Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey Read Free Book Online Page B

fell to scaling, gutting, trimming, washing, salting down the fish in kegs and crocks. That evening you ate hearty—of anything except fish. That night you slept the sodden sleep of one drugged by hard repetitive labor and next morning you woke stiff and sore in your every cell. Waiting for you would be a breakfast prepared by Tony featuring scrambled eggs and herring roe.
    Their hands would be still a mass of cuts when the Curtis clan came back days later to help with the second stage, and the salt stung. Soon the cavernous old kitchen reeked of boiling vinegar and onions and pickling spices and above all, as these were chopped in pieces, of fish. When the work was done every surface was covered with glistening jars.
    The herring to be smoked were left whole. They were skewered through the eyes on metal rods and hung in racks in the smokehouse. The firebox was outside the smokehouse, connected to it by a stovepipe. Throughout the night Tony and he took turns getting up and feeding the fire with corncobs and green hickory. In the morning the fish had been transmuted overnight from new silver to old gold. For days afterwards you smelled of fish and smoke and spices and vinegar and through the year the taste of herring brought back to you memories of the fishing and the fun, the fellowship.
    If it should be an autumn visit to Hudson that he was on then it would be still dark when Tony knocked on his bedroom door in the morning and recited:
    Waken, lords and ladies gay!
    On the mountain dawns the day;
    All the jolly chase is here
    With hawk and horse and hunting spear;
    Hounds are in their couples yelling,
    Hawks are whistling, horns are knelling;
    Merrily, merrily mingle they.
    Waken, lords and ladies gay!
    Relieved of his weight, the old canopy bed gave a groan. He washed but he did not shave. This morning was a holiday from shaving and whiskers were protection to the face against the wintry wind from off the water. He pulled on long silk underwear and, over these, long woolen ones, a wool shirt, and thick wool pants. The odor of mothballs in his clothes was another association with this season and this house. Going down the paneled and tapestried high-ceilinged hallways with their family portraits and pedestals and all that old oriental opulence, you felt as though you were living in Sir Walter Scott’s time and were on a weekend at a laird’s great country estate.
    Tony, at the kitchen range, would be just easing an omelette onto its back. Kippers in a crucible—a prosaic skillet, really—were undergoing alchemy. An early riser, restless for each day to begin, Tony cooked breakfast for himself and whoever else was up each morning. Now he would intone:
    Louder, louder chant the lay:
    Waken, lords and ladies gay!
    They would finish it together:
    Tell them youth and mirth and glee
    Run a course as well as we;
    Time, stern huntsman, who can balk?
    Staunch as hound and fleet as hawk;
    Think of this, and rise with day,
    Gentle lords and ladies gay!
    How lightly they had said it then, and now youth and mirth and glee had run their course, and time, stern huntsman, had hunted down Riverside’s gentle lord, but in those days they were full of mirth as Tony took a stone bottle from the freezer and the two of them tossed down with a toast to the day their time-honored eye-opener, a jigger of Dutch gin, icy in the mouth, fiery further down.
    â€œWhat’s our weather, gentle lord?” he would ask.
    Tony always knew. His first act on getting up in the morning was to step outside and, while relieving himself, assess the weather. Not even a blizzard could stop him.
    â€œDark, dreary, dank, and dismal.”
    â€œDucky!”
    The lunch hamper would be already packed, so, breakfast finished, they would go to the den to get their guns and their gear. For years he had left his here at Riverside, Tony being his only duck-shooting companion. Men with whom you looked forward to spending all day in a duckblind no