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My grandfather, the fisherman in our family, stood in his backyard of afternoon light. My grandfather waited for me in the light off whitewashed clapboards of fence and barn. From the back porch, I could see him the way I knew him best, wearing the soft clothes he wore, holding his hat. My grandfather Caron was the stander at the stove, the sweeper and card player those summer afternoons with Grandma Rose and the other women with their shoes slipped off in the grass under the card table in my grandfather’s backyard.

Grandmother Caron, my mother too, all those other women, had something in them different from my grandfather and from me–they were different quiet with different secrets, but that is a different story. For this story, my Grandmother Caron was the one snapping the teeth of my suspenders into biting up my pants. She was the one who had my baseball cap on me.

Out in the heat and light, my grandfather put on his hat. His hand held my hand. His strength and his tallness had us walking on the grass. Our walking shadow was a fisherman, who had pulled up a boy on the hook of the fisherman’s hand. Our shadow disappeared into the bigger shadow of my grandfather’s barn. His ladders and lawnmower, his Ford, seemed to me to wait for him from the deeper shadows. Climbing–with my grandfather helping me, boosting up my backside–inside the Ford, the seat sank under me as if I was crawling, or swimming, in the belly of a giant fish that we were letting swallow us. From before, my grandfather’s Ford fish had swallowed his cob pipe and his fold of tobacco, a penny become underwater green I found between the seats, a pistachio nut. I stood myself against my grandfather starting the Ford. From that springy height, I could see into the back seat, see his fishing pole and reel, his blanket.

Light came from everywhere onto and off the shiny metal and glass of his car while grandfather drove us. His Ford finned us through the deep water of familiar streets. The salty red from the shelled nut was sucked out. The shell too hard for me to crack was spit into my hand and wiped on my pants while I looked at my grandfather under his hat. He was my mother’s blue eyes and her nose on a man. His eyes and the rest of him steered us through a rattling of light, the tunneling of shadow from trees taller than he was. I rested my small arm over his suspenders, which were bit with tiny metal fish teeth wider than my suspenders. My small fingers felt the way over the hills of him until my hand was out the window. Air blowing cooler, heavy as water, pushed at my hand. I felt where we were.

The world itself was water sliding around us.

At the bottom of the hill was MacSheen’s Store where Grandmother Caron bought me red sodas. The store was carried off behind us. The world itself was water sliding around us. The house where my mother was born went by. The place where grandfather got gas for his Ford came gliding up and by. I knew the Dairy Bar was coming up. With my hand, I could feel the wind as if from the Dairy Bar sweeping around the bend. The Dairy Bar had nearly floated by us when grandfather slowed the car, air whistling to a flutter in the window vent. He turned the steering wheel with his hands that tied knots for fishing. The car popped, pinged over gravel. We quieted to a stop. Through the glass of the windshield, through the sunlight on the Ford’s green hood, through the big windows of the Dairy Bar, I saw people sitting at the counter on swivel stools. I saw a man with too much potato in his mouth putting some potato back on his spoon.

“When you eat pistachios,” my grandfather said to me, “try not to wipe your fingers on your pants.”

I felt for the penny in my pocket. Grandfather held open the car door for me stepping down. The heat was like heat from an oven, as if Grandmother Caron’s stove was held open huge on the summer afternoon. Grandfather guided us between the sides of cars too hot to touch.

Inside, in the cool of the Dairy Bar, I touched, pulled and let go the metal knobs of the cigarette machine holding my father’s Lucky Strikes. A woman sitting in a booth laughed a croaky laugh with cigarette smoke wisping out from between her teeth. Dirty dishes and cups, a spoon, clacked under the counter wiped clean for my grandfather and for me. Grandfather helped me up, lifted me to sitting at the counter. Grandfather sat, put his hat on the counter. He ran a hand on the gleam of his head. Light chopped from off the blades of the ceiling fan at the sweating metal of the milkers, at more knives and forks and spoons set out for us, at the coffee pot, at my grandfather’s head. The ceiling fan cooled the sweaty band of hair around my head where I had taken off my baseball cap.

“Hello, Leo,” the woman wearing all blue on the other side of the counter said to my grandfather. “Hot enough for you?”

“Hello, Adelle,” my grandfather said to the woman. “Hot enough to keep me and my boy sitting with you a while.”

“Lucky for the brookies,” the woman said and smiled in such a way that her smile seemed to include all of us.

My grandfather laughed and said, “Lucky for us.”

When the woman asked my grandfather what we wanted to have, my grandfather told her, “My boy likes to fish for himself.”

I told the woman what I wanted. My grandfather told her he wanted a slice of apple pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

While waiting, I smelled cooking egg and coffee smells. I turned around and around on my swivel seat. I turned all the way around. I saw my grandfather in the light striking him again and again.

The woman brought my grandfather’s pie and ice cream first. He waited for her to bring me mine before he would eat. His vanilla ice cream ran melting while he waited. My grandfather was the one who watched over me. He was the one who waited for me to take the first bite.

A man no longer the father he was drove us fast. A flock of birds in their little lives flew faster trying to keep ahead of us. From where I sat by the window, I saw that the man had my father’s face. His smoke and his Ballantine beer smells were my father’s smells. His hair, his glasses, his teeth had some secret I was afraid of, a secret I knew was different from the secrets of women or what was known between my grandfather and me. The man drove us in my father’s car by broken cornfields. My grandfather was in the same ground of another field. His fishing pole and reel were cobwebbed in the shadows of his barn. I looked at the man wearing my father’s face and hands. When he turned his head and saw me looking at him, I looked out the car window. Sunlight came through the clouds the same as in the painted picture of Jesus above my Grandma Roses’ bed. In that picture, Jesus was a fisherman held upon the water by the giant sunlit hands of his father.

More little birds burst up over a cornfield. The birds headed for some woods. I looked at the man turning the steering wheel with the hand with the ring on the finger that showed he was married to my mother. I drew lines on the fogging window with one of my fingers.

The window had fogged up again by the time the man stopped the car under trees by the side of the road. Outside the car, I stood in leaves lifting in the wind. The light coming through the leaves was such it seemed that I could look and not miss looking at any thing in the world. The man smoked a Lucky Strike while walking in the wet leaves up ahead. The leaves scuffed up dry from underneath smelled of summer afternoons. I looked back between branches blown clean of their leaves. Ahead, the man was walking by a pond with ghostly old stumps.

Through and under this other world, mossy twigs and leaves rested rotting.

Things came to this: leaves of red and gold on a pond. Between and on the leaves, on the water mirrored with light, a boy with his father’s eyes, his teeth, looked up at me looking down. Trees with a few leaves seemed to float upside down. Clouds crossed quietly as if in some other wind. Through and under this other world, mossy twigs and leaves rested rotting. The boy touched at the bones of his face.

I looked up and saw the man weeping, touching at the water with a stick.

Fish, tiny fish, sprayed from the water into the air.

“Did you see that?” he said to me.

I once saw my father naked, crawling on the floor, eating what was left in ashtrays, hitting his head on the wall over and over leaving hair and blood on the wallpaper until my mother called the doctor, who came and took him away for a long time.

I sat in my dead father’s canoe out in the cold in a field. Shadows darkened the snow where the field ended, where the woods began. The hills and sky were losing light. What was colder, the sky or the snow? When I moved, the canoe my father never got to go fishing in creaked on snow so cold and hard the crust could cut me. The cold had crawled up from the metal of the canoe into my father’s boots that I wore, into the three pairs of socks.

Wind and colder came with the going of the light. The few leaves left curling on branches chittered. My lips tried to warm my teeth. My coat sleeves were tubes where I tried to work warm air. I remember thinking that if I died then, out in the field or down by the river, maybe no one would find me until spring. Cattails with calling blackbirds would grow out of me, up through my soggy old coat. Someone would call my mother and she would have to come fetch what was left of me–a twig, some hair, a sock–from out of the cattail thicket. I heard branches skinned in ice clicking against other icy branches. A dog howled somewhere down the hill through the woods. Some old tracks, the hollowed of the canoe’s run again and again, crusted from the field and down through the hard snow in the woods. I poked at the crust with the poling stick. I chipped ice chunks while the cold held in the metal of the canoe burned at my backside through my grandfather’s rotting old blanket.

The fire whistle set the dog to howling some more. The dog seemed to howl the news that it was time for my Grandma Rose and the others to get out of work. I could see down the hill through the woods to the road, to the roofs of row houses along the river frozen over, to the mill where Grandma Rose worked. Getting to work, shoving off, I pushpoled from on my knees. The canoe, taken, scraped faster along the crust. The windy cold in my mouth was a fishhook. The cold on my teeth was the sound of the push pole ticking on icy crust. I closed my mouth, warmed my teeth with my tongue, while the canoe scraped down through the woods closing in on me faster. I pushed, again, harder, dodging trees.

At the bottom of the hill, it seemed as if something was waiting in the woods to get me. Something, it seemed, was getting ready to jump me taking aim at a hump of snow with my poling stick become a spear.

I dragged the canoe behind a log by the side of the road. I crossed the road trying to stamp feeling into my feet. I clunked along on the ice blocks that had been my father’s boots, making my way behind the row houses and past a dog chained to a barrel. I was in the car wrecks river-banked before the dog let loose with a howl. On the other side of the river, the mill windowed down light. Women were walking through that light on the snow. I could see her coat, Grandma Rose in her coat with her own say-so and secrets walking with the other women and men to cars snow covered in the parking lots. The night’s coming on was helped, I believed, by the lights of the mill.

With that coming-on feeling on my shoulders and on my neck, I started across the icy river. The colder was colder than before. The ice groaned, moved, under me. I kept going, slower, tapping at the splintering ice with my spear as I went. A bubble as big as I was moved under the ice under his boots. I did not call to my grandmother, who I could see so clearly. I did not yell to her or to the other women waiting while the men brushed snow from the cars. The boy I was, my father’s son–and not some drowned dog, not a fisherman caught in the long weeds in the cold dark under the ice–would not and did not call for help from those soon shouldered snug into cars heading for home.

Again, under the dark ice, there was a flash, a metal glint.

More than halfway across the broad slide of the river, in what little light was left from the sky, I saw a glint. Again, under the dark ice, there was a flash, a metal glint. The metal moved and I saw it was a fish.

On my knees, I looked through the ice. I could see the eyes, the gills and fins, the tiny teeth of a fish. I tocked the ice with my stick. A bubble billowed long. I tocked again. The fish stayed caught.

From where I sit writing this, I can see out the window. I can see the house across the street. The house is rotting clapboards and flaking paint in the afternoon light. A woman and a boy come out of the house, the boy shading his face with a hand while looking up at the woman. Holding hands, talking, the woman and the boy go out the gate and along the sidewalk. I cannot see them any more.

I look down at what I have written, and I know that I am caught. I know that I am not getting away from any of it.