The Brass Bed
- Автор: Флора Флетчер
- Год: 1956
- Язык: английский
- Год: Lion Books
- Жанр: Романы для взрослых
Электронная книга - «The Brass Bed». Краткое содержание книги:
...and the root of it all lay hidden in the secret of THE BRASS BED.
5
Harvey got around a little before five-thirty with a flat-bottom boat on a trailer behind his car, and we got on out to the river about an hour later. The river was called the Newawah, and it wasn’t much of a river, as rivers go, but at this place we went it ran deep in its banks, and the trees grew thick and tall on the banks along it, and it was as fine and comforting a river for fishing as a reasonable person could want. The old cabin sat high on the bank in a clearing among the trees, and in front of it a path went down to a wide gravel bar, and right there the river was narrow and shallow and quite swift between the bar and the bank opposite, and with a rod you could take out of it sometimes those sleek and shining channel catfish which are as good as bass for fighting and better for eating. Below the bar, the river widened and deepened and darkened, and that was where we stretched our trot line across from bank to bank and caught with dough balls the fat and sluggish bullheads. The bullhead is also a catfish, not sleek and shining and full of fire like the channel cat, but he makes a very satisfying weight on a hook and line, and he is very satisfactory, too, wrapped in cornmeal in a skillet.
Harvey and I unloaded the boat from the trailer and carried it down the bank and across the gravel bar to the water on the deepening side below the shallow channel. We left it there and returned for the oars and the dough balls and trot lines, and then we came back once more to the boat and got in and rowed down the river a way. Harvey handled the oars, and I sat in the stern of the boat with the lines and dough balls. The water was cool and dark green, almost black in the long shadows of the trees, and it was pleasant to hear it lapping against the boat and the banks, and to hear above the soft sound of its lapping the many, unidentifiable sounds of small life in and around it. The best book I know about a river is Huckleberry Finn, which is actually a book about a river and a boy, and one of the best things about this best book is the way the author makes you feel the river the way the boy must have felt it, but this river in the book was a great river, a river of historical dimensions, and I have often thought there is also much to be said for the small river, the Newawah type river, and I wish I could say it here, but I can’t.
Pretty soon Harvey stopped rowing and rested on his oars and said, “This is a good place. We caught a lot of good bullheads here the last time.”
“I remember,” I said. “It’s as good a place as any.”
He swung the boat around and rowed across current to the bank, and I grabbed the drooping branch of a willow and pulled us in close. There was a stout root of a tree projecting from the bank just above the waterline, and I tied one end of the trot line to this root, and then Harvey rowed across the river to the other bank, bearing slightly downstream at an angle, and I let the trot line out into the water behind the boat and tied the remaining end to another root on the other side when we got there. After it was tied, we started back again more slowly along the line while I baited all the hooks with dough balls. Every couple of feet along the line, there was a drop line with a hook on it, and I put a dough ball on each hook. Three of the drop lines, spaced along the trot line, had weights on them instead of hooks. This was to keep the entire line well down in the water so the bullheads could get to the dough balls without too much trouble.
“Shall we set another line?” Harvey asked.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Well, let’s see how the luck runs. If the luck runs good, one’s enough, and if the luck runs bad, we can set another tomorrow.”
“That’s a good idea. We’ll see how the luck runs tonight.”
He rowed back to the gravel bar, and we pulled the boat up out of the water and went on up the path to the old cabin. We got the ice chest out of the back of the car and broke open the two cases of beer and put the cans into the chest on the ice, and it was by then getting pretty dark, so we gathered up some wood and made a fire. Sitting on the ground near the fire, we watched the darkness grow thick beyond the perimeter of light, and listened to the small river go by below us between its high banks.
“Are you hungry?” Harvey said.
“I’m pretty hungry,” I said, “but what I’m hungry for is a nice bullhead fried crisp in a skillet.”
“Do you want to wait and see if we get something? Maybe we’ll have something in an hour or so.”
“We’ll go run the line in an hour, and if we don’t have something then, we’ll eat something else.”
“All right. That sounds like a good idea. I wish the beer was cold, though. We should have put it on ice when we had the chest filled. If we’d done that, it would be good and cold now.”
“That’s true. I don’t know why we didn’t do it.”
“How about some coffee? We could have some coffee while we’re waiting for the beer to get cold.”
“All right. I’ll make some coffee.”
“No. Let me make it. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, old boy, but I must say that my coffee is superior to yours.”
“You make it, then.”
“I haven’t hurt your feelings, have I?”
“Of course not. I take practically no pride at all in my coffee. You are quite welcome to whatever glory accrues from superior coffee-making.”
“That’s a sensible attitude, old boy. It’s understood that these little gifts are passed around among us. I have a superior gift for making coffee, and you no doubt have superior gifts in other lines. If so, you are more than welcome to the fruits of them.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He got up and got some coffee and a pot from the back of the car and began to measure coffee into the pot. There was no water around, except the river water, but he had brought three gallons from town in a can, and he measured some of this into the pot with the coffee and set the pot on some coals that he raked out of the fire.
“Now I’ll have to watch this very carefully,” he said. “It is important to let the water boil only for the proper length of time. I have an idea that this may be where you go wrong on your own coffee-making, old boy. I think it’s quite likely that you let it boil too long.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes, I do. I think it’s quite likely.”
“I’ll have to be careful about that in the future.”
He squatted by the pot and watched it, and I lay back on the ground and folded my arms up under my head and watched the stars in the sky above the trees beyond the river, and there were a hell of a lot of them up there. After a while I started thinking about Jolly and me, and wondering if we were ever going anywhere, which didn’t seem likely, and the coffee started smelling very good. It was quite saddening to lie there looking at the stars and hearing the river and smelling the coffee and thinking of Jolly, and I wished there was something to be done to simplify things, but there didn’t seem to be anything. Then I thought of Jolly’s wistful death-wish, which was something that could not be thought of with serenity, and so I sat up and tried to quit.
When the coffee had boiled the right length of time by Harvey’s standards, he got up and went into the old cabin and came back with two tin cups. We kept a few things like that in there so that we wouldn’t have to bring them out from town every time, tin cups and plates and things like that, and now Harvey poured coffee into the cups and handed one of them to me. I drank some of it, and it was good and strong and very hot in the throat.
“Is it good?” he said anxiously.
“Yes, it’s very good.”
“Do you think it’s strong enough?”