The trail went uphill. He got hot. He sweated. He watched his father’s head and shoulders with feelings of admiration and love. It was the middle of the morning when they saw the clearing ahead of them through the trees. They pushed up the last slope and there was the pond and they were the first to have seen it since the hunters in the fall. The place was ugly but it had the exalting ugliness of the swamp. Leander looked into the bushes and found what he wanted—an old duck-shooting battery. He told Moses to get some wood for a fire and when the fire was lighted he took a can of tar out of his pack, rigged a crane of green wood over the fire and heated the tar. Then he swabbed the boat’s seams with hot tar which hardened quickly in the cold. They floated the battery and rowed out onto the water against the north wind. In spite of the tar the battery leaked but they baited their hooks and began to troll.
Five minutes later Leander’s rod bent, and with a grunt he set his hook and with Moses keeping the boat in motion he played a big trout that rose, a hundred feet to their stern, and then sounded and fought, taking his last sanctuary in the dim shade of the battery. Then Moses caught a fish and within an hour or so they had a dozen trout between them. Then it began to snow. For three hours they trolled in the snow squall without a strike, eating their dry sandwiches at noon. This was an ordeal and Moses had the sense to see that it was part of their trip. In the middle of the afternoon the squall blew off and then Leander had a strike. Then the fish began to bite again and before the sky began to darken they each had their limit. They pulled the battery up onto the banks—stupefied and brute tired—and stumbled down the trail to the lake, reaching this not much before dark. The wind had backed around to the northeast and from beyond the mouth of the swamp they could hear the roar of water but they crossed safely, with Moses bailing, and made the boat fast by her bow and stern. Moses lighted a fire while his father gutted four trout and fried them on the stove lid and when they had finished supper they mumbled their good nights, put out the lamp and went to bed.
That was a good trip and they returned to St. Botolphs with enough fish for all their friends and relations. On the next year it was time for Coverly to go. Coverly did have a runny nose, as it happened, but Sarah didn’t mention this. However, late on the evening before they left, she came into his room carrying a cook-book and put it into his pack. “Your father doesn’t know how to cook,” she said, “and I don’t know what you’ll eat for four days so I’ll give you this.” He thanked her, kissed her good night and left with his father before dawn. The trip was the same—the stop for lunch and whisky, and the long voyage up the lake in the Cygnet. At the camp Leander threw some hamburgers onto the stove lid and when they had finished supper they went to bed. Coverly asked if he could read.
“What’s your book, son?”
“It’s a cookbook,” Coverly said, looking at the cover. “Three hundred ways of preparing fish.”
“Oh Goddamn it to hell, Coverly,” Leander roared. “Goddamn it to hell.” He took the book out of his son’s hands, opened the door and threw it out into the night. Then he blew out the lamp, feeling once more—Icarus, Icarus—as if the boy had fallen away from his heart.
Coverly knew that he had offended his father but guilt would have been too exact a word for the pain and uneasiness he felt and this pain may have been aggravated by his knowledge of the conditions of Honora’s will. The sense was not only that he had failed himself and his father by bringing a cookbook to a fishing camp; he had profaned the mysterious rites of virility and had failed whole generations of future Wapshots as well as the beneficiaries of Honora’s largess—the Home for Aged Sailors and the Hutchens Institute for the Blind. He was miserable, and he would be made miserable again by the feeling that his human responsibilities had been abnormally enlarged by Honora’s will. This was some time later, a year, perhaps, and anyhow later in the year and the matter was a simple one, simpler than fishing—the village fair which he attended late in August with his father as he always did. (Moses had planned to go, but he grounded the Tern on a sandbar and didn’t get home until ten.) Coverly had an early supper in the kitchen. He wore his best white ducks and a clean shirt and had his allowance in his pocket. Leander gave him a toot on the whistle when the Topaze rounded the bend and swung the boat over to the dock, putting her into half-speed and then neutral but just touching the dock long enough for Coverly to jump aboard.
There was only a handful of passengers. Coverly went up to the cabin and Leander let him take the wheel. The tide was going out and they moved against it slowly. It had been a hot day and now there were cumulus clouds or thunderheads standing out to sea in a light of such clearness and brilliance that they seemed unrelated to the river and the little village. Coverly brought the boat up to the wharf neatly and helped Bentley, the deck hand, make her fast, and knocked together the old deck chairs, upholstered with carpet scraps, and lashed a tarpaulin over the pile. They stopped in Grimes’ bakery, where Leander ate a plate of baked beans. “Baked beans, the musical fruit,” the old waitress said. “The more you eat, the more you toot.” The mild crudeness of the joke had kept it fresh for her. Walking up Water Street toward the fair-grounds Leander let several loud farts. It was a summer evening so splendid that the power it had over their senses was like the power of memory and they could have kicked up their heels with joy when they saw ahead of them the matchboard fence and within it and above it the lights of the fair, burning gallantly against some storm clouds in which lightning could be seen to play.
Coverly was excited to see so many lights burning after dark and by the apparatus for the tightrope artist—a high pole secured by guy wires with a summit of fringed platforms and pedestals, all of it standing in the glare of two up-angled searchlights in whose powdery beams moth millers could be seen to swim like scraps of gum paper. There a girl with powdery skin and straw hair and a navel (Leander thought) deep enough to put your thumb into, and with rhinestones burning blue and red at her ears and breasts, walked and rode a bicycle over the tightwire, pushing her hair back now and then and hurrying a little it seemed, for the thunder was quickening and the gusty wind smelled clearly of rain and now and then people who were anxious or old or wearing their best clothes were leaving the bleachers and looking for shelter although not a drop of rain had fallen. When the high-wire act was over Leander took Coverly down to the head of the midway, where the argument for the cootch show had begun.
Burlymaque, burlymaque, see them strip the way you like, see them do the dance of the ages. If you’re old you’ll go home to your wife feeling younger and stronger and if you’re young you’ll feel happy and full of high spirits as youth should feel, said a man whose sharp face and sharp voice seemed wholeheartedly dedicated to chicanery and lewdness and who spoke to the crowd from a little red pulpit although they stayed at a safe distance from him as if he were the devil himself or at least the devil’s advocate, a serpent. Lashed to poles at his back and billowing in the rain wind like idle sails were four large paintings of women in harem dress, so darkened by time and weather that the lights played on them to no purpose and they might have been advertising cough syrup and cure-alls. In the center was a gate in which some lights spelled GAY PAREE—the gate scuffed and battered from its long summer travels up and down New England. Burlymaque, burlymaque, hootchie cootch, hootchie cootch, said the devil, striking the top of his little red pulpit with a roll of unsold tickets. I’m going to ask the little ladies out here just once more, just one more time, to give you some idea, a little idea of what you’ll see when you get inside.