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By Root 447 0

and our catch was typically catfish or perch. Fishing with Johnny was always wrapped in some adventure. First we would have to start whatever broken-down car he happened to be driving, and this might involve pushing it down the street and hopping in and popping the clutch. Then would come the search for some secret spot that might require traversing an active railroad trestle with the tides rushing below, or renting a wooden boat and rowing into the current and dropping a concrete-block anchor to hold us steady as industrial barges passed by. The lures not only brought John back to me in a way, but they had the added poignancy of bringing him back to me as a boy and a young man. He was not only younger than I when he had used these fishing lures; he was younger than my son. They were artifacts of his life before he had come into ours, my mother’s, Paul’s and mine. I was surprised to learn that the lures even existed. I had never known him to own very much—a secondhand car, a good seaman’s knife that he brought along on his merchant marine trips, a watch with a metal band, some changes of work clothes, and one good suit and a pair of polished black shoes. That was about it. It seemed that his entire life always had been able to fit in a seabag. The few things that he had given me—my first shotgun, a brass double-edge safety razor that operated by turning the handle to open the place where the blade was placed, those hand lines for fishing—had been lost through the years. Nothing more. So for me—who had brought no possessions from childhood into my adult life and had nothing to remember Johnny by except a few photographs—these lures instantly were prized possessions. I planned to clean the rust from the hooks and hang them in the cabin.

And then, almost at the same time, as if some sort of cosmic mechanism had been set in motion, I got a note from Johnny’s niece, who, as it happened, was living in Maine. Would Paul and I like to have lunch with her and her mother? She had been a child of maybe four or five at the time that I was growing up in Silverton and living my life as a fisherman and trapper. Her father had been John’s brother, and her family had lived not far from us. Her mother had been a close witness of my mother and John’s marriage, and she had continued to see John after he’d disappeared from our lives. Chapters that I thought had closed for good were opening.

Over lunch, Paul and I asked a few questions and sat quietly and listened to the story of the final twenty years of John’s life—the years of his life after he had left us. He had lived at first with his brother Charles not far from where we were living—so while his whereabouts were a mystery to us then, he had been only about ten miles away. Then he began drifting—he went to Florida, worked construction off and on, got involved there with a woman, whom he eventually would bring back to New Jersey, and shipped out again as a merchant seaman. All the time, his drinking worsened. He eventually found his way to New Orleans, where he lived for a number of years—maybe because there was a merchant marine union hall there—but then he returned to New Jersey. He was always the same John, she said, except that each year of drinking took a deeper toll on his health and appearance.

In the year before he died, she told us, he had been making a plan with his brother to visit my mother, Paul and me in Maine. It was going to be some sort of grand reunion. He was outfitting a van, she said, for the trip. (This had the ring of truth in it for me. He could not simply drive up; it was only an eight-hour trip with traffic, but he’d need to make it an adventure.)

“He loved you boys,” she said.

By then, his hair was long and his cheeks were sunken between his jaws. His teeth were gone. In the last year of his life, his health had seriously deteriorated, and he was living at his mother’s house in Spotswood and rarely came out of the bedroom where he slept. He was depressed and marking time until his death. It came as heart failure. His mother arranged for his burial at sea by