1
----
Timewhen
C ould have been April when this started, this whole business about Fishboneâs song, which I âspose could be called my song just as well. Thing is, I know where it went and sort of how long it lasted.
Or not, maybe it wasnât really April, at least not the way time works here in the woods where we live next to Caddo Creek, just where it spills across three big rocks to make something almost like the homemade music I try to do on the old small guitar I found in the back of the caved-in âshine shack.
I only know what the time of the day it is so that when Fishbone says:
âItâs the time when the willow bark slips enough to cut a thumbâs worth and make a high whistle for to blow. . . .â Then I know soon the creek will be swollen from the runoff out of what Fishbone calls â. . . . the long mountains,â which Iâve never seen but will someday. And then there will be the little chub fish with the rainbow on their side to net and cut in slits to smoke. And the mushrooms will come soon after the chubs run, mushrooms hiding in the grass like tiny Christmas trees until you see one and then they all seem to jump out at you, and after that to cut and dry them on a slab board in hot sun . . .
When he says that, when he says âtime when,â it always comes out as one word: âtimewhen.â Which he says a lot, all the time, about a lot of things. Heâs old. Very old. So old he canât really be figured in years or regular time and sometimes heâll just say âtimewhenâ and not follow it up with what he was thinking about. Instead heâll look off at a cloud even if there arenât any clouds in the sky, and smileat some little or big thing only he knows, only he can remember. It might be something as small as a hummingbird hovering on a wild raspberry flower or as big as a war. Same smile. And he might tell you then if you ask him and he might not until later, maybe a year later, when heâs sitting on the porch smoothed with âshine made by the man Iâve never talked to who brings the clear alcohol in the middle of a night in half-gallon canning jars. Fishboneâs old foot will tap his old work boot in a kind of tap shuffle tap, and heâll look off into the place he was then, back then, and heâll tell you in soft words that run together like new honey about what it was; hummingbird or war. Same voice. Same sound.
Nobody knows why they call him Fishbone or even when it might have got started as a name for him. He once said it was because he got a fishbone stuck in his throat and two doctors had to hold him in a half-broken-down wooden chair full of splinters and knots, one holding his mouth open whilethe second one, who was younger, dug down in his throat with a rusty pair of horseshoe tongs. They pulled out the bone, which came from a big old yellow channel catfish caught off a mudbank, and all he had to ease the pain was two swallows of clear corn moonshine . . .
All the parts of the story tight and told like they were true and they might have been, probably were, the true story. Except that maybe a week later he would tell it different and say that it was when he was fishing for crawfish and had no small hook and had to make one from the backbone of an ugly gar fish he killed in the shallows with a piece of driftwood he used for a club.
And it was not until later, on a still summer night, sitting on the porch listening to the whine of night bugs hitting the water in the dog dish where the moon had come down to sit, that you would find that both stories were true or were thought true . . .
Thoughttrue.
Like timewhen.
All the same, all the same time or place or something happening. No difference in those things because the main part was that it was his name.
Fishbone.
Stories about how I came to be with Fishbone, by him, of him, family to himâall true,
----
Timewhen
C ould have been April when this started, this whole business about Fishboneâs song, which I âspose could be called my song just as well. Thing is, I know where it went and sort of how long it lasted.
Or not, maybe it wasnât really April, at least not the way time works here in the woods where we live next to Caddo Creek, just where it spills across three big rocks to make something almost like the homemade music I try to do on the old small guitar I found in the back of the caved-in âshine shack.
I only know what the time of the day it is so that when Fishbone says:
âItâs the time when the willow bark slips enough to cut a thumbâs worth and make a high whistle for to blow. . . .â Then I know soon the creek will be swollen from the runoff out of what Fishbone calls â. . . . the long mountains,â which Iâve never seen but will someday. And then there will be the little chub fish with the rainbow on their side to net and cut in slits to smoke. And the mushrooms will come soon after the chubs run, mushrooms hiding in the grass like tiny Christmas trees until you see one and then they all seem to jump out at you, and after that to cut and dry them on a slab board in hot sun . . .
When he says that, when he says âtime when,â it always comes out as one word: âtimewhen.â Which he says a lot, all the time, about a lot of things. Heâs old. Very old. So old he canât really be figured in years or regular time and sometimes heâll just say âtimewhenâ and not follow it up with what he was thinking about. Instead heâll look off at a cloud even if there arenât any clouds in the sky, and smileat some little or big thing only he knows, only he can remember. It might be something as small as a hummingbird hovering on a wild raspberry flower or as big as a war. Same smile. And he might tell you then if you ask him and he might not until later, maybe a year later, when heâs sitting on the porch smoothed with âshine made by the man Iâve never talked to who brings the clear alcohol in the middle of a night in half-gallon canning jars. Fishboneâs old foot will tap his old work boot in a kind of tap shuffle tap, and heâll look off into the place he was then, back then, and heâll tell you in soft words that run together like new honey about what it was; hummingbird or war. Same voice. Same sound.
Nobody knows why they call him Fishbone or even when it might have got started as a name for him. He once said it was because he got a fishbone stuck in his throat and two doctors had to hold him in a half-broken-down wooden chair full of splinters and knots, one holding his mouth open whilethe second one, who was younger, dug down in his throat with a rusty pair of horseshoe tongs. They pulled out the bone, which came from a big old yellow channel catfish caught off a mudbank, and all he had to ease the pain was two swallows of clear corn moonshine . . .
All the parts of the story tight and told like they were true and they might have been, probably were, the true story. Except that maybe a week later he would tell it different and say that it was when he was fishing for crawfish and had no small hook and had to make one from the backbone of an ugly gar fish he killed in the shallows with a piece of driftwood he used for a club.
And it was not until later, on a still summer night, sitting on the porch listening to the whine of night bugs hitting the water in the dog dish where the moon had come down to sit, that you would find that both stories were true or were thought true . . .
Thoughttrue.
Like timewhen.
All the same, all the same time or place or something happening. No difference in those things because the main part was that it was his name.
Fishbone.
Stories about how I came to be with Fishbone, by him, of him, family to himâall true,
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