“Sure,” Thomas Hudson said. “Sometimes in the live-well of a smack in rough weather the groupers will get so seasick that they die.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” David asked his older brother.
“They get sick and they die,” young Tom said. “But what proves that it’s seasick?”
“I think you could say they were really seasick,” Thomas Hudson said. “I don’t know whether they would be if they could swim freely, though.”
“But don’t you see that in the reef they can’t swim freely either, papa?” David said. “They have their holes and certain places they move out in. But they have to stay in the holes for fear of bigger fish and the surge bangs them around just the way it would if they were in the well of a smack.”
“Not quite as much,” young Tom disagreed.
“Maybe not quite as much,” David admitted judiciously.
“But enough,” Andrew said. He whispered to his father, “If they keep it up, we won’t have to go.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“I like it wonderful but I’m scared of it.”
“What scares you?”
“Everything underwater. I’m scared as soon as I let my air out. Tommy can swim wonderfully but he’s scared underwater too. David’s the only one of us that isn’t scared underwater.”
“I’m scared lots of times,” Thomas Hudson told him.
“Are you really?”
“Everybody is, I think.”
“David isn’t. No matter where it is. But David’s scared now of horses because they threw him so many times.”
“Listen, punk,” David had heard him. “How was I thrown?”
“I don’t know. It was so many times I don’t remember.”
“Well let me tell you. I know how I was thrown so much. When I used to ride Old Paint that year he used to swell himself up when they cinched him and then later the saddle would slip with me.”
“I never had that trouble with him,” Andrew said smartly.
“Oh, the devil,” David said. “Probably he liked you like everybody does. Maybe somebody told him who you were.”
“I used to read out loud to him about me out of the papers,” Andrew said.
“I’ll bet he went off on a dead run then,” Thomas Hudson said. “You know what happened to David was that he started to ride that old broken-down quarter horse that got sound on us and there wasn’t any place for the horse to run. Horses aren’t supposed to go like that across that sort of country.”
“I wasn’t saying I could have ridden him, papa,” Andrew said.
“You better not,” David said. Then, “Oh hell, you probably could have. Sure you could have. But honestly, Andy, you don’t know how he used to be going before I would spook. I was spooked of the saddle horn. Oh the hell with it. I was spooked.”
“Papa, do we actually have to go goggle-fishing?” Andrew asked.
“Not if it’s too rough.”
“Who decides if it’s too rough?”
“I decide.”
“Good,” Andy said. “It certainly looks too rough to me.”
“Papa, have you still got Old Paint out at the ranch?” Andy asked.
“I believe so,” Thomas Hudson said. “I rented the ranch, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The end of last year.”
“But we can still go there, can’t we?” David asked quickly.
“Oh sure. We have the big cabin on the beach down by the river.”
“The ranch is the best place I was ever at,” Andy said. “Outside of here, of course.”
“I thought you used to like Rochester best,” David teased him. That was where he used to be left with his nurse when she stayed with her family in the summer months when the other boys went west.
“I did, too. Rochester was a wonderful place.”
“Do you remember when we came home that fall the time we killed the three grizzlies and you tried to tell him about it, Dave, and what he said?” Thomas Hudson asked.
“No, papa. I can’t remember exactly that far back.”
“It was in the butler’s pantry where you guys ate and you were having children’s supper and telling him about it and Anna was saying, ‘Oh my gracious, David, that must have been exciting. And what did you do then?’ and this wicked old man, he must have been about five or six then, spoke up and said, ‘Well that’s probably very interesting, David, to people who are interested in that sort of thing. But we don’t have grizzlies in Rochester.’ ”
“See, horseman?” David said. “How you were then?”
“All right, papa,” Andrew said. “Tell him about when he would read nothing but the funny papers and read funny papers on the trip through the Everglades and wouldn’t look at anything after he went to that school the fall we were in New York and got to be a heel.”
“I remember it,” David said. “Papa doesn’t have to tell it.”
“You came out of it all right,” Thomas Hudson said.
“I had to, I guess. It certainly would have been something pretty bad to have stayed in.”
“Tell them about when I was little,” young Tom said, rolling over and taking hold of David’s ankle. “I’ll never get to be as good in real life as the stories about me when I was little.”
“I knew you when you were little,” Thomas Hudson said. “You were quite a strange character then.”
“He was just strange because he lived in strange places,” the smallest boy said. “I could have been strange in Paris and Spain and Austria.”
“He’s strange now, horseman,” David said. “He doesn’t need any exotic backgrounds.”
“What’s exotic backgrounds?”
“What you haven’t got.”
“I’ll bet I’ll have them, then.”
“Shut up and let papa tell,” young Tom said. “Tell them about when you and I used to go around together in Paris.”
“You weren’t so strange then,” Thomas Hudson said. “As a baby you were an awfully sound character. Mother and I used to leave you in the crib that was made out of a clothes basket in that flat where we lived over the sawmill and F. Puss the big cat would curl up in the foot of the basket and wouldn’t let anybody come near you. You said your name was G’Ning G’Ning and we used to call you G’Ning G’Ning the Terrible.”
“Where did I get a name like that?”
“Off a street car or an autobus I think. The sound the conductor made.”
“Couldn’t I speak French?”
“Not too well then.”
“Tell me about a little later by the time I could speak French.”
“Later on I used to wheel you in the carriage, it was a cheap, very light, folding carriage, down the street to the Closerie des Lilas where we’d have breakfast and I’d read the paper and you’d watch everything that went past on the boulevard. Then we’d finish breakfast—”
“What would we have?”
“Brioche and café au lait.”
“Me too?”
“You’d just have a taste of coffee in the milk.”
“I can remember. Where would we go then?”
“I’d wheel you across the street from the Closerie des Lilas and past the fountain with the bronze horses and the fish and the mermaids and down between the long allées of chestnut trees with the French children playing and their nurses on the benches beside the gravel paths—”
“And the École Alsacienne on the left,” young Tom said.
“And apartment buildings on the right—”
“And apartment buildings and apartments with glass roofs for studios all along the street that goes down to the left and quite triste from the darkness of the stone because that was the shady side,” young Tom said.