The Salmon at the Cleaning Station

The fish

She walked up to the table, set her backpack down on the dock, and took out Grandpa Sawyer’s knife. She slid it out of the sheath and held it up so the light caught the edge.

“Uncle Larry,” she said. “You’re going too deep behind the head. You’ll lose half the meat. Can I do it?”

My uncle looked at her for a long time, rubbing his gray goatee. I could not read his face. Then he looked down at the fish, at the crooked cut, and back up at her.

“That’s Dad’s knife,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

He stepped back from the table without another word. He set his yellow knife down and stood there with his hands at his sides.

Bobbie moved in. She laid the fish flat, ran her hand along its side to feel the bones, and started. She made a clean cut behind the gill plate, straight down to the backbone, and then turned the blade flat and ran it down the spine in one long, smooth stroke, the way I had shown her a hundred times.

The first fillet came off in a single piece, bright orange and perfect. She laid it on the table skin side down.

Zach let out a breath. “How do you do that?” he said.

“You let the knife do it,” Bobbie said. “You don’t push. You just follow the bones. Here. You try the other side.”

He looked at her like she had handed him a live snake. “I’ll mess it up.”

“No you won’t. I’ll show you.”

She turned the fish over and put the knife handle in his hand. Then she stood next to him, close, and put her hand over his on the handle the way Grandpa Sawyer had done for me, and the way I had done for her.

“Feel that?” she said. “That’s the backbone. Just keep the blade flat and follow it. Slow.”

Zach’s hand shook. But he followed her. The second fillet came off almost as clean as the first, with one little ragged spot at the tail that did not matter at all.

He stood there holding it in both hands, that thick orange fillet from the biggest fish he had ever caught, and he looked at Bobbie like nobody had ever shown him how to do anything in his life.

“I did it,” he said.

“You did it,” she said. “Now we skin them. Watch.”

What Larry said

My uncle had not moved. He was standing at the end of the table with his cap in his hand, and his face had changed. All the red set look from the dock was gone.

I walked over and stood beside him. I did not say anything. I did not have anything to say that would have been kind, so I just waited.

After a while, he spoke, so low I almost missed it.

“He’s never won anything, Birdie.”

I looked at him.

“Never,” he said. “Not one thing. He got cut from the basketball team in seventh grade and eighth grade. He tried out for baseball and sat the bench all spring. He gets C’s and D’s no matter how hard he studies, and he studies, I watch him do it. He reads slow. They tested him for it last year.”

He was turning the cap around in his hands, around and around by the brim.

“And his mother left two years ago,” he said. “You know that. Moved to Lansing, calls him on his birthday. Some years she does. He thinks it’s his fault. He thinks everything is his fault.”

“Larry,” I said.

“I’m sixty years old today,” he said. “I’m too old to be his dad, everybody says so. I know it. I see the other fathers at school, they’re forty. I don’t know how many more summers I’m going to be able to take him out on that lake.”

He stopped. He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“I just wanted him to have one day,” he said. “One day where he was the best at something. Where he got to hold up that envelope and everybody clapped for him. That’s all I was thinking. And then her fish came up out of that water, and I saw his face, and I just. I didn’t think.”

“You did think,” I said. “You thought about your boy. You didn’t think about mine.”

He nodded. He did not argue. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s exactly right.”