Stories My Father Told

From my impoverished father I inherited immeasurable wealth – stories that shaped and blessed the trajectory of my life as a storyteller. He told the first as I sat by his skinny knee in our trailer one hot, damp summer evening in St. Petersburg, Florida, while June bugs drummed against the screen door like heavy rain drops. It was 1952. I was 5…

Dad’s diamond-blue eyes sparkle as he drops a large, gentle hand on my shoulder, and starts talking in a soft voice about wolves.

On this winter’s night, I was a teenager alone on my way home in the North Woods of Canada, driving a sleigh pulled by a single horse along a narrow path through the forest. The sleigh rattled and hissed on the snow, and the horse’s hooves plodded softly. A single lantern swung on its post sending bursts of light left and right into the trees.

Until this trip, I had never feared wolves. But never before had I been alone in the woods on so dark a night so far from home. The first howl came far in front of me to the right. A long, slow, high-pitched cry that made my horse stumble. A second wolf answered to my left, closer. Another cry to my right. Two more to my left. Each time closer.

I snapped the reins on my horse’s back, urging him to go faster.

The sleigh and the howls met up, and the howling became rhythmic huffing – the heavy breathing of large creatures keeping pace.

The lantern swung right and I glimpsed eyes running between trees. To the left another pair of eyes in the lantern’s swing. The eyes increased in number with each swing until the woods on each side blazed with their reflection. I didn’t have to slap the reins again. My horse already galloped at the speed of terror, his head swinging left and right with the lantern.

Something behind me. I feel it. Can’t see it. Can’t hear it. More wolves closing in from the rear? I dared not turn my head, son. Did I need to see even more of them?

Onward we plunged through that narrow corridor of hell-fire, but I am focused on just one light that grows before me. I gripped the reins, waiting for – expecting! – a dark force to land upon my hunched back and seize my neck in a drooling grip.

Now my sleigh burst through the opening of our fenced yard where my father waited, lantern held above his head. “Son!” he cried when the sleigh halted before him. I leaped into his arms as the woods around us filled with howls.

 

The Eyes

Son, one night when I was about your age, I walked to the shore of a lake in the North Woods of Canada where my family had a cabin. It was in the fall and too warm for snow and too cold for mosquitoes.

Hold your right hand out palm up so that your fingers are straight up like mountain peaks. Your thumb must also stick straight up. A lone peak. Your palm is a cup that holds the lake.

In the gap between your thumb and fingers a full moon is rising.

The moon is alone in a cloudless sky and has risen to a point where its reflection floats in the lake like the dot of an exclamation point at the end of a long wooden dock.

The moon lures me on to that dock, made of boards that are old and curling. Each board creaks when I put a foot down and creaks when I lift it. There is no other sound as I slowly move to the end of the dock.

Without even a baby’s breath of breeze to scratch the water, I can’t see its surface. And I don’t see a floating moon. I see a thousand moons deep within the lake, each the size of pinheads, and getting larger as I watch. As they grow to the size of marbles, I sense that they are getting closer, coming up from the depths toward me.

Now I see that they aren’t moons at all.

They are eyes.

I cannot move, I cannot breathe, but I can hear the drumming of my heart. It tells me to run but all I can do is watch a thousand staring eyes rise up until they run out of water and their dark bodies swirl, revealing the lake surface before they simply disappear.

Walleyes, son, that’s what they were – the great fish of the North that live in deep dark cold depths until the great moon lures them upwards. Their big eyes yearn for the moon, fill with its light, glow with their lust for it. They would swim through space and time to have it, son, and so would you.

 

The Lake Trout

Son, you will never find the lake where it happened. I don’t think I could find it again amid all the thousands of lakes hidden among the trees and hills and mountains, and linked with little waterways so shallow that they are barely wet, and you must drag your canoe along them.

I had been out for days traveling from lake to lake and pulling my canoe behind me between the lakes, with a rope attached to both sides of the canoe’s bow and the rope’s loop around my forehead so that I could pull it forward using my whole body – like an ox.

It was hard work, so hard that I didn’t feel the black flies biting until blood and sweat mingled in little streams down my face; nor did I feel the leeches hanging on my calves. Their feast continued until, on an afternoon, I found a lake that intrigued me. Bigger that most, and deeper. It had the purple blue of water that holds profound secrets and big trout.

Son, when this day finally ended many hours later, I swore that I would never forget what happened, not even a single detail. Like the lure. In my memory it lays across my palm, longer than the space between my outstretched thumb and small finger, and heavy as a banana. Its maker pounded it from a bar of steel to be spoon-shaped on its length and slightly curved at both ends, so that it wobbles as it makes slow left and right curves. A thick coat of pearlescence, carved out of a mussel’s inner shell, is glued to both sides to catch light too faint for our eyes and send sparkles that fill a trout’s eyes with hunger. A large hook swings from one end of the wobbler and I attach my metal line through the hole at the other end.

There is lots of light left as I paddle out and drop the lure into the lake, watching the light winkle from it as it flutters down and finally disappears into the depths. Then I place the rod across the canoe so that the butt is against my left calf and the shaft is against my right shin and the rod tip sticks out two feet from the side of the canoe. As I paddle, the lure starts to shimmy and the rod tip begins to bounce. At just the right speed, the rod is bobbing to the seductive, twisting dance of the pearly wobbler deep below. I close my eyes and imagine seeing the lure through a trout’s eyes.

I am in a rhythm as the canoe and the day move along together, lulled by the soft noise of bubbles flowing down the length of the canoe. There is nothing but the bubbles as I paddle, and I fall into reverie.

I am puzzled when the reverie ends. Why isn’t the rod tip moving? Why isn’t the canoe moving, even though I paddle? I stop paddling and the canoe starts moving backwards.

Something has swallowed that pearly wobbler and is pulling my canoe in reverse. The stout rod tip is bent like a bow and the canoe – by the sound of it – is going much faster backwards than when I was paddling forwards. There is a frothy white V spreading from the stern, which is now acting like the canoe’s bow.

It is good that I braced the rod against my legs for it would have leaped out of the canoe otherwise. I haul on the rod and the fish surges. It is heavy and in control and all I can do is hold on as the canoe goes backwards around the lake. We keep going round until twilight when I feel the fish weaken and I finally can spin the canoe around and have the fish pull me forward. Now the hard work begins. I haul the rod up and then drop it, reeling fast. It is grunting, sweaty work that goes on until the last color has drained from the sky and the fish lies on its side along the canoe, gently slapping the surface with his giant fanned tail.

My canoe is 10 feet long. The fish is half that length and fat and silver and too big to haul over the side of that canoe without tipping it over. How big? Bigger than my imagination. At least 50 pounds, probably more. Big enough to feed an entire generation of my family. Too big for just me. I ease the hook out of the hole in the side of its mouth and turn it free. It twitches and heads downwards, slowly returning to the depths; an evaporating shine that at some point blinks out.

That night, staring from my sleeping bag up at stars, I know that I am ready to leave home and enter a world at war. I feel strong and brave. And lucky.

Dad went home and joined The Royal Canadian Air Force. Those blue eyes failed him, though, on his first attempt at landing an airplane, and he crashed out of the service. Morose, he went drinking at a seedy little bar in Sioux Ste. Marie, and woke up in the belly of a merchant ship in the North Atlantic, where Hitler’s U-boats in those early days of World War II were sinking ships and their crews faster than they could be replaced. Dad, like many others, had been shanghaiied into service, and would feel the sting of Hitler’s torpedoes three times on ships that never lost a single man. One torpedo punched into the engine room where he worked and didn’t explode. They called him “Lucky Jack” after that and every sailor wanted passage on his ships. He considered himself particularly lucky one day in 1944 when his ship made port at Norfolk, Virginia, and the flamboyant Doris swept him off a bar stool to bless and curse and shape the trajectory of his life.