My beautiful bride said if you spend all your time fishing the river, you catch nothing but monkfish and bream. You get water wens all over your feet. If you want money, she said, you go sea fishing. So there I was, a river man all my life, marrying after I had nine gray hairs, pricing fisher’s small-craft at the weekly sale. Most of those belly-up clinker-builts belong to dead fishermen, their bodies feeding crabs, and everybody knows it. It keeps the prices down, but I decided to be a beach fisher, and I had some luck. You have to take the long view. You like whelks, you eat whelks. Shellfish don’t bother me. When I don’t catch anything, the tide all the way to the sunken merchantman in the mouth of Zeebruge harbor, I trudge back and start clamming. Eight, nine you have supper.
Yanni, my rose-cheeked wife, would say, “All day out there, and you come home with what?” That lovely mouth of hers, working nonstop.
“I have six fine cockles,” I would say. Or, if the tide had run well, two fine whiting. Or two soles, or John Dory, or a dozen pier mussels. Whatever it was, and they were always prime. I don’t want to eat anything diseased or deformed or that looks peculiar. The fact is some days I can’t bring myself to eat fish. It’s not just that fish flop around with their mouths open. They have slits they breathe through and eyes that look up like pennies, and there’s nothing you can do to tell a fish to lie still. You can use one of those mallets especially made for shutting fish up, head hammers, the dorymen around here call them in their usual jocular way, but about the only thing you can say to a fish is nothing.
Tourists love it. We put on these wooden mud-treaders, and you can hear them calling to their kids, “Look, how darling, wooden shoes.” And I, for one, always wave and smile. I know they can’t help it, so far from home and nothing to look at but a man going to work with about twenty ells of net on his back.
“You bother to catch one pilchard, Weebs, you might as well catch a hundred,” my wife would say. Always sewing, needle winking up and down. Skirts, blouses, collars, gloves. “I might as well be a herring gull you come back with such tiny little fish.”
“It takes a lot to maneuver the net with just two arms,” I would answer. “You need a strong back and a feel for the current.”
“You’ve got talent, Weebs,” she would respond. “A rare genius. You ought to win a prize for being able to work for less money than anyone who ever scraped mud.”
“You want me to catch flounder.”
“Eels,” Yanni would reply, squinting at her needle.
“Eels have two hearts,” I would say. “They crawl over land. They have conventions in the ocean, they have nests in the hills. An eel is too complicated to eat. I like pilchards. You can hold a fish like that in your hand.”
“Men,” my wife would say.
“There’s something about a herring that says I’m made for eating, it’s okay to eat me, I have an eye on each side of my head, and I am going to be eaten by something I never saw coming, it might as well be you.”
“Catch something worth the effort,” she would reply. Bored, having given up on me. But still talking about it, one of those people who can’t shut up. She would walk into a room making announcements saying she was cold, I would be late for high tide, why was it so dark, where was her darning.
It was a glorious day for watching clouds. I had caught nothing. The sea was filthy, a gale out of the northwest. All the horsefishers were in their stables. The sailorfishers were sipping juniper spirits by their fires, and there was only I myself, on the broad flat beach. I didn’t want to come home wet with rain and wet with brine, blue and nothing to show for it but a pocketful of limpets.
You cast your net and it looks pretty, black lace spreading out. When it drifts down over the water there is a splash where the netting settles, and the sound of it is what satisfies. Casting the net, you feel the waves calm under the span you mended, and sometimes I could do it well into the dark, regardless whether or not I caught a fingerling.
I was almost ready to quit for the night. One more cast, I told myself. Just one more. It’s a serene sight, the net sweeping up, hanging over the waver, lifting with the wind. The net drifted onto the sea. And it happened. The net tugged, tightened. And there it was as I hauled in the net, the famous fish, the size of a Michaelmas tureen, fat and silver.
I have a great aversion to flounders. I can’t stand to take them by the tail, much less slit one open. They have their eyes close together on one side of their head, and they swim around blind on one side, looking up at the sky with the other. I want something simple to eat, not a living curiosity.