Holy Mackerel

In the spring of 1979, following my mother’s death, our azaleas were as bright as ever, but my father and aunt never mentioned them. The country was in a recession, again people waited in lines for gas, and my father was out of work for weeks at a time. The residual bills from my mother’s illness, despite insurance, strained our family, and Aunt Lil stayed up late cutting coupons from the paper and sewing my torn pants. Then there was my brother, a three-year-old who needed daycare so Lil could return to work. My father sold some of our antiques and split firewood, hustling an odd job here and there. He never turned angry or dangerously despondent, he just stilled. I was thirteen. He let me do what I wanted, never checking on my homework or chores, and I could come and go pretty much as I pleased. I was running and lifting weights, my body slowly changing. I tried out for the junior high basketball team and got cut. My father didn’t say anything. In the evening he drank beer, watched a game on television, and occasionally went out to the local gin mill with a friend.

“Come on, Dad,” I shook him from his sleep on the couch.

“Okay, okay,” he raised a hand in surrender.

He had been out late but promised to take me fishing in the morning. I got him up. Lil cooked breakfast, but he hardly ate. His truck was full of scrap metal, so we loaded the jon boat in the back of the family station wagon. It was May, and I was keen to jig for mackerel, which entered the spring Sound in vast numbers, readily biting anything twinkled before their pointed mouths.

We drove past old Ralph’s Fishing Station, condemned by the Town of Brookhaven and deserted. When we last saw Ralph he looked miserable. “Dey wanna make a park,” he said, egg-shaped pouches under his eyes. Ralph and Barbara fought hard against eviction, lost their lease, but were offered new property above Mt. Sinai’s east inlet. “Ralph works hard and drinks hard,” my father said. “We’ll see what happens.”

“Barbara’s a really hard worker, too,” I said.

My father looked at me, then turned back to the road, and there was long silence in his foggy head. “Yeah,” he finally spoke. “They’re a good team. They’ll make it.”

We followed the winding road around Mount Sinai Harbor and pulled into the parking lot facing the sound at Cedar Beach. A nor’wester was pushing swells and whitecaps. “We’re not getting out there today,” my father said.

“It’s not that bad,” I countered.

“You wanna drown for a damn mackerel? Don’t be silly.”

We drove to the harbor side, and it was relatively calm, although a stiff breeze clanked lines against the aluminum masts of sailboats.

“This looks okay,” he said. “Why don’t you try for some flounder?”

“I don’t have any bait.”

“Pull some mussels off those pilings.”

I rolled my eyes in frustration. “That stinks,” I said.

“Well then, we’re going home.” And as he put the car in gear, I relented. We backed down the ramp, launched the boat, and my father helped me pick some mussels, then told me he was staying in the car. He needed more sleep. “Stay in the harbor,” he said. “I’ll be right here. Okay?”

It was okay. I headed out, waving to him over the noise of the outboard, into the channel past a sailboat named Sanity. Fishing alone was fine with me. The air was chilly, but spring was greening the marsh and leafing the high wooded hills to the west. Anchoring near Crystal Brook, I rigged for flounder, pulled out the stained plywood cutting board, cracked a mussel, baited up, and dropped. The tide was rising, black ducks flew overhead, and a mute swan parted the cord grass. I thought of those times my father and I brought home a bucket of flounder that Mom admired. Sometimes the fillets were thin, but she dipped them in egg and breadcrumbs, shook on Old Bay Seasoning, fried them in butter, and set them on the table with tartar sauce and ketchup. Secretly she would buy more flounder fillets at Wally Brown’s fish market to supplement our meager harvest, the impossibly thick pieces heavy on the fork and satisfying in our mouths. “You guys did a nice job catching these flounder,” she’d say. I would mention Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes, and my mother would laugh, “So, you did learn something in Sunday school.” Aunt Lil reminded me that Jesus’s disciples were fishermen and that I should follow their example.

I thought of my beer-drinking father listening to the Mets while his neglected pole slumped against the side of the boat, and me, eating two sandwiches and a bag of chips washed down with orange soda, worshipping a ten-inch flounder like some old Cananite kneeling before scaly-suited Dagon, the fish god who promised a bountiful catch and more religious holidays in the school calendar. Even the apostles started out as wayward goofballs, so maybe we did have a chance at respectable discipleship. I thought of the grief the disciples felt when Jesus died, their amazement when he appeared after the resurrection and gobbled down a piece of broiled fish, and then their elation and transformation over his proven promise of eternal life. But even as a child I knew the resurrection was no different than the fantastic stories of the Setauket Indians who sent their dead drifting into a glorious, torch-lit, fish-filled afterlife.

Anchored alone in Mt. Sinai Harbor, soft lapping under the hull, my hand holding a rod at attention for the slightest sign of life, a single gull hovering above, I just started crying. I didn’t cry at my mother’s funeral. It all seemed confusing, her death impossible, worse, an intrusion into my life. How could she have changed so much? How could she have grown so weird, sick, distant, and ugly? My once beautiful mother, bald and bloated, wandering madly through the house or screaming at me. Then I felt a wave of guilt. I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry—and I wept on.

Maybe we have souls, I thought, but really we are just animals with brains and hearts, and when they are destroyed and fail, we disappear. Mussels smashed on the cutting board. Our seventh-grade science teacher explained that a salt deficiency in our brains could render us idiots, could make happy people depressed and suicidal. We are fragile estuaries with billions of neurons flashing like shiners. I prayed to God to heal my mother. I prayed with utter sincerity. Now it seemed silly. It was just nature. She got sick and died. Like fish, we would all die in the bucket or in the dark tide, lost to sickness, age, or bigger fish. I could die right now, tie the anchor around my neck, and roll over the side.

I got a bite—a tentative tapping, then a tug—so I set the hook, reeling in a hand-sized flounder. I carefully unhooked the fish and let it go. “Not today,” I said aloud. Five minutes later I caught an even smaller one. Flounder made a weak showing that year. No one else was fishing for them. Mackerel. I had to get out and get the mackerel.

I started the outboard, pulled up the anchor, and shot across the harbor toward the inlet. Cormorants came up black and shimmering with sand eels in their bills. A returning cruiser rose and fell as it entered the breakwater. It was still rough. With the engine in neutral, I changed out my flounder rig for a Christmas tree, a line of red and green two-inch tubes on long hooks weighted with a two-ounce diamond jig, ready for mackerel.

The inlet was a horse market of confused water. Back in gear and surging forward into a large swell, a wall of water came over the bow and soaked me. Other waves came in from the side. Scared but not sure how to turn around, I pointed the boat’s square face toward the biggest waves and pressed on, salt water drenching my body and stinging my eyes. A couple inches of water sloshed around my feet, so I picked up the little bucket that held the mussels and bailed with one hand, keeping my other on the tiller throttle. Beyond the jetty, the waves became more regular, and I could see a line of boats about a half mile from shore. That’s where I needed to be. My father was sleeping. He’d never know.

Fortunately mackerel are fished on a drift, not by anchoring. I approached the line of boats, most of them twenty feet or longer, put the engine in neutral, and dropped my line. My father and I had jigged for mackerel the year before on a calm day from a friend’s runabout. I knew how to do it, but this tossing made things tough. Head down and picking a bit of backlash out of my reel, the boat suddenly lurched to the side and I smashed my hand on the oarlock. I put the engine back in gear, got aligned in the waves, and started jigging, my hand throbbing and swelling. Instantly there were fish.

The Atlantic mackerel is a two-pound torpedo that fights like hell. Get three or four on the line, and it’s a rod-bending thrill that rewards in astonishing color—an iridescent blue-green back vermiculated in dark stripes. Mackerel are easy to grab, and I quickly unhooked the first fish and was back in the water.

Boats drifted by pulling up dozens of fish. Mackerel-crowded seas, indeed, I would think back years later reading Yeats, amazed that my own young heart was so “sick with desire.” One cruiser got close, and a man yelled, “You shouldn’t be out here, kid. It’s way too rough.” A woman in yellow raingear fishing sturdily off the stern of a forty-foot gameboat shouted, “Hey, do your parents know you’re out here?” The way she cocked her head and studied me, I wondered if she knew them. “Put on your life jacket,” she told me. We never wore life jackets. Mine floated next to the gas tank.

Over fifty mackerel flopped and drummed on the wet floor of my boat. Holy mackerel—I suddenly understood the expression as a blessing. Our line of boats drifted closer to Cedar Beach, and I could see people jogging and walking dogs. A boy was flying a kite. Not thinking anything of it at first, I heard a persistent car horn. And when I looked over I saw headlights flashing. It was our station wagon. It was my father. He got out of the car and waved his arms. I waved back. He pumped his pointed hand toward the inlet.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said when I cut the engine, gliding the boat onto the ramp. “Didn’t you hear what I said? Are you deaf?”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not using this boat for the rest of the summer.”

“Why?” I yelled back. “’Cause you’re too scared? ’Cause you’d rather get drunk and sleep all day?”

“Let’s go,” he said. “Get that engine off.”

My hand swollen and bruised, I unscrewed the outboard, lifted it off the transom, and set it on the ramp. We tried lifting the boat, but it was too heavy with all the fish and water, so we unloaded the gear, pulled the drain plug, and stuffed the fish into burlap bags. My father was silent.

At home I washed and put away equipment, and my father brought out the Castro Oil can. “You know what to do,” he said. I filled the can with water, set the engine inside, and ran it to flush out the corrosive salt. At the sound of the engine the neighbors came over, as they often did, to see what we caught. “Mackerel,” my father said. “Take all you want.” Grouchy old Mr. Stanley from next door wrapped a couple in newspaper and muttered, “Thanks.” My three-year-old brother, David, came out with Aunt Lil. “You catched fishes,” the little boy chirped, picking one up with both hands and bringing it to his lips for a kiss. Herbie drove up and looked at the heap of mackerel. “Holy mackerel! How the hell did you get these? There was small craft warnings this morning.” My father just shook his head and said nothing. I smiled at Herbie and watched him light a cigarette. “You wouldn’t be smiling,” he said and paused to take a drag and exhale, “if you went swimming in that cold water. I known a few that’s done it, and they ain’t around to tell the story.”

But here I am, telling you the story, reminding you to wear life jackets and know the water that your craft can handle. Don’t drown for a damn mackerel! I say. But going out that morning also saved me from drowning.