The Murkiness at the Bottom of the River

The Murkiness at the Bottom of the River

            Maddy had her toes in the river.  It was clear there – the murkiness didn't start until about a foot from the bottom – and a school of curious trout fry were staring unabashedly at the odd pink things that were invading their world from above.  One of them, no bigger than her little finger, even flitted up to nibble at her pinkie toe, which made Maddy giggle. She flicked her foot at the opposite bank, scattering the fry and causing a shower of rain to fall briefly on the dusky, underwater universe.

            “Maddy!” Clara hissed, twisting from where she sat on a rough outcropping of rock to glare at her sister.  “Don't do that.  You're going to scare the fish away.”

            “We've been sitting here for half an hour,” whispered Maddy, who had always had low patience and had never caught a fish.

            “Just twenty more minutes,” Clara insisted and returned her gaze to the rod and line drooped in her hands.  Maddy followed the hair-thin line with her eyes for a moment, but soon let her gaze drop off into the water again, to float in the lazy amber current where the fry had begun to regroup.

            The Mattawamkeag River looked like a channel of iced tea: long and fat and golden, it lay basking between reeds and evergreens in a slow, crooked arm around Gordon, Kingman, and Macwahoc, all the way up to Haynesville.  It was four o' clock in the afternoon and the sunlight was saffron yellow, sweeping in a band across the far bank, the east bank, and turning that side of the river into apple juice.  Maddy and Clara were perched on the end of a mounded cliff which seemed as though it had been thrust forth from a veritable explosion of greenery; a hillside of bough, vine, and leaf that towered 100 feet above their heads. 

            Somewhere at the top of that hillside their summer home hid among the trees.  It had belonged to their grandmother before them, and it had been she who had first taken them fishing, in the small, silver hours of the morning; it had been she who had shown them the secret paths that drew the house to the river bank.  “Remember, girls,” she often said as they picked their way through bracken fern and trillium, “Always watch your feet.  You never know what might be hiding beneath the leaves.”

            Maddy's eyes bobbed slowly over the deserted pebble beach on the opposite bank, then floated down to rest on her sister.  Maddy had always loved Clara. They did everything together, and she admired her more than anyone she'd ever known.  Clara was clever and brave and patient and, two years older than Maddy at twelve, everything her younger sister wished she  could be.  Her eyes were brown, brown like the river, and they always seemed to have a sharp light in them as if she were looking through a magnifying glass.  She wasn't afraid of the murkiness at the bottom of the river.

            The murkiness.  Maddy leaned over the edge of the rock and peered down into the depths of the riverbed, where centuries of silt had collected like globs of cocoa powder, making it impossible to see what was underneath.  Her grandmother had warned her about what might lie within the murkiness – water snakes that wove between your legs, thin and dark, snapping turtles that would bite your foot off if they could see it, unexpected rocks or submerged logs that could trip you and send you crashing into the murkiness yourself – but Maddy had always felt certain that there were worse things down there; sinister things, things that should never see the light.  Maddy loved the river, with its slow, amber grace and overhanging blue spruce boughs, but the murkiness frightened her more than anything.  She dared not disturb it.

            She looked up from tracing the rock with her index finger.  “Clara-”

            “Look, Maddy!”

            Maddy leaned forward, and her mouth pressed down into a thin line of excitement.  The red and white float that had been sitting blatantly on the surface of the water for nearly an hour now had been suddenly submerged and was now being yanked back and forth, sending out quivering ripple after quivering ripple.  Maddy could see the fish now: a dark smear in the dusky brown depths.

            Without warning, the brown water heaved and the fishing line pulled taught as the fish lunged away from its fate.  Both girls shrieked in surprise and Maddy scrambled towards her sister breathlessly, saying “Reel it in, Clara, reel it in!”

            Clara began to crank at the reel, one white-knuckled hand wrapped around the rod.  The fish appeared again – a heavy trout with wide, bulging eyes spraying water left and right as it flung itself wildly around the hook – and its captor squealed and pulled at the line.  And then the fish was on the rocks, flopping and gulping, with dust and bits of grass sticking to its sides. 

            The two girls knelt beside it and watched it thrash.

            “What do we do?”  Maddy asked.

            “Well, we have to kill it, of course.”  Clara touched the fish, poking its fin with a hesitant finger.  It jerked sideways and both Maddy and Clara jumped back.

            “How?”

            “Break its neck.”

            Maddy wrinkled her nose.  She didn't like the thought of snapping the neck of the poor fish.  She'd seen her grandmother do it many times – one quick motion and it was done – but neither she nor Clara had ever done it themselves.  And she didn't want the fish to suffer, struggling out of water, unable to breath...

            “I'll do it,” she said quietly, and reached for the fish.  It was cold and wet to the touch as she'd expected, but the spikes of its webbed fins were sharp and its body was as thick and strong as her forearm.  She turned the poor thing upside down, one hand just above its tail and one hand on its throat, then shut her eyes and yanked its head back as quickly as she could.  She didn't feel a snap.  She didn't feel the jarring of the spine, the release of tension.  She bent it back further, until the fish was in two.  Still no snap, but the fish had gone limp.

            Maddy released her grip and opened her eyes a crack.  For a second, the fish dangled from her hand, its scales glittering in the light of the setting sun.  Then its sides heaved and its eye rolled around to look at Maddy, bright and dark and looking at her. 

            Maddy couldn't pull her gaze away.  “Clara,” she whispered, her voice breaking high, “Clara, it's still alive.”