Chapter two
1911
Something I discovered early is that boat names are not parceled out willy-nilly but rather on a first-come, first-served basis: first daughter, first love, first original (or unoriginal) thoughtāthose kinds of priorities. And names can be confusing. According to Cap, Mabel the boat is 54 feet long, 14 feet across the beam, and draws 4 foot 4 inches of water. She is a passenger/light-freight steamer made of solid oak, built by George H. Notter Co., Buffalo, New York, in the year 1893. She weighs nineteen gross register tons and has a single screw rig of fifty indicated horsepower, which might not mean anything to you, but believe me, it meant something to us.
Mabel the person isnāt as broad across the beam and doesnāt weigh as much as Mabel the boat, but then Mabel the person never learned to buck the waves. Mabel the boat lists slightly starboard, as if sheās cocking her head, considering if youāre worth anything. She creaks and complains and demands much of both Cap and me, but she can turn around and rock you gently in her lap, just when youāre sure youāve had enough of her. I knew a lot about Mabel the boat back then and next to nothing about Mabel the person, my sister who was six years older than me.
Today, as on most summer days, Iām leaning back in my wooden folding chair, short wide feet propped against the railing. I hear the easy slapping of waves against the side of the Mabel and the rustling of the reeds as we cut through parts of the narrows. The reeds bow to me as they always do, and I imagine myself as the queen of the lakes, the reeds my loyal and willing subjects. When I close my eyes, the smells ambush me. The musty smell of the old steamer mixes with the odor of the scrap wood we burn for fuel, and thereās that fish-fowl-fauna smell as well. I wonder if Iām starting to smell musty, and I figure I am from hours of sitting on these side berths. Iāll smell like this for the rest of my life, I imagine; I am in my realm here.
Itās sunny, but like a polite smile, I donāt feel warmed by it. The wind is southwesterly at ten to fifteen knots. Waves today are less than a foot in Grand Traverse Bay, though weāre not in the bay. The Mabel runs only through the inland waterway, seventy-five miles of connecting lakes and rivers between the villages of Elk Rapids at the south end of the chain and Eastport or Bellaire at the north end. Right now weāre running up Torch River headed toward Spencerās Creek.
Why you so lumpy? Keane, Doc Mulcaheyās son, asks me. Heās said this to me oftenāI imagine because he liked the look he saw on my face the first time he said it. His voice isnāt distinctive, but it crawls inside me whether I like it or not. I donāt answer him, but itās the damned pockets that make me lumpy, or rather the stuff in the pockets that forms cumbersome bulges at my hip joints and hard lumps under my backside. There can never be enough pockets in a pair of overalls, and mine are crammed full of an assortment of gear: fly line, a pair of small scissors for trimming knots, fabric tape measure, silk for tying flies, and rags for oiling line. I adjust the lump under my left cheek and ease back in my chair, which is sandwiched between two black trunks and a packing crate of bluing headed to Eastport.
When you leavinā? I ask Keane. I do my best to look through him, but heās standing over me, and though I canāt articulate this quite yet, I can smell things leaking through his pores, something like fast-approaching adolescence mixed with an inexplicable disappointment in something.
Do you mean leave the boat or leave you off to yourself? What kind of question is that anyway? he asks.
You know, I say. When the heck you gettinā off? I turn my back on him and see to my line.
Fly line has always intrigued meāthe fact that you can cast it at all, even oiled. Flimsy, snarled, angryāit has all the potential of a big knot. Yet, according to Cap, in the right hands it becomes an art, a da Vinci sort of concept: composition, perspective, form, mood, light, imagination. And not just visual but musical as well, he says: rhythm, balance, harmony, distance, and velocity. Fly-fishing is science put into pictures and set to music. Gravity, in her mean attempt to drag it all down (according to me), provides the grace and subtlety.
But I know a lot about knots, too. Tight and imperceptible. Turle, blood, surgeonās, and clinch knots. And several kinds of loops.
Keaneās fishing over my shoulder so to speak, annoying the hell out of me. Heās older by a couple years, has a habit of walking backward, skipping, and tossing something Iāve always assumed to be money but usually turns out to be pieces of slag from the heaps. Smart-alecky and cocky is how he looks. Like heās got time to waste while I have none. When he does walk forward, he leans into the balls of his feet, braced, as if heās walking against a strong current. Like itās an effort. It occurs to me then that perhaps he walks backward because he doesnāt want stuff to end, while Iām always praying for the finish. (Like visits with Aunt Lena, meals containing salt pork (which can happen during visits to Aunt Lena), long winters, reluctant springs that refuse to turn into summers, bad fishing daysāand even good fishing days, because I want them to end before they become bad onesāand any conversation with Mrs. McLaughlin next-door.)
Up to this point in my life, or until recently, the hope of a more superior day in the future overshadowed even an exemplary day in the present; you canāt overstate the mere potential of a thing. But on this day I find myself understanding that desire to look back, or at least to drag my feet, and I feel sick that Iām reduced to that. Sick that my mind is snagged up at all and sick that Iāve bothered to have thoughts about Keane Mulcaheyās reasons for doing anything.
Keane leans toward me, points to a private wooden launch headed into the river behind us. Wonāt be long, he says, before people will get around these lakes in those, especially if you keep treating folks the way you do. His head is close to mine, closer than it ought to be. Like that boat. An invasion.
A lady dressed in an impractical hobble skirt, an enormous lampshade-style tunic, white gloves, and a ridiculous matching merry-widow bonnet is standing next to her valise with several tapestry satchels under each arm and is eyeing me, as if I canāt be trusted with a few lousy suitcases. The womanās skirt wraps so that it opens in front to slightly below the knees and clings so tightly, Iām sure sheāll have to hop like a rabbit in order to move. I know all about ladies like her. Her husband, whose upper lip seems to dissolve into his lower, is turning red and patchy under the blistering sun, his face getting soggier by the minute, though heās dressed more sensibly. No doubt theyāve spent the whole month of Ju-lah reclining on some fancy lounge chair at that Rex Terrace place the other side of Elk Lake. In the shade. Resorters started coming as far back as 1875.
Letās sit inside, Loreta, the man says to the woman. I canāt hear what Loreta whispers back, but Iām sure it has to do with my lack of trustworthiness. Loreta plops down on the valise, which sighs under her weight. I turn my back on both of them then.
Iām guiding my leader through the reeds, false casting a couple times to avoid them. You can get cleaned out if youāre not careful, particularly through Torch River. Keane keeps on about what a heck of a thing it is Iāve said to him, a paying customer.
Weāve got all the business we need, I say to him. But in truth there arenāt too many people aboard the Mabel today. I tell myself this is because itās a Monday, but in my heart I know thereās more to it. I point to the launch, still following in our wake. Why donāt you see if theyāll take you aboard right now? I say.
The small boat cuts through the wake of the Mabel, races up on her port side. Keane waves to a hefty red-haired woman trying to hold on a straw bonnet in the wind. The woman waves back, then puts her hands, one on each side of her head, hunched over a bit, like sheās trying to hold her head on instead of the hat. I havenāt seen her or the man steering before, but I have seen the boat, dockside, in Elk Rapids. Small cabin, gasoline engine, maybe a twenty-five-footer.
Irrelevant, I tell myself. Steamboats have dominated the inland waterway for better than fifty years, and they always will. But the fact is, the launch is looming, threatening to take over everything we know about ourselves, Cap and me, and itās coming full throttle. Keane is looming, too, seeming to personify that launch.
And itās more than that.
A strange thing has been happening ever since Mama died, and though I couldnāt have put it into words, Iām aware of a difference in my perception of things. Can feel a host of events lining up, waiting to happen, even though some things have already happened, and it will take no more than my acknowledgment to make them real. Some are on the verge of happening, threatening to sweep me into a future I have no part in, no love for. I know thereās danger in being lost, in being driven one direction, dragged another.
I see Keane is holding a small cardboard box that peeps. Iāve seen him before with boxes that peep, with birds in his hands or on his shoulder. He opens the box and feeds a baby gull something yellow out of an eyedropper.
Why you taking that bird with you everywhere? I ask.
Have to, he answers. Wouldnāt dare leave him at the house.
Why the hell not? I say. Why canāt you leave the stupid thing at home?
Just wouldnāt be a good idea, he says and jerks his head sideways, blinks fast, like someone is about to kick sand in his face. The look comes as a shock because Iāve never seen anything there but cocky and canāt imagine what this new expression has to do with the bird. Or with me. This is the first time Keane Mulcahey has appeared interesting to me, which confuses me even more.
The point here, the true absurdity of the day, has to do with the lunches, not Keaneās silly bird. The day was, in so many ways, a typical day for Cap and me aboard the Mabel and, in several important ways, not typical. I always hand out the lunches shortly before we dock at Spencerās Creek, which is what we call it, though it was renamed Alden in 1892 after some senator, I think. Mabel the person has made lunches, which she does every day we run, and they consist today of ham sandwiches, potato salad, and a dilled pickle. The boxes are made of heavy white cardboard, like a cigar box, only these are deeper, sq...