Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > The Fisherman > Status Update

‘Who is your master?’ Rainer says. Helen answers in a voice like rocks cutting the surface of a stream. Jacob feels his bowels shudder. The others step back. She says, ‘His name is not for you.’ ‘Who is your master?’ Rainer says. ‘Ask Wilhelm Vanderwort,’ Helen says. That name sends a jolt through Rainer. He starts to speak, stops, and says a third time, ‘Who is your master?’ ‘The Fisherman,’ Helen says.

The Bible, however, is the past, except for Revelation, which is the future. As for the present, you have to look carefully for the supernatural in it. It’s a matter for study and interpretation. God and the Devil, good and evil, are active, but their actions are subtle. All this – broken woman returning from the grave and threatening their children, men vomiting monsters, sorcerers – it’s so blatant, so vulgar.

The children hear her on the other side of the door, breathing heavily from her efforts. Maria, Helen’s oldest, will tell Lottie’s sister Gretchen that the breathing sounded like her grandfather’s in the months before his death, hoarse and harsh, and something else, wet, like the way you breathe when you’re congested. Slowly, Helen retreats from the door, shuffling back to what was her house and husband.

His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.

It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long. That’s something I learned after Marie died. In the short term, folks can show compassion like you wouldn’t believe; wait a couple of weeks, though, a couple of months at the outside, and see how well their sympathy holds.

She was there once when I had worked my way from the Esopus up a little fast-moving stream whose name I meant to learn later but never did. She was there one afternoon when I returned to my spot on Springvale to discover I’d have to share it with two old women sitting on lawn chairs. I can’t say I was haunted, exactly – that sounds a bit too regular for what happened to me. But I did have a visit or two.

So there I was, in, I don’t mind saying, a bad place, my wife gone and me doing what I could to join her. It was, you might say, a cold February in my soul. And then one morning my eyes pop open and waiting for me is this thought, I need to go fishing.

I’ve stood on the shore of an ocean whose waves were as black as the ink trailing from the tip of this pen. I’ve watched a woman with skin pale as moonlight open her mouth, and open it, and open it, into a cavern set with rows of serrated teeth that would have been at home in a shark’s jaws.