For a Little While Read online

  In remembering the jubilee, I recall how different the quality of sound was. It wasn’t extraordinarily loud; it was just different, a combination of sounds I had never heard before. The waves were shushing and the confused fish were slapping the water as they thrashed and fought the poison of the fresh water. There were a lot of birds overhead, gulls mostly, squalling and squealing, and the ten-piece band from the restaurant had come down and set up along the water’s edge, and they were playing.

  The hotel staff had set up dining tables with linen tablecloths out on the beach, and had lit torches and candles all along the shore, and around the dining tables. The chefs had come down to the jubilee also, and were chopping off fish heads and gutting the entrails, slicing off fillets and frying and boiling and grilling a dozen different recipes at once, luminous in their bright white aprons, knives flashing in the candlelight. There were cats everywhere, cats coming from out of the sea oats to take those fish heads and run back off into the bushes with them.

  There was a boy walking up and down the beach, staying almost always just at the farthest edge of the light from the candles and lanterns and bonfires. He was barefoot, like all of us, and shirtless, and was wearing blue jeans that had been cut off at the knees; and as he paced back and forth, observing us, I could tell he was agitated. His agitation stood out even more, surrounded as he was by the almost somnolent contentedness of everyone else. The rest of us sloshed around in the waves, our heads tipped slightly downward like wading birds’, with all the fish in the world available to us, it seemed, just for the taking.

  The boy was roughly my age, and because he was hanging back at the edge of firelight, back in the blue-silver light of the moon, that is how I thought of him, as the blue boy. I hadn’t seen him around earlier in the week, and I had the feeling that rather than a hotel guest he was some feral wayfarer who had wandered down our way from a distant, ragged shack back in the palmetto bushes.

  He looked hungry, too—like those cats that kept dragging away the fish heads—and though I couldn’t hear any voices over the little lapping sounds of the surf, I got the impression he would sometimes call out to us, asking for something, and I avoided observing him too closely, out of concern that he might somehow seek me out.

  Once the chefs had most of the fish prepared, they began ringing a series of large copper bells mounted on heavy wrought-iron stands and tripods, and as that gonging carillon rolled out across the waves, most of us turned and waded back to shore, to seat ourselves at the long dining tables set up in the sand; though still a few people remained out in the water. Some of them had borrowed tools from the gardener’s shed and were raking in the fish, or shoveling them into baskets—unwilling to stop, even when the feast was ready and waiting, and set before them.

  We ate and ate. The chefs mixed champagne and orange juice in pitchers for us at sunrise and blew out the torches. We could see the fish out in the ocean starting to recover when the sun came up. The surface of the water was thrashing again as fish spun and flopped and rolled back over, right side up.

  The blue boy had disappeared when the thirty or so of us had turned and come marching back in from out of the waves; but now he reappeared, came out into the soft gray light of dawn, and I could see my initial impression had been correct, that he was scraggly and feral, rough as a cob; and that indeed he was agitated, for now he waded out into the waves and began scolding the dozen or so guests who were still out there with pitchforks and shovels and bushel-baskets and trash cans, still raking in those stressed and wounded and compromised fish. He was hollering at them also to leave the biggest, healthiest fish, and was shouting at them to come on in, that they had taken enough, had taken more than enough.

  With the boy’s attention focused elsewhere, I was free to observe him without being noticed, and there was something about him that made me think he was not from this country—though what other country he might have been from, I could not have said. A country, I supposed, where they had run out of fish.

  The pitchforkers ignored the blue boy, however, and kept on reaching for more and more fish, stabbing and spearing them, scooping and netting them into their baskets, until finally all the fish were gone and the sun was bright in the sky: and the blue boy just stood there, staring at them, nearly chest deep in the waves, and then he turned and made his way back to shore, and disappeared into the dunes.

  The sun rose orange over the water, and the ocean turned foggy gray, the same color as the sky. The band stopped playing, the waiters and waitresses cleared the tables, and we all went back to our rooms to sleep.

  For two days afterward we would see all these rich people who’d come to this place for a vacation working on their fish instead. They kept them cool in garbage cans filled with ice, and would be scaling and filleting fish all day long: these bankers and lawyers and doctors and titans. Some of them used electric knives, and we’d hear that buzzing, humming sound, a sawing, going on all day.

  They were slipping with the knives and chopping up their hands, so that at dinner the next couple of nights we would see people trying to eat with their hands wrapped in gauze bandages, with blood splotches soaking through them.

  The rich people would have fish scales all over them, also—not a lot, just one or two, stuck to a thumbnail or sometimes a cheekbone, or in their hair—and they wouldn’t realize it, so the scales would be glittering as they ate. It made them look special, as if they were wearing some new kind of jewelry, or as if they were on their way to a party or had just come from one.

  We ate fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They were far and away the best fish I’ve ever eaten. The clerk in the lobby said she’d actually been disappointed by the yield—that it was one of the briefest and smallest jubilees she’d witnessed yet—and when I asked about the blue boy who’d been so upset, she said he lived just a mile or so up the beach and was always there during a jubilee, and that in years past his father and grandfather had been there also, shouting the same things.

  She said his was a fishing family, and that his warnings were not to be taken seriously, that they probably just wanted all the fish for themselves. Still, she admitted, the jubilees were getting smaller by the year, and less and less frequent. She said the blue boy came from a large family; she guessed he had at least a dozen brothers and sisters, and they were all churchgoers, fundamentalists, and very close, like some kind of old-fashioned feudal clan. She said if you crossed one of them, you brought down the wrath of all of them, and that it was best to steer clear of them. She said they were all alike, that there wasn’t a hairsbreadth of difference between any of them.

  For the next couple of days Otto and I got up early and went back down to the beach just before daylight, to see if by some freak chance the jubilee might be happening again, if even on a lesser scale—like a shadow of the jubilee. We went down to the beach and waded out into the ocean. The water was dark, and the sky was dark—once or twice a mullet skipped across the surface—but that was it. Things were back to the way they had been before, big and empty.

  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 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 crossed the ocean the waters behind us would have filled back in with fish, so 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 t
old, 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.

  The Lives of Rocks

  Things improved, as the doctors had promised they would. She still got winded easily, and her strength wasn’t returning (her digestion would never be the same, they warned her; her intestines had been scalded, cauterized as if by volcanic flow); but she was alive, and between spells of fear and crying she was able to take short walks, stopping to rest often, making her walks not on the craggy mountain where she had once hiked, but on the gentle slope behind her house that led through mature forest to a promontory above a rushing creek.

  There was a picnic table up there, and a fire ring, and sometimes she would take her blanket and a book, and build a fire for warmth, and nestle into a slight depression in the ground, and read, and sleep. On the way up to the picnic table she would have to stop several times to catch her breath—when she stopped and lay down in the pine needles she felt the world was still carrying her along, although once she reached that promontory and built her little fire and settled into her one spot, she felt fixed in the world again, as if she were a boulder in midstream, around which the current parted. It was a spot she strove to reach every day, though some days it took her several hours just to travel that short distance, and there were other days when she could not get there at all.

  She slept at least as much as she had when she was a baby. Some days it was all she could do to get to the hospital for her daily treatment, so that the days were broken into but two segments, the twenty hours of sleep and the four hours of treatment, including the commute to the hospital.

  Her nearest neighbors were a fundamentalist Christian family named Workman, a name that had always made her laugh, for she had rarely seen them not working; the mother, the father, and the five children—three boys and two girls, ranging in age from fourteen to two.

  The Workmans lived only a few miles away as a raven flew, though it was many miles by rutted road to the head of their valley, and even then a long walk in was required. They lived without electricity or running water or indoor plumbing or refrigeration or telephone, and they often were without a car that ran. They owned five acres downstream along the creek, the same creek that Jyl lived by, and they had a fluctuating menagerie of chickens, milk cows, pigs, goats, horses, ponies, and turkeys.

  When they traveled to town, which was not often, as it was difficult for them to get out of their valley, they were as likely to ride single file on a procession of odd-sized, multicolored horses and ponies as they were to travel in one of their decrepit vehicles, smoke rings issuing from both the front and back ends as it chugged down the ragged road.

  No family ever worked harder, and it seemed to Jyl sometimes that their God was a god of labor rather than mercy or forgiveness. When she saw them on the road, they were usually working—often pulled over in the shade of cottonwoods, dipping water from a puddle to pour into their steaming radiator, or stopped with their small remuda haltered in a grove while they examined some injury to one of the horses’ or ponies’ hoofs—and even when all was well and the horses, or truck, were in motion, they seemed to be ceaselessly working: the girls riding in the back of the truck, knitting or sewing small deer hide knickknacks to sell at the People’s Market, the boys husking corn or shelling peas or cracking nuts, their fingers always moving, in a way that reminded Jyl of the way she herself had addressed the mountain before her illness, with her long strides just as relentless.

  From the Workmans’ cabin came the sounds of industry at all hours: the buzz of chain saws, the crashing of timber, the splitting of wood, the jingling and rattling of mules in chains pulling stumps and stoneboats to carve ever more garden space in the side of the rocky hillside of the mountain beneath which they lived. They were forever adding on this or that strange-shaped loft or closet or cubicle to accommodate their expanding brood, as well as the developing needs for space and privacy among their older children, so that the steady sounds of those renovations filled their little valley, and the smoke from burning stumps and piles of slash and smoldering stubble fields, as well as from their various wood-stove chimneys, rose from the cove day and night and in all seasons, as if just over the mountain there were some long and inconclusive war being waged, or as if such a battle had just finished and only the ruins remained now, still smoking—though always, the next day, the sounds resumed: the clangings and bangings, the buzzing, grinding, hammering and sawing, backfires and outbursts.

  On her hikes to the top of the mountain and back, particularly late in the autumn when the leaves had fallen from the deciduous trees, opening up greater views, there had been a space where Jyl had been able to look down from one of the deer-trail paths that ran along the high cliffs and see into the Workmans’ little valley, and it had seemed to her that the dominant activity in that landscape, and in that isolated little family, had been the gathering of firewood—always, there were children trundling from out of the woods, their arms filled with ricks of limbs and branches—and, if not that, the gathering of water: the children traveling back and forth to the river, ferrying double bucketloads with each trip, trudging slowly and carefully to avoid sloshing too much but spilling some nonetheless—the younger children having to set the buckets down frequently to stop and rest, and to massage their stretched-out arms.

  And in berry-picking season, the entire slope of the mountainside seemed covered with Workmans, wearing faded sun-soft overalls and straw hats against the bright sun, dropping their berries one by one into straw baskets; and down at their home there would be smoke rising from the chimneys on even the hottest summer days, as the mother, Sarah, boiled water for sterilizing the canning jars and
for boiling the berries down to make preserves and jam. Jyl would watch for them as she hiked up the mountain, observing them sometimes in little glimpses through the trees, in all seasons, and she would pass on by.

  She remembered a game she had played as a child, often while waiting for her father to come back from the Far North, from the Andes, from China and Mongolia—from all the wildernesses of the world, all the treasured storehouses of elemental wealth.

  She had constructed paper boats and then launched them downstream in the little mountain creeks, running along beside them, following them as long as she could, hurdling logs and boulders, pretending the toy boats were ships bound for sea, ships on which she should have been a passenger—voyages for which she had a ticket, but with the ship having embarked without her. And though she knew it was only her skewed and selective memory of childhood, it seemed that that was how she had spent most of her time then, chasing after those bobbing, pitching little boats.

  Seeking partly to provide entertainment and even a touch of magic for the hardened lives of the Workman children living downstream from her—and seeking also some contact with the outside world—she began to craft little boats once again, while waiting at the hospital, or at home, at night, in the last few minutes before sleep, seeking to integrate something new into her life other than sleep and pain.