Guts

Our father baits his fishing hooks with mud.

Us brothers watch our father do this hooking, dipping his muddy hand into the rusted bucket of mud.

He casts his muddy hooks out into the night’s dark, the river’s darker waters.

We wait.

Patience, our father says.

We wait some more.

Fish on, our father cries.

Our father pulls back on his rod.

His knuckles’ bones shine white from under his mud gloved skin.

Our father’s fishing pole is alive with this big fish’s under water tugging.

Keep the tip up, our father tells us.

Slack, our father warns us, is bad.

Tension, our father says, is good.

We see the fish rise up out of the muddy waters.

The fish’s eyes are moons rising into the river’s mud darkened skies.

Our father rips the hook from this fish’s mouth, then pitches this fish into the rusty metal bucket.

Where there’s one fish, he says.

He doesn’t say anything else.

He dunks his hand once again in the muddy bucket of mud.

He baits and makes his hook more muddy with mud.

We watch him cast out his line into the muddy dark.

We hear the sinker sink.

See it sinking.

It sinks.

There is a current here. There is an under tow here that will tug you down.

It is dark and muddy down here.

Our father waits for something to happen.

Us brothers wait for something to happen.

The stars above us burn.

Fish on, our father says.

Our father hands us sons the butt of his rod.

It is cork gripped.

It is alive with a fish tugging at its tip.

We know it is there even though we can not see it.

This fish.

We take turns reeling in.

We take turns baiting the hook.

We take turns setting the hook.

One by one, the fish come.

One.

Two.

Three.

The bucket slowly fills up to its rusty rim.

So many moons glowing unseen underneath the river’s muddy water.

We take the fish home.

Here, our father says, and hands each of us brothers a knife. Now it’s time to clean.

We do not like that word, clean.

Us brothers like dirt, like mud, like dirty.

Our father says for us to, Gut them good.

Gut is better.

Gut is better than clean.

He shows us how to do the gutting right.

The knife feels good in our brotherly hands.

I can speak for my brother.

We are brothers.

Our father takes a fish out of the bucket. It is not dead. It is still alive and swimming in his hands.

The muddied water in the bucket goes splish, splash.

We watch our father do this dance with his hands.

We know what our father can do with his hands.

This is how you learn a thing or two about a thing or two, our father tells us.

This is another thing we know.

He takes the fish and lays the fish down on its side on a piece of scrap two by four piece of wood and then he takes a hammer and a bent back nail and he nails the nail through the fish’s tail. The fish kicks, it stiffens, shakes its head. Its gill plates flitch open switch blade quick so that we see inside it red.

We see our father set down his hammer and take up his knife. This is a thing he is good at. See him stick the pointy tip of the blade into the fish’s white under belly, see his big right hand give a quick push in until the knife slips in through a slit in the scaley skin and guts, muddy colored guts, come slushing out.

There is this sound the fish makes when our father’s knife disappears a quarter of the way into the fish’s belly. It is a sound that sounds as though the fish is saying, Shish.

Shush.

Our father cups his whole hand up inside the gutty innards of the fish and swipes out this mess in one quick swoop. Intestines, stomach. Whatever else this muck is called that makes up the insides here on the inside of these fish.

Our father takes these guts and dumps them out into this other bucket that sits next to the bucket with the other fish inside of it, where every once in awhile a fish will kick its back fin up against the bucket’s metal inside, to say what, to us, we don’t know.

What I’d guess it was saying is: I know I am about to die.

I do not feel sorry for these fish.

These fish are not my brothers.

My brother who I call just plain Brother says to us, Look at that fish.