We Make Mud

Our Father in the Belly of the Fish

Us brothers, we go down to the river to look for our walking-out father. Our father, us brothers, we believe this, he is down by the river, he is down here, a part of us believes, at the bottom of the muddy river. When we call out to our father his name, when that word father comes floating up and out from out of our open boy mouths, we are fearing that the sound that our mouths make, those burbly sounds bumping up against all of this muddy river water, we are afraid, us brothers are, that these sounds that we are making, our hunting hollerings out of, father, where are you, father? father, come out, come out, wherever you are: we are afraid, us brothers are, that these words that are ours are going, that they have gone, by our father, by our father’s ears, unheard. And so, what we do is, instead of us keeping on with this calling out to our father our father’s name and having that word make nothing but some muddy sound that not even the fish can make out what it is that us brothers are trying to say, we get it into our boy heads to start to look and to call out to our father the way we have heard it said that deaf people, those of our world who can’t with their mouths make the sounds that are words, who can’t with their ears hear the sounds that words make — yes, we have heard it said, yes, us brothers, we have seen it said too, that these people who are not like us, who don’t talk like us, who don’t hear like us, but they can, yes, they can and they do talk with their fingers: they make words come to life with their fingering hands. You have got to see it, if you haven’t seen it, how beautiful it is to see these people speak without making a sound. How beautiful it is, it must be so beautiful, to be able to make words out of fingers that are made, by a twist of the wrist, by the bend of knuckles — these fingers that are made to look like to us brothers, they turn into letters, sentences made up of silent words, an alphabet made out of bone. And so, us brothers, we take up our bonied boy fingers, we make with our mud-dusty hands, shapes that we hope can do, here at the river, here at the bottom of this river that is ours, what our mouths seem unable to say when they try to mouth out that word, father. Look here. See how Brother, with his hand, he is closing it right now to make it into a fist. Hit is what this fist of his is saying. Or else: back off. Or, maybe yes: Brother I am ready to take it. My hand, this hand of mine that I say hello with this hand, with a wave of this hand that is mine, this hand that I pick up stones with and send them skipping across the muddy skin of this river that runs its way through this dirty river town: this hand that I hold the hammer with is what I am really wanting you to see: see this, it is the hand that I open it up so that the fingers on this hand are all five of them finning and fanning out. See my hand, see with my hand: it is a starfish that has risen up from the bottom of some long-ago rivery sea. This hand, it is a star calling out to our father his name. Us brothers, we each of us take turns fingering that word father so that our father might see it, so that he might rise up toward, a river-bottom fish swimming up toward the light of the moon: a fish leaping up, breaking through the sky of the river, opening up its fish mouth to take a bite of the moon. Father. We say this word with our hands held up for our father to see, to eat. We say this word father ten thousand times with our bony boy hands, our fingers gnawed down to the muddy nubs. We walk up and down the river’s bottom but our father does not hear or see us. Only other fish swim up near to us brothers and come up to us brothers’ calling out. The littler fish swim up to us brothers and nibble us on our fingers and toes. It is possible that they believe us to be their mothers. But the bigger fish, they swim up to us brothers and take our whole hands up inside their fish mouths. There is this one big fish that is the biggest big fish out of all of these coming up to us brothers fish. This fish, it is the biggest fish that the eyes of us brothers have ever before seen. This fish, it is as big as us brothers are big. If this big fish stood up on its big fish tail, this big fish, it might even be bigger than the both of us. I can see that Brother can see this too, so I look at Brother with this look. Us brothers, there is this look that we sometimes like to look at each other with. It is the kind of a look that actually hurts the eyes of the brother who is doing the looking. Imagine that look. Look now at us brothers. We are still looking at each other with this look that we sometimes look between us when we hear some rivery voice say, Boys, look inside. Look inside where? is what I am thinking, and because Brother is my brother, Brother says, out loud, these words that I am thinking. This big fish that is bigger than the both of us, it is then that this fish, it opens up its fish mouth. This fish’s mouth, it is big enough for us to stick inside of it both of our boy heads. This is what we do. We stick our heads into this fish’s mouth. When we do do this, when we take us a look up inside of this fish, what we see is, we see our father. It’s our father here on the inside of this fish. Our father, he is down inside the belly of this bigger-than-us fish. And us brothers, us seeing our father like this, we both know what it is that we have to do next. I hold up with just one finger to say to our father for him to hold on. What our father does to this is, he holds up his hand too, his thumb and be-quiet finger touching to make themselves into a circle, and in this light that is right now shining down from the above-the-river moon, our father’s hand held up in just this making, it makes a shadow of a dog on the inside walls of this here fish. Good, Brothers, is what our father is wanting to say to us, his sons. He winks at us with one of his eyes. With our eyes, us brothers, we look at each other. Brother sticks up and out a thumb. I take this to mean that what Brother is saying is that this big fish, it is a keeper. If you say so, Brother, I say to myself. And then I reach my right hand down inside my right trouser pocket. What I fish out from the inside of this pocket is the knife that us brothers use when we take the fish that we catch out of this dirty river home in buckets rusted with mud. What we do with these fish after we catch these fish, after we walk with these fish back home is: we gut and we cut off the heads off of these fish. We give each of these fish each a name. Not one is named Jimmy or John. Jimmy and John is mine and my brother’s name. We call each other Brother. So I take this shining blade of this knife, and then I stick, I run it, the blade of this knife, up from the tail end of this fish all the way up to where this fish’s gills are good and red and are about to get even redder now with its own blood. Fish, we say, give us back our father. This, I whisper this. This, to this fish, I hiss this into where I believe is this fish’s ear. This big fish, it stiffens, it winces with its fish body, but it’s too late now for this fish to put up a fight. The guts of this fish are floating up and away, they are heading down the river, because down and away is how most rivers like to flow. Our river is like most rivers in the way that it flows down and away and out to the lake. But it is up, not down the river, where us brothers want your eyes to take a look: to see, no, not the guts of this big fish floating down and away, down the river, but to look, to see, instead, our father, he is up from this fish’s big fish belly, like a last breath bubbling up and out: this is our father coming back upriver back up to be with us. Our father, he is up from the bottom of this muddy river rising up: our father, he is up toward the light of the moon rising up: he is, our father, a fish looking for a hook, and a pole, and a mud-rusty bucket filled up to its brim with fish. He is looking for us brothers for us to take him back home with us. Because he is hungry, our father says to us. He says this to us with his hands. It’s time, our father, he knows this — our father, he is telling us brothers this — to come back home to us brothers, to sit back down, a father to us sons: it is time for us to eat.