High Lonesome

A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis

WE WERE OUT EARLY IN THE BROWN WATER, THE LIGHT STILL gray and wet.

My cousin Woody and I were wading on an oyster shell reef in the bay. We had cheap bait-casting rods and reels with black cotton line at the end of which were a small bell weight and a croaker hook. We used peeled shrimp for bait. Sometimes you might get a speckled trout or flounder but more likely you would catch the croaker. A large one weighed a half pound. When caught and pulled in the fish made a metallic croaking sound. It is one of the rare fish who talk to you about their plight when they are landed. My aunt fried them crispy, covered in cornmeal, and they were delicious, especially with lemon juice and ketchup.

A good place to fish was near the pilings of the Saint Stanislaus school pier. The pier gate was locked but you could wade to the pilings and the oyster shell reef. Up the bluff above us on the town road was a fish market and the Star Theater, where we saw movies.

Many cats, soft and friendly and plump, would gather around the edges of the fish market and when you went to the movies you would walk past three or four of them who would ease against your leg as if asking to go to the movie with you. The cats were very social. In their prosperity they seemed to have organized into a watching society of leisure and culture. Nobody yelled at them because this was a very small coastal town where everybody knew each other. Italians, Slavs, French, Negroes, Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics. You did not want to insult the cat’s owner by rudeness. Some of the cats would tire of the market offerings and come down the bluff to watch you fish, patiently waiting for their share of your take or hunting the edges of the weak surf for dead crabs and fish. You would be pulling in your fish, catch it, and when you looked ashore the cats were alert suddenly. They were wise. It took a hard case not to leave them one good fish for supper.

That night as you went into an Abbott and Costello movie, which cost a dime, that same cat you had fed might rub against your leg and you felt sorry it couldn’t go into the movie house with you. You might be feeling comical when you came out and saw the same cat waiting with conviction as if there were something in there it wanted very much, and you threw a Jujube down to it on the sidewalk. A Jujube was a pellet of chewing candy the quality of vulcanized rubber. You chewed several during the movie and you had a wonderful syrup of licorice, strawberry, and lime in your mouth. But the cat would look down at the Jujube then up at you as if you were insane, and you felt badly for betraying this serious creature and hated that you were mean and thoughtless. That is the kind of conscience you had in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where you were always close to folks and creatures.

This morning we had already had a good trip as the sun began coming out. The croakers swam in a burlap sack tied to a piling and underwater. The sacks were free at the grocery and people called them croaker sacks. When you lifted the sack to put another croaker in you heard that froggy metal noise in a chorus, quite loud, and you saw the cats on shore hearken to it too. We would have them with french-fried potatoes, fat tomato slices from my uncle’s garden, and a large piece of deep sweet watermelon for supper.

It made a young boy feel good having the weight of all these fish in the dripping sack when you lifted it, knowing you had provided for a large family and maybe even neighbors at supper. You felt to be a small hero of some distinction, and ahead of you was that mile walk through the neighborhood lanes where adults would pay attention to your catch and salute you. The fishing rod on your shoulder, you had done some solid bartering with the sea, you were not to be trifled with.

The only dangerous thing in the bay was a stingaree, with its poisonous barbed hook of a tail. This ray would lie flat covered over by sand like a flounder. We waded barefoot in swimming trunks and almost always in a morning’s fishing you stepped on something that moved under your foot and you felt the squirm in every inch of your body before it got off from you. These could be stingarees. There were terrible legends about them, always a story from summers ago when a stingaree had whipped its tail into the calf of some unfortunate girl or boy and buried the vile hook deep in the flesh. The child came dragging out of the water with this twenty-pound brownish-black monster the size of a garbage can lid attached to his leg, thrashing and sucking with its awful mouth. Then the child’s leg grew black and swelled hugely and they had to amputate it, and that child was in the attic of some dark house on the edge of town, never the same again and pale like a thing that never saw light, then eventually the child turned into half-stingaree and they took it away to an institution for special cases. So you believed all this most positively and when a being squirmed under your foot you were likely to walk on water out of there. We should never forget that when frightened a child can fly short distances too.

The high tide was receding with the sun clear up and smoking in the east over Biloxi, the sky reddening, and the croakers were not biting so well anymore. But each new fish would give more pride to the sack and I was greedy for a few more since I didn’t get to fish in salt water much. I lived four hours north in a big house with a clean lawn, a maid, and yardmen, but it was landlocked and grim when you compared it to this place of my cousin’s. Much later I learned his family was nearly poor, but this was laughable even when I heard it, because it was heaven: the movie house right where you fished and the society of cats, and my uncle’s house with the huge watermelons lying on the linoleum under the television with startling shows like “Lights Out!” from the New Orleans station. We didn’t even have a television station yet where I lived.

I kept casting and wading out deeper toward an old creosoted pole in the water where I thought a much bigger croaker or even a flounder might be waiting. My cousin was tired and red-burnt from yesterday in the sun, so he went to swim under the diving board of the Catholic high school a hundred yards away. They had dredged a pool. Otherwise the sea was very shallow a long ways out. But now I was almost up to my chest, near the barnacled pole where a big boat could tie up. I kept casting and casting, almost praying toward the deep water around the pole for a big fish. The lead and shrimp would plunk and tumble into a dark hole, I thought, where a special giant fish was lurking, something too big for the croaker shallows.

My grandmother had caught a seven-pound flounder from the sea wall years ago and she was still honored for it, my uncle retelling the tale about her whooping out, afraid but happy, the pole bent double. I wanted to have a story like that about me. The fish made Mama Hannah so happy, my older cousin said, that he saw her dancing to a band on television by herself when everybody else was asleep. Soon — I couldn’t bear to think about it — in a couple of days they would drive me over to Gulfport and put me on a bus for home, and in my sorrow there waited a dry red brick school within bitter tasting distance. But even that would be sweetened by a great fish and its story.

It took place in no more than half a minute, I’d guess, but it had the lengthy rapture and terror of a whole tale. Something bit and then was jerking, small but solidly, then it was too big, and I began moving in the water and grabbing the butt of the rod again because what was on had taken it out of my hands. When I caught the rod up, I was moving toward the barnacled pole with the tide slopping on it, and that was the only noise around. I went in to my neck in a muddier scoop in the bottom, and then under my feet something moved. I knew it was a giant stingaree instantly. Hard skin on a squirming plate of flesh. I was sorely terrified but was pulled even past this and could do nothing, now up to my chin and the stiff little pole bent violently double. I was dragged through the mud and I knew the being when it surfaced would be bigger than me and with much more muscle. Then, like something underwater since Europe, seven or eight huge purpoises surfaced, blowing water in a loud group explosion out of their enormous heads, and I was just shot all over with light and nerves because they were only twenty feet from me and I connected them, the ray, and what was on my hook into a horrible combination beast that children who waded too far would be dragged out by and crushed and drowned.

The thing pulled with heavier tugs like a truck going up its gears. The water suddenly rushed into my face and into my nose, I could see only brown with the bottom of the sun shining through it.

I was gone, gone, and I thought of the cats watching onshore and I said good-bye cat friends, good-bye Cousin Woody, good-bye young life, I am only a little boy and I’m not letting go of this pole, it is not even mine, it’s my uncle’s. Good-bye school, good-bye Mother and Daddy, don’t weep for me, it is a thing in the water cave of my destiny. Yes, I thought all these things in detail while drowning and being pulled rushing through the water, but the sand came up under my feet and the line went slack, the end of the rod was broken off and hanging on the line. When I cranked in the line I saw the hook, a thick silver one, was straightened. The vacancy in the air where there was no fish was an awful thing like surgery in the pit of my stomach. I convinced myself that I had almost had him.

When I stood in the water on solid sand, I began crying. I tried to stop but when I got close to Woody I burst out again. He wanted to know what happened but I did not tell him the truth. Instead I told him I had stepped on an enormous ray and its hook had sliced me.

No.

Yes. I went into briefer sobs.

When we checked my legs there was a slice from an oyster shell, a fairly deep one I’d got while being pulled by the creature. I refused treatment and I was respected for my close call the rest of the day. I even worked in the lie more and said furthermore it didn’t much matter to me if I was taken off to the asylum for stingaree children, that was just the breaks. My cousin and the rest of them looked at me anew and with concern but I was acting funny and they must have been baffled.

It wasn’t until I was back in the dreaded school room that I could even talk about the fish, and then my teacher doubted it, and she in goodwill with a smile told my father, congratulating me on my imagination. My father thought that was rich, but then I told him the same story, the creature so heavy like a truck, the school of porpoises, and he said That’s enough. You didn’t mention this when you came back.

No, and neither did I mention the two cats when I walked back to shore with Woody and the broken rod. They had watched all the time, and I knew it, because the both of them stared at me with big solemn eyes, a lot of light in them, and it was with these beings of fur then that I entrusted my confidences, and they knew I would be back to catch the big one, the singular monster, on that line going tight into the cave in the water, something thrashing on the end, celebrated above by porpoises.

I never knew what kind of fish it was, but I would return and return to it the rest of my life, and the cats would be waiting to witness me and share my honor.