Messenger - Lois Lowry [9]
Leader was at his desk. He looked up from the papers in front of him and smiled at Matty. "How's the fishing?"
Matty shrugged and grinned. "Not too bad. Caught four yesterday."
Leader laid his pen aside and leaned back in his chair. "Tell me something, Matty. You and your friend are out there a lot, fishing. And you've been doing it for a long time—since you came to Village as a little boy. Isn't that so?"
"I don't remember exactly how long. I was only about this high when I came." Matty gestured with his hand, placing it level with the second button of his own shirt.
"Six years," Leader told him. "You arrived six years ago. So you've been fishing for all that time."
Matty nodded. But he stiffened. He was wary. It was too soon for his true name to be bestowed, he thought. Surely it was not going to be Fisherman! Was that why Leader had called him here?
Leader looked at him and began to laugh. "Relax, Matty! When you look like that, I can almost read your mind! Don't worry. It was only a question."
"A question about fishing. Fishing's a thing I do just to get food or to fool around. I don't want it to turn into something more." Matty liked that about Leader, that you could say what you wanted to him, that you could tell him what you felt.
"I understand. You needn't worry about that. I was asking because I need to assess the food supply. Some are saying there are fewer fish than there once were. Look here, what I've been writing." He passed a paper over to Matty. There were columns of numbers, lists headed "Salmon" and "Trout."
Matty read the numbers and frowned. "It might be true," he said. "I remember at first I would pull fish after fish from the river. But you know what, Leader?"
"What?" Leader took the paper back from Matty and laid it with others on his desk.
"I was little then. And maybe you don't remember this, because you're older than I am..."
Leader smiled. "I'm still a young man, Matty. I remember being a boy." Matty thought he noticed a brief flicker of sadness in Leader's eyes, despite the warm smile. So many people in Village—including Matty—had sad memories of their childhoods.
"What I meant was, I remember all the fish, the feeling that they would never end. I felt that I could drop my line in again and again and again and there would always be fish. Now there aren't. But, Leader..."
Leader looked at him and waited.
"Things seem more when you're little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther. The first time I came here through Forest? The journey seemed forever."
"It does take days, Matty, from where you started."
"Yes, I know. It still takes days. But now it doesn't seem as far or as long. Because I'm older, and bigger, and I've gone back and forth again and again, and I know the way, and I'm not scared. So it seems shorter."
Leader chuckled. "And the fish?"
"Well," Matty acknowledged, "there don't seem to be as many. But maybe it's just that I was a little boy back then, when the fish seemed endless."
Leader tapped the tip of his pen on the desk as he thought. "Maybe so," he said after a moment. He stood. From a table in the corner of the room he took a stack of folded papers.
"Messages?" Matty asked.
"Messages. I'm calling a meeting."
"About fish?"
"No. I wish it were just about fish. Fish would be easy."
Matty took the stack of message papers he would be delivering. Before he turned to the staircase to leave, he felt compelled to say, "Fish aren't ever easy. You have to use just the right bait, and know the right place to go, and then you have to pull the line up at just the right moment, because if you don't, the fish can wiggle right off your hook, and not everybody is good at it, and..."
He could hear Leader laughing, still, when he left.
***
It took Matty most