Sundays Were For...

It's necessary sometimes to turn and look behind in order to see what the road looks like ahead of you.

For this week's story, dear reader, let us see what the past has to show us. In particular, let us hear of what a young Dwight Thompkins used to know that...

Sundays Were For... an In Council story by M. K. Dreysen

Sundays had always been for Maw-Maw. Two little boys in clean white shirts, Mom and Maw-Maw each with one of their endless selection of hats and matching dresses, and the dinky little veils on them that DT had never been able to figure out the what for of. Long hot sermons with the Reverend just getting wound up when you were starting to fade into oblivion.

Singing standing and dancing and sweating along with Missus Phillips when she and her organ called the little congregation to it.

Sundays were for standing in front of the Reverend's little church, waiting for him to shake DT's hand, and Bubba's hand too, and tell Maw-Maw and Momma how proud they must be of "these fine little men."

Sundays were for the fish fry that came after the Reverend had done his best to bring them all a little closer to the Lord.

Sundays had always been about these things, so far as DT could remember. Last year, when he was into comic books and baseball cards and a young man named Willie Mays was tearing it up for the San Francisco Giants. The year before that when he'd found this book about something called a "hobbit" in the school library.

Momma would tear him away from the book, and the comics and the cards, and tell him to wash his face and put on his good clothes so they could all walk to meet Maw-Maw at the church. "And mind Bubba, he'll need your help," which DT always knew and did but Momma was forever reminding him anyway.

Only, this year, when DT had discovered another book at the library, this one on something called "circuits", Paw-Paw stepped in and changed what Sundays were for.

"I think I'm going to borrow DT this weekend, sister," Paw-Paw had told Momma Friday afternoon. He'd been waiting there when DT made his way into the kitchen with Bubba's hand firmly tucked into his.

Paw-Paw and Momma, home from her job at the little bank and sharing a pot of coffee with her daddy at Momma's clean little kitchen table. "Daddy, are you sure?"

"I taught him to swim, didn't I?" Paw-Paw asked. "He'll be fine." And that had been fun; not like Reggie, DT's best friend. Reggie's dad's idea of teaching his son to swim involved a deep water hole and a long drop from the bluff above it.

Paw-Paw had actually made DT learn to float first. And then shown him how to go, one hand over another. "Where'd you learn to swim, Paw-Paw?"

"Navy. Even if they wouldn't let me do anything but serve the Captain's table, they at least didn't want me and the rest of the mess drowning." Paw-Paw only talked about those things when DT was around, and nobody else.

DT figured it was Bubba's turn to learn to swim, this year or next, but he didn't think Bubba would ask the same sorts of questions. If DT got lost in books, his little brother got lost in music.

They'd discover, much later, how much alike they were, these two little rascals. But for now, DT thought the four years between them, and the differences in what Bubba spent his time on, to be as big and wide as the Old Muddy itself. They'd both be a while before they discovered that a mile and a half of relentless water could be as far a distance as from here to the moon, and at the very same time be just as little a thing as a walk down to church.

"I'll be here to pick you up first thing tomorrow morning, DT. You be ready to go with the sun, ok?"

"Yes sir."

DT spent the night staring out the window at the full moon, listening to the bugs through the screen. Not knowing that on the other side of the wall, Momma was doing the same thing.

And she was there with him the next morning, too. With her paper and a big green Thermos full of coffee. "You're wearing your oldest shorts?"

"Yes ma'am." And his oldest shirt and canvas shoes. Not just because of the gumbo mud, which stank to high heaven. But because of the blood and guts. And the slime. Catfish made the biggest mess.

Momma didn't tell DT to be safe. She just gave him the Thermos and a long hard hug before he went out through the screen door to meet his grandfather.

****

Senior year at Grambling and Dwight Thompkins heard something from a friend that tangled him up in memory. It was at one of those parties where the faculty tried to show the students how to hang out in society. "There's a fisherman who they say can charm the fish right into his boat," Ernest Wallis began the story.

Dwight didn't smile. He hid that behind his drink.

But he did listen. And remember. "Folks say that they jump right in whenever he sings. Catches all the best fish in the marsh. The white folk follow him, trying to figure out where he puts his lines, only he doesn't use any lines or nets because he doesn't need them."

****

DT had never had occasion to worry about just how it was that his grandfather filled the freezer. He, like the rest of their little community, just accepted it as given that when they were hungry for fish, or alligator or shrimp or duck meat or anything else wild that came out of the marsh, Paw-Paw would bring it back. Gumbo, fish fry, turtle sauce piquante, if someone could get Maw-Maw to say she wanted it, that's all that was needed.

DT did know about the white folk, though. Paw-Paw had told him about that, solemnly, quietly. "You might even see a couple of them when we come away from the swimming hole, son. The Campbells in particular, they've been following me for years trying to learn where I put my lines."

DT hadn't seen anyone on those trips to the swimming hole. Oh, sure, the trucks and the cars went by, but DT never caught anybody staring at an old man and his grandson.

Same thing that Saturday morning. Paw-Paw kept his little boat at the back of his house, where the bayou came through. He and DT put the ice chest in, DT grunting at the weight of it, then the lines and the hoop net, and then Paw-Paw climbed in. "Let me get the motor started, then you climb down with the rope."

"Yes sir." The little outboard chuckled to life on the first pull; DT climbed aboard and sat down for the ride.

Every little while, DT looked for the lines of the other fishermen, and the little bits of flag they put on those lines to identify them. Here on a stump, there a cypress root. And then when the bayou came to a larger channel, one of the delta's many routes to the sea, here came floating bleach bottles and milk jugs, and other custom floats that folks used to keep their lines identifiable.

And, somewhere behind them, another boat followed now. DT looked over his shoulder, trying to catch sight of them, but even with the sun now up enough to see floats and flags, the other boat was far enough behind, or slow enough, that DT couldn't find them.

Paw-Paw smiled, and shrugged. "Don't know that they're after us today, DT," he called over the motor's roar.

And they weren't, not that day. On other trips, as the fishing trips and the hunting trips that dominated the winter became more regular parts of his teenaged life, DT saw the folks who did try and follow his grandfather, "Sniffing my secrets" as the old man called it.

Today though, when Paw-Paw cut the engine way back and turned the boat into a little cut in the marsh, only their own engine noise accompanied the pair.

"I set this run of lines yesterday, while you were in school," Paw-Paw said, quieter now that he didn't have to compete with the motor as much. "A dozen or so, plus my other hoop net."

"Why'd you bring this one, then?"

"Once we run this line, I'll show you how to set up another one. Salt water for that one, though, your momma asked me for some flounder. Plus, Mister Roy Campbell loves redfish and speckled trout for his restaurant. Enough to pay us good cash money for anything I catch."

The wonders of the delta system; here, inland enough and the freshwater species, the channel and the blue cats dominated. Paw-Paw pulled the boat into each line in his set, close enough for DT to grab the high end. "Walk it down, that's right."

The first line, all the bait had been cleared off the first half dozen hooks. DT passed the line hand over hand, pausing while his grandfather baited the hooks with chicken livers. "I'll use cheese on the next one."

DT nodded, not that he knew which bait was better. Unlike Reggie and some of the other kids, they all had opinions. DT figured catfish had as much a right to change their menu as anybody else did.

The next three hooks came up empty, but the last one didn't. "Paw-Paw!" DT said, nerves rattling him and pushing him to yell.

"Good fish, son, you got him?"

A channel cat swung there in the water, jerking his head on the hook and pulling the line hard against DT's fingers. "I think so..." DT whispered.

All he could think of were the spines, the little sharp fins on the cat's side, waiting for some little fool to grab hold. But Paw-Paw talked him through it, and this fish ended up in the ice chest just exactly where he belonged. "About three pounds, just about right," Paw-Paw said when he slammed the lid on the first fish of the day.

He said that for most of the fish. The little ones, the ones that DT thought he wouldn't have trouble with but the little bastards were quicker than he could have imagined, those Paw-Paw threw back. "We'll catch them again when they're off the tit," Paw-Paw said, and DT laughed.

DT frowned the first time they caught a really big cat, this one a big blue that Paw-Paw said probably came out at fifteen pounds or better, a thick chunk of catfish. "Here, let me get him," Paw-Paw said. Then he reached down, gloves on for this one, thumbed the cat's mouth and pulled the hook loose to free the big fish.

"Why, Paw-Paw?" DT asked.

"I only bring them in for special occasions, and only for us," Paw-Paw said. "Just don't think it's necessary to pull in the old men and women, not when there are so many of the middlin' sized to catch. Besides, the three and four pounders are better for frying. That big old momma's good for a courtbouillon, but we're not cooking that this weekend. Let her go back to her hole and raise up another year's worth of her children for us."

The two filled the ice chest on the catfish set. "Plenty for the church," Paw-Paw said. "Now let's see if we can't make a little money."

Paw-Paw didn't sing the fish to the boat. He used lines and nets just like anyone else in the marsh.

But he did have his magic. DT saw it for the first time that Saturday morning. His grandfather pulled the boat just to the edge of the slough, passed his grandson a sandwich and the Thermos, and said, "Ok, give me a minute to hunt down the wind."

"Paw-Paw, what are you doing?" DT asked.

"Shh."

DT turned around, Maw-Maw's bologna and cheese sandwich in his hand, and watched.

His grandfather sat, his own sandwich on his knee, yet unopened, eyes closed. Nostrils wide and head cocked over at just a little bit of an angle.

'He's listening, and smelling,' DT thought. So, because he was, as his grandfather knew, at that certain age, DT copied his Paw-Paw. He put his sandwich down on his leg, trying to avoid as much as he could where the catfish had slimed his shorts. Then DT sat up straight, closed his eyes, and tried to listen.

The water. The birds. An alligator grunting. An outboard in the distance.

And the smells, too. That rough smell of decomposing vegetation, the marsh's constant background. The water and the mud and... salt. The sea. Somewhere close the marsh changed its character.

"Is that what you're smelling?" DT asked.

"Part of it," Paw-Paw said. "Wait a little more. And don't forget to listen."

DT thought it over. Everyone, most folks anyway, would know the smell of the salt, where the Gulf made its way and brought the redfish and the specks and the crabs with it. Paw-Paw searched for something else, though. DT wondered what.

The splash of a mullet jumping? Or the cry of an osprey chasing it?

The smell changed. Somehow, call it the alchemy of sun and wind and water, the salt smell opened and a faint whiff of a clean open world teased the back of DT's throat and the inside of his ears.

Then Paw-Paw hummed a little song, just a burst of a tune DT didn't know but he'd now remember for always, and DT heard a rush of...

"There," he said. And he pointed, out across the delta channel, off to the west and south a little.

"Yep," his grandfather agreed. Paw-Paw pulled the engine alight and eased the boat back out on the path his grandson had chosen. "Keep it in your mind, son. You're doing good."

DT discovered that day that his grandfather's magic didn't have anything to do with how the stories he'd later hear had it. Later that year, DT would discover that Paw-Paw could conceal himself and his little boat, and the channels where he'd set his lines, from those folks that tried so hard to learn his secrets. Today, though, he learned the heart of it.

The old man didn't charm the fish out of the river, he didn't whistle down the ducks when the cold fronts drove them down from the north. He didn't scoop shrimp from the marsh with his bare hands and fill the boat at his choosing.

No, Paw-Paw's magic told him where the fish swam and schooled. Where the cold current had shifted and the flounder with it. DT learned the essence of his grandfather's magic that trip.

And he also learned that he himself, little mister Dwight Thompkins, carried that magic as well.

****

Dwight Thompkins stood on the porch of his mother's house, a glass full of iced tea on the railing, and waited for his brother.

Leonard Thompkins got down from his car and straightened himself under his big brother's gaze. Suit, hat. The silk bag tied at his belt. When all was right, Len turned, expecting to make the walk under his brother's grin.

Dwight swept him up in a tight hug. All the years fell away; the heights, no different than a hand's breadth now but it still felt for both of them that they stood on the church steps again.

Bubba's face buried in his brother's chest. DT's chin on Bubba's head.

Len pushed his brother back, still gripping Dwight's shoulders though so he couldn't get away. "How's she doing this morning?"

Dwight's grin didn't fall, so much as it turned solemn and pained. "She'll be glad you're here. The pain came up hard yesterday. How long, do you think?"

"When's fall semester start?"

"Last week of August."

"Don't go home, big brother."

Dwight nodded, then tucked his arm over Len's shoulders. The two walked up the sidewalk and the steps, Dwight pausing only long enough to get his glass from the porch rail.

Dwight's own view of his mother's illness had matched up with his brother's. Mother Sorrow had been right, of course. As soon as Dwight set his eyes on Momma through air rather than the video phone connection, he'd seen it.

The stream of time winding around his mother faded to the shallows.

But Len had been here, made this walk every Sunday morning for the past six months. Came to visit his mother and to eat of her pain.

Len's magic lay in a different direction than his older brother's. Len would know more precisely when the end would come, Dwight knew.

Dwight set aside his tea and watched as Len pulled the mask from the silken bag.

When Len tied the false smile into place, he nodded.

Dwight turned to the swinging door between kitchen and living room, where their Momma lay in the hospital bed that had come into the home at almost the same time Dwight was stepping on the plane.

"Momma, the Laughing Man has come."