Drowning Catfish

The rhythm of the mouth moves with me. The slow, regular work of impossible breathing should have been frantic, should have looked more like fighting death, but then, having come so far from the water, if a catfish wriggled free, where could it expect to go?

I was three. My first fishing trip to my grandfather's little pond he'd built behind his trailer—some peaceful place he could watch over after his "nervous breakdown," where he could be alone to nurse his country-widower's virulent paranoia while he waited to die. Keep your door locked. Brace it with this staff of wood. Wrap a rubber band around your wallet to make it harder to steal. Don't go to town unless you have to.

But he laughed sometimes. At the first tug of my line, he'd told me to "break his damn neck!" "I'll break his goddamn neck!" I said—a warm family moment we'd recollect for years after.

We don't talk about the after. I suppose we don't need to. Cleaning fish is a country boy standard and never demands conversation. In the after, we walked up the hill, me taking long strides to step in the tracks of my father, he easily walking in the footprints of his—good practice, he'd say, to conceal from trackers how many of us there'd been.

Daddy carried the five-gallon plastic bucket, our small mess of fish sucking the last little oxygen from the water that barely covered them.

Catfish are slippery, and hide sharp spines in their dorsal and pectoral fins. Cleaning them on a flat surface was the foolish man's way. Around here, if you weren't too lazy, you'd build a rack on which to skin them. And if you built things properly, they'd be permanent. Two steel posts sunk into the ground, secured with concrete. A four-foot crossbar eye level with a grown man, but far too high for the clumsy work of a boy. Along the crossbar, Daddy had welded a row of ten heavy-gauge nails, curved and sharpened to fine points—barbless industrial fishhooks.

The hands looked very much the same—my Daddy's and his daddy's. Wordlessly, they each took a fish—palming down the dorsal spine, sliding thumb and forefinger safely under the knifepoints of the pectoral fins— and lifted it to the skinning rack. The mouth moved, slow and calm, even as the eyes grew large with panic, then relaxed in resignation. Gills flared but drew in nothing. They moved at the pace of a schizophrenic, rocking on a dark filthy bed with his chin to his knees. The rhythm of the mouth moves with me.

The mouth will open. Lay the bony upper jaw against the hook. Pick a spot just below the point of penetration—between the eyes—and gently pound there with a ball-peen hammer. The hook breaks through. For a moment there is flailing. Fleshy whiskers, suddenly awhip, settle quickly. The rhythm of the mouth returns. The rhythm of the mouth moves with me.

Air-breathing catfish croak like weary frogs. Imagine ten at once in a hopeless choir of something that may or may not be pain as I know it.

Special clippers to lop off the spines, to strip the skin and make a sound like peeling tape. Knives that live in families for generations delicately part the bodyflesh from the head. Daddy's cuts so clean and precise they can be taken as evidence of love.

It takes gentleness to leave the organs dangling, respect not to mutilate. The heads live on for several minutes. Leave the right machinery intact, and the croaking continues. Leave nothing, and the sound goes, but the mouth keeps moving, the gills flare, the rhythm of it constant. One seemed not to notice when I poked her hanging roe sack with an exploring finger.

In this way I first watched something accept its own dying, and never did I refuse to eat what came of it. The lungshot deer. The vivisected fish...