Chapter VI

Big Jim lights a Winston.  He clicks his Zippo closed and his face disappears in a cloud of gray smoke.  I hand him his britches and he steps out of bed slowly, covered from head to toe except for his eyes and nose and the palms of his hands with thick black hair.  With his hands on his britches, he still manages the fiery Winston between his lips and clenched teeth even as he is overcome with a fit of coughing and turns bright red in the cheeks and forehead, his throat tightening so that the veins and muscles rattle looking like green and blue snakes shimmying up his neck beneath the pink skin.  I can hear the mess breaking up inside his chest and then the coughing subsides.  He takes a big drag off the Winston and taking it off of his lips, he hands it to me to hold.  The brown filter is wet at the end where it was in his mouth and though I have often held them before, the thing that surprises me the most is how hot the cigarette feels burning in my hand.  I tap the cigarette against Big Jim’s dressing table and let the ashes fall to the floor.  Big Jim knows how to work a cigarette, and as he takes it from me to put back in his own large big lip mouth, I cannot imagine him without it.

“That’s breakfast, a cigarette and a good cough.” As he says this, he pats me on the head, then tightens the thick leather belt around his belly, which is pale and growing large beneath all the black hair.

“You want I should knot up your hook for you?” I ask.

“You can do it?”

“Yes’em, been watchin’.”

“All right. Don’t need me to go on babying you forever?”

“No sir.”

“You get them rods ahl’eady for us and I’ll pull on this here smoke a bit more.”

Big Jim is my uncle.  He and Lightning Rod are brothers.  My Mama was their little sister.  When my Mama took sick, Lightning Rod, and Big Jim and Cherene all help to take care of me.  Lightning Rod works on the truck with my Daddy and Daddy always says, but not when Rod is around, that Lightning Rod is like his own flesh and blood brother.  Cherene came to live with us all when Mama got sick.  Big Jim, though, he is more like me in most ways than the others.  Big Jim does not work on the truck.  He is the one who taught me to fish the river and that is what he does most.

“Big Jim is an eater,” Grandma says when she piles up his plate with second helpings.  “All my boys are healthy eaters and that’s the way I raised ’em.”

“Gotcha boots with you, Derrick?” Big Jim asks, sitting on a stool working a knot on a number six hook with his big thick fingers, his eyes tight and squinting against the gray smoke rising up out of his mouth and into his brown eyes.

“I got ’em but I ain’t wearing them.” I manage to say downing a big gulp of hot coffee with milk and three sugars.

That’s the way I like it, real sweet.  Mama and Cherene laugh at me when I take my coffee that way, saying that it’s just a cup full of candy, but when I’m with Big Jim he lets me do pretty much anything I want and if three sugars in my coffee is what I want, Big Jim don’t even give two looks my way.  Now Lightning Rod, he’s almost as bad as Cherene and even though he’s younger than Big Jim, he minds over me like my Daddy.  I don’t spend so much time with Lightning Rod anymore; since he got older, he goes out to work with my Daddy.  He already seems older than Big Jim who never works for too long.

Both Big Jim and Lightning Rod love to fish the river the way I do.  It bothers me that Lightning Rod never has time and is always tired and doesn’t come fishing with us anymore.  Sometimes in the evening I catch him still in his stinking work clothes sitting quietly in the room with the Old Man.  He holds the Old Man’s hand that never holds back and I hear him whispering, though I don’t dare to go close enough to make out the words.  Most of those nights I think that I am afraid to hear those words and so I stand quiet in the hallway, the air slowly coming out of me so as not to creak the wood floor and I listen to the sound of Lightning Rod’s whisperings.  I can feel the moistness of his tongue inside his talking mouth; and hear his lips come apart and together, I shiver at the music of his quiet with the Old Man.

“If you ain’t wearing your boots, then you ain’t coming with me”, Big Jim tells me.  “Your Mama’d have me hung up by the tenders if you ripped open your foot or got bit by something.”

That’s it then, my Mama’s voice speaking through Big Jim.   I fiddle with my tackle for a minute, then pull on my boots not lacing them as Big Jim lights up another Winston and leans his thick face through his own cloudy exhalation and says, “Ready?”

Where we come to the river, the bank is all chewed up, dead grass and churned earth give way to the red clay basin of the river.  The channels are all changed beneath the surface of the water and they tell us that the currents are strong and not to go swimming.  A girl up in Canin was washed away, disappeared in the rusty current as her mother bathed her in the river.  The Sheriff came by the next morning and he and my Daddy went up along the banks looking for the washed-up remains but found nothing.  I felt her pass through the river in the night.  I dreamt her small hand reaching up through the murky water toward the moon, her eyes open and flooded with the light, and a last bubble of her dead breath rolling over her teeth like a droplet of mercury and away from her forever.

We do not talk about these things.  Big Jim and I only bait our hooks and cast them on the water.