MY GRANDFATHER TOOK ME FISHING on the Varney Lake Pier When He Judged Me Old Enough To

The Ten Mile Fish Story

by Jo-Anne Rosen

MY GRANDFATHER TOOK ME FISHING on the Varney Lake Pier when he judged me old enough to bait the hook myself. I was also old enough to take an ethical position. I told him I couldn’t stand to kill a living worm on purpose, though I might step on one by accident.

“You can stand to eat fish and chips, can’t you?” was all he said.

I was sorry now I hadn’t stayed back at the cabin where my grandmother was reading the Collected Poems of Longfellow. I liked to curl up on the verandah rocker beside Bubbie and listen to her recite from “Hiawatha’s Sailing,” or we might play Crazy Eights together. Or else go up to the farmhouse to drink tea with Miss Braithwaite, whose hair was carroty red though she had been an old maid when my mother was a little girl summering on Varney Lake.

Varney Lake was not a resort area but a farming community midway between Toronto and Montreal; we had driven half a day to get there and on back roads. The Braithwaite Farm bordered for a few hundred yards on the sandy lake shore and in the summer they rented out a half dozen or so cabins clustered downhill from the main house in an apple orchard.

In a meadow behind the cabins stood a six-ring, wood burning stove with weeds growing out of the oven door, rusted out and possibly not used in the 25 years since Zaydie had last pitched a big canvas tent beside it and Bubbie had stoked it up every night to cook dinner for my mother, aunts and uncles. On Sunday mornings, Zaydie would fry Paul Bunyan flapjacks on the griddle. I was sorry to have missed those flapjacks.

I was sorry, too, that we weren’t sleeping in that tent or, better yet, a teepee. That was the summer I was obsessed with Indians, or rather, with a Hollywood-comicbook-Longfellow pot pourri of Indian lore. I spent every penny of my allowance on dime store Indian artifacts—a head band and feathers, quiver and arrows and bow, a rubber knife. The week before the trip to Varney Lake, Bubbie took me downtown to Eatons and bought me a pair of beaded Princess Summer Fall Winter Spring moccasins, in which I padded around stealthily all day long, removing them only to swim and to sleep.

The morning of the fishing expedition I plaited my hair in two long braids with considerable excitement. I was going hunting with the chief of our tribe, he whose word was law. In fact, my grandfather looked remarkably like an Indian, with his dark skin, high cheek bones and narrow hooked nose. I pulled on my bathing suit and moccasins, surveyed myself in a long mirror, sighed. What Indian maiden ever wore a two-piece pink bathing suit with ruffles or had sunburnt freckled skin and blue eyes?

Then Zaydie said we had a long hike ahead of us and I would have to wear running shoes and socks, else I’d be afflicted with blisters, corns and fallen arches. When he said, off with the moccasins, off they must came, unless Bubbie intervened. I looked at her hopefully. “Tsk tsk tsk,” she said. She rolled her eyes back so the whites showed and fluttered her lids to make me laugh, but I wouldn’t.

I WAS HUNGRY because I had not eaten the porridge, served up at a long table in the farmhouse kitchen that morning. Porridge had been another major disappointment on this trip. I had never eaten porridge in my life and was looking forward to it. Pease porridge hot, the stuff of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, had a thick and satisfying sound. It was a bowl of greyish mush with plenty of brown sugar in it and raisins and butter; it smelled sweet and nutty. The problem was the flies circling the room, diving at my head and at the bowl. A burly man dressed in coveralls slapped his forehead, leaving a smear of blood and squashed fly there. He told us how he had ordered this new foolproof fly killer out of a catalogue for twenty dollars and all it was, was more flypaper. Dangling from the ceiling above the table were several long sticky brown strips laden with the carcasses of flies. The raisins floating in the bowl of porridge looked exactly like drowned flies. I refused to eat.

The grownups talked over my head.

“I’ll fix her toast with marmalade,” said Miss Braithwaite.

“She will eat porridge or nothing at all,” my grandfather rumbled.

“Oh no, dear,” said my grandmother. “She can’t hike to the pier on an empty stomach.”

“Hmm,” he reconsidered. “Crab apples,” he said finally. “For a crabby miss.”

WE SET OFF TOGETHER right after breakfast. In my pockets were six tiny crab apples he had picked for me, to be eaten at intervals throughout the morning. I carried a paper sack with three waxpaper-wrapped, egg salad sandwiches in it that were for our lunch and Zaydie carried the fishing poles, a thermos and a bucket. We walked a long while without speaking. He held his head straight and proud under a visored cap, and he moved briskly. I had to take long strides to keep up. Once I stopped to pick a jack-in-the-pulpit and when I looked up he was already out of sight.

The trail meandered through birch and maple woods and grassy meadows, never far from the lake shore. Wild flowers tempted me in all the meadows. I wanted to pick a bouquet, but he was not about to stop.

“How much longer?” I begged. “My feet hurt. In these stupid shoes.”

“When I was your age,” he replied “I walked three miles to school every day. I walked ten miles merely in the hope of catching one fish for my mother.”

“Did you catch it?”

“That would be telling the end of the story first,” he said.

I don’t care about your stupid story, I thought but dared not say. I ran on ahead, as fast as I could up the next hill, and waited for him there, panting. Suddenly the egg salad smell pierced through waxpaper and brown paper, it went right up my nose and down my throat swift as an arrow to my empty stomach. Quickly I ate a crab apple. It tasted sour and wild.

By the time we got to the pier I had eaten all six apples and I was still hungry. It was hot mid-morning now with no breezes stirring on the old wooden pier, where we joined several more grandfathers—all wearing caps with visors just like Zaydie’s. They nodded and smiled at me. I smiled politely back, though I longed to shout, maybe kick something or someone. It’s those crab apples, I thought indignantly. Everyone settled down again. It was so quiet, I could hear waves lapping the shore and far away a baby crying.

“Zaydie,” I whispered, “When will we eat lunch?”

“When we catch it,” he said.

“But the sandwiches!” I squeaked.

“Emergency rations.”

Was he kidding me? He sounded amused but looked deadly serious. Maybe it was some kind of test; he would never be mean to me on purpose, I was certain. Had I prostrated myself on the pier and begged for food, of course he would have authorized a raid on the sandwich bag. This was not in my repertoire, however. All that I could manage was a lofty refusal to stick fish hooks into worms. I looked away as he baited both lines.

“Here you are, Miss Minnehaha,” he said, handing me the smaller pole with its worm curling on the end of the line. He showed me how to hold the rod and wind the reel. Then he cast off both lines.

We sat side by side on the pier, legs dangling over the edge, and he lit up his pipe. The smoke curled up smelling like butterscotch. I wondered what I would be doing if I really were an Indian girl. Give me of your fish, oh shining water. I wouldn’t need a pole, I’d catch the fish barehanded. Then what? Give it to a squaw to cook.

After a long, long while, I said, “I’m starving.”

“You are in no danger of starvation,” my grandfather said not unkindly. “A little hunger is good for you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“So you will savor your food.”

“What’s savor?”

Before he could answer, there was a tug on my line so sharp that I almost tumbled off the pier, but Zaydie grabbed me around the waist and I held tight to the rod, and he told me exactly what to do next. Reel it in, play it out, reel it in again. I could see the sleek black fish leaping in and out of the water. This is tug-of-war, I told myself, me against a big fish. All the grandfathers gathered around now shouting encouragement. Atta girl, they cried. You got ‘em, here he comes now. The rod arced over, it looked like it would snap. The line quivered. Up rose the fish thrashing wildly. Alive, I thought. It’s alive. In my sudden confusion I let go, but still the fish came in, it got reeled in, it was flopping on the pier at my feet, still alive, a nasty hook through its jaw and its bulgy eyes accusing me. Throw it back in, I whispered, but no one heard me. Perhaps I never said it aloud.

“Rare to see so big a one,” said one man. “Beginner’s luck, eh,” said another.

My grandfather took out a jackknife and whacked the fish on the head. It ceased to struggle. He took out the hook and slit the fish’s belly. I watched aghast as he tossed the entrails at the circling gulls. He turned to me beaming.

“We’ll have lunch now,” he said.

THERE WAS A FIRE PIT and a picnic table under some shade trees near the pier. I helped Zaydie gather dry twigs and branches and also a pile of big green leaves. He quickly started a small fire—with matches—but otherwise his preparations seemed Indianlike to me. He soaked a wad of leaves in lake water and wrapped the fish up in the leaves, head and tail and all. Then he said we would have to wait till the fire became coals to cook it.

“Are you feeling alright?” he asked.

I shrugged. He looked at me sharply.

“How about an appetizer?” He pulled an egg salad sandwich out of the bag, unwrapped it and offered me half. I nibbled at it half-heartedly, one eye on the leaf-wrapped fish that I had just slaughtered. On purpose. This felt much worse than squashing a bug or worm, for it had struggled hard to live and it was smarter than any insect.

Zaydie cleared his throat.

“While we are waiting for our lunch,” he said somewhat formally, “I will finish the story I started earlier.”

“What story?”

“Why the fish story, of course. Remember I told you I walked ten miles merely in the hope of catching one fish?”

I nodded.

“I was about your age,” he began, “and I can tell you we were all gash darn hungry as often as not, my little brothers and sisters and I. We kids went to bed hungry and woke up hungry, and we were lucky to have a bowl of porridge amongst the six of us.” He looked at me till I stopped squirming, then went on.

“We kids didn’t know what money was. We never had any at all. In the summer we ran around barefoot and our feet got tough as leather, but in the winter we were lucky to get a pair of shoes that fit or didn’t leak. They were passed along and padded with rags and sometimes didn’t match. But I tell you, by Harry, I wouldn’t have traded that country boyhood for all the silk in China.”

“What about the ten-mile fish,

“Hold your horses, young lady.

“Now when my parents came over here from Russia they stayed in Montreal with some cousins, but my father didn’t like the city life at all. No sir, he didn’t come all that way to the New World to raise his family in a ghetto, packed into one room like sardines in a tin. He knew how to shoe horses and my mother was handy with a needle. So they settled in the little village of Lanark, and at first he went around the countryside on foot doing odd jobs. Later on he got five dollars together and bought an old nag. Then some fellow gave him a dilapidated cart that he reincarnated into a wagon that could travel. Yes sir, he rode around the countryside buying and selling rags, and sometimes had to be away for days on end. Like I do now,” Zaydie chuckled.

I smiled though it seemed a lame joke. Zaydie sold silk ribbons and he had a factory downtown where Italian ladies sat around a big table weaving ribbons into rosettes and bows.

“You know, you’ve got to give those old Jews credit. They didn’t speak the language.”

He glanced at the fire, dying down to coals now, and casually tossed the leaf-wrapped fish atop it.

“Where was I?”

“They didn’t speak the language,” I sighed.

“That’s right. Now, we were the only Jewish family in that village and for miles around. Still my mother kept a kosher home. When times were good, we ate bread, butter, eggs, cheese. Fresh vegetables in the summer. Otherwise kasha, you know, buckwheat groats. Even when we could afford meat or chicken, Pa would have to ride for half a day to where the next shoychet was. Do you know what that is, the ritual slaughterer?”

I nodded yes, though I didn’t really understand. Why didn’t they buy a chicken from a farmer and just bless it themselves? But he was already talking about something else.

“It was just before sundown,” he said, “early in summer, and here was my mother sitting in a rocking chair rocking a baby to sleep. Must have been Rose, your great-aunt Rose. I looked at my mother and there were tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘Why are you crying?’ I asked, and she said, ‘Tomorrow night is Shabbas.’ She pointed at the closet behind the stove. There were still enough wrinkled potatoes and a bag of groats to feed us, a bit of butter. But we had been eating potatoes and kasha all week, and for weeks on end. Pa was not expected home till Sunday or Monday. Last weekend he had brought a small smoked fish home, enough for each of us to have a taste.

“I said to my mother, ‘Would you like fish for Shabbas?’ ‘I’d love some,’ she said. That’s all she had to say. I dashed out of the house, ran into the shed, grabbed a shovel, and went into the garden to dig up worms. The ground was soft and there were more worms in that black earth than I’d ever seen before. They practically jumped up into my shovel. I filled two cans, and that night my mother tucked us kids into bed and we all prayed to God for a good catch.

“As soon as the sun came up, I set off with my brother Izzie. He was only six years old. We were a couple of Huckleberry Finns with our bamboo poles and cans of worms and straw hats. We each took along a basket for our catch.

“The Clyde River runs through Lanark, but the fishing wasn’t good there. I had never had any luck. A neighbor told me about a small lake five miles away and I thought there might be more fish in a lake than in a river. I had never been there and to this day I do not know its name. Well, we set off, as I say, and we walked and walked along this dusty trail, not even sure if we were going in the right direction. Somehow though we had faith. It was a long way to go in the blazing sun for two little chaps, especially for poor Izzie. We didn’t even have an apple to sustain us; it was too early in the summer for apples. He never complained though.”

There was a pause. I folded my hands on the table and waited patiently.

From the fire came a sweet smoky fishy smell. I was hungry again.

“Eventually, we found it. We came around a bend and suddenly there it was, a beautiful blue jewel of a lake, no houses in sight, nobody else around. You wouldn’t find it so nowadays, I don’t think. It was situated in a pine forest, quiet and clean and fresh-smelling. I tell you if paradise looks and smells like that, I’ll go cheerfully to the grave.

“By gash, that was something. Now the amazing thing was, the only noise other than a few birds peeping was the sound of fins slapping in the water. Fish were jumping all over the lake. We couldn’t believe it. Here were schools of black bass actually struggling for a position on shore, lining up begging to be caught. All we had to do was go over there and grab the fish and put them in our baskets. Well we didn’t waste any time. We filled both baskets up and we both thought it was a shame to leave so many of their compatriots behind, but we could barely carry what we’d collected, two little chaps, you know. With all that weight it took us hours to struggle home. My mother was tearing out her hair by the time we showed up.

“Now that was a scene I’ll never forget. She grabbed hold of us and hugged and kissed us and said, ‘Tonight we eat like kings and queens,’ And so we did. It was the most delicious fish I have ever eaten. Then Ma smoked the leftover black bass, and we were eating that for weeks.