Cutting Bait

in Ploughshares

Jimmy returned from summer camp in love with fishing. He swam, played baseball, took riflery and even horseback riding, but passed his best days dangling a five-pound cat-gut line in the cold, blue lakes of Wisconsin. He was sad when camp ended and he said good-bye to Uncle Marv, the counselor who taught him fishing, and the knife Uncle Marv gave him with a silver marlin on the bone handle Jimmy held in his hand as the train pulled from the station and the wind blew his tears dry along his face.
His mother worried when he did not care to see his friends or even ride his bike. Listless and dejected, he merely sat in the house watching television, his snack of cookies or plums again left untouched. Determined to give what she knew her child wanted, she put pressure on her husband John, who had spent little time with Jimmy since the boy returned from camp. Though willing to do something with his son, John didn’t understand why it must be fishing.
“Because that’s what he wants,” she said.
“We live in the suburbs,” John declared. “People get fish at the supermarket. He can choose his own live lobster at Turf and Surf. But this is Skokie,” he said, gesturing towards the window and the hedge trimmed like a crew cut, “not Eagle River.”
“I know,” she said, then sighed, exasperated. “So what are we going to do?”
Having never fished and knowing nothing about it, John suggested taking his son to a major league baseball game.
“But he wants to go fishing,” his wife pleaded.
John hated fish, even the taste of it except for French fried shrimp which he knew weren’t really fish though anything from the sea was all the same to him. Still, he was a good father and, like his wife, tried giving whatever his child wanted. At the breakfast table on Saturday morning, John announced that he felt like going fishing. Jimmy turned from his cereal bowl with hopeful, hesitant eyes.
“You want to go?” John asked him.
“For real?”
“You’ve wanted to go fishing,” John said, then casually shrugged his shoulders, “so let’s go fishing.”
“And where are you boys going?” wondered Jimmy’s mother.
Basking in the warm, grateful gaze of his son, John replied, “Rainbow Ranch.”
It was only a half hour by car from the house, in a western, undeveloped suburb encroaching on farmland. Jimmy was excited, not only to go fishing, but fishing with his father. It was fun sharing an adventure with someone he loved, and Jimmy loved his father who would be proud seeing how well his son could fish. Yet even before they arrived Jimmy knew something was wrong when he saw a billboard along the highway, the words RAINBOW RANCH spelled with cut-out drawings of smiling trout.
To Jimmy, Rainbow Ranch looked more like a converted miniature golf course with shallow water replacing the tiny fairways and greens. Many people stood beside the water or else on little bridges over it, dropping lines baited with cubes of American cheese. Within seconds after a cheese cube plunked into the water, a fish was yanked out, a frantic, glistening shard of rainbow in the sunlight. But no one who caught the fish knew what to do next, and amid happy screams and laughter the fish struggled for release until it was brought in and unhooked by a waiting attendant. Pleased with success, the customer stuffed the fish into a plastic bag before squeezing another cheese cube on the hook and going back for more.
“Well,” Jimmy’s father said while smiling at the commotion surrounding them, “here we are,” then turned to his son. “So, go fishing.”
Reluctantly, Jimmy walked to the edge of the canal, his rod and reel in one hand, his little tackle box clanging with hooks and sinkers in the other. Never had he seen so many trout and at first their beauty and grace thrilled him, but the shallow water was so crammed with fish that Jimmy could have reached in with his hand and easily grabbed one.
“What’s the matter?” his father asked, standing beside the boy and peering into the water.
Dragging a frown upward to his father’s concern, Jimmy muttered, “This isn’t really fishing.”
“Everyone else seems to think so,” John said, scanning the busy crowd. Suddenly he grew annoyed at the boy’s ingratitude as well as his own failure to please.
“Either you go fishing,” he declared, “or you go home.”
Without hesitation, Jimmy headed for the parking lot.
“Nothing’s ever good enough for you,” John complained while driving back to the highway. “I take you fishing and you’re not happy. I send you to camp and you’re not happy.”
“I was happy at camp,” Jimmy mumbled.
“Well, you’re not at camp now,” John snapped. “You’re back home where you belong, and if you don’t like it then you won’t go back to camp next year.”
Even as he spoke, John knew his threat was empty, and Jimmy frowned into his shoes with a heart so sunken it dispelled his father’s temper.
“You wanted to go fishing so I took you fishing,” John said helplessly. “What else do you want?”
But Jimmy couldn’t tell him, he couldn’t explain, and the two remained in dismal silence the rest of the way home. And no matter how convinced John was of his son’s ungratefulness, he knew the boy was even more unhappy, but after taking Jimmy fishing just like he wanted, John couldn’t understand why.

The process and the place; Jimmy loved this about fishing. Catching a fish only came later, as a bonus.
In the weeks before camp ended, he had set his mind to wake just after dawn, then tiptoed past his sleeping cabin mates into the quiet, chilly, pure Wisconsin morning. He walked the path through the trees down to the rowboat pier, startling water birds in the reeds and cattails along the shore. Wood ducks flapped noisily as water dripped off their wings, but the herons lifted with elegance, long and bony and prehistoric looking, flying across the lake where distant pine trees were smoky and blue like in the stories of Indian spirits told around campfires. In the peaceful morning Jimmy heard the whirl of his line when he cast, then he listened to the calls of waking birds and how the water sounded when a fish broke the surface. Water beads sparkled on his line as if each drop held a piece of the sun.
He caught only pan fish from the shore – blue gills and sunfish and small perch – and he always returned them, wetting his hand before touching the fish so as not to harm its delicate skin. He unhooked it quickly and smoothly, never tossing the fish into the water where the slap to the surface might shock it, but releasing it by hand, the first fluttering the fish made for freedom tickling his palm.
He heard the gradual stirrings as the camp awakened. After the scratched and muffled reveille over the loudspeakers, Jimmy returned to his cabin and stowed his gear before the breakfast bell. There would follow cabin clean-up and morning activities before lunch, but after rest period he could fish again, this time in the boat with Uncle Marv. They would row far out on the lake or else into the backwater, shadowy inlet where sometimes the big ones rested in the shade beneath lily pads. His days were filled with fishing, his dreams with Northern pikes and Muskies swimming through the deep, clear water of Lake Winona.
But Jimmy could explain none of this to his father, and with his unhappiness deepened after the Rainbow Ranch disaster, his mother again raised the matter to her husband.
“But I took him fishing,” John said defensively. “He didn’t even try.”
“Then take him somewhere else. More like what he had at camp.”
“That’s why we sent him there in the first place. So he can do things he can’t do here. If he liked horseback riding should I buy him a pony?”
“I’m not saying buy anything,” she replied. “I just think it would be nice if you spent a little time with him.”
“What’s the matter with a ball game? I used to love when my dad took me to a ball game.”
“He wants you to see how he can fish. He wants to make you proud of him. You remember what that’s like.”
John tried but couldn’t remember, though he understood her point anyway.
“Maybe Fox Lake,” he said with a serious, thoughtful face.
“That’s a wonderful idea,” she replied, and though initially Jimmy didn’t want to go, his mother assured him this would be nothing like Rainbow Ranch, that he and his father were driving just a few miles below the Wisconsin state line. Early in the morning of the following Saturday, Jimmy and his father again went fishing as they rode two hours with hope that this time everything would be fine.
“Wish it was sunny,” John said, struggling for a note of camaraderie while glancing at the sky.
“Sun’s too bright,” Jimmy uttered proudly, “fish won’t bite.” Then he turned to his father and added, “Uncle Marv said that.”
John had heard plenty about Uncle Marv. Even Jimmy’s letters from camp mentioned him continually. At first John had imagined an old man with white hair and a wrinkled, suntanned face–Camp Wajiba’s version of Spencer Tracy. John was grateful that the old man had taken an interest in his son, but when John remembered that the camp counselors weren’t old men but rather college boys supporting themselves with summer jobs, a vague, uneasy jealousy soured his heart. He worried if Jimmy admired Uncle Marv more than he did his own father, and John hoped the fishing this time succeeded so he could reclaim the largest part of his son’s love.
After exiting the highway, John drove a two-lane road that led deep into the backlands. The trees were hardy and abundant this late in summer, and a small row of shacks along the road had barely cut into the surrounding forest. A sandwich board straddled before one shack, the words ‘Bait ‘n Tackle’ on one side of the sign and ‘Breakfast Til Noon’ on the other. John parked the car, then he and Jimmy passed through the screen door that flicked a friendly bell as they entered. To the left, men eating breakfast at a half dozen tables glanced at John incuriously before returning to their strong coffee and farm-fresh eggs and thick slices of smoked ham. Jimmy went immediately to a glass cabinet display of jigglers and Dare Devil lures, while John waited at the counter, staring at dusty cans of soup and beans on even dustier shelves.
“Yes, sir,” said a young man strolling from a breakfast table while rubbing toast crumbs from his fingers to his jeans.
“The boy and I want to go fishing,” John said, and the young man, grinning widely, looked John over from head to foot. In a sport shirt and cotton slacks, John had dressed, appropriately he thought, in casual wear.
“We need some bait,” John said.
“Nightcrawlers?” asked the young man.
John did not reply. He did not understand what the young man meant.
“Worms,” he added helpfully.
“Yes,” John said in relief, and the young man, his grin restored, headed for the back room.
John imagined the young man bore a similarity to Uncle Marv, both having that easy, country way about them, amused and condescending to people from the city. His discomfort increased with the suspicion that the men eating breakfast at the tables behind him were looking at his soft-leathered loafers. He wished he had worn his tennis shoes. At last the young man returned carrying a coffee can filled with dirt which he set on the counter.
“Any worms in there?” John asked, city-wise and wary of a joke at his expense.
The young man yanked from the can a handful of dirt which he turned upside down. Worms twisted in his fist like little tentacles as John looked away, disgusted.
“Anything else?” the young man wondered, tossing the dirt back in the can and wiping his fingers on his jeans the way he has done with the toast crumbs. “Got ‘nuf hooks, lines and sinkers?”
John rented a fishing pole with an open-cast reel. He paid, took the can, then called to Jimmy while moving towards the door.
“Oh, sir,” said the young man.
Feeling the glances of the other men, John turned to the young man’s friendly smile.
“Good fishing to you,” he said.
John smiled with weak gratitude before hurrying from the store and the burst of laughter he knew would follow.
Back in the car, John and Jimmy rode deeper through the woods on a trail meant for Land Rovers and Jeeps, not a Chevy sedan. During the bumps and dips, John envisioned the damage to his car’s undercarriage just as the glove compartment flew open again. At last they arrived on the shore of Fox Lake, which reminded Jimmy of Lake Winona, and the boy looked to his father with such excitement and appreciation that it renewed John’s confidence that he could make his son happy after all.
“When I say I’m taking you fishing,” John declared, looking over Fox Lake as if he had just purchased it, “I’m taking you fishing.”
He rented a rowboat–confused only momentarily over which way to face in it–then pulled strongly at the oars as the land receded. Jimmy sat in the stern preparing his line, and after tying leader with a firm, quick knot, then cutting the line with his bone-handle knife, Jimmy smoothly impaled a worm onto his hook. John was mildly impressed at the boy’s competence.
“Where you rowing us, Dad?” Jimmy asked.
John didn’t reply because he didn’t know. He hadn’t thought about it. He simply had gotten in the boat and started rowing for the middle of the lake.
“Right here,” he uttered at last with assurance, dragging the oars until the boat came to a bobbing rest. Meanwhile Jimmy had nearly completed preparations on the second line.
“I’ll finish that,” John said.
Jimmy handed the rod and reel to his father, then picked up his own fishing rod, held it out, and after raising it with his wrist he flicked it lightly back to the water. Line spun from his reel, sailing through the air for ten yards before breaking the surface and settling in the murky water of Fox Lake.
As Jimmy reeled in slack from his gentle cast, John baited his own line. The hook swayed in the breeze, and when he grabbed for it the barb caught him in the heel of his palm. He set down the rod, then freed himself from the hook, scowling at the tiny bead of blood that emerged from the hole. With the hook pinched tightly, John poked through the coffee can as if searching a drawer for a cuff link. He probed deeper but still found nothing, then his jaw tightened just before he grabbed a handful of dirt which he sifted with his fingers until a worm rolled loose. He tried slipping it over the hook as easily as Jimmy had done but the worm twisted in contrary directions and gyrated frantically when the hook pierced its side. John extracted the hook, pulling out some of the worm’s innards in doing do, then tried again, impaling part of the worm as the rest coiled around his finger. Impatient and growing nauseated, John squished the worm onto the hook until it resembled a knot squirming at the end of the line, but he was satisfied.
After rinsing slime from his fingers in the cold water, he lifted the rod above his head and, with an aggressive snap of the arm, sent the bobber, the weights, and the worm lofting into the air as line spun from his reel. The cast carried further than Jimmy’s and the boy had seen it. Confident in his ability, knowing with a little beginner’s luck he might catch a fish large enough to push Jimmy’s esteem for Uncle Marv permanently overboard, John reeled in until both the line and his heightened estimation of himself halted abruptly.
“Backlash,” Jimmy said, staring at his father’s reel where the line was tangled like spaghetti.
John picked at the confusion, and Jimmy knew his father’s efforts only tightened the backlash even more.
“Uncle Marv showed me a secret about backlash,” Jimmy said, but John wanted to do it himself. He continued pulling at the knots, his urgency growing with the belief that if the worm died on the hook it was prove useless and he’d have to repeat the messy procedure. After a last futile yank on the line, John shoved the reel to his son, whose light tugs in the deepest part of the backlash easily untangled it.
“That’s pretty good,” John said, then admitted grudgingly, “Uncle Marv taught you pretty good.”
Jimmy returned his attention to his line as a quiet smile lit his face. John had never seen him smile that way. The boy appeared older, and John realized that his son had grown over the summer months, that he was a little boy no longer. The discovery surprised him, then he grew oddly uncomfortable, believing the boy compared him to Uncle Marv. Though his rivalry and resentment increased, John could do nothing unless the biggest fish in Fox Lake accommodatingly hooked itself on his line.
Jimmy caught the first fish of the day, a sunfish which he unhooked with patient swiftness before slipping it back into the water.
“What’re you doing?” John exclaimed as the fish vanished beneath the surface.
“You throw the little ones back,” Jimmy said while searching the can for a worm, “so they can get bigger.”
John assumed this was another fisherman adage from Uncle Marv.
“The only fish you throw back,” John replied, wanting the last word, “if the one that offers three wishes.”
Jimmy laughed, delighted, just as John felt a small vibration on his line. His bobber dipped, resurfaced, then dipped again, so he reeled in before pulling from the water a small perch, frantic when the air hit it. John grabbed for the fish, missed, grabbed and missed again. After setting down the rod, he trapped the fish with both hands, startled at the violence of the little fish’s struggle. John removed the hook from its thin, hard lip, then slammed the fish to the bottom of the boat. The fish bounced high before dropping limp and motionless at his feet.
“You know what big fish eat?” he asked his son, then answered immediately, “Little fish.” He reached out, palm upward, and fingers moving: “So give me that knife.”
Jimmy obeyed. John sliced at the fish’s head, but he cut along the crisp ridges of the gills where the blade could not easily penetrate.
“Great knife he gave you,” John said triumphantly while pressing so hard that the fish’s eye bulged from its socket. Jimmy nearly told him to cut behind the soft tissue of the brain when suddenly the fish quivered and John jumped back as if a firecracker had exploded in his face. For he had only stunned the fish and now, still alive, it flopped and flipped desperately for freedom. John stomped at the fish repeatedly until he pinned it with his shoe, then he reached under, holding the fish with his fingertips and allowing it to raise a fin which sliced his palm.
“Damn!” he said, glaring into his hand where a fine line of blood appeared.
“Kill it already,” Jimmy cried as the fish gasped for breath beneath his father’s heel. Jimmy’s alarm panicked John, and the boy watched, appalled, as his father jabbed the knife into the fish until the tip stuck in the bottom of the boat. John rotated the knife to enlarge the wound but the fish still lived, its mouth opening with each turn of the blade as if uttering a silent cry of pain.
“Give me the knife,” Jimmy demanded. “If you can’t kill it, I can!”
John stabbed at the fish once more, his anger fueled by the boy’s outrage. He was sorry for the misery he caused but hated the fish for spiting him with its refusal to die easily, and hating his wife and son for getting himself into this situation but mostly hating himself, inept at what even a child, his own son, could do better, and all his anger was heaped on the little fish that finally lay headless in the bottom of the boat.
“You like this fishing stuff?” John cried, his eyes shooting from Jimmy to the mutilation and back to Jimmy. “Is this what you like?” he asked, indicating the fish with hands bloody from the fish parts. Sweating furiously, he dragged his knuckles across his eyebrows and beneath his lips, leaving fish scales stuck to his forehead and mucus smearing his chin. He glanced quickly at the rented fishing pole.
“Get that damn worm off there and give me the hook,” he said, then cut the fish into pieces, the smell even more than the sight of it nearly gagging him. Jimmy hadn’t moved.
“Did you hear me?” John declared, but the boy turned in disdain to the shoreline. John was astounded. His mouth opened and he was about to speak but could find no words. After quickly reeling in, he pressed chunks of meat on the hook, his hands trembling with his attempts at self-control, then he cast his line as if trying to snag the distant treetops. Backlash. He ripped at the knots, knowing they tightened but refusing to relent, believing the very size of his effort could somehow free the line. Jimmy let him struggle, and after a desperate, final attack at the backlash John reached for the knife and cut the line, his wild eyes fixed on the bobber, weights, hook and fish parts slipping beneath the unquiet surface of Fox Lake. Hot air swarmed around his head like crazy insects and he thought the little boat was spinning. He remained motionless until his breath returned and the dizziness passed. He still held the knife, so after running his finger down the blade to clean it, he folded the knife and handed it back to Jimmy—and John ached at the reflection of himself in his son’s face. He couldn’t bear looking at the boy. His arms felt very heavy when he at last reached for the oars and slowly rowed to shore, wincing with each stroke from the pain in his hand where the little fish had finned him.
And when he took that first effortful stroke, the hold Jimmy kept on himself relaxed as if a clenched fist gradually opened. Soon his anger passed into the breeze with each of his father’s labored breaths. The fiery gaze that bore into his father softened, and after another moment Jimmy looked unresentfully on his smeared, unhappy face. Embarrassed for him, Jimmy lowered his eyes to the fish parts drying in the bottom of the boat and upon his father’s shoes. The loafers would permanently stain, and he felt responsible for the damage because of his wish to go fishing. Friendly, unfamiliar pity for his father gathered in Jimmy’s heart, and he wanted to comfort his father, to show he was forgiven for his failings and loved even if he couldn’t fish. Jimmy reached for the rod and reel, untangling the backlash, then tying new leader to the line. John was grateful, having dreaded returning the equipment the way he left it but which he could never repair alone. Soon the rod and reel looked just like before, and when John lifted his eyes with a joyless smile, the little boat seemed lighter because of it.