The Lives of Rocks (24 page)

At Point Clear, we'd meet up again for dinner—Otto and my parents tanned from the extravagances of their own day, and relaxed: appearing not quite sated—never that—but almost. Even then I felt acutely that I was between two lands.
I wanted to take but I also wanted to give: though what, I wasn't sure.

Were there others like me? I had no idea. It was entirely possible that I was alone in this regard: that even amid bounty, too much space surrounded me.

 

The jubilee was a phenomenon that usually happened only once every few summers in south Alabama, following afternoon thunderstorms in the upland part of the state. The storms would drop several inches of rain into all the creeks and streams and rivers in a short period of time. That surge of fresh cold rainwater would then come rushing down toward the Gulf, gaining speed and potency, doubling at every confluence, until finally, a few hours later—almost always in the middle of the night—the wall of fresh water would come rolling into the Gulf.

The moon was involved with the jubilee, too, though I don't know exactly how. Perhaps the moon had to be full, and pulling out a big rip tide just when all the extra fresh water came gushing out—or maybe it was the other way around, and the moon had to be bringing a high tide of sea-water upriver—but anyway, the bottom line, or so said the brochure I had read at the front desk, was that when the jubilee hit the flush of fresh water would stun or kill all the saltwater fish in the vicinity, and that the fresh water would also carry out on its plume a swirling mix of freshwater creatures—catfish, gar, crawdads, bullfrogs—that would also be salt-stunned.

It was a rare thing, almost a once-in-a-lifetime thing, to see it. I made sure our family's name was on the list for the wake-up call. The first year I signed us up, I was seven years old. I'd lie there in our cottage every night, watching the
moon through the window, waiting for the phone to ring. The woman at the front desk told me that whenever you answered the phone and heard the one word—“Jubilee!”—it meant the thing was on.

I would lie awake wondering if it had rained in the uplands that day. I would strain my ears to see if I could hear the shouts of “Jubilee!” drifting across the golf course, and up and down the beach.

Summer after summer passed in this manner, with me wandering solitary along the edges of the bright and well-kept lawns and gardens of wealth in the daytime, and lying there in the cottage each night, trying to stay awake for as long as I could, awaiting the call.

I imagined that the jubilee was an event of such significance that the hotel staff kept someone down at the beach each night on permanent lookout, like a lifeguard perched high in a chair, waiting to report its arrival.

In the summer when I was eleven, finally, the call did come, but I was asleep, and didn't find out about it until weeks later, when we were back home. The phone had rung at two
A.M
., and when my father leaned over and picked up the phone, a woman's voice cried “Jubilee!” and then hung up. Neither my father nor my mother had a clue what a jubilee was, much less that I had signed us up for one.

 

The year that I was twelve—the year I finally saw the jubilee—I slept by the phone. It was very rare to have two jubilees in two years—and this time I got to the phone, and got to hear the woman say it.

She uttered just that one word—
Jubilee!
—and then hung up. I hurried outside, and could see other people
already moving down toward the beach in the moonlight—some in bathrobes, others in shorts and sandals. Some had flashlights, though the moon was so bright you didn't really need one.

I went back inside and got my family up. At first they didn't want to go, but I kept haranguing them, and finally they awakened.

By the time we made it down to the water, people were already wading out into the ocean. The first thing that hit me—beyond the beauty of the moonlight on the water—was the scent of fresh fish.

It wasn't quite as I had pictured it would be. I had imagined that there might be a thousand people, or even ten thousand; but instead there were only about forty of us, moving slowly through the waves, our heads down, searching for the stunned fish floating belly-up. I had thought people would hear about it on the radio stations, and through word of mouth, and that there would be cars parked all up and down the beach—that people would have come all the way from Mobile and Pensacola, and even farther: Biloxi, Hattiesburg, and the uplands—Selma, Columbus, and Tallahassee. But instead it was just us: the resort-goers.

I had thought you would be able to see the jubilee, too—that the plume of fresh water would be darker, like spilled ink, and that you would be able to discern precisely where it entered and mixed with the bay, being diluted and spread laterally by the longshore currents. But it wasn't that way at all. I couldn't tell any difference between salt water and fresh. The waters looked just as they always had. Every now and then I could catch the faintest whiff of something really fresh and dark—organic, like black dirt, forest, nutmeat,
rotting bark—but always, just as soon as I became aware of that dark little thread of scent, it would disappear, absorbed by the mass of the ocean.

I had thought there would be more fish, too. I had thought there would be millions. Instead, there were only thousands. Some of the smaller ones appeared dead, but the larger ones were just stunned, swimming sideways or upside down, gasping and confused. They were out there for as far as I could see—white bellies shining in the moonlight—and other fish were careening as if drunk against my legs—fish panicked, fish drowning, is what it looked and felt like—and people carried pillowcases and plastic bags over their shoulders, filling them as if they were gathering squash or potatoes from a garden.

Everyone participated. Class distinctions fell away, and Otto and my mother and father and I loaded our pillowcases right alongside the rich and the superrich, as well as alongside the hotel workers, filling our pillowcases with our catches: crabs, catfish, red snapper, flounder, shrimp, bullfrogs, sheepshead, angelfish... We didn't have to worry about sharks, because they wouldn't come in to where the fresh water was mixing. It was all ours. For that one night—or those few hours—it was all ours. Father and Mother were very happy, as were all of the people out on the beach, and it felt to me as if I had been drawn already into some other, older world—the land of adults—without having quite yet petitioned for or having even desired such entrance, still pleased as I was by childhood.

In remembering the jubilee, I recall how different the quality of sound was. It wasn't extraordinarily loud; it was just different, a combination of sounds I had never heard before.
The waves were shushing and the confused fish were slapping the water as they thrashed and fought the poison of the fresh water. There were a lot of birds overhead, gulls mostly, squalling and squealing, and the ten-piece band from the restaurant had come down and set up along the water's edge, and they were playing.

The hotel staff had set up dining tables with linen tablecloths out on the beach, and they had lit torches and candles all along the shore, and around the dining tables. The chefs had come down to the jubilee also, and the chefs were chopping off fish heads and gutting the entrails, slicing off filets and frying and boiling and grilling a dozen different recipes at once, luminous in their bright white aprons, knives flashing in the candlelight. There were cats everywhere, cats coming from out of the sea oats to take those fish heads and run back off into the bushes with them.

There was a boy walking up and down the beach, staying almost always just at the farthest edge of the light from the candles and lanterns and bonfires. He was barefoot, like all of us, and shirtless, and was wearing blue jeans that had been cut off at the knees; and as he paced back and forth, observing us, I could tell that he was agitated. His agitation stood out even more, surrounded as he was by the almost somnolent contentedness of everyone else. The rest of us sloshed around in the waves, our heads tipped slightly downward like wading birds', with all the fish in the world available to us, it seemed, just for the taking.

The boy was roughly my age, and because he was hanging back at the edge of firelight, back in the blue-silver light of the moon, that is how I thought of him, as the blue boy. I hadn't seen him around earlier in the week, and I had the
feeling that rather than a hotel guest he was some feral wayfarer who had wandered down our way from a distant, ragged shack back in the palmetto bushes.

He looked hungry, too—like those cats that kept dragging away the fish heads—and though I couldn't hear any voices over the little lapping sounds of the surf, I got the impression that he would sometimes call out to us, asking for something, and I avoided observing him too closely, out of concern that he might somehow seek me out.

 

Once the chefs had most of the fish prepared, they began ringing a series of large copper bells mounted on heavy wrought-iron stands and tripods, and as that gonging carillon rolled out across the waves, most of us turned and waded back to shore, to seat ourselves at the long dining tables set up in the sand; though still a few people remained out in the water. Some of them had borrowed tools from the gardener's shed and were raking in the fish, or shoveling them into baskets—unwilling to stop, even when the feast was ready and waiting, and set before them.

We ate and ate. The chefs mixed champagne and orange juice in pitchers for us at sunrise and blew out the torches. We could see the fish out in the ocean starting to recover when the sun came up. The surface of the water was thrashing again as fish spun and flopped and rolled back over, right side up.

The blue boy had disappeared when the thirty or so of us had turned and come marching back in from out of the waves; but now he reappeared, came out into the soft gray light of dawn, and I could see that my initial impression had been correct, that he was scraggly and feral, as rough as a
cob; and that indeed he was agitated, for now he waded out into the waves and began scolding the dozen or so guests who were still out there with pitchforks and shovels and bushel-baskets and trash cans, still raking in those stressed and wounded and compromised fish. He was hollering at them also to leave the biggest, healthiest fish, and was shouting at them to come on in, that they had taken enough, had taken more than enough.

With the boy's attention focused elsewhere, I was free to observe him without being noticed, and there was something about him that made me think that he was not from this country—though what other country he might have been from, I could not have said. A country, I supposed, where they had run out of fish.

The pitchforkers ignored the blue boy, however, and kept on reaching for more and more fish, stabbing and spearing them, scooping and netting them into their baskets, until finally all the fish were gone and the sun was bright in the sky: and the blue boy just stood there, staring at them, nearly chest deep in the waves, and then he turned and made his way back to shore, and disappeared into the dunes.

The sun rose orange over the water, and the ocean turned foggy gray, the same color as the sky. The band stopped playing, the waiters and waitresses cleared the tables, and we all went back to our rooms to sleep.

 

For two days afterward we would see all these rich people who'd come to this place for a vacation working on their fish instead. They kept them cool in garbage cans filled with ice, and would be scaling and filleting fish all day long: these bankers and lawyers and doctors and titans. Some of them
used electric knives, and we'd hear that buzzing, humming sound, a sawing, going on all day.

They were slipping with the knives and chopping up their hands, so that at dinner the next couple of nights we would see people trying to eat with their hands wrapped in gauze bandages, with blood splotches soaking through them.

The rich people would have fish scales all over them, too—not a lot, just one or two: stuck to a thumbnail or sometimes a cheekbone, or in their hair—and they wouldn't realize it, so that the scales would be glittering as they ate. It made them look special, as if they were wearing some new kind of jewelry, or as if they were on their way to a party or had just come from one.

We ate fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They were far and away the best fish I've ever eaten. The clerk in the lobby said she'd actually been disappointed by the yield—that it was one of the briefest and smallest jubilees she'd witnessed yet—and when I asked about the blue boy who'd been so upset, she said that he lived just a mile or so up the beach and that he was always there during a jubilee, and that in years past his father and grandfather had been there also, shouting the same things.

She said his was a fishing family, and that his warnings were not to be taken seriously, that they probably just wanted all the fish for themselves. Still, she admitted, the jubilees
were
getting smaller by the year, and less and less frequent. She said the blue boy came from a large family; she guessed that he had at least a dozen brothers and sisters, and that they were all churchgoers, fundamentalists, and very close, like some kind of old-fashioned feudal clan. She said that if you crossed one of them, you brought down the wrath of all of them, and that it was best to steer clear of them. She said
they were all alike, that there wasn't a hair's breadth of difference between any of them.

For the next couple of days Otto and I got up early and went back down to the beach just before daylight, to see if by some freak chance the jubilee might be happening again, if even on a lesser scale—like a shadow of the jubilee. We went down to the beach and waded out into the ocean. The water was dark, and the sky was dark—once or twice a mullet skipped across the surface—but that was it. Things were back to the way they had been before, big and empty.