By Hand

Cecil Rowe’s house was green and had boats round it the way other houses had hedges.

It stood at the water’s edge on the far side of the cove from the resort, at the end of a dirt track through the trees, a low green frame house with a tin roof and a screened porch along the lake side and a dock going out from the porch into the water; and round it, on every side, there were boats. Boats on trailers, in the yard. Boats upside down on trestles, being painted. Boats tied to the dock, three of them, aluminium, with outboards. A boat in the grass by the porch steps with flowers growing in it, red ones, geraniums, which somebody had planted a long time ago and somebody had kept watering. And a boat on the roof of a shed, which nobody explained.

They came down the dirt track at twenty to six in the grey, the four of them, walking, with no breakfast, because Cecil Rowe had said so; and Kimura behind them, and Castellanos behind her, carrying a canvas bag that Frederick had not seen before and did not ask about.

Cecil Rowe was on the dock.

He was sitting on an upturned bucket at the end of it, in the tractor cap and a pair of old canvas trousers cut off at the knee and nothing else, with his chest bare and brown and wrinkled like a walnut, the same as his face, and the same colour, all over, and a cup of coffee in his hand that steamed in the grey; and he watched them come down the track and along the dock towards him, the four boys and the two officers, and did not get up, and did not say anything, until they had stopped in front of him.

He looked at them one after another. The same length of time for each.

“You eat breakfast?”

“No, sir,” said Theo.

“Good.” Cecil Rowe drank some of his coffee. “Fish can smell bacon on you. Through the water. That’s what my daddy said.” He thought about it. “I don’t know if it’s true. But I’ve never eaten breakfast before I went in, and I’ve never not caught one.” He put the cup down on the dock. “You four ever fished?”

“No, sir,” said Marcus.

“Ever?”

“Felix caught a crab once,” said Theo. “At Santa Monica. On a bit of string. Off the pier.” A pause. “It got away.”

Cecil Rowe looked at Felix for a long time.

“Then we’ll start,” he said, “the ordinary way.”

---

The ordinary way caught nothing.

It was rods. Cecil Rowe had four of them in a rack by the porch, old, of bamboo and fibreglass, with reels that clicked, and he gave one to each of them and showed them, once, without hurrying, how you put a worm on a hook, which was not something Frederick had ever imagined doing and which made Marcus go a colour he had gone on the octopus; and how you held the rod, and let the line out, and threw it, with a flick of the wrist, not the arm; and then he sat back down on his bucket at the end of the dock with his coffee and did not say another word for an hour.

They sat on the dock with their legs over the edge and their lines in the water, in a row, in the grey turning to gold, while the sun came up over the trees on the far side of the cove and the mist lifted off the water in slow curls, and the birds started, all of them, in the trees, and a heron came down at the far end of the cove and stood in the shallows on one leg, very still, and caught three fish while they watched.

They caught nothing.

Nothing at all. Not a bite. The floats sat on the water in a row, red and white, and did not move, for an hour, while the sun came up and the heat came with it.

“This is stupid,” said Felix, at a quarter to seven, very quietly, so that Cecil Rowe would not hear.

“It’s fishing,” said Theo, equally quietly. “That’s what it is. My dad says. Fishing is sitting next to water being disappointed.” A pause. “He loves it.”

Frederick sat with his rod in his hands and his line in the water and his float on the gold surface, not moving, and found that he did not mind. He did not mind at all. He sat on the warm boards of Cecil Rowe’s dock with the sun on his back and the heron at the end of the cove and Theo’s shoulder against his, and nothing to do but watch a red and white float not move on the water, and it was, he thought, very nearly number ten. Very nearly nothing. And it was not, because he was waiting for something, and you could not do nothing while you were waiting.

At seven o’clock Cecil Rowe stood up.

“Reel in,” he said. “Now you’ve done it the ordinary way.” He put his cup down. “Now you know why I don’t.”

---

The rules were four, and he said them standing on the dock, with the four of them in front of him, barefoot, in their shorts, and Castellanos and Kimura behind them, listening.

“One,” said Cecil Rowe. “Never by yourself. Never. Not once. Not if you’ve done it fifty years. There’s always somebody next to you in the water, and somebody on the bank or in the boat, watching the somebody next to you.” He looked at them. “You go by yourself, you’ll die by yourself, and they’ll find you in October when the lake goes down.”

Nobody said anything.

“Two. Never deeper than your chest. Never. You don’t go under for one. You put your arm in, not your head. If the hole’s too deep to reach without putting your head under, you leave it. There’s always another hole.”

“Three. You check with the stick first.” He held it up. It was a long straight stick, a sapling, peeled, smooth, with the end worn grey. “You poke the stick in the hole before you put your hand in. Gentle. If it’s a fish, he’ll bump it, or you’ll feel him move. If it’s a turtle,” he looked at them, “you’ll know. A snapper’ll bite the stick. Hard. And then you leave that hole, and you thank God it was the stick.” He put the stick down. “If it’s a beaver, you leave that hole too. And you go home. A beaver’ll take your finger off at the knuckle and not even be sorry.”

“Four.” He looked at them, one after another, the same length of time for each, with his pale blue eyes in his walnut face. “When he bites, you don’t pull your hand out.”

There was a silence on the dock.

“He bites,” said Felix, slowly. “The fish. It bites you.”

“That’s the whole thing,” said Cecil Rowe. “That’s the way it’s done. You find his hole, where he’s sitting on his eggs in the summer, in the bank, under a root or a rock or a stump, in the dark. And you put your hand in, slow, and you wiggle your fingers. And he thinks you’re a fish come to eat his eggs. And he bites you.” He held up his own right hand. It was brown, and wrinkled, and enormous, and the back of it and the wrist and the inside of the forearm, Frederick saw now, in the low sun, were covered in fine white scars, hundreds of them, in rows, like the marks of a very small comb. “And when he bites, you don’t pull out. You push in. You go in, with your whole arm, through his mouth, and get your hand round the inside of his jaw, or out through his gill, and you hold on. And then you pull him out.” He lowered his hand. “He hasn’t got teeth like a dog. He’s got teeth like sandpaper. Thousands. It’s like putting your hand in a cheese grater that’s angry with you.” He looked at the four of them. “That’s why I said you weren’t ready for your hands.”

“Are we ready now?” said Theo.

Cecil Rowe looked at them for a long time.

“No,” he said. “But it’s August. And they’re on the nest. And you’re going home.” He picked up the stick. “So you’ll have to be.”

---

Castellanos went into the water.

Frederick had not thought he would. He had thought, on the dock, listening to the four rules, that this was the end of it: that Castellanos would hear never by yourself and never deeper than your chest and a beaver’ll take your finger off at the knuckle, and look at the King, and at the lake, and at Cecil Rowe, and say no, sir, the way he had said it at the trailer door about the shoes. After the creek. After the forty minutes, and the report, and the note on his file. He had been waiting for it all through the rules.

Castellanos did not say no, sir.

He opened the canvas bag. He took out a pair of swimming shorts, black, new, with the price still on a plastic tag at the waist, which he bit off; and a pair of rubber shoes, the kind you wore on rocks; and he went behind the shed with the boat on its roof, and came back in them, and the blue T-shirt, untucked, for the first time, hanging loose to his thighs; and he stood on the dock in front of Cecil Rowe, large, brown, solid, with his arms folded, and his shoes from the creek replaced, and his face perfectly still.

Cecil Rowe looked at him.

“You’ve done this,” said Cecil Rowe.

“No,” said Castellanos.

“Then why are you dressed for it?”

“Because I’m going to be next to him in the water,” said Castellanos. “Rule one.” He looked at the lake. “Sergeant Kimura will be in the boat. Watching me.” He looked at Cecil Rowe. “And you’ll tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, and so will he. And if you say a hole is too deep, it is too deep, and if you say leave it, we leave it, and if you say go home, sir, we go home.” A pause. “I don’t argue with a man who’s got arms like that.”

Cecil Rowe looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked down at his own arms, at the hundreds of fine white scars in their rows.

“Huh,” he said.

---

The holes were along the bank at the far end of the cove, where the trees came down to the water and the bank was steep and undercut, with roots going down into the lake, and rocks, and old stumps standing in the shallows, grey, smooth, the stumps of trees that had been cut, Cecil Rowe said, when the lake came, in 1940, and had stood in the water ever since; and under the water, he said, all along that bank, there were holes. Under the roots. Under the rocks. Inside the stumps, where they had rotted hollow. Dark places, in the bank, below the surface, where a catfish could back in and sit on its eggs and guard them, all summer, in the dark.

“There’s a whole town down there,” said Cecil Rowe, from the boat, looking at the water. “The old town. Ketchum. Under forty foot of it, out in the middle.” He pointed with his chin across the cove, at the open lake beyond the point. “My granddaddy’s house is down there. And the church. And the school my daddy went to. They took the people out and cut the trees and let the water come.” He looked at the stumps. “The fish live in it now.”

Nobody said anything.

They went into the water in pairs. That was rule one. Cecil Rowe in the boat with Kimura, ten feet off the bank, standing, with the stick, watching; and in the water, chest deep, along the bank, the four boys and Castellanos, in a row, a few yards apart, feeling. Feeling with their feet first, along the bottom, which was mud and rock and sunk branches, soft, then hard, then soft; and then, when Cecil Rowe said there, from the boat, pointing at a place along the bank, feeling with the stick, and then with their hands.

Felix found a turtle.

He found it first, before anybody else had found anything, at a hole under a rock at the end of the row; and he did everything right. He put the stick in, slowly, gently, the way Cecil Rowe had said, and the stick went in a foot and stopped. And then it jerked. Hard. Out of Felix’s hands, nearly, so that he grabbed it with both, and pulled, and it came out of the hole with something on the end of it: a head, grey-green and ancient and horrible, like a dinosaur’s, with a beak, clamped on the end of the stick, and two small furious eyes; and Felix screamed, a high clear scream that went across the whole cove, and let go of the stick, and went backwards into the lake with a splash that soaked Marcus.

The stick floated. The turtle let go of it and went back into its hole.

“That one,” said Cecil Rowe, from the boat, with great satisfaction, “you leave.”

---

Theo caught the first fish.

It was small. Cecil Rowe said so at once, from the boat, as soon as Theo’s arm went into the hole under the root and Theo’s face changed; small one, son, nine, ten pound, hold on. But it was not small to Theo. Frederick was three yards away, chest deep, and he saw Theo’s face go through everything at once, surprise and pain and terror and astonishment and fury, and saw his shoulder go into the bank, and his whole body lean, and heard him say a word in Wisconsindeutsch that he had said at the fence at the fair, and then another, and then Theo pulled.

He came up out of the water with it. Both arms round it, against his chest, and his right hand somewhere inside its head, and the fish thrashing, brown and yellow and mottled, flat-headed, with a wide wide mouth and whiskers, and its tail going, so that the water flew off it in the sun in a spray; and Theo standing chest deep in the lake at a quarter to eight on a Saturday morning in August holding a catfish against his chest with his face blazing.

“I’ve got it,” said Theo. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, Freddie, I’ve got it, it’s biting me, it’s still biting me…”

“Hold on,” said Cecil Rowe from the boat. “Hold on, son. Walk it to me. Slow.”

Theo walked it to him. Slow. Chest deep, through the water, with the fish thrashing and his face screwed up and blazing; and Cecil Rowe leaned over the side of the boat and put his own great scarred hand into the fish’s gill and took it from him, in one movement, and lifted it into the boat, where it lay, flapping, on the boards, with Kimura looking at it.

Theo stood in the water and held up his right arm.

The inside of his forearm was red. Raw, from the wrist halfway to the elbow, in fine rows, as if he had dragged it across a cheese grater; and bleeding, a little, in a hundred small places, and the lake water washing it pink.

He looked at it. He looked at it for a long time, standing in the lake.

“That’s going to scar,” said Theo, at last, with the most profound satisfaction Frederick had ever heard in his voice.

---

Frederick found his hole at half past eight.

It was a stump. It stood in the water at the end of the bank where the cove opened out towards the lake, a big one, grey and smooth, as thick as a man, and it had been a tree, Cecil Rowe said, a big oak, a hundred years old when they cut it in 1940; and under the water, on the lake side, at the bottom, where the roots went into the mud, it had rotted, and there was a hole. A dark hole, the size of a dinner plate, in the grey wood, going back into the inside of the stump, under the water, at the height of his knee.

He felt it with his feet first. Then with the stick.

He put the stick in, gently, the way Cecil Rowe had said, and it went in a long way, further than he expected, into the hollow inside of the stump; and then it stopped. And then he felt it. Not a jerk. A bump. A soft, heavy, deliberate bump against the end of the stick, the way a very large dog bumps your hand with its nose when it wants you to stop doing something.

“Big one,” said Cecil Rowe, from the boat, very quietly.

He had not seen anything. He could not have seen anything. But he was standing in the boat ten feet away with his pale blue eyes on the water at the foot of the stump, and on Frederick’s face, and he had seen it.

“How big?” said Castellanos, beside Frederick, in the water, chest deep, a yard away.

“Big,” said Cecil Rowe. He looked at Frederick. “You want to leave it, son, you leave it. No shame. There’s a little one under the rock by your friend. There’s always a little one.”

Frederick looked at the dark hole under the water at the foot of the stump.

He thought about the clock. About carrying it in, at the end, in his arms, like a man carrying another man, with the pendulum knocking softly against the case at every step; and about the brick at the bottom of the deep end, heavier than it had looked; and about the pig, in the creek, looking at him with her calm small eyes for a long time while he stood there with his arms out and decided that he was there and was going to stay there.

“No,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

“Then breathe,” said Cecil Rowe. “And go slow. And when he bites, go in.”

---

He put his hand in.

He put it in slowly, under the water, into the dark hole in the stump, the fingers first, and then the hand, and then the wrist; and it was cool inside, cooler than the lake, and soft, the rotten wood, like felt; and he could not see anything, nothing at all, he was looking at the surface of the water with the sun on it and the grey stump going up out of it in front of his face, and his hand was somewhere in the dark inside a tree that had been cut down in 1940 and drowned, in a hole, with something in it, and he could not see it.

He wiggled his fingers.

Nothing happened.

He wiggled them again. He reached a little further in, to the forearm, and wiggled them, slowly, the way Cecil Rowe had said, like a fish come for the eggs.

Then it bit him.

It was not like a dog. It was not like anything. It was like the whole of the inside of the stump closing on his hand at once, all round it, to the wrist, hard, with a strength that he did not believe, that he had not known a living thing could have; and rough, rasping, a thousand small points all round his hand and his wrist at once, gripping, and then twisting. The fish twisted. It turned its whole body in the hole, and his arm went with it, and he felt his shoulder go into the stump and his feet go out from under him on the mud and the water come up over his chin.

He did not pull out.

He did not know how he did not. Everything in him said pull. Every single thing he was, every nerve in his arm and every year of his life, said get your hand out of the dark mouth of the thing in the hole; and he heard Cecil Rowe’s voice, from the boat, from a long way off, from above the water, saying in, in, go in; and he went in.

He pushed. He pushed his hand forward, into the mouth, into the rasping, past it, and felt something in there, inside, hard and curved, a bone, the inside of the jaw, and closed his fingers round it, and held.

And then he pulled.

---

He came up with it.

He did not know how. He knew only that his feet found the mud again, and that his head came up out of the water into the sun, and that there was something in his arms. Against his chest. Enormous. Heavy. Heavier than the brick, heavier than the clock; alive, and furious, and twisting, with his right arm inside its head to the elbow and his left arm round its body, and its tail going, beating against his legs under the water like somebody hitting him with a wet sack; and the sun in his eyes, and the water pouring off both of them, and somebody shouting.

Castellanos had him.

He felt it. Castellanos had come the yard through the water and had him by the back of the T-shirt, in one large fist, the way Marcus held Felix in a crowd, and was holding him up. Not taking the fish. Not touching it. Just holding him up, by the shirt, from behind, so that he did not go under again, while he stood chest deep in Grand Lake at half past eight on a Saturday morning with his arm inside the head of a fish as long as he was tall from his waist to his chin.

“Walk it to me,” said Cecil Rowe, from the boat. Very quietly. Very steadily. “Slow, son. Slow. Walk it.”

He walked it.

He did not know how far it was to the boat. Ten feet. It was the longest walk of his life. Through the water, chest deep, with the mud sucking at his feet and the fish against his chest, twisting, and his arm in its mouth, and the rasping, and Castellanos’s fist in the back of his shirt the whole way, holding him up; and the boat coming nearer, and Cecil Rowe leaning out over the side of it with his great scarred hand reaching down; and Kimura beside him, holding the boat steady against the bank with an oar, looking at Frederick’s face.

Cecil Rowe put his hand into the fish’s gill and took it.

He took the weight of it, in one movement, and Frederick felt it go, all of it at once, out of his arms; and felt the jaw open, inside, round his hand, and let go; and pulled his arm out of the fish’s mouth, and stood in the lake, and held his arm up in the sun.

It was red to the elbow. Raw. In rows. Bleeding in a hundred small places. Like Theo’s, but all the way up.

He looked at it.

He looked at it for a long time, standing in the water, with Castellanos’s fist still in the back of his shirt; and he did not feel it. Not yet. He felt nothing at all except the sun on his face and the water at his chest and a thing in his own chest, behind his ribs, that was very large and was going to come out of him at any moment in a shout or in tears and he did not know which.

In the boat, Cecil Rowe held the fish up.

He held it up by the gill, with both hands, against the sky, and it hung there, its tail nearly to the boards of the boat, and Cecil Rowe was not a small man; flat-headed, broad, mottled brown and yellow and olive, with its mouth open, wide, wider than a dinner plate, and its whiskers, and its small eyes, and its whole body going slowly still in the air.

“Thirty,” said Cecil Rowe. He looked at it. “Thirty-one. Maybe two.” He looked at Frederick, in the water. “That’s the biggest fish anybody’s took out of that stump since 1983.” A pause. “I took that one.”

---

There were eggs in the stump.

Cecil Rowe showed him. He held the fish in the boat in a tub of lake water, where it lay, still now, breathing slowly through its great mouth; and he got out of the boat into the lake, chest deep, an old man in cut-off canvas trousers with his walnut chest, and went to the stump, and put his own arm into the hole, all the way to the shoulder, without the stick, as if he were reaching into a cupboard; and brought out, on the flat of his scarred hand, very carefully, something yellow.

It was a mass. A soft, round, jelly-like mass, the size of two fists, yellow, translucent, with the sun coming through it; and inside it, when Frederick looked close, there were dots. Thousands of them. Small and dark, each one in its own clear yellow bead.

“That’s what he was sitting on,” said Cecil Rowe. “That’s his. That’s the daddy. The mama lays them and goes off and the daddy sits on them, all summer, in the dark, and fans them with his tail so they get the water, and bites anything that comes in the hole.” He looked at the yellow mass in his hand. “Till they hatch. Then he goes.”

He put his arm back into the hole, slowly, and put the eggs back, where they had been, in the dark, inside the drowned stump; and took his arm out.

He looked at Frederick.

“You can keep him,” said Cecil Rowe. “You caught him. He’s yours. He’s good eating, a fish like that. There’ll be a lot of people in this county will tell you so.” He looked at the fish in the tub in the boat. “Or you can put him back.”

Frederick looked at the fish in the tub.

He thought about the list. 8. Catch a fish. In Felix’s hand, in the King’s sitting room, under the library card in his own, because there was a lake; and it did not say keep a fish, or eat a fish. It said catch. He had caught it. He had put his hand into the dark and been bitten and gone in instead of out, and held on, and walked it ten feet to the boat with Castellanos holding him up; and it was done.

He thought about the eggs in the dark inside the stump, without anybody to fan them.

“Put him back,” he said.

Cecil Rowe did not say anything. He looked at Frederick for a long moment from the water with his pale blue eyes. Then he nodded, once, the way Officer Hummingbird had nodded at the decision from the porch.

He lifted the fish out of the tub, by the gill, and lowered it over the side of the boat, into the lake, and held it there, under the surface, by the stump, gently, for a long time, while the water went through its gills and its tail began to move. And then he let go.

The fish hung in the water for a moment, brown and yellow, by the grey stump. Then it turned, slowly, and went down, and into the dark hole at the bottom, backwards, the way it had been, and was gone.

---

“Number eight,” said Theo, in the water, holding his own arm up out of it, raw, in the sun.

---

Breakfast was at eleven, on Cecil Rowe’s porch, out of an iron pan.

It was Theo’s fish. The small one, nine pounds, ten, which Cecil Rowe had looked at in the boat and said was a good eating size, not a daddy, a young one, out for the morning, and which Theo had said, without a moment’s hesitation, they would eat; and Cecil Rowe cleaned it on a board at the end of the dock with a knife so quickly that Marcus did not have time to go any colour at all, and cut it into pieces, and rolled them in cornmeal from a tin, and fried them on a gas ring on the screened porch in a black iron pan the size of a cartwheel, in an inch of fat, until they came out gold and spitting; and they ate them with their fingers, sitting on the porch boards, with bread and with hot sauce from a bottle with no label and with tomatoes from a bucket that somebody had left on the steps, and with coffee, which was terrible, and which Cecil Rowe kept pouring.

It was the best thing Frederick had ever eaten. He thought he had thought that before, this summer, about several things. He thought that it had been true every time.

His arm hurt now. It hurt very much. Kimura had washed it, on the dock, with water from a bottle and something from a small white tin in Castellanos’s canvas bag, and wrapped it in a bandage from the same tin, from the wrist to the elbow, neatly, without saying anything; and Theo’s too; and they sat on the porch side by side with their bandaged arms held out in front of them, eating catfish with their other hands, and Theo kept looking at his own bandage with an expression of deep contentment, as if it were a medal.

Castellanos sat on the porch steps in the black swimming shorts and the blue T-shirt, drying, with a plate of fish on his knee that Cecil Rowe had put there without asking, and eating it, slowly, looking at the lake.

Cecil Rowe did not eat. He sat on his upturned bucket at the end of the porch with his coffee and watched them eat. He watched them for a long time, without saying anything, with his pale blue eyes in his walnut face.

“Sir,” said Frederick, at last.

Cecil Rowe looked at him.

“Why did you fold the newspaper? At the café. The first Sunday.”

Cecil Rowe drank some of his coffee. He looked at the lake. He thought about it for so long that Frederick thought he was not going to answer, and that this was all right, and that he would not ask again.

“My granddaddy’s house is under that lake,” said Cecil Rowe. “You know that. I told you.” He looked at the water. “They came in 1938. Men from New Westminster. In suits. With a map. And they said the government was going to build a dam, for the flood, for the power, for everybody, and the river was going to come up forty foot, and the town would have to go. And my granddaddy said no. And they said he didn’t have a say.” He drank his coffee. “And they put his picture in the newspaper. Standing in front of his house with a shotgun, saying no. Every paper in the State. Ketchum farmer defies dam. People drove from Tulsa to look at him. People drove from Kansas City. They stood in his yard and took photographs of him, for a year, till the water came.” He put the cup down on the boards. “He moved up the hill in 1940 with everybody else. He never once talked about the house. Not to anybody. Not to me.” A pause. “But he kept that newspaper. In a drawer. Folded. With the picture on the inside.”

Nobody on the porch said anything.

“That’s why,” said Cecil Rowe.

He picked up the coffee pot and filled Frederick’s cup, which did not need filling, and put the pot down, and looked at the lake.

“You come back next August,” he said, “you come see me. They’ll be on the nest again.” He looked at Frederick’s bandaged arm. “You’ll be ready for your hands.”