happens in those abysses, and all the mysteries of the sea; what is bred in the Sargasso Sea? They spun each other old true yarns, known to the children from their cradles, but which they listened to again, about the conger eel, born a thousand miles from shore in the Sargasso Sea, transparent as glass, which, working slowly shoreward, turns into the elver, and at last near the coast he begins to feed and turn dark.

“Now,” said Sam, turning to the wide-eyed children, “millions of those elvers are approaching our shores, entering our tidal basins and estuaries, here and all along the coast from Gulf to Gulf. In from five to twenty years, until they are older than you, much older than Looloo, they stay up streams and creeks and feed, and then the females begin to drop downstream again, sleeping in the daytime, traveling by night; then they change from that olive green to black, they meet the males, and males and females move out to sea. When they leave our shores they disappear, like so many migratory pelagic beings; no one knows how they go—whether in a great swarm like the great migrations of men in the Asiatic continent, or singly, on a tremendous love journey. Their offspring are found out over the watery abysses, beyond Florida and the Bahamas. Then it seems they die. Out there in mid-ocean, they meet the European eels, but they do not go back with the Frog eels and the Spik eels and the Arab eels—no sirree, their children all know where they come from, and they come back to America when they are born, ribboning transparently through the heavy, dark sea water.”

The children grinned from ear to ear, and Saul (who only in fishing found peace from his termagant wife) would grin too, and then would earnestly turn to Sam again and ask, Did he think the migratory schools of tuna and marlin traveled all the year in the Gulf Stream, as they were always to be found in the Stream; but even so, how they knew the time of year was a mystery.

“Do they come on May fifteenth in leap year too?” asked Ernie with his mouth open, for the answer to pop in. Oh, they spent long hours together, and then the children saw a different sort of man, a thoroughly democratic sort of man who had no thought of grades and length of service, or of mortgages and of his sons’ being great scientists—they saw the Fisherman Sam; and Sam would say that though crops and livestock were privately owned, and birds and freshwater fish might be claimed by the land-grabber, the sea was socialist, the fish of the sea was for all, and it was wrong and a shame that anyone should presume to get separate fishing licenses and go fishing for private interest in the free and democratic sea: the fish should belong to all, the whole nation, the entire world could live off the sea, if it were properly used. But look how rash we are! When Captain John Smith came to the Chesapeake, he could ladle fish out of the bay with a frying pan—to fish with a line was not necessary. In Hiawatha’s time, the Great Lakes were stirring with fish, but we know so little that if the law did not arm inspectors and wardens, we would empty the whole giant Chesapeake system of fish, crustaceans, and bivalves, all that were edible, and kill what was left with the hideous effluvia of capitalism! “We are all the sons of old David Collyer,” said Sam, not troubling to drop his voice, “cramming our mouths, satisfying every taste, and wrecking his fortune and even grubbing into the ground under the house he built for odd pieces of good fortune that might be left. We are nothing but the locust; and the Department of Agriculture should send out planes to destroy with gas bombs those locusts of our foreshores and fishing waters who decimate the commissariat of our great and good mother Nature.” (Then, as a footnote, Sam mentioned his idea, that man himself should be decimated, and, with the good tithes left, a new race, especially interested in fish conservation, might be propagated.)

“Would you kill off everybody?” inquired Little-Sam thoughtfully. The children were much intrigued by this idea of universal destruction. But Saul Pilgrim was not interested in social ideas, and he would proceed with some idea of his in fish cookery. He wanted with Sam to work out a fish-cookery column “to interest the ordinary greedy and the housewife, who can be touched only through their stomachs,” said Sam, “in the conservation of some of our wondrous wild life.”

Then Tommy took him off secretly to the washhouse where, from behind the copper, he drew out the brace of boats he was making for Sam’s birthday, June twenty-third, a whaleboat and a buckeye. The whaleboat was little different from his rowboats and dinghies, but Louie would put cord round it in loops and make it all right; and on the buckeye Louie would put three sails, and they would fill it with little shells to look like a heavy load of oysters. Little-Sam had been scouting round the district for weeks and now had a marble bag full of wire and flooring nails, brads, tacks, and staples that he had found—most of them new or only slightly weather-stained. Saul had been selling newspapers, running round with his pleasant rosy face and straw hair, in a pair of gaiters against the mud, to get money to buy his father a new brace-and-bit, but now he had only enough money for a putty knife or two hinges for the new gate they were making for the driveway from driftwood. Saul hoped that this tale would draw a nickel or two from Mr. Pilgrim’s tender pocket, but it did not. Meanwhile, Ernie, with the same idea, was hanging impatiently in the background. Ernie was in the worst stew of the lot. (Ernie’s morale had, as Sam frequently said, “disimproved,” and he was showing a sad strain of Collyer sullenness and a tendency to weep when jeered at; so, to cure him of it, Sam had taken to calling him “Glossy-eyes.”) Glossy-eyes had meant to buy for his father a new steel square, but money had been short for a long time. He would never empty his money box if he could; but Henny had been borrowing from him for her trips to town and other little things, and not only could not afford any interest any more, but hardly ever paid him back. Even when she got her checks, she usually spent nearly all the money in a day or two, and what was left had to be sent to butcher or grocer to keep him in a good temper. Henny would not allow her eldest son to do jobs round the neighborhood; but Ernie had collected a great store of empty bottles, old iron, old springs, and old lead which he cheerfully begged and collectedly “found” in every rotting corner of the creek and cove. When would he have money? Ernie wondered. When would they let him go and get a job? Old David was dead. Old Ellen lived in a tiny cottage with Barry, who was pressed for money to buy drink and had had to let his mistress go (everyone knew it, and Ernie had seen the cottage and been frightened to notice that Old Ellen sat in the kitchen calmly, with her plump parchment hands on her knees, and her old black dress stretched to her hanging throat, and her large old eyes clear of any determination). The estate was nearly all sold and the business loaded with debts. Uncle Norman Collyer had quarreled with the whole family, the whole family was in debt and mostly without jobs (for now Old David was dead, the business could not keep them), and Uncle Philip had shot himself.

Ernie thought about it all during long hours. He harried Henny many days with his questions and calculations. He alone knew, of all the children, that Daddy had realized on his life insurance, that there was no fire insurance, and that there was a second mortgage on the house. He knew there was some delay about Daddy’s getting his new job, and he had already asked Sam to sell the strip of viny wilderness at Spa House alongside the dead end or at least build two garages there and rent them. With his money so low, Ernie found it next to impossible to sell his lead in dribs and drabs to get a few cents, but wanted to accumulate it, in order to get a fat sum at the end. If only his mother had allowed him to sell papers, he would have been happier. Meanwhile, Ernie’s lead was a standing joke, and even Henny grumbled perpetually about his “damnfool lead collection collecting dust and making rust marks on the cement floor, under his bed.” Sam wisely kept away from the washhouse while the children were showing their presents to Saul Pilgrim and, having nothing better to do, went into the boys’ room to smile to himself and also to step off the dimensions of a darkroom for photography that he proposed to build in one corner of it, near the kitchen sink, until such time as he could build in a bench and sink for the darkroom. He moved Ernie’s bed, and an astonishing sight met his eyes, five or six large lumps of lead, irregularly formed, and several small ones that seemed to have been hammered out of shape. He had not looked for several weeks and had no idea how Ernie had got so much. Beside the lead were the bottles and several pieces of iron. In moving the bed, he had upset a chamber pot, and the urine, with the sight of the lead and the rust marks on the floor, caused him to begin hallooing and howling for the children, in a great state of excitement, fun, and horror. Saul Pilgrim had to come in and see how his house was kept at eleven in the morning; and then Sam flung out of the room with him, until the mess was cleaned up, and then once outside he began to poh! and pooh! and fooey! and fwow! at the smells and sights, while the little boys stamped around giggling, and Ernie, the cause of all this, stood aside mournfully, until Sam called him “Glossy-eyes,” when he turned the corner, even more mournfully, and went down to poke a stick in the sand and write his name, “Ernest Paine Pollit.” On the beach their shouts still reached him, “Oh, fwow! What a pigsty!” and then commandment, “Goyls, clean up the stinking shop! It’s a pigsty! It’s a sump! It’s a garbage tip! Chicago is a violet farm by comparison,” then the boys giggling again, and a remark by Saul Pilgrim, and Henny shrieking out of a top window, “What’s the matter?” and Sam, actually replying to her, “Tell the dirty girls to clean up this pigsty of a house for once,” and Henny answering (all in the tops of the trees), “Ten maids couldn’t clean up after the filth you slop over the house every minute,” and Sam shouting, in a towering passion, “You look after my house and children, or I’ll get a separation,” and Henny yelling, “I couldn’t look after your child if I had ten hands and twenty eyes. Why don’t you stop her picking her nose?” (For Henny had had a row with Louie ten minutes ago.) After this came a calm, during which the girls, both bawling, cleaned up the room and stripped the beds to air, while Sam, in a low, sad voice, lectured the boys outside on female sluttishness, and told them the sort of wives they must pick. “When I saw my first baby was a girl,” continued Sam, pathetically, “I gave a whoop of joy, I wanted a little girl—”

“Roll yourself into a hoop and roll away,” cried Little-Sam boldly, and was immediately terrified. After months of silence and even savage mutism, he would come out with something queer and insolent, and could not stop it. Sam was used to him and merely gave him a mild kick in the pants. But Sam was quick enough to catch a little smile on his friend’s face, so he led him round to look at the new aquaria, and then into the boys’ room to ask his advice about the darkroom. Saul was an old hand and he knew better than to expect lunch; so about eleven-thirty he took himself off, after promising to send Sam a marlin for a birthday present, “the very next Tuesday as ever is,” said he. The children saw him go without regret; they felt he was a silly man enough to be writing poems in newspapers about “Goin’ Fishin’ ”; he had not handed out any nickels; he was in trouble with an old vixen (as Sam told them a thousand times), and his name, amongst his colleagues was “Baits” Pilgrim—even Sam often called him “Baits” or “Peelers.”