Portrait of a Fisherman
“Fella has three boats sink under him, why he gets the message.”
Clarence took off his cap and squinted out to where the low, grey bulk of the island broke the horizon. His face was weather roughened and lined and his pale blue eyes bright as chips of ice but, without his cap, his scalp, exposed like that, was pale and the skin translucent, like it was too thin to cover bone and vein and muscle.
“Mabel, she’s always been one for church on Sunday, she says God’s saving me for something, I figure he’s just forgotten me, ‘magin he’s got quite a load on his mind. Old fella like me, I just slip through the cracks, so to speak. That’s why I got the punt here on the stern. The ‘Mabel-Lou’ takes a mind to go down again, why all’s I got to do is step aboard the punt and row ashore. That way if the good Lord is taking a nap or got his mind on what all else, why, I can just as easy save myself.”
We looked out at the islands and listened to the slop of the sou’west chop among the pilings under the wharf. The ‘Mabel-Lou’ bumped against the wharf like a dog leaning its head against its master’s leg, letting him know it’s time. The punt sat on the stern, her painter coiled neat in her bows. Pair of seven-foot oars on the thwart with a length of twine around them; half-hitch with a loop, enough to hold them there but handy, so they could come free with just a tug.
The sea breeze making in with the tide set the punts to dancing on the moorings and made a dazzle of the bay. Clarence set his cap back over his fine white hair and fished out a pack of Winstons. He stepped back, into the open doorway of the bait sheds, to find a lee and lit one with a battered silver lighter.
“You know,” he said. “Back when Mabel and I lived out on the island, I always knew I was home soon as I got in by Enoch’s Ledge. You know, the cobble beach there where the ledge joins the shore. Get that far and; engine shuts down, bilge catches fire, whatever the hell else happens, whatever the tide and the wind got on their minds, I’ll drift ashore, fetch up on one end of that scrap of beach or the other. Anything can happen. Wait long enough and it generally does, but there’s a spot in every trip, that one place where you know you can make landfall and all’s you got to do is hoof her over the hill and home no matter what.”
With his face in shadow, the lines dark, framed against the slanting glare of the fall sun, he looked more enduring than flesh and bone, like maybe he’d been cut out of stone and all he’d seen and heard chiseled in lines and grooves.
