The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (6 page)

The Fisherman

In the northcountry, if you have an abstract turn of mind, you tend to measure the approach of winter by the sun, how in late October it starts slipping toward the southern horizon, spending less and less time each day in the sky and, because of that, seems to move across the sky at an accelerated rate, as if in a hurry to depart from this chilled part of the globe and move on to the Southern Hemisphere, there to languish slowly through the long, hot afternoon of the pampas, the outback, and the transveldt. Or, on the other hand, you might measure the approach of winter by the ice, which seems a more direct, less abstract and mathematical way of going about it. You wake up one morning toward the end of October, and when you glance out your window at the lake, you see off to your left, where a low headland protects a shallow cove from the wind, a thin, crackled, pink skin of ice that spreads as far as the point and then suddenly stops. There is no ice yet in the swamp, where the trickling movement of inlets to the lake and the pressure of tree stumps, brush, and weeds forbid freezing this early, though by tomorrow morning or the next it will be covered there, too; and there is no ice where the lake empties across the flat stones of the old Indian fishing weirs to form the Catamount River, though it, too, will gradually freeze solidly over; and there is no ice along the western shore, for here the ground drops down quickly from the tree-covered hills, and the water is deep and black.

The man named Merle Ring, the old man whose trailer was the last one in the park and faced one end toward the weirs and the other toward the swamp, was what you might call an iceman. When the ground froze, his walk took on a springing, almost sprightly look, as if he were happy to find the earth rock-hard, impenetrable, and utterly unyielding. Every October, the morning he saw the first ice on Skitter Lake, he pulled on his mackinaw and trotted down to the shore as if to greet an old friend. He examined the ice, reading its depth, clarity, hardness, and extension the way you’d examine a calendar, calculating how many days and weeks he’d have to wait before the entire lake was covered with ten or more inches of white ice, cracking and booming through subzero nights as new ice below expanded against the old ice above, and he could set up his bob-house, chisel into the ice a half dozen holes, and commence his wintertime nights and days of fishing for pickerel, black bass, bluegills, and perch.

For over a half century Merle had been an ice fisherman. Where most people in this region endure winter to get to summer, Merle endured summer to get to winter. Ice fishing is not what you would ordinarily think of as a sport. You don’t move around much, and you don’t do it with anyone else. It’s an ancient activity, though, and after thousands of years it’s still done in basically the same way. You drop a line with a hook and piece of bait attached into the water, and you wait for an edible fish to take the bait and get hooked, and then you haul the thrashing fish through the hole and stash it with the others while you rebait your hook. If you are a serious ice fisherman, and Merle was serious, you build a shanty, and you drag it onto the lake, bank it around with snow, and let it freeze into the ice. The shanty, or bob-house, as it’s called, has trapdoors in the floor, and that’s where you cut the holes in the ice, usually with a harpoonlike, steel-tipped chisel called a spud or with a long-handled, steel auger. At some of the holes, depending on what kind of fish you are seeking and what kind of bait or lure you are using, you set traplines, or tip-ups, and at others you drop handlines. With live bait, minnows and such, you can use the traps, but if you’re jigging with a spoon or using ice flies, you need to keep your hand on the line.

The bob-house is only as large as need be, six feet by four feet is enough, and six feet high for a normal-sized person. At one end is a door with a high step-over sill to keep out the wind, and at the other a homemade woodstove. Along one of the long walls is a narrow bench that serves as a seat and also a bed when you want to nap or sleep over the night. Your traps and lines are set up along the opposite wall. There is a small window opening, but it remains covered by a hinged, wooden panel, keeping the bob-house in total darkness. When no light enters the bob-house, you can sit inside and peer through the holes in the ice and see clearly the world below. You see what the fish see, and you see them, too. But they cannot see you. You see the muddy lake bottom, undulating weeds, and decaying leaves, and, in a cold, green light, you see small schools of bluegills drift over the weed beds in search of food and oxygen, and coming along behind them three or four pickerel glide into view, looking for stragglers. Here and there a batch of yellow perch cruise past, and slowly, sleepily, a black bass. The light filtered through the ice is still, hard, and cold, like an algebraic equation, and you can watch the world pass through it with a clarity, objectivity, and love that is usually thought to be the exclusive prerogative of gods.

Until one winter a few years ago, Merle Ring was not taken very seriously by the other residents of the trailerpark. He was viewed as peculiar and slightly troublesome, mainly because, while he had opinions on everything and about everyone, when he expressed those opinions, which he did frequently, he didn’t make much sense to people and seemed almost to be making fun of them. For instance, he told Doreen Tiede, who was having difficulties with her ex-husband, Buck, that the only way to make him cease behaving the way he had behaved back when he was her husband, that is, as a drunken, brutal crybaby, was to get herself a new husband. “Who?” she asked him. They were in the car, and she was giving Merle a lift into town on her way to work at the tannery. Her daughter, Maureen, headed to the baby-sitter for the day, was in the back, where she was unaccustomed to sitting. Doreen laughed lightly and said it again, “Really, Merle,
who
should I marry?”

“It don’t matter. Just get yourself a new husband. That way you’ll get rid of Buck. Because he won’t believe you’re not his wife until you’re someone else’s.” He looked out the window at the birches alongside the road, leafless and gold-tinted in the morning sun. “That’s how I always did it,” he said.

“What?” She was clasping and unclasping the steering wheel as if her fingers were stiff and cold. This business with her ex-husband really bothered her, and it was hurting Maureen.

“Whenever I wanted to get rid of a wife, I married another. Once you’re over a certain age and have got yourself married, you stay married the rest of your life, unless the one you happened to be married to ups and dies. Then you can be single again.”

“Maybe Buck’ll up and die on me, then,” she said with a quick grimace.

“Mommy!” the child said and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

“I was only joking, sweets.” Doreen looked into the rearview mirror. “And stop sucking your thumb. You’re too old for that.” Then, to Merle: “Is that how you got to be single, after all those wives? How many, six, seven?”

“Numerous. Yup, the last one died. Just in time, too, because I was all set to get married again.”

“To who?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t have anybody in particular in mind at the time. But I sure was eager to get that last one off my back.”

“Jesus, Merle, isn’t anything sacred to you?”

“Sure.”

“For instance.”

“Marriage, for instance. But not husbands or wives,” he quickly added.

“I can’t take you seriously, Merle,” she said, and they drove on in silence.

That was the form most of his conversations took. It didn’t matter whom he was talking to, Merle’s observations and opinions left you feeling puzzled, a little hurt and irritated. To avoid those feelings most people told themselves and each other that Merle “wasn’t all there,” that he didn’t really understand how complicated life was, and that he really didn’t like anyone, anyhow. But because he was orderly and quiet and, like most small, neat, symmetrical men, physically attractive, and because his financial life was under control, he was accepted into the community. Also, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other if you took him seriously or if you followed his advice, and, as a result, Merle was never an agitated man, which, naturally, made him an attractive neighbor. No one thought him a particularly useful neighbor, however.

Until he won the state lottery, that is. That same October morning, the morning he saw the first ice on the lake and a little later had the brief conversation with Doreen Tiede concerning her ex-husband, Buck, he purchased, as he did every month, a one-dollar lottery ticket. It was a habit for Merle, ever since the state first introduced the lottery back in the 1960s, to go into town the day after his social security check arrived in the mail, cash his check at the bank, and on the way home stop at the state liquor store and buy a fifth of Canadian Club and a single lottery ticket. There were several types available, but Merle preferred the Daily Numbers Game, in which you play a four-digit number for the day. The winning number would be printed the next morning in the Manchester
Union Leader
. For your one-dollar bet, the payoff on four digits in the exact order was $4,500. At that point, your number went into another lottery, the Grand Prize Drawing, made later in the year, for $50,000. Merle won $4,500, and here’s how he did it. He bet his exact age, 7789—on October 30, 1978, he was seventy-seven years, eight months, nine days old. He had always bet his age, which of course meant that the number he played varied slightly, but systematically, from one month to the next. He claimed it was on principle, for he did not believe, on the one hand, in wholly giving over to chance or impulse or, on the other, in relying absolutely on a fixed number. It was a compromise, a realistic compromise, in Merle’s mind, between randomness and control, two extremes that, he felt, led to the same place— superstition. There were, of course, three months a year when, because he was limited to selecting four single-digit numbers, he could not play his exact age, and in those months, December, January, and February, he did not buy a ticket. But those were the months he spent ice-fishing, and it seemed somehow wrong to him, to gamble on numbers when you were ice-fishing. At least, that’s how he explained it.

Merle took his $4,500, paid the tax on it, and spent about $250 refurbishing his bob-house. It needed a new floor and roof and a paint job, and many interior fixtures had fallen into disrepair. The rest of the money he gave away, as loans, of course, but Merle once said that he never loaned money he couldn’t afford to give away, and as a result of this attitude, no one felt especially obliged to pay him back. Throughout November, Merle hammered and sawed away at his bob-house, while people from the trailerpark came and went, congratulating him on his good luck, explaining their great, sudden need for $300 or $400 or $500, then, while he counted out the bills, thanking him profusely for the loan. He kept his prize money inside a cigar box in his toolbox, a huge, locked wooden crate far too heavy for fewer than four men to carry and located just inside the door to his trailer.

Meanwhile, the ice on the lake gradually thickened and spread out from the coves and shallows, creeping over the dark water like a pale shadow. Merle’s bob-house was a handsome, carefully fitted structure. The bottom sills had been cut to serve as runners, so that Merle could push the building out onto the ice alone. The interior was like a ship’s cabin, with hinged shelves and lockers, hooks and drawers, a small woodstove made from a twenty-five-gallon metal drum, a padded bunk that folded against the wall when not in use, and so on. The interior wood, white pine, had been left raw and over the years had darkened from woodsmoke and moisture to the color of old briar. The exterior, of lapstrake construction to stave off the wind, Merle covered with a deep red stain. The pitched roof was of new, unstained, cedar shingles the color of golden palomino that would silver out by spring.

Clearly, the structure deserved admiration, and got it, especially from the denizens of the trailerpark, for the contrast between Merle’s bob-house and the cubes they all lived in was notable. As November wore on and Merle completed refurbishing the bob-house, people from the park daily came by and stood and studied it for a while, saying things and probably feelings things they had not said or felt before. Until Merle won the lottery, the people had more or less ignored the old man and his bob-house, but when they started coming around to congratulate him and ask for loans, they noticed the tiny, reddish cabin sitting on its runners a few feet off the lake, noticed it in a way they never had before, for they usually found him working there, and their attention got drawn to his work, and also they were curious as to how he was spending his money, so as to determine whether there would be any left for them. And when they saw the bob-house, really took a close look at its precision and logic and the utter usefulness of every detail, they were often moved in strange ways. It was as if they were deserted on an island together and suddenly had come upon a man among them who was building a seaworthy boat, and it was a boat that could carry no more than a single person off the island. They were moved by the sight of Merle’s bob-house, moved to hate the sight of their own rusting, tin-and-plastic trailers, the cheap, manufactured clutter of their shelters, and this unexpectedly disturbed them. The disturbance moved them, unfortunately, to envy Merle’s bob-house.

“How come you making it so fancy?” Terry Constant sneered.

Merle looked up from the floor where he was screwing down the new two-by-eight-inch plank flooring and saw the black man silhouetted darkly against a milk-white sky so that his features couldn’t be seen. He wore an orange parka and Navy watch cap and was chewing a toothpick. Merle said nothing and went back to work.

“You win the numbers, like they said?”

“Yup.”

“That’s how come you’re making it so fancy, then.”

“…”

“Luxury!”

“…”

“Who’s gonna see it, a little fish house? I coulda slapped this thing together in half the time for half the cost outa plywood.”

“…”

“This thing’ll last longer’n you will. You realize that? You’ll be dead a hundred years, and this thing’ll still be sitting here by the lake.”