On the Water

The water was so still that it looked like glass. Armand looked out at the edge of the lake and saw the visage of the tree line perfectly reflected on the water’s surface. He seldom moved and spoke for the three hours that he had been waiting for his line to catch hold of something. In part because he didn’t know what to say, but also because he didn’t want to disturb the scene he had found himself in. He felt like he was bearing witness to something he hadn’t experienced before. The sun had risen and was hanging on the eastern half of the sky. Its glow had caused the leaves of the trees in the distance to shimmer as if they were being set alight. He saw birds that were hidden in their branches fly off into the azure sky in droves, off without a second thought to some distant horizon that had beckoned to them. He stared longingly as they soared through the air and grew smaller as they flew further and furhter away, and even for a bit longer after they had disappeared, all that was left of them being the echoes of their flight songs.

“You don’t feel nothing?” His father asked in a hushed tone.

Armand looked at the shaven face of his father. He hadn’t quite registered what it was that he had asked him, half his mind was still far off somewhere else. His father had loose skin about his jaw that made him resemble, to some extent, a turkey. Every time he spoke, Armand couldn’t help but notice it wiggle.

“Oh. No, nothing yet.”

“Shh. Don’t yell. You’ll scare the fish.”

“I wasn’t yel-”

“Quiet now, Armand.”

Armand looked at his line, and then at his fathers. Neither of them had so much as a nibble since they set out onto the pond at four in the morning. “Have you felt anything?”

“Not yet. Gotta be patient. They’ll come.”

“That so?”

“Sho.”

Armand went back to watching his surroundings. At first, he had been opposed to getting up as early as his father had planned for them to. The earliest he had ever woken up was for school, and even that was four hours later than the time he had dragged himself out of bed that morning. Armand even hesitated to call it morning. When he walked outside of his house, fishing gear and lunch box in tow, it was still the dead of night and he could hear the shrill hum of the katydids hidden in the dark. They ate breakfast in silence. They didn’t breathe a word during the twenty minute drive in his father’s truck, the only sound being the gospel that played on the radio.

Once they got the skiff off the trailer and onto the water, his father drove it near the center of the lake, a fifth of a mile from the shore.

During the first hour, Armand was seething with impatience. The was a frigidness in the air above the water that made him tremble on occasion. The aspect of him sitting in that small skiff with his father for hours on end waiting for the fish to catch was unfathomable to him. It was as if the hours ahead of him were some disparate, oppressive avenue in which he had to trudge through, the end not being anywhere in sight. But, after a couple of hours, the darkness began to recede and day began to break.

It started as a faint blue glow at the eastern edge of the sky. Then it gave way to a deep orange hue, just before the incandescence of the sun broke through and gently rose farther into the sky, caressing the tree tops. It pained Armand’s eyes at first, but once he adjusted to the light, he couldn’t help himself but to witness the radiance bathe the mist covered landscape around him. The canopy of the trees, the shimmer of the lake all shone in the morning’s brilliance. He felt the warmth on his face and all the shivers that had plagued him before had melted away.

Armand closed his eyes and felt everything. The warmth in the air, the slight breeze that carried the smell of turned earth and what he thought to be the still wet bark from the rain earlier in the night. The slow rocking of the skiff and the sound of the wild birds warbles.

“’S nice, isn’t it.” His father said.

His sudden question gave Armand a start. He had nearly forgotten about his father, he had been so quiet up to that point.

He didn’t know how to respond. He would always talk to his father in a guarded manner, with words that never betrayed what he was truly thinking. They had never grown close through the years. There had been too many moments of strife, too many instances of conflict and the occasional argument that had never truly been resolved, only brushed under the rug, out of sight. Yet all those feelings had festered and moldered into the undercurrent of unacknowledged resentment that pervaded any sort of interaction between the two.

So Armand just didn’t respond. He remained silent, making like he hadn’t heard his father, waiting for him to repeat the question.

He didn’t.

The silence now consumed everything. A pang of guilt flared in Armand. Guilt that compelled him to speak up, regardless of how daunting it seemed.

He opened his mouth before speaking, hoping the words would flow out, but they failed him. He pursed his lips and looked into the water, at his reflection.

The person who stared back at him was unfamiliar. He wanted to look away, but he felt it was important not to waiver or yield to whatever he was afraid of.

“Hey, Dad. What was the first fish you ever caught?”

Silence clung to the air like the thin fog clung to the pond. Armand began to well up with regret at asking such a ridiculous, uninteresting question. Then his father spoke.

“Well, that there's a story. But I guess we got time.” He adjusted himself where he sat. It was the first time he had moved since he cast his line.

“I had to have been about twelve years old. I was with your granpa and we came down to this very lake. He didn’t tell me beforehand. Just came into my room one morning, woke me up, and told me we were going fishing. I remember being real confused, like maybe I was dreaming or something. He was already dressed and ready to head out. Maybe he just didn’t think to tell me before he packed up or maybe he just plum forgot. But I always figured that he didn’t think to bring me with him in the first place. Like I was an afterthought.

“I got ready in about ten minutes. He was insistent on not wasting any daylight. Kept telling me that I was going too slow and to put some pep in my step, but I was still half asleep. I think I even put my underwear on backwards. I still wasn’t all the way there when I climbed into his truck.”

“Was he mad at you or something?”

“No. That’s just how he was. Patience wasn’t his strong suit. Which I always thought was funny since he would go fishing every weekend. I thought he would cuss at the fish if they hadn’t bit in the first ten minutes. But something came over him when we got out there and set our skiff afloat. He got all calm and quiet. Like he left that chip on his shoulder that I’d always known him for back in the truck. He taught me how to cast the line, what to do if I felt a bite, and not to move around too much or make any loud noises that’d scare the fish.”

“How long did it take for something to bite?”

“We musta sat there not even thirty minutes before my line began to pull. I was scared out of my mind. Nothing really prepares you for it. Everything my pa told me went and flew straight outta my head. But not even a second passed by before Pop had sat next to me and started walking me through it. He told me to stay calm and to reel it in nice and easy. He said that if I fought it and pulled too hard the line would snap on me. But I was trying my damndest not to get pulled by it. If I had let my guard down for a second, I woulda been dragged straight and into the water.”

“Was it a big one?”

“Not in the slightest. It was a young smallie. Couldn’ta been more than three and a half pounds. I was a small kid, skin and bone, so it was good enough that the wind didn’t blow me away.

“Your granpa took it off the line and hooked his finger in it’s mouth and told me to do the same. I asked him if fish had teeth and he said that they did. He even showed them to me. By that point, there was no way in hell I was putting my finger in that thing’s mouth. But then he got real mad at me and told me I had too since I caught it. I was nearly in tears when I was holding it, but if I had cried then Pop would have gotten even angrier. He told me that when we got to shore that he’d teach me how to dress it. I didn’t know what that meant back then so I asked him. And he told me. And when he did, I went all pale. My finger must have gone slack since the fish slipped right off and back into the water.”

“What’d grandpa do?”

“He was furious. Started yelling at me and saying that I had done it on purpose. Told me that he’d never bring me fishing again if I was gonna be that ungrateful. After that we went back and loaded the skiff and drove back home. The sun had barely started to rise when we drove off.”

“Did he ever take you after that?”

“Not once. But he’d still go by himself to the lake every weekend until he got sick to the point where he couldn’t even get outta bed anymore. He got cancer when I was fifteen and died a year after.

“I didn’t know that he died when you were that young.”

“Yup. Had to drop outta school to help your granma pay the bills. He didn’t leave us any money, just the land, and house. And the truck.”

“And the skiff.”

“And the skiff.”

Armand looked into the distant shore, at the pines and oaks that came together to form the woods that surrounded them.

“I’m sorry you lost your dad so young.”

“It’s alright. Figure it would have been more of the same even if he had lived longer. He wasn’t much for change.”

“I imagine he would have been pretty upset with us both right now since we probably scared away all the fish away.”

His father laughed as if it caught him by surprise. “Seems like it, don’t it?”

“Yeah, but we still got a good piece of daylight left.”

“Sho. Plenty of time for you to tell me about this girl you been seeing.”

Armand’s face grew flushed. “Um, what?”

“You thought I didn’t know? You can’t hide that little extra bit of spring your step. That and you been singin in the shower louder lately. She must be some girl to have you goin and makin all that noise. Can’t watch my programs in peace.”

“Does Mom know?”

His father gently shook his head. “You can’t hide anythin from us, boy. Never was good at keepin your cards close to your chest. Got that from me, I’m afraid.”

Armand smiled. “Whatever, Dad.”

“So, go on. Tell me about her.”

And so Armand did. He would go on to tell his father about how he and she had met, how they discovered their interest in each other and how he was now coming closer to realizing that he was in lover with her. And his father would listen with pride in his heart, chiming in when the moment seemed right to, and staying silent the rest of the time, listening to his son speak with exultant mystification on how a single person could paint his whole world in new colors. Their conversations would carry on over the lake on which they were afloat, through the woods that surrounded them and well on passed when the sun began to set in the west and the orange primrose swathes returned to the sky.

And not a single time were they interrupted by a pull on their lines.