The Fishhouse

by

Stephen Dinsmore

I never want to go back to the Fishhouse now. That was my father’s dream, his cathedral barn, his castle over the sea. It stands - if at all - on twelve-foot pilings above the granite-and-iron ledge of near-deserted Friendship Long Island’s Flat Rock Beach, a couple of miles off the Maine coast. Today I stared once more into its black-and-white portrait, taken the week of my father’s death by his closest friend, a photographer. Its shingles fifteen years ago had already greyed and curled like feathers on some prehistoric gull, obese and leggy. My father added the rows of windows with two dormers, along three walls of the high loft. A tall window splits the windward face; you could stand inside it to gaze at hairy orange rockweed awash far below. Dizzy, you could just see your own hair at the tide’s sudden mercy. From the cove’s outer point, the windows form the beak and long slit-eyes of the hunkering bird. It watches across the wide bay, reflecting a ray of sunset upwards as if lit from within, inspired.

Friends insist my parents were hippies, and with selective evidence - orange VW bus; granola; compost pile; meditation; sprouts; stubborn nakedness; outdoor haircuts with dull scissors; quasi-religious diets from Asia and California; huge garden; lack of plumbing, electricity, deodorant, or brand names - it gets hard to deny the accusation. I prefer “back-to-the-landers,” “artists,” “bohemians.” I equally admire and hate my father’s rejection of his social world - when in my early-seventies toddlerhood he deep-sixed a brilliant Connecticut teaching career and installed our family of four in his writer’s hermitage, a tiny resurrected bait shack, whose décor included fish scales on the wall, cat-litter newspaper on the floor, rotten overalls on a nail. Craving further retreat, he soon bought his future Fishhouse up in Lobster Gut - around the seaward point from our cove - and in fact floated the soberly gorgeous ugly duckling to its remoter perch.

My father christened his architectural orphans with capital letters as he coaxed them back to life. He named our cramped home George’s Place after its previous hermit, decade-dead. He ’d bought the patchwork, tarpaper camp from George’s younger brother Delbert, the ancient lobsterman who then unloaded his lame, leaning fishhouse. Over seventeen years, the Old George’s became the kitchen of our meticulous resident poet’s post-and-beam New George’s. He floated the Garden Shed over from Morse Island, winched it up our cove’s high bank, and fashioned a two-room auxiliary library crammed with lobster-crate bookshelves. Warrior beyond the garden, he felled with his trusted chainsaw like Hector, till he’d cleared his Little Field for yet another studio, the Little Barn (dead in infancy). My mother, sister, and I fed infernal brush piles at Back Bone - named for its Precambrian ridge - for one more clearing, twenty minutes ’ walk from George’s Place. There, shouting distance from the Fishhouse, he imagined the Big Barn (stillborn) - and my settling there, his lifelong neighbor.

Above all he nursed his Fishhouse vision, crowning glory of a one- or two-man artistic plantation: a place to sit way, way up and watch storms, or the lighthouse flashes of Franklin, Monhegan, and Pemaquid; and track pre-dawn lobster boats, each on its individual schedule, known by engine pitch; and witness how in autumn whole little islands (Otter, Cranberry, Harbor, Burnt) turn at once red, orange or yellow, apart from the others. One day from his Olympian wicker armchair, he would summon and forge the world ’s ebb and flow, and the stillness.

Daily as he tended to dozens of projects, germs of language took root in his head. He wrote in a tight, sharp hand on materials at hand: the back of tide calendar pages, envelopes he splayed with George ’s broken fishknife, brown-paper New Yorker wrappers, cedar shingles. He built and wrote like a finnicky bull, or a blacksmith turning out lace. A closet or letter took three weeks with revisions. Evenings back at George ’s Place he emptied a pocket or bag into a cardboard liquor box, which he lugged when full to the Fishhouse.

I returned once before we sold all our island plots, to salvage his notes, the bowels of unfinished novels. The tall driftwood ladder, missing a rung, still lay behind the foundation of what should have become the Brick Outhouse. I retrieved it to the side of the Fishhouse, ascended shaking from safety to scaffold, and pried the false lock with the rusty screwdriver he ’d squirreled. I entered the afterimage of the ultimate Fishhouse Bash: its real glory.

For my seventeenth birthday at the end of August, a week before I left the nest, my father partied big time. He invited lobstering families I’d never heard of and summer friends of his summer friends; he hired a three-piece fiddle band. Festivities at sundown: hear ye. Into the booze early, he roused the musicians and revelers with his hair-loose, hard-stomping, arms-up jig he called “high life ” which he ’d copied or invented on the African humanitarian outreach where at nineteen he ’d met my mother. A mere inch of barn board lay between oblivious guests and their brain injuries; dark obscured the giddy cracks. An oversize enamel pot of mussels I’d scavenged boiled over on the woodstove. To clear the air our host swung open the twin barn doors: and onstage rushed the Milky Way ’s dust so sharp and full we focused into it to count infinity in a speck. Outside he’d improvised a balcony fenced with Delbert’s torn fishnet; the crowd lurched onto bouncing planks and peered through a cocktail fog, all huddled in the crisp night, together stunned awake, suspended.

Five years later I was poking through the party’s ruins, shy guest returned, needing to steal one last, secret word from the master of ceremonies. Pillar candles, preserved in gothic decay, still lined the long workbench. Two lowball glasses nestled in a rope coil, sticky dust inside. Mouse droppings decorated a cake pan. The woodstove ’s side bore a rash of orange rust.

And all around crowded the castaways of his local history. He’d archived bricks: oh bricks by the bargeload, but only the favorites saved out here, immortalizing some stonemason’s fingertips, a curious cat’s paw. Buoys from the blown-glass days, bubbly green, caught and bewitched light I’d let in. Driftwood blanched and beaten, twisted - nightmare knot-eyes waking - lay in a boneyard corner. From crumbled houses of the extinct island community he had scavenged windows, hinges, doors, hewn beams, a pitcher pump, a rain barrel, a cast-iron sink - details he might someday add to the story of George’s Place. In those days my father assembled new life from old.

To my mind the Fishhouse remains the real scene of his death. Two springs after the Fishhouse Bash, I visited from college to tell him I’d already dropped out and bought a one-way train ticket West. Despite seizures and blurred vision, for months he’d refused doctors, opting for psychics, organic vegetables, and vodka. Like a rock crab lodging scared, cancer’s claws gripped the brain convolution called Broca’s area, seat of language expression. It burrowed him into his profoundest retreat. Now the tumor often talked; aphasia was eclipsing his tongue. My devoted mother seemed to wear the nemesis mask. Busy rebelling, I got contorted into his life raft of sanity and youth. On the third day of my goodbye we paced the Fishhouse loft together. Yellowed notes he ’d begun desperately to collate lay on long pumpkin-pine shelves under the window rows, an endless poker hand, folded, among flies who ’d lost a battle for light.

“Stay with me here.”

I couldn’t. My happiness was in mountains I’d never seen.

His brown hair, angled back in a kingfisher-tuft, showed red in the sunset, as did his freckled arms and dirty ripped jeans. “It will be fun. Build the Big Barn together. Visit every day. Read the same books. Play duets. Like we used to.”

When was the last time he’d read a book? Played his piano? Already the alders had overgrown our Back Bone clearing.

He tried anthropology: “In many cultures, children parent parents. When old.”

He was only 47. What cultures?

“Afraid I’m going to die.”

He wasn’t going to die.

“Really scared.”

In the past year I’d grown taller than him, though not as strong. I forced a chuckle, sat on a lobster crate, and craned to glimpse the gulls I’d noticed opening mussels by dropping them down to the ledge from our height, and screeching murder below for a claim. Nature’s direct cruelty came as slight relief.

“Deeply afraid.”

Then he could go see a doctor.

“Thinking of....”

His tears couldn’t hold me.

“...Killing myself.”

Okay so he could just do it. A manipulation.

“Might burn this place. The house too.”

He could do it then. He’d never do it.

“Please. Help. Begging you.”

I was leaving, he knew that.

He wept. Tears of change, these. Never before. Cold and hot brine to fill our corner of sea. But at once I saw these final waters could only drown him in their mercy.

He bowed deeply. Groaned. Began scratching at his head with both furious hands, as if to aid the bloody birth of some idea, or a fatherly shout. But had nothing to say now. Curled to the floor.

Get up...? Oh how dramatic. Stop.

The pallor. The blue lips.

Don ’t do it now. For chrissake Dad.

A gentle tremor rocked, comforted his flesh. Calmed.

He rose. A fire beyond the white cheeks. The intense eyes of a man saved. He spoke now with conviction: “Carrot.”

What?

Insisted: “Carrot!”

Carrot? I laughed.

He shook his head, rubbed temples, erased the word with a wave. Clarified for my lay ears. “Carrot.”

Dad?

All his world of words, sweet and bitter, compressed in a carrot.

We had needed dead-flat calm for moving the Fishhouse, and at last got thick fog in the forecast. No question I could stay home; anyhow, my voluble fourth-grade teacher linked into Friendship’s gossip chain and expected a report. With contagious, ruddy excitement, my father brought me on a hasty trip in our double-ended dory to the town ’s one phone booth, and called Ronnie, the maverick mover he’d located over in Goose Neck.

“Good for tomorrow early-early.”

“If she sinks we’re even, ” Ronnie reminded my father, and reiterated his seventy-five-percent success rate. Two weeks ago his crew had chainsawed a widow’s Waldoboro farmhouse down the middle, patched it up with plywood, and towed the back half to a satisfied son-in-law’s acres in Union. Earlier in spring one of those swayback dinosaur barns - Ronnie wouldn ’t tell where - had flatly deflated onto cornfield stubble. “Sir, I ’m a gambling man.”

“Yes indeed.”

Next morning early-early we met Ronnie’s crew in Friendship Harbor. His battered Ford pickup trailed twin aluminum jet-refueling tanks like personal rocketships twice the length of his truck. Shiny-red bald, he chewed a cigar stub and sported a stitch-marked scar from eye to jaw, where no salt-and-pepper whiskers grew.

Tim, proprietor of the harbor’s tallest Fiberglas trawler, emerged from pal Buddy ’s bait shack with a half-smile and gave each tank meaty blows that returned deep-sea echoes. “At it again, are you? ” he said, perhaps affectionately, checking my father’s soundness too with a solid back-slap. Far less eccentricity makes for rural fame.

Buddy, who headquartered an ongoing poker table, got on his CB to Barbara my bus driver, who notified my schoolmates’ mothers, who relayed to their husbands’ lobster boats already circling the outer islands. As local curiosities for four years now, we’d pieced together the circuit.

A logging truck ground down the harbor’s steep road, cradling retired telephone poles, lumber, power tools, jacks of all sizes, crank winches with cables and chains, and heaps of rope thicker than my arm. The doors of a brown Datsun I hadn’t noticed opened, and the rest of Ronnie’s crew, two stout, two wiry, got to work loading three wooden floats my father had borrowed.

Gasoline vendor Bill, in his wharf-end shop under complicated antenna rigging, warmed up short-wave tubes and tatted off Morse code. That day the Fishhouse’s dot-and-dash story got tailed in Borneo and Lisbon.

For two hours on a half-tide-rising, we inched through fog that wet our faces. Four or five lobster boats and a couple of skiffs idled barely in view; we recognized Ikey and Bernie, and some kids, clam diggers. Months later we would hear of the betting pool; grumpy Ikey had a hundred on seeing Delbert’s behemoth sink. Bernie had wished us better but confessed he ’d still put down twenty-five.

From here my choppy memories remain misty black-and-white. Just after eight: landfall. Delbert’s beach. The Fishhouse loomed up gray and grainy ahead.

On my living-room plaster, the film clicks. My father had trusted me with his Super-8 camera.

The cursing crew, my father among them, slog gear through muck. Punky beams need reinforcement. A gasoline generator sputters; power tools whine; sawdust flies. I expect blood, shrieks, amputations.

Biceps crank jacks around back. The Fishhouse budges, lists ahead, the way rheumatic Delbert himself had rocked and groaned, hovered forward from his chair to shake my hand.

One telephone-pole roller under. Up front, more jacking. Another two poles. Position the floats. Clear the ledges.

Push.

Easy, big baby. Come to papa.

Hippo untethered, she rumbles onto the floats.

Still standing.

Tide’s a-coming. Chain on sci-fi pontoons.

Lunch time? Lady’s made sandwiches and tea. Obliged to you.

Near afloat. Another hour. Where’s the shithouse?

Tie up good and gun the outboard like hell. Crowbars.

Heave!

The Fishhouse comes loose from all effort and time. She turns, silent planet.

Ikey never spoke to us again. On Flat Rock Beach they jacked it up and up, heaping a nest of scrap lumber underneath to position it for pilings. Delbert had left a ladder inside that missed a rung. My father leaned it against his rising phoenix, which couldn’t possibly come level; he would have to settle for warp. Yet as he climbed he shut one eye and sighted down the sill-beam base, squinting while the sea’s horizon merged in perfect parallel with the airy foundation of his dream.