The Fisherman's Son

Perhaps it was when he first felt his shoulders roll an oar, or when he pulled the thick boots on. Perhaps it was when he saw the curved thin rod of the moon angle into his father’s face and hook his mouth into an ugly grin; or perhaps when the sun rerouted his eyes to the necks of wading birds along the shore as the first pink tones of dusk uncurled along the ferns. It could have been the way his father’s knife eased out the eyes of so many fish like spoonfuls of compote that gave him thoughts black as the inky emulsions of squid, a sleep no fishing boat could ease, nor star prick with its comforting pin. Perhaps he learned nothing from his father’s face except how whiskey trawled sleep from his eyes and left him pursued by pain and thunder and a show of lightning’s yellow flares. Perhaps when he felt the rod pull his arms through a reel’s band of static, when he heard his father’s voice in the headache scudding low across his forehead, the reel with an insect’s drum-head pitch his heart into summer’s mounting heat; the slow drip of days revved up by outboards then dispelled by a drill of mosquitoes, or weather finding tenor in its squalls. Among stars and fish, those notes from the waste hours he gutted, from the river’s sweep of years, who could know how many knives he heard audition for his nerves, or what beat his heart took, or how many rounds of an ingoing lake before the wind rushed into the uncaulked cracks and left him face-down, deep-drummed, gear-slipped, deaf to his inner repertoire, blind now to the river’s weather-beaten stare. Perhaps from a tangle of yellow air, or when he heard the wind bale out of a speeding sky, or a firetail add its flute to the rankling handle of a windlass, a lyrebird weigh its call in with an anchor’s unrolling links, some twisting erratic pull of tackle as the mosquitoes buzzed; when he heard his father’s voice in each dizzy injected dose…. All day such talk went on as the men brought in their hauls, gutting fish to the noise of pelicans, those bills clacking like clapperboards, the ease of routine. Here among the brace of tides, as wind skips along ropes left lank and loose and dangling now among the sloops, no one fully knowing why a boy would desire to die….The avocets walking the shore with their hesitant, hair-splitting steps.