White

I go back to my husband. My yellow boys are curled around black holes, poplar sticks with line flashing visible/invisible in the murky light, gold-barbed hooks beneath the surface, danger for the trout below. Then a whoop and a holler from a boy in a black jacket, his over-large jeans cinched around his groin, grey tartan boxers, age ten at most. He’s caught a cutthroat. The boy pulls it out, red and yellow-green, silver, the only colour of the day. The fish lands on the ice with a dull meaty thud, thrashes wildly until Byrne comes down and thwacks it on the head with his beer bottle: Canadian I am, he is, fish wasn’t. The boy grins. The other kids squeal in mock horror, but Jaxen’s shock is unfeigned.

“Better that way,” my husband explains to Jaxen’s sickened face. “The water their air, our air their demise.”

Chase, too young or unfazed, goes over to admire the swiftly fading colours on the cutthroat along with the crack-the-whip line of girls. The teenage hockey players swoop in for a look, then blur off across the ice. Jaxen stands apart.

“Home?” I ask my husband.

“Not yet,” he says.

And indeed, despite himself, Jaxen can’t help but be drawn into the circle. He leans down to examine the silver-dead mercury of the cutthroat’s eye.

The razor-eared Dobermans come barrelling across the lake to the circle of children. My husband blocks the black, lean-muscled animals, tries to shoo them away. The dogs stand ten feet out, watch the children, but mostly the whereabouts of the fish that the kids pass back and forth amongst themselves like a treasure, the younger ones running their bare fingertips over the slick silvery scales, awed by the red violent slash like blood beneath the cutthroat’s gills.

The Dobermans tire of waiting and lope off to the other end of the lake where they wrap themselves in the fishing line of an elderly woman in a blue parka with matching hair. No doubt Byrne’s mother from the dire expression on his already-funeral face as he sprints past us, surprisingly agile for a man his size. He loses his beer bottle in the process. Byrne bellows at the dogs that immediately cease their whining, their brutish jumping about. The dogs lie at the feet of Byrne’s mother while Byrne expertly cuts the tangled fishing line from around his mother’s legs with a bowie knife he produced from the shank of his left boot; the knife’s end is curved up, dangerous-looking, designed to finish more efficiently.

The mother straightens up, smoothes her parka over her body. The Dobermans take off running the quarter section that is Byrne’s, and soon they are only two black dots/dogs on the white horizon. Byrne gathers his mother and on the way past us retrieves his beer bottle/fish killer, which he hands over to the ten-year-old boy in the black jacket like a rite of passage.

The kids scatter back to their respective holes. And while Chase can’t see beneath the surface, he knows the fish are there from the yelps of the other children, the despondent dance of coloured fish caught in the air that is not theirs. The hockey players rip over, stopping precariously close, snowing the children in a spray of white in order to witness the number of thwacks required to make a fish say uncle.