Chapter 3: Two Fish

Two Fish

The hill up from the Broadwater was the steep part, and Duncan took it at a trot, because the fish were heavy and heavy was the whole point of the morning. Under the green fish the bottom of the basket was cold as a stone.

Seven of them. Three as long as his forearm.

Halfway up he set the basket down and stood over it and looked, because there was nobody on the path to look at it with him.

Then there was.

“Hey. Hey — Duncan.”

Elsie Thane came down the path with her chin up. She had a round, plain face, and a smile that lit it, and she turned the whole of the smile on him now before she stopped.

“Where,” she said.

“Under the bank. By the alders.” He shrugged. “They came up out of the mud and stayed.”

“That’s seven.”

“I know.”

She was eleven and an inch taller than him and had been since the winter, and she had never once let a week go by without mentioning it.

“Your father’s going to have you up on the roof for this,” she said.

“Let him.”

“Here.” He had two of them out before he finished saying it — the big one and the one beside it, which was near enough — and laid them in the crook of her arm. They gaped at the sky.

Elsie went still.

“Duncan.”

“Take them home.”

“I can’t take them.”

“You’re holding them.”

“I’m holding them because you put them there.” She did not put them down. “What do I say? I walk in the door with two fish and my mother says where did those come from, and I say Duncan Hale, and she says—“

“Say your father got them.”

“My father hasn’t had a line in the water since the spring flood.”

“Then say you found them on the road.”

“Found two fish.”

“Lying in the ditch. People lose things.”

“Duncan. Duncan Hale.” She was laughing at him now, and she said his whole name like a line she had been practicing. “You come back down this path tonight.”

“Can’t,” he said. “What would I come down for?”

She laughed harder than that, and he climbed the rest of the way with the sound of it behind him and thought no more about it, because the morning had been good and he had fish to show.

What he knew about Elsie Thane came down to one thing, and it was her father. Dunstan Thane was the straightest man in Alder Creek — the one man on the lane whose word got taken instead of weighed — and Duncan had decided years back that he liked him better than any man not under his own roof, and when you like a man’s father you are decent to his daughter. That was the whole of it.

In Alder Creek a girl was promised young, and the women on the lane had done the arithmetic on Elsie Thane and Duncan Hale long before either of them could have. Elsie had finished deciding years ago, the way children decide things: quietly, all the way through, and out loud to nobody. Duncan had not started.

At the house he dropped the whole basket into the little pond behind the kitchen, fish and all, and the water went brown around the willow, and the fish stood upright in the shallows as if they had been planted.

Then he took the other thing out of the bottom of the basket and dried it on his sleeve.

It was round, the size of his palm, the gray of the stones in the Broadwater, with a rim of something darker around the edge. The face of it was broken into seven or eight pieces and the pieces had not come out; the rim held them, so that the whole thing looked like ice on a bucket in winter, holding together right up until the moment you trust it.

He held it up against the light and got nothing back. Not his face, not the yard, not the sky — a gray plate with gray seams across it, and the seams went nowhere.

His aunt had a true looking-glass. It was the only one in that end of the village, and his mother had taken him to see it the year he turned nine, and he had stood in front of it a long while watching his own face look back the way a person looks back out of a doorway. This was not that. This was metal or stone or something with no name to it, and the best a man could say for it was that it had lain in the river and had not rusted.

He put it inside his shirt, picked up the three boxes off the table, and went out to the field.

No arms, no mouth. The bottom of a basket, under a green fish, and nowhere to be but where the boy carried him. Then the pull started.

Thin, at first. A hair laid across his face. The kind of thing you tell yourself you made up, and then stop telling yourself, because it does not go away.

It thickened on the path. Every step the boy took toward the houses it rose in him the way water rises in a ditch, and by the time they came up under the Old Oak at the mouth of the village it had closed around all of him at once, and the round of glass that was the whole of his body began to shake against the boy’s hip.

And it went red. He could not see, down there under the fish, and he could not have said how he knew, but the gray ran red at the edges, the red of a coal somebody had breathed on, and the shaking did not stop.

The boy walked on. The boy did not look down. The boy did not know there was anything down there to look at.

What came to him then came all at once and would not explain itself afterward. Whatever sat up that way was his. His, or the thing he could not do without — and either way the distance between them was a debt, and he was the one who owed it.

North. All of it came out of the north, and it had come a long way, and it was bigger than the boy and bigger than the houses and had nothing to do with either of them.

The boy went on into the lane, and the grip let go finger by finger. Fifty paces and it was a line again, a hair again, laid across the inside of the glass and pointing north. He marked it and let it lie.

He looked at the village while he was carried through it, because looking was the only work left to him, and he had learned in the river that when you cannot move, you learn the shape of a room one wall at a time. Alder Creek was small, and poor, and not hiding anything, and he went over every foot of it anyway, looking for what was not. Nobody moved faster than a walk. Nobody carried anything with a shine on it. The houses were timber and mud with thatch on top, and the biggest of them was two floors of the same, and the smoke coming off them smelled like wood and grease and somebody’s supper already started. A dog, some geese, a forge going behind the row — the ordinary noise of a couple hundred people doing today what they did yesterday.

Where there is power there is work, and where there is work there is money, and money puts itself into gates and roofs whether anybody wants it to or not. He had never once seen that arithmetic fail, in a world he was trying very hard not to think about.

It did not fail here. Nobody in Alder Creek had a gate worth looking at.

The boy stopped and talked to people, and he learned what he could.

At the well there was an old man up on a stump who said something long and rolling, and the boy laughed. The man’s mouth was in one place and the rest of him was in another. The whole time the words came out of him, the want underneath leaned on the basket — leaned, and stayed leaning — and the want was: what have you got in there, boy, show me what you’ve got in there. The boy said something short and walked on, and the old man laughed after him. The joke came clear to the glass and none of the words of it.

At the gate with the split rail a woman put her head over and said something that went up at the end, the way a question goes, and the boy answered her, and her attention never once moved off the basket.

He began to gather the sounds in, the way you learn a tune off the radio — a chorus at a time, and no idea yet what any of it meant. Which sounds came around again. Which were the same one with a different end on them. By the time the boy came in at his own door he had the shape of the language and not the words of it, and from the old man at the well he had the other thing, worth more than either: that the words and the want underneath them need not match, and that he could hear both at once, once he stopped listening only for words.

Then a door, and a woman’s voice, and a lid coming off a pot. Then cloth over the top of him, and dark.

He did not waste the dark. The mother’s voice, the boy’s short answers, the creak of a door, the fire being fed — he took each one as it came and filed it away with the others. North when he had the words for it; the words when he had the people. Nobody had looked twice at the boy’s shirt.

The field ran along the low ground past the orchard, and Duncan came over the rise and saw the three of them out in it below him.

His father was in the front row. Elias Hale had gone away once, when the war came around, and come back with pay enough to buy this ground and put a house on it, and he had killed men in whatever place that was — the valley knew it and the house did not talk about it — and in thirteen years Duncan had never once seen him look like a man who had got what he came for. Elsie’s father said the other thing out loud every time he came up the lane. What a lucky man. Four sons and ground enough. Elias never answered him.

Corwin was at the head of the field in the shade of the ash with his hat off, and he stood up when he saw the boxes, which meant he had been watching the path long enough to time it.

Corwin was seventeen and had a beard now — thin and yellow and not much of one — and everyone in the house had agreed without ever saying so to treat it as a beard.

“You came up that hill at a run,” he said, “with all of that on your back. Sit down.”

“I’m not stopping. I’ve got—“

“Sit down the length of one breath. You’ve gone white around the mouth.”

Duncan sat down. He could not have said why.

Corwin took one of the boxes and called down the rows and got an answer, and the middle brother came up the furrow with a hoe over his shoulder and his hat pulled down against the sun. Gareth was fifteen and had a man’s shoulders already. He squatted back on his heels, which for Gareth was sitting, and looked in the box, and looked at Duncan.

“How many.”

“Seven. Five at the house.”

Gareth nodded once. From him that was a speech.

“You two eat,” Duncan said. “I’m going back.”

Corwin told him to take the hill slow. Gareth ate.

His mother had been in the kitchen most of the afternoon. There were greens in the pork fat, and potatoes, and bread, and when Duncan came in the whole house smelled like the inside of a loaf.

Then the back door banged and the little one came through it with a grain sack over his shoulder, and the sack was moving.

“Nobody touch it,” Corin said, in the tight voice of a boy who had run the last quarter mile uphill, and he had it open on the table before anybody could stop him, and out onto the boards came four rabbits, young ones, fat as anything, all of them still alive.

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then their father put his head back and laughed, and hit Corin on the shoulder hard enough to move him a step sideways, and then found Duncan and hit him too, and the two of them stood there and took it and could not stop grinning.

There was fish on the table that night, and it was the best thing on it and everybody said so twice. The four of them ate like the day had cost them something, which it had. Their father tasted one bite and set his fork down and let it go at that. Their mother ate almost nothing at all and watched the four of them do it, and every time one of them came up for air she was smiling.

Under the table the big yellow dog worked the legs of all six of them, round and round, nosing at whichever one it had decided was weakest, and got nothing for it, and lay down, and was quiet.

The moon was over Alder Mountain by the time supper was done.

Duncan took a stalk of timothy out of the stack and went to the corner of the house and leaned on the wall and chewed the sweet end of it and looked at nothing, which was the best hour of the day and always had been.

His father came out after him and stood in the middle of the yard with his hands behind his back and his head tipped up, going over the sky. Not the moon, which was where everybody looked. He went over it the way a man walks a field he is thinking about buying.

Duncan watched him do it a while. Then he went over and pulled at his trouser leg, which was as much of his father as a boy that size was likely to get.

“Pa.”

His father looked down.

Duncan had the glass out of his shirt and flat on his palm before he could think better of it. “I found this. This morning. In the river.”

Elias took it. He turned it over twice. He put his thumbnail to the rim, and then he knocked it against the stones of the wall — once, twice — and tipped his head and listened to it the way you listen to a pot.

“Not iron,” he said. “Not brass.”

He looked at it a little longer, and then he held it back out.

“Some treasure,” he said. “Was there nothing better than that in the water?”