Angling
The boy was feeding calves when his cousin called out to him from where he was filling up his truck.
“How about I take you fishing tonight?”
The boy nodded, but, figuring his cousin would forget like he always had before, put it out of his mind so as not to be disappointed.
But that afternoon, feeding calves again, his cousin came walking up from the machine shed with a Folger’s can and told him to gather up some worms. He’d be over in an hour to pick him up. Shy, the boy peered in at the eyebrow-shaped crescent of grounds at the bottom.
When his cousin was gone, he licked his finger and tasted it, an earthy, slightly-bitter flavor that he carried back over to the other house along with the can itself, slung over one handlebar.
His mother was on the porch, talking on the cordless. When she saw him walking up with the can in both hands, as if it was filled to the brim with water, she pinned the phone between her ear and her shoulder and made a reeling motion. It was she who’d called his cousin the day before to ask if he’d take the boy fishing before school started.
The boy had never been fishing before. His father was busy farming and the boy didn’t have any older brothers who might have taught him. For as long as he could remember the poles had leaned together in one corner of the machine shed, rigged up with rusted tackle, pale lead weights pinched along the length of the line. Small as they were, there was a violence about the hooks. They had known the innards of innumerable worms and the soft mouths of fish that were tossed back thrashing to grow old and bitter in the waters of the Pearl River.
One day back in June, when he hardly knew what to do with the new wealth of hours after school let out, the boy had taken one of the poles up, more out of a longing to touch what his cousin had touched than out of any interest in fishing. He’d gone down to the pond below the house where his cousin lived and tried fishing with a bare hook. And that was when his cousin had come out onto the porch and made the promise that he was finally keeping that evening.
He walked down to the kitchen garden. It was August and the beds had been let go wild. He stepped in and knelt amongst the herbs. Their scent was heady and somewhat sickening. He picked some parsley and chewed it as if it were an antidote. He liked the way the leaves tickled the roof of his mouth. The soil was soft, brightened in places with vermiculite from the potted starts he’d helped his mother put in in the spring.
It took some digging before he found the first one, but after that, as if some permission had been granted, they were everywhere. He pulled them, writhing and attenuated, out of the dark secret soil and lay them gently, one upon the other, in the can, dimming the quicksilver tin so that it ceased blinding him when he glanced in. Every now and then he tossed a handful of dirt in, in a trusting, measured way, the way he’d seen his mother toss salt into soup. He stopped when the can was full. The dog came up from under the porch to greet him, sniffed at the can and, at a loss as to how to participate, somnolently licked its side.
It was still possible his cousin wouldn’t show. Sitting on the porch step between the flaming geraniums, he began to wish he wouldn’t. But then the truck appeared on the brow of the hill and came bucking down the field path, the dust trailing in a long plume that would take all evening to settle. Long before he braked abruptly before the lilacs, the boy recognized the song he was blaring: “Free Falling,” the hit of the moment.
His cousin came walking up to the porch, carrying both poles in one hand, a dirty tackle box in the other. The lines were rigged up with bright new tackle. His mother brought out an obligatory pitcher of lemonade, with three glasses on a tray, and invited his cousin to sit in one of the chairs angled matrimonially towards one another. The boy stayed on the steps. A worm had pierced the surface of the soil, its featureless head wagging back and forth in a pitiable, searching way. He suppressed an urge to tamp the worm down and watched his cousin. The boy was fascinated by everything he did, the way he sat there so casually, one hand dangling between his thighs, the other holding the glass of piss-colored lemonade, the way his Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. He had watched him on Friday nights, juking and shaking off would-be tacklers, had heard his name boomed from the loudspeaker, allowing himself to feel pride in being related to him, and now he was sitting there, on their porch.
The light changed. Soon his father’s truck would appear on the hill. Just when he started wondering if they’d ever go, his cousin stood up. In the truck his cousin offered him a can of Old Milwaukee from a blue and white cooler set on the bench seat between them. When he cracked it open, his cousin hooted. They knocked cans. Some of the beer spilled onto his hand. Sipping it, its flavor was familiar, if only from smelling it on breath and from the empties he helped carry from porch to kitchen. The can of worms was on the floor between the boy’s boots. He squeezed it to keep it from tipping over, so that the lid look like a grimacing mouth. His cousin peeled out onto the road without looking to see if anyone was coming, as if they were the only ones who could possibly be on that road. They took the hill so fast he felt his stomach go hollow. He was scared but he refused to show it. They blew past the bridge. Only upon losing momentum did his cousin turn around and drive back.
They carried everything to the bridge. The power line overhead was festooned with lengths of fishing line and dangling tackle, evidence of the errant casts of other summers. Together they gazed down at the water purling against the pilings, brown with runoff from the fields.
His cousin unzipped his fly and drew it out, scattering a golden, misty plume like a benediction over the water. Catching the boy staring, his cousin turned towards him, rocking a little, making it sway. The boy felt something similar to what he’d felt coming down the hill, only in a different part of himself.
Putting it away, his cousin knelt down and reached into the dirt, drawing out a worm. He brought the hook and the worm right up to the boy’s face and pierced its soft flesh so that it writhed, doubling back upon itself. He kept running the hook through again and again until the worm was a tight ganglion of pain, then cast it into the water.
The boy drew a worm out of the dirt in the can. He thought of its life in the garden, delving through the deep, rich beds, knowing nothing of hooks or the mouths of hungry fish. He turned away from his cousin, who, fishing, seemed to have forgotten him, and pretended to bait the hook. He fished that way for an hour, as his cousin showed him how to put a little action in the line to make the drowned worm more attractive. The more his cousin drank, the less likely it became that he’d notice the boy was fishing with a bare hook.
Later, after his cousin dropped him off, before going on into the house, a little drunk from the one beer, he returned the pardoned worms to the garden.