The Fisherman - Part 2
by
Joe Mancini, Jr. © 2005

III.

August, 1975     

The sweatshirt reaches only to my navel now, and my elbows poke through the holes.  Splotched with sea-stains, the pleated pants lie where I dropped them, one leg draped over the rubber knee boots thrown into the corner.  He’d found the boots in his father’s toolshed under the rakes and hoes.  A legacy.  He’d taken them, but did not wear them, these boots his father had worn for years when he would work isolated in the manure of his quarter-acre garden, burgeoning with escarole, broccoli, green beans, and those huge Italian tomatoes my mother called “beefeaters” and used in her sauces.  “My father said they were for you,” he would mumble to her, dropping the bag on the kitchen table and then stepping down to his place in this cellar.

I draw the trousers to my waist and notch the belt in the first hole.  My ankles gleam white beneath the cuffs.  He’s getting smaller. 

June, 1975

When my mother called me in Cambridge two months ago, she said, “Go to him.  He’s at your grandmother’s.”  But I stopped first at my mother’s, soothed her, and went to the cellar.  Still on the stringer, their puffed lips and gills oozed bubbles and blood into the dark, cast-iron well beneath the faucets he had installed.  I turned the spigot, but some of the blood had already coagulated on their scales.  Grabbing one of my mother’s discarded terri-cloth towels, I used it to grasp the collapsed tail of the one left hanging over the side.  It belonged with the others.  But it slipped out of the towel.  In the way that he had taught me, I tightened my thumb and index finger around the gills and flapped it into the tub.

As I parked my car, I saw him through the windshield, sitting alone on the stone steps, his hands lying lightly on his knees.  At my approach, his head popped up like the bobbers he had abandoned after switching from fresh to salt water.  He hadn’t changed his clothes.  Behind him, through the screen-door, muted voices hummed.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

A hand lifted and dropped back into place.  I sat heavily on the stair just below him and drew my hands around my knees.  The shadow of the towering pine his father had planted at the edge of the garden before I was born twenty-seven years ago draped over us like a black arm.  From the tomato side of the garden, the odor of fresh manure wafted around us, slowly obliterating the smell of sea-grass wedged into his sneaker’s sole.

The pine’s shadow deepened with the coming of twilight.  Only the chirping of crickets and the scraping of a bottom shifting its weight disturbed the shared silence.  I lit a cigarette.  Through a crack just below the filter, smoke wisped away.  I flipped it in a long, sparkling arc toward the darkening grass.  A tiny coal that illuminated something, a scene nearly forgotten: 

The ash had glowed brighter as he sucked on the Camel clamped in his lips just inches from my seven-year-old hair.  From behind me, his left arm had twined under my enveloping sweatshirt, and his right hand had slipped over its smaller image as I clutched the rod.  “Throw!” he said.  On the monstrous wharf at Fort Coney, with his head near mine, I threw, rewound the line, and threw again and again until he let me go and I cast on my own, teetering to and fro on my short legs.  He smiled down at me, “You see.  You can do it.”  A few years later, in the cold, pelting rain at another place far from the parked Chevy, I saw the fruit of twelve hours of casting and waiting.  “How many should we take home to Mom?”  “All of ‘em!” I said, tears mixing with rain pellets on my flushed cheeks.  Soon, under the weight of twenty-seven “white-chinners,” strung, higher on his side, between us on a dead pine branch, I stumbled over into the mud.  “I don’t care if I get dirty,” I said, my gleaming eyes fixed on his.  “I don’t care!” 

The coal ashed out.  Sitting on the stone stair below him, I could not hold him. I rocked slowly back and forth. 

Two days later in the living room where the wake had been held according to his father’s instructions, the family waited for the undertaker to come and screw down the casket’s lid.  Sitting beside my mother on a funeral parlor chair, he fingered the still-folded handkerchief on his knee.  Ten feet away, I was being introduced by one of his sisters to a stranger leaning on a cane: “This is my brother’s son. They used to go a lot to…Fort Getty, right?”  She had turned toward her brother.  He stared at the lacquered pine wood mirroring the bright gold handles.  Her head returned.  “We’re proud of this one, our oldest nephew,” she gleamed at the man with the cane.  “He goes to Harvard.”

On the walls hung several of her other brother’s paintings.  My aunt patted the man away and followed my eyes.  “Did you know that, thirty-five years ago when your Pa first started at the Coro factory, he won a scholarship to the R.I. School of Design to fashion jewelry?  He dropped out, I think, when your older sister was born.”  His eyes seemed as lacquered as the wood.  When I didn’t nod, she whispered, “Did you go with him to the ocean two days ago?”  My head slipped sideways and back.  “Going there was the only thing that made him feel alive…feel himself…after Pa sent him to the farm at sixteen.”

I excused myself and went out to the yard where the tree dropped its Mackintosh apples down into the escarole and broccoli popping out of their side of the garden.  I climbed into the main crotch, my leather soles slipping on the bark.  A fat apple near my face bounced on its twig in the light breeze.  On the tomato side of the fenced-in garden, as though tearing its roots from the manure that nourished it, the pine arrowed up into the blinding sunlight and into the wind that, in contrast, swayed the apple-laden branches down onto the dark earth.  Once, years ago, he and I had watched his towering father turn his back, step over the chicken wire, and begin mulching the soil, his knee-booted legs protected from the manure.  Raising me into these branches that now brush my face, his son had supported my stealing of the biggest apple, and then, hands linked, we had slipped quickly towards the waiting car.

The wind picked up and pushed an apple against my cheek.  Sap-stained from my climb, one hand clutched the trunk as my Sunday trousers slipped on the bark.  I pulled with the other until the twig snapped its leaves back into the limb above.  As the undertaker’s hearse pulled into the driveway, I rolled my lips away from my teeth and crunched hard into the red and white flesh. 

I was to help carry his father.  Waiting while the family knelt on the velvet stoop next to the casket and then were escorted out to their cars, I watched him, the oldest, waiting for his turn.  My mother, holding the lacey handkerchief to her cheek, went up alone, parted her lips, touched his face, and then turned and walked toward the door.  I turned away before her face sent a message.  It wasn’t my turn.

It was his turn.

His rising took hours.  He hitched up his trousers; he hunched his shoulders; his fingers tugged at the edges of his coat.  As his lower jaw began to go flaccid, saliva touched his lip.  His eyes traveled from the foot-end to the name-plate and back again and then to the edge of the opening.  He straightened his arm out until his fingers touched the gleaming handle and then walked themselves up to the head cushion.  His index finger began to lift above the others.  I swam miles to reach him.  One arm reached round him from behind while the other slid down his extended arm rigid like pine wood.  I felt my stomach press into the small of his back and send him forward the last few inches.  That hand that had sawed a straight cut and cleanly slit gills wavered on the plastered eyes.

“Pa,” he cried, “oh, Pa!”

I held on to him.

We were united, one.  Three of us…and one more.  It loomed behind me, pressing into my spine.  I had to look.  Beyond the arms.  In that coffined, withholding face, I saw the battered scavenger, Ollie who was a person, my hemorrhaged aunt, boots with laminated laces.  And him.

And me.  Fingered by that shadow summoning my inconceivable son.

“Throw!” I screamed to him without a sound.  “Cast it out!”

 But his sobs banged him against the sparkling handles. 

I had to break this, pull away, and take him with me.  I had to help him.  It was my turn. 

Read the final part next month...

Joe Mancini, Jr., Ph.D., M.S.W., M.S.O.D. is a therapist, hypnotherapist, teacher, group leader, business consultant and presenter, executive coach, and national workshop leader in many areas.  For 15 years, in various venues, he has facilitated workshops in men’s issues using many intensive modalities.  He has also written articles on topics relevant to men, including one on the spiritual meaning of the sword for Wingspan.  He is also the creator of RoundTable Theatre, a fun-filled and also serious modality using improvisation to help men and men find new possibilities of mind, emotion, body, and soul to get out of stuck places.  Joe’s father, Joseph Mancini, worked as a foreman in a jewelry factory for 35 years and died in 1987 at the age of 77

Copyright 2005 Joseph Mancini Jr., all rights reserved