Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

He feared my aunt, I knew it, and let me off at the house, driving off by himself while I gathered my stuff and waited for my folks to pick me up. I heard later that he did not return home for three weeks. For months, even a year, he would not drink, not touch a drop, then he would have a nip and disappear. Uncle Peter was a binge drinker. Still, I blamed my aunt, a fastidious and abrasive country woman with a previous marriage. It was a tragedy she could give him no children and I had to stand in as his line in the family. She blundered here and there, saying wrong and hurtful things, a hag of unnecessary truth at family gatherings — a comment about somebody’s weight, somebody’s hair, somebody’s lack of backbone. She was always correcting and scolding when I visited and seemed to think this was the only conversation possible between the old and young, and would have been baffled, I think, had you mentioned it as an unbearable lifetime habit. I blamed her for his drinking and his insensitivity to blacks. He was doing it to show off to her, that’s what. He was drinking because he could not stand being cruel.

The next time I saw him he had made me two fishing lures, painting them by hand in his shop. These he presented me along with a whole new Shakespeare casting reel and rod. I’d never caught a fish on an artificial lure, and here with the spring nearly on we had us a mission. His lakes were full of big healthy bass. Records were broken every summer, some of them by the grinning wives and children of his customers, so obliged to Mister Peter, Squire of Lawrence County. On his lands were ponds and creeks snapping with fish almost foreign they were so remote from the roads and highways. You would ramble and bump down through a far pasture with black Angus in it, spy a stretch of water through leaves, and as you came down to it you heard the fish in a wild feeding so loud it could have been schoolchildren out for a swim. I was trembling to go out with him to one of these far ponds. It seemed forever before we could set out. Uncle Peter had real business, always, and stayed in motion constantly like a shark who is either moving or dead. Especially when he came out of a bender, paler and thinner, ashen in the face almost like a deacon. He hurled himself into penitential work. His clothes were plainer, like a sharecropper’s more than the baron’s, and it would be a few weeks before you’d see the watch chain, the fedora, or the nice boots — the cultured European scion among his vineyards, almost.

I did not know there were women involved in these benders, but there were. Some hussy in a motel in a bad town. I’d imagine truly deplorable harlots of both races, something so bad it took more than a bottle a day to maintain the illusion you were in the room with your own species. He went the whole hog and seemed unable to reroute the high lonesomes that came on him in other fashion. But had I known I’d have only cheered for his happiness against my aunt, whom I blamed for every misery in him.

At home my father meant very well, but he didn’t know how to do things. He had no grace with utensils, tools, or equipment. We went fishing a great many times, never catching a thing after getting up at four and going long distances. I think of us now fishing with the wrong bait, at the wrong depth, at the wrong time. He could make money and drive (too slowly), but the processes of life eluded him. As a golfer he scored decently, but with an ugly chopping swing. He was near childlike with wonder when we traveled, and as to sports, girls, hobbies, and adventures my father remained somewhat of a wondering pupil throughout his life and I was left entirely to my own devices.

He had no envy of his wealthy brother’s skills at all, on the other hand, only admiration. “Old Peter knows the way of things, doesn’t he, son?” he’d cheer. It seemed perfectly all right that he himself was a dull and slow slob. I see my father and the men of his generation in their pinstripe suits and slicked-back hair, standing beside their new automobiles or another symbol of prosperity that was the occasion for the photograph, and these men I admire for accepting their own selves and their limits better, and without therapy. There’s more peace in their looks, a more possessed handsomeness, even with the world war around them. You got what you saw more, I’d guess, and there was plainer language then, there had to be. My father loved his brother and truly pitied him for having no son of his own. So he lent me to him, often.

In the dullish but worthy ledger mark my father down as no problem with temper, moodiness, or whiskey, a good man of no unpleasant surprises that way. He was sixty-five years old before he caught a bass on a spinning reel with artificial bait. He died before he had the first idea how to work the remote control for the television.

At last Uncle Peter had the time to take me and himself out to a far pond, with a boat in the bed of the truck and his radio dialed to his beloved Cardinals. We drove so far the flora changed and the woods were darker, full of odd lonesome long-legged fowl like sea birds. The temperature dropped several degrees. It was much shadier back here where nobody went. Uncle Peter told me he’d seen a snapping turtle the width of a washtub out in this pond. It was a strange, ripe place, fed by springs, the water nearly as clear as in Florida lakes.

He paddled while I threw a number of times and, in my fury to have one on, messed up again and again with a backlash, a miscast, and a wrap, my lure around a limb six feet over the water next to a water moccasin who raised its head and looked at me with low interest. I jerked the line, it snapped, and the hand-painted lure of all Uncle Peter’s effort was marooned in the wood. I was a wretched fool, shaking with a rush of bile.

“Take your time, little Pete. Easy does it, get a rhythm for yourself.”

I tied the other lure on. It was a bowed lure that wobbled crazily on top of the water. I didn’t think it had a prayer and was still angry about losing the good one, which looked exactly like a minnow. We were near the middle of the pond, but the middle was covered with dead tree stumps and the water was clear a good ways down.

A big bass hit the plug right after it touched the water on my second cast. It never gave the plug a chance to be inept. It was the first fish I’d ever hooked on artificial bait, and it was huge. It moved the boat. My arms were yanked forward, then my shoulders, as the thing wanted to tear the rod out of my palms on the way to the pond bottom. I held up and felt suddenly a dead awful weight and no movement. The bass had got off and left me hooked on a log down there, I knew. What a grand fish. I felt just dreadful until I looked down into the water when the thrashing had cleared.

The fish was still on the plug in ten feet of water. It was smart to try to wrap the line around the submerged log, but it was still hooked itself and was just sitting there breathing from the gills like some big thing in an aquarium. My uncle was kneeling over the gunwale looking at the fish on the end of the line. His fedora fell in the water. He plucked it out and looked up at me in sympathy. I recall the situation drew a tender look from him such as I’d never quite seen.

“Too bad, little Pete. There she is, and there she’ll stay. It’s almost torture to be able to look at your big fish like that, ain’t it? Doesn’t seem fair.”

Uncle Peter didn’t seem to enjoy looking in the water. Something was wrong, besides this odd predicament.

“No. I’m going down for it. I’m going to get the fish.”

“Why, boy, you can’t do that.”

“Just you watch. That fish is mine.”

I took off all my clothes and was in such a hurry I felt embarrassed only at the last. I was small and thin and ashamed in front of Uncle Peter, but he had something like fear or awe on his face I didn’t understand.