When I was a child I spent my summers at my grandparent's fishing launch, The Fisherman's Rest, along the Bayou Sauvage on the outskirts of New Orleans. It was not only their place of business, but also where they lived. You could launch your boat for a dollar or rent a skiff all day long for five. They sold bait, fishing supplies, canned food, soft drinks, and beer. It was the kind if place where rich and poor, both black and white, mixed freely without any hang-ups because the one and only concern was fishing. On more than one occasion, I saw C.E.O.'s fishing with the janitors who worked for them. The summer fishing season was a kind of fever for most people and it was a beautiful thing to experience. My earliest memories are of fishing off the wharves of the boat shed. Every Friday, an old black man known as Red would fish with me on the wharves. He was called Red because of the color of his hair but when I knew him, his hair was as grey and coarse as a Brillo pad. He was thin, in his early seventies, and he moved very slowly when he walked, but he was still quite strong in his arms, the result of cutting pulpwood for sixty years. The sides of his eyes were mustard colored, his mouth just a slit, and his nose was long and narrow. He always smelled like cinnamon for some reason. He was fond of saying that fishing kept him alive, it was his only reason for living, he said, since he no longer worked and didn't have a wife or children. Red never fished with a rod and reel but with a twelve foot cane pole that at its base was as big around as the fat end of a Louisville Slugger. He cut the pole himself years earlier from an enormous rozo cane patch down the highway from The Fisherman's Rest. He called it Bertha, and would talk to Bertha as he fished, telling her to get with it if the fish weren't biting and praising her to no end if he was on a streak. When he was finished for the day, he would wind the cotton string around the pole, stick the hook into the cork, and slide it between the forked rafters of the boat shed. Good night Bertha, he would say, and off he'd go to clean the fish or have coffee with my grandparents. The water that moves through Bayou Sauvage is brackish; there is never any telling what kind of fish you might catch. I remember catching large mouth bass and bream alongside sand sharks and flounder. Red's favorite fish to catch was sheepshead, a kind of saltwater drum fish with narrow horizontal black stripes across its body. Red never ceased to be amazed by their human-like teeth. God sure is a funny kind of man to have done that, he would say. When he spoke, it was never like you would hear on television; his words always seemed his own, they were shrouded in a dark strangeness. Once he told me that he didn't like to look at dolphins, they frightened him. He said he could see a man's face trapped in a dolphin's face, and he called them "water people." He said he often had nightmares of "water people" cut in two and writhing on the front lawn of the duplex he rented near City Park. Red said that dolphins were unnatural and that an animal ought to be either fish or beast, not both. Every August, silver mullet would migrate from the Gulf of Mexico and pass through Bayou Sauvage to feed and mate in the large lagoons in the marsh. They would come in schools by the thousands and you could see them rippling the water for a mile down the bayou. As the sun went down, scores of them would jump into the sky. It was quite a sight to witness, but when they started to jump, Red would pull his line out of the water, wrap his pole up and walk away. He said it was too much for the eye to watch and that was bad for the heart. He also didn't like large sea birds. If one flew into sight, he would avert his eyes, or if one was feeding off the shore nearby, he'd throw rocks at it to make it fly away. He called them "flying people." Apparently just one more mistake in God's creation. Red smoked Pall Mall cigarettes one after the other as he fished. As many cigarettes as he smoked though, he always put the butts in a can, he never threw them overboard like everyone else. He drank Dixie Beer from a small red ice chest at a modest pace. The beer had no effect on him at all; his speech and behavior remained the same whether he had two beers or twelve. He always fished sitting down, he only stood if he had to. He never used live bait, only fresh shrimp and livers. He said he didn't like sticking a hook through something that was alive, although when it came to fish he had no mercy. He would hook a fish and if it wasn't too big that it had to be netted, he would whoop and holler, giving constant praise to Bertha, and hold the pole high up over his head and sling the fish onto the wharf. He would pull the fish close to him, admire it for a long time with the best smile his small lips could render, then bash the fish's head with a rusty ball ping hammer that he kept in his tackle box. He'd toss the fish into a white plastic bucket that had RED written across it in huge black letters. He had this bucket for years, and I remember seeing tears in his eyes on the day he found it missing from the boat shed. I didn't bother to tell him I lost it a couple of days before while I was fishing with my grandfather in Lake Borgne. We were fishing on an oyster reef and it began to storm, so we scrambled to the skiff to keep it from filling up with water, and I forgot all about Red's bucket, which I was using to keep whatever crabs I might catch on my rod and reel. I got Red another white plastic bucket just like the one I lost on the oyster reef and wrote RED across it with a black marks-a-lot. It took a long time for him to accept the new bucket. Red always fished off the wharf, he never went out in a skiff to fish the bayous and lagoons. He said he was afraid of boats, that people didn't belong on the water or in the sky. He also said he couldn't swim and he felt just fine fishing off the wharf. I offered to take him to the lagoons where the fish were bigger, but he always refused. I told him he could wear one of those orange life preservers my grandparents rented for fifty cents a day and then he wouldn't have to worry about not being able to swim, but he would have none of it, he just kept smoking Pall Malls and sipping from his Dixie and muttering something to Bertha. Not long before he died, I went to the boat shed to meet Red for our Friday fishing and Bertha was missing along with Red's bucket. Red was nowhere to be found. His beat up '67 Dodge Dart was parked under the same willow tree like always. I went looking for him but none of the fishermen had seen him. I was worried that he might have fallen overboard and told my grandmother Red was missing. She said he had probably just gone to town with my grandfather to get something he needed. He had never gone anywhere with my grandfather before. It was already late evening before I got my gear together and had a line in the water. It felt strange to fish without Red on Friday evenings, but it was happening a lot lately: his doctors warned him against getting out too much. He had cancer for years but never seemed all that affected by it, although that was probably why he walked so slowly. I didn't think death could ever come to Red because he was so strange. I sat fishing for a while but nothing much was biting. A barge heading to Lake Borgne chugged slowly by and its waves jostled the water lilies that grew around the creosote pilings of the boat shed. The skiffs rocked against each other gently. The sky was beginning to grey and a few scattered storm clouds were moving to the east over Lake Ponchartrain. The late evening wind was blowing colder than normal for this time of year, and over the big lagoon called Chico, I could see the first grey ducks of the season funneling down into the marsh, a sure sign of an early fall. I fished for about an hour with only two crabs and a small gar to show for it. I never did catch anything much unless I was fishing with Red. My grandfather pulled up into the shell laden drive in his battered station wagon. The crushing sound of rolling tires over the clam and oyster shells always made me melancholy. I asked him about Red but, no, he hadn't seen him since last week. He looked worried too as he hobbled to the back door with bags of groceries cradled in both arms. He said he would call the coast guard if Red didn't show up before dark. The fishermen started coming in one after another in their skiffs and bateaus. They were all standing around on the wharf talking about their day's luck, saying how they shouldn't have even bothered to go out on a day when the tide was so low, making it hard to fish the backwaters of the bayou, and how the north wind was blowing bait right into the fishes' mouths making it all but impossible to catch anything. I was wrapping up my pole when I heard someone laughing and laughing off the bayou. It was Red. He was wearing an orange life preserver and rowing one of the green wooden skiffs. He pulled up to the wharf and I reached down and picked up the bow rope and tied him off. He was in a skiff named after me, The Lucius. He kept laughing and had a hand on Bertha. The fishermen looked over into the skiff, mouths agape and wide eyed. It was filled with fish. The floor boards were completely covered up to Red's knees with sheepshead. His laughter turned to tears as he began holding up the large fish to the amazed fishermen, telling them that they had to take the fish off his hands because there was no way he could clean this many. He wouldn't let anyone help him hand out the fish, not even me. Red handed them up one after another as the sun went down over the marsh. The wind blew cool from the north and the grey ducks speckled the sky and dropped down into Chico Lagoon. Louis E. Bourgeois was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1970 and earned his B.A. at Louisiana State University and his MFA at The University of Mississippi. A three time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, he has published hundreds of poems and stories worldwide. His most recent collection of poems, OLGA, is forthcoming this year from WordTech Communications. Currently, he is an instructor of literature and writing at Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. HOME