Hostages to Fortune (6 page)

The full nets strained their muscles too, but tired as you soon were you worked on, for the herring must be harvested while they were there. Already around your feet spent fish were washing tail first back to the river, back to sea. You slithered and slipped among the rocks, fell in over your boot tops, and still you dipped and hoisted, dipped and hoisted until the plastic pails were brim full. Struggling back up the long steep bank with one of those in each hand you stopped often to rest, catch your breath.

At home all hands fell to scaling, gutting, trimming, washing, salting down the fish in kegs and crocks. That evening you ate hearty—of anything except fish. That night you slept the sodden sleep of one drugged by hard repetitive labor and next morning you woke stiff and sore in your every cell. Waiting for you would be a breakfast prepared by Tony featuring scrambled eggs and herring roe.

Their hands would be still a mass of cuts when the Curtis clan came back days later to help with the second stage, and the salt stung. Soon the cavernous old kitchen reeked of boiling vinegar and onions and pickling spices and above all, as these were chopped in pieces, of fish. When the work was done every surface was covered with glistening jars.

The herring to be smoked were left whole. They were skewered through the eyes on metal rods and hung in racks in the smokehouse. The firebox was outside the smokehouse, connected to it by a stovepipe. Throughout the night Tony and he took turns getting up and feeding the fire with corncobs and green hickory. In the morning the fish had been transmuted overnight from new silver to old gold. For days afterwards you smelled of fish and smoke and spices and vinegar and through the year the taste of herring brought back to you memories of the fishing and the fun, the fellowship.

If it should be an autumn visit to Hudson that he was on then it would be still dark when Tony knocked on his bedroom door in the morning and recited:

Waken, lords and ladies gay!

On the mountain dawns the day;

All the jolly chase is here

With hawk and horse and hunting spear;

Hounds are in their couples yelling,

Hawks are whistling, horns are knelling;

Merrily, merrily mingle they.

Waken, lords and ladies gay!

Relieved of his weight, the old canopy bed gave a groan. He washed but he did not shave. This morning was a holiday from shaving and whiskers were protection to the face against the wintry wind from off the water. He pulled on long silk underwear and, over these, long woolen ones, a wool shirt, and thick wool pants. The odor of mothballs in his clothes was another association with this season and this house. Going down the paneled and tapestried high-ceilinged hallways with their family portraits and pedestals and all that old oriental opulence, you felt as though you were living in Sir Walter Scott's time and were on a weekend at a laird's great country estate.

Tony, at the kitchen range, would be just easing an omelette onto its back. Kippers in a crucible—a prosaic skillet, really—were undergoing alchemy. An early riser, restless for each day to begin, Tony cooked breakfast for himself and whoever else was up each morning. Now he would intone:

Louder, louder chant the lay:

Waken, lords and ladies gay!

They would finish it together:

Tell them youth and mirth and glee

Run a course as well as we;

Time, stern huntsman, who can balk?

Staunch as hound and fleet as hawk;

Think of this, and rise with day,

Gentle lords and ladies gay!

How lightly they had said it then, and now youth and mirth and glee had run their course, and time, stern huntsman, had hunted down Riverside's gentle lord, but in those days they were full of mirth as Tony took a stone bottle from the freezer and the two of them tossed down with a toast to the day their time-honored eye-opener, a jigger of Dutch gin, icy in the mouth, fiery further down.

“What's our weather, gentle lord?” he would ask.

Tony always knew. His first act on getting up in the morning was to step outside and, while relieving himself, assess the weather. Not even a blizzard could stop him.

“Dark, dreary, dank, and dismal.”

“Ducky!”

The lunch hamper would be already packed, so, breakfast finished, they would go to the den to get their guns and their gear. For years he had left his here at Riverside, Tony being his only duck-shooting companion. Men with whom you looked forward to spending all day in a duckblind no bigger than an outhouse were few.

It was fitting that he leave his gun here. This was its home. It was an under-and-over double-barrel made expressly for Tony's father by a famed London gunsmith. The finely checkered walnut stock had the figure and the finish of polished agate, the engraving of the metal displayed its breeding by its lack of display. The gun that had fit the father did not fit the son, so Tony said. It pained Tony to shoot a better gun than his friend. He offered this one to him.

“But, Tony,” he had said, “I'd be afraid to shoot a gun that fine.”

“Oh, just be careful where you point it,” said Tony.

Day would be dawning, the light straining through the tent of clouds stretched low overhead. The wind out of the north would be laden with mist. In hip boots and down-filled jackets spotted in camouflage, carrying guns, hamper, shellboxes, they went down the path that parted the dense growth of periwinkle. Nero, the black Labrador retriever, bounded and frisked ahead of them.

At this time of year the boathouse sheltered the Thayer clan's entire collection of vessels. Boats were handed down in that family the way clothes were in others. Resting on saw-horses, suspended from beams, were sailboats for every age and level of competence, punts, skiffs, sculls, even a kayak, and there were the iceboats. In addition to those accumulated by his ancestors, Tony owned several that he had been given as the popularity of the sport among the river families, once great, declined. Stripped down to nothing more than a pair of crossed sticks, a mast with a set sail, a tiller and two shallow trays, one for the driver and one for a single passenger to lie prone upon, the whole thing poised on runners, an iceboat had but one purpose: speed. In a high wind one of those things could attain a hundred and thirty miles an hour; that, held by Tony, was, in fact, the current record. He had them in sizes from eighteen to thirty feet long. Trim, lean, even gaunt, and so strictly limited in function they brought to mind his Anthony's hawks, the little merlin up to the big goshawk, which, even at rest on their perches, seemed instinct with swiftness, with the same inherent capacity of an inert cartridge to explode into flight. After seeing it but before trying it himself he had urged his friend to give up iceboating as too dangerous. A man with a wife and child owed it to them to forgo some forms of fun. To this Tony replied that he had heard of a woman's being thrown overboard once and fracturing an arm but that it was a sport for which no fatality was recorded. And after experiencing it, bounding over the frozen waves with a noise like a galloping herd, flying sometimes a foot above the glazed and dazzling surface and feeling in his face the sting of the icy spray thrown back by the runners, he himself had surrendered to its appeal.

But today it was onto the water, not onto the ice. Their punt, double-pointed for getting out of dead-end windings too narrow to turn around in, was waiting on the ramp. They stuffed two canvas bags with decoys and hauled the boat down to the water. Nero leaped aboard and seated himself in the bow: a fitting figurehead. He took his place amidship and Tony launched them. The motor responded to the pull of the cord, the bow rose high out of water and they planed across the cove headed west. The rising tide was near the full. To pass under the railroad trestle they had to duck their heads.

Inside the cove, separated from the river by the railway embankment, the water had been smooth but on the river the wind funneling down the valley raised waves and the ride was rough as the boat crested and bottomed, crested and bottomed. A southbound freight train, its length lost in the mist, overtook them and clanked alongside with a noise like the links of a chain being dragged over the ties.

The train's caboose had disappeared into the mist when they turned from the river and passed under the trestle into the bay. Under reduced power they crossed the open water to the marsh. There Tony cut the motor and took it aboard and stood with his long push-pole. In their jump-shooting it was always Tony who poled. There was a knack to it, a final twist of the pole against your hip, gondolier fashion, that momentarily turned the pole into a tiller and steered the boat through the tortuous narrow channels, a knack he could never get.

They entered one of these channels tunneled by tall purple loosestrife and cattails. Their heads frazzled and faded, these latter looked like oversized cotton swabs. Darkness was lifting as they glided silently along the channels and through still pools that shone like quicksilver. At their edges floated pinfeathers plucked from themselves by preening ducks. He could just see to shoot now and he loaded his gun and stood, bracing his right leg against the seat, rocking in rhythm to Tony's steady stroke of the pole. Their progress resembled that of the lone gallinule that swam in spurts ahead of them, its head bobbing.

It would be a day early in the season but it would not be opening day. That they passed up. Too many green and greedy gunners then, who opened fire on birds impossibly out of range and scared them off from gunners into whose range they were being decoyed. The bay sounded like warfare then, and sometimes erupted into it, with shots exchanged not far above heads. Now you shared it with fewer, more dedicated, more experienced, and more courteous sportsmen.

They rounded a bend and a pair of mallards flushed, beating the water with their wings in their takeoff. They were thirty yards away when his swing picked up and momentarily blotted out one with the muzzle of the gun. Then the sky reappeared momentarily and in that moment he fired. The boom reverberated around the bay and without pause he swiveled, picked up, at forty yards, the second bird, covered it, swung past, taking a slightly longer lead this time, fired, and followed through on his swing. Whether he had touched either bird he did not know. Or rather, he knew he had, but he had not seen it happen.

“Keep that up,” said Tony as Nero swam back with both birds by their necks in his mouth, “and you'll have time on your hands waiting for me to fill my limit.”

The shots had disturbed the birds in the area and they took to wing out of range. Without putting up another they reached their blind on the edge of and commanding its own spot of open water. They set out their stool of decoys, concealed the boat, and climbed into the blind. They had built it on weekends in early autumn, boating out on a falling tide with poles for the stilts and boards for the floor and the walls and hemlock boughs to camouflage the whole thing, working when the bay was drained, then boating back when the tide had risen to float them. Just out of gunshot range from one another, other blinds were going up on those weekends. Come opening day of the season, the bay looked like the site of some primitive tribe of bog dwellers. Yours brought back to you the clubhouse you had built with some playmate as a boy.

They stood back to back and each scanned his section of the gray sky. To the west the mountains loomed loftily, their tops still indistinct, as though the day came up from earth and forced the night to lift. Guns were beginning to sound now, most often automatics emptying their legal limit of three shots, in fire so rapid the echoes, trapped by the low-lying cloud cover, got in one another's way.

“Wood ducks!” Tony hissed. “Wood ducks!”

He too had spotted them, a flock of seven or eight, and had identified them by their speed and by their characteristic bunching and scattering in flight and by their habit, unique to them among ducks, of turning their heads in flight. Both froze, hunching to conceal the white of their faces, not daring to look to the side farther than the rolling of their eyes allowed. This was the prescribed reaction to the appearance of all ducks, but wood ducks were not to be missed. Not because they were the most prized on the plate, for they were not, but because theirs was the plumage most sought after by tiers of trout flies. The five most indispensable patterns required feathers from the cape of the wood duck drake, and the sale of them was illegal. You got your own or you got none—unless, as both were hoping now, you had a father and a godfather to get them for you. For years the breed had been so near extinction that all shooting of them was banned. They had recovered from decimation and come back in numbers enough to permit shooting—limit one per day. Would these wing over now or would they circle and come back, maybe flock in to the decoys?

“They're turning,” Tony whispered. “They're circling. They're coming in. Oh, damn it, they've seen us! Now or never!”

This was pass-shooting at tiny targets going fifty miles an hour. The eye had to focus and function with the speed of a camera shutter. He chose a bird out of the flock, tracked it on its line of flight, overtook and passed it, fired and kept swinging. When he looked back the crumpled bird was tumbling out of the sky, striking the water with a splash. Tony too had scored.

These two would not be plucked, they would be skinned whole. They would make many trout flies; even so, they would soon be used up. The flytying that Anthony had taken up as a hobby had become a business. In the beginning he sold flies to the members of the fishing club. They showed them to friends and soon he was filling mail orders. Now he had several part-time employees, boys and girls whom he had trained and who tied flies as a cottage industry. Never one to do things by halves, he bred his own gamecocks. He kept them in coops and incubated the eggs, always in quest of a strain that would consistently produce feathers with hackles of the requisite stiffness and of the perfect subtle shade of dun blue. Toward the undesirable poults he was unsentimental, businesslike. Lately he had found a use for them. He fed them to the hawks he had begun to fancy.