During that last winter, Ryan painted catfish that were yellow and flat-headed, but he left the fish on dry canvas, not filling in the river around them. I was back home after my first semester of grad school in New York. Ryan was supposed to be finishing his first semester of undergrad. Like me before, he lived at home while attending classes at the state college down by the river.
When Dad took the church up here in Illinois, an hour east of the Mississippi, I was glad to move into its parsonage. It was the first house we’d lived in that had an upstairs and a basement. Well, the upstairs was really just a finished attic, but I liked it for the window light, and Ryan seemed content to burrow down in the basement.
The other thing I liked about living in rural Illinois, what we all liked, was the courthouse square, with its soda fountain, bookstore, and boutique. Mom and I would go to the candy counter and buy a chocolate coconut nest to share. Sometimes Ryan came with and got his own. I always knew when Ryan was nearby because he had vocal tics—usually a pushy vowel sound like “uh,” sometimes with a roll of the shoulder or jerk of the neck. He had Tourette Syndrome, and I found out later that some of his meds, like Haldol, were antipsychotics and could change his mental state for the worse.
When home on winter break, I spent most of my day in the attic, reading and taking notes, and that’s what I was doing late one night when I heard a knock on the front door. Because the vent in my floor was open, I could hear Dad answer the door, and then a man’s voice, grave. The voice was telling Dad that Ryan had been arrested for breaking into a house and stealing CDs. It must have been the sheriff–he was a church elder and a friend of Dad’s. Dad went over to bail Ryan out. They returned and I heard Dad ask Ryan why, but Ryan didn’t say. He didn’t deny it, though.
Since I’d left for grad school Ryan had taken up smoking. He ate red licorice for dinner. It was as if he was abandoning any effort to be healthy or disciplined. I suspected Ryan had been pressured or dared to break into the house, and that he did not have the judgement to step away. I planned to ask him later.
The next morning as soon as Dad crossed the parking lot to go to his office in the church, Mom descended into the basement and I followed, pretending I had to do laundry. It was dark and dank down there. Ryan’s fishes on blank canvas rested against every upright surface– the walls, his dresser, his T.V.
“Why don’t you get out of bed and finish one?” Mom said.
“You don’t understand artists, Mom,” Ryan said.
“First, a semester’s tuition down the drain,” she yelled. “And now this. They report arrests in the paper, you know.” Mom reached for one of his paintings.
“What are you doing?” Ryan said, but the rage had already overcome her. Before I left for grad school, she would unleash this rage on me for leaving a bag of bagels on the table or not wearing lipstick to church. Ryan witnessed the way she could blow up at me and calm down within minutes. I would yell back at her, but he just took it, and I felt bad for him.
Mom knocked a canvas to the floor, broke its cheap frame with her stomping. The catfish he’d painted lay lifeless in the wrinkle of the unhinged canvas. Mom knocked down more unfinished canvases, a school of dead fish. He’d dotted them with flashes of neon green that jumped off the dark carpet. Mom walked over every painting before she stopped. Her frame was fragile, like the cheap wood Ryan had stretched the canvases across.
She stood in the river of unfinished paintings. “Why are you doing this to me? Throw them in the dumpster,” she said. And to me, “Don’t even think about helping him.”
She climbed the stairs around to the kitchen and I followed her, but stopped at the landing, where I could see her folding bread dough. She always folded the dough in two creases, like a formal letter, then rotated it a half turn and repeated the fold. Her hands were small and quick. She smoothed the dough into a ball and nestled it into a floured basket. Her rage seemed to have left as quickly as it came. And I remember her like that, intent on a task. How would Ryan remember her? Enraged? Or flattered when, while strolling around the courthouse square, he’d drape his arm around her for no reason?
From the landing, I could have gone back down to him, up to her, or left through the back door. I stepped up. “You’re too hard on him,” I said and wished I’d stepped down. Mom turned her head to me. Ryan looked like her, the two of them with dark hazel eyes and high cheek bones. I’m blondish and look like her less, except that she and I are both petite.
Mom’s face tightened. Maybe Ryan would have seen it as fury, but I recognized it as inner hatred. She spoke. “Hard on him? He’s hard on me. And so are you. Because he’s just another fish in the sea, but the foolish one, the one that gets caught.”
“Mom, ‘another fish in the sea’ is said for solace. It’s for unrequited love, not an arrest.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just know they caught him stealing. A failed semester and an arrest on his record. How does that make me look?”
I found Ryan clearing a path through the canvases. He had a way of laughing her off, as if she were a child. I put a hand on his shoulder, but he slipped away. There was a canvas in the corner Mom didn’t get to. He had painted a channel catfish at the bottom.
“You could finish this one,” I said.
“You could go back upstairs,” he said.
“I’m sorry about Mom,” I said.
“Don’t be. She’ll feel guilty later, dig into her stash, and take me to the art store on the square. I’m fine.”
He was not fine, and I was forever asking what if I had just stayed down there and sat with him in that path between the catfish? If Ryan and I had sat together, not moving or talking. If that might have been enough to throw death off its course for another day.
Instead, we busied ourselves gathering up canvases. Their broken frames banged my knees. We threw them in the dumpster in the church parking lot out back. It was 40 degrees—warm for February. Dirty mounds of plowed snow were melting in the sun. Ryan’s bare feet splashed in the icy puddles.
Ryan had decorated the dumpster with a bumper sticker of a line drawing of a fish. It’s true that the simple fish had once been a secret way to let other Christians know you were Christian too, but when Ryan put the sticker there, he wasn’t trying to communicate anything about religion. He was saying, “Let’s go fishing.”
Dad liked to tell fishing stories when he preached. He quoted the Gospel of Mark: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people.” And then Dad would beseech us to embrace the outcasts. Ryan and I never had to explain to each other what the fishing metaphor meant for each of us. I was a fisher of words and he was the fisher of people, lost people, even of his old friend Jason, who didn’t have many friends left.
We were on our second trip to the dumpster when Jason pulled into the church parking lot with a canoe sticking out the back of his truck. When Ryan and Jason were in junior high, Jason would eat dinner with us sometimes. Mom loved it because Jason would talk about how great her cooking was and after dinner, he’d help clear the table. But Jason got a concussion in football practice his freshman year and he wasn’t the same after that. One evening, Jason knocked on the back door to get Ryan to go out for a milkshake. I looked out the window and saw that Kevin, this kid we didn’t know very well, was waiting in his car. The story, as I overheard it from Dad, was that Jason and Kevin drove by the principal’s house and Kevin dared Jason to throw a brick through the principal’s window. No one could believe that it was Jason who did it, but he confessed. He said that it was during a school board meeting and no one was home, so he didn’t think it would hurt anyone. Jason didn’t tell anyone that Ryan was in the car, but I knew.
Jason got out of his truck and gave me a hug. He was the only one of Ryan’s high school friends who did that. I still adored Jason, even as I couldn’t trust him.
“Isn’t it too wintry to be toting around a canoe like that?” I said.
“We’re going out on the Spoon River above the Bernadotte dam,” Ryan said.
“No, you’re not. I mean, there’s no dam around here,” I said.
“It’s defunct. It’s not hooked to a grid anymore,” Ryan said.
“Then why’s it there?” I said.
“Catfish spawn below it every year and anglers catch these humongous flatheads, like 80 pounds,” Ryan said. “You can even eat them.”
“Gross. I heard defunct dams aren’t safe,” I said.
“It’s not like we plan on going over it. We’ll take the boat out at the bend, before the dam even comes into view. Chill out, sister.” Ryan rested his heavy arm around my shoulders.
“People row boats over that dam all the time,” Jason said. “The key is to keep paddling.”
I slid out from under Ryan’s arm and stared at him. “Don’t listen to him.” And to Jason, “Don’t you dare.”
Maybe that was the pivotal point—me, suggesting a dare by trying to prohibit it.
Ryan went inside and came out wearing an Andean wool sweater. The memory of that morning–first Mom’s rage, the sunny day, the rough wool, Jason’s truck–must reside in Ryan’s bones. It does in mine.
***
Ryan didn’t come home for dinner. It was dark when Mom, Dad, and I sat down to eat without him. The sheriff knocked. He said Ryan was missing. Missing. I longed for “arrested.” An ambulance was going out for Jason. He probably had hypothermia and lung damage. The sheriff insisted that he would drive Dad and me out to the dam. The sheriff’s wife stayed with Mom, who went in her room and shut the door.
In the car, the sheriff talked about melting snow, the swift current, the rumors of other drownings at the dam. The locals do not keep count of the number of accidents there. Deputies filled us in through the radio. Jason said he got lucky–the current spit him out. Jason blamed himself. He convinced Ryan to get a little closer to the dam, get a better look at it. Then the current pulled their canoe over the dam and Ryan’s arms gave out. He stopped paddling. The boat capsized. How would Ryan tell it?
I stared out the window of the patrol car. The route to the dam was dark. No moon.
We pulled into a gravel lot next to the diner and got out of the car. The river rushed and roared. Men with flashlights were searching along the bank.
A stair step, smooth as glass, swelled across the river. It was not even a waterfall, just a short dip. Even with the floodlights on it, I couldn’t see anything dangerous.
“Where’s the dam?” I said.
“Right here. Don’t get too close,” Dad said.
“That’s a dip, not a danger. He’s probably in the diner. Did anyone even look there? Maybe he’s on the other bank. Did they search there yet?”
“They’ve looked everywhere,” said the sheriff.
I searched the ground for a healthy branch and dragged it back and forth along the mud and crumbling concrete.
***
One of those days before Ryan disappeared, Mom was in the kitchen, talking to the sheriff’s wife about empty nest syndrome. “It begins when the first child leaves,” she said. She put a book on the kitchen table for the sheriff’s wife to see. “I am a Mother of the Empty Nest,” she said.
“Mom,” I said, “your 18-year-old son lives at home. That’s not an empty nest.”
After the sheriff’s wife left, Mom went down to Ryan’s room and turned on the lights. I stopped at the backdoor landing and listened.
“It’s two in the afternoon. Is this how you want to live your life?” Mom of the empty nest started in.
“Actually, yeah,” Ryan said.
But what did Dad say when he got home?
“If you want to talk, I’m here,” Dad said.
“Okay,” Ryan said.
“I love you,” Dad said.
“I love you too,” Ryan said.
***
The first night I was back for winter break, I had gone down to Ryan’s room, where he set up a canvas for me.
“It’s too big, I’ll never finish it,” I said.
“So what. Sometimes things want to be unfinished. Watch. This is how I paint a flathead.” He mixed a dab of yellow into the brown and painted a cube, except that it was short and wide and had soft edges. He worked fast. “Flatheads are the hardest to paint because they’re so wide. You should start with trout.”
“What? Like this?” I grabbed his brush, and on the same canvas, above his unfinished flathead, I painted two arcs. At one end, the arcs met, and at the other, they intersected. The intersection formed a tail that opened, like a math sign that means greater than.
He pointed to the tail of my fish. “See? The river and all it holds is greater than the single fish.”
He saw the greatness of the emptiness. I tried to see it too.
***
The day after Ryan disappeared, Dad and I returned to the dam. We rode silently, and when we arrived, I got out of the car and saw a couple of workers in orange vests were dredging the river many yards downstream from the dam.
“But that’s not where he is. Why don’t they get closer?” I said.
“It’s too dangerous, undercurrent’s too strong,” Dad said. We took comfort in the cold facts. They were numbing, like sedatives.
“But there’s no rapids, no gushing or splashing,” I said.
“It’s what’s under the surface, what we can’t see. He must have blacked-out fast because the body accepts fresh water more quickly than saltwater,” he said.
The rescue phase was over, but Dad had not yet said the word “drowned.” “Drowned” didn’t seem right since Ryan was a good swimmer. What was the right word? “Killed,” I think now. The dam killed him.
It was said that the roll of the water over the dam had carved out a cave underneath it. The cave drew in the dead–not just Ryan, but others—drunk soldiers, unlucky anglers and children who had gone in to rescue their dogs. There’s never been a way to reach them.
In the paper, the lead story became “Crews Abandon Recovery Search for Missing Man.” On page three at the bottom, the “Police Beat” included Ryan’s arrest, but I never heard any talk of it. The funeral was arranged.
The sanctuary wouldn’t hold all the mourners, so the funeral directors installed speakers and seating in the basement. The town dignitaries attended–such as the mayor and the sheriff, but the outcasts came as well, like Jason, who had counted on Ryan for company. I had an off-and-on boyfriend who came with his family. The relatives drove up from Tennessee and Texas. No one recalled a time when the church held so many people.
Mom was on sedatives. Her friends held her up. It felt to me as if I had lost both my mother and my brother.
During the service and afterwards, I relied on the habits of the preacher’s daughter: sit, stand, appear to sing, make eye contact, receive sympathies. If Ryan had been the surviving sibling, he, the preacher’s son, probably would have dribbled snot on the shoulders of all the old ladies. They adored him. In a sympathy card one of them wrote that she loved Ryan’s “devilish ways.”
When the cards and casseroles stopped coming, I was left with my grief. Some people had a thing they called “a good cry,” but weeping gave me no relief. Tears felt like fire, burning my cheeks and filling my head with smoke. I learned to grieve with my hands.
I took a square of paper, folded and unfolded it four times– on the vertical, horizontal, and both diagonals. I used a ruler and No. 2 pencil to draw a grid that supported symmetry. I drew four fish, their noses kissing at the center. I drew symmetrical scales. The “greater than” shape of the fish tails fanned out to each corner of the page.
I dug out the murkiest greens, greys, yellows, and oranges from a hat box of colored pencils. The colors had names like Avocado Peel, Pale Vermillion, Marine, and Mineral Orange. I started with the fish in the top left quadrant of the paper. With “sunburst,” I colored in the space between the eye and the point of its face and called it the nose. Sunburst was too bright for freshwater fish, so I muddied it up with “sand.” I did the same with the fish in the bottom right quadrant. This was my yellow-themed set of twin fish.
For the twins on the other diagonal line, I filled in the noses with “pumpkin.” Now, the center of the page resembled two bowties that intersected like a pinwheel.
I kept switching out colors for the eyes, the space behind the eyes, the hundreds of scales. I kept the colors of the two fish on each diagonal line the same: a yellow-themed set of twins, and an orange set.
Finally, I got to the tails. They were made of line and nothing else. I traced yellow over the first set of tail lines, then orange over the second set. Remembering Ryan’s fishes on blank canvas, I left the space around the fish bare, calling it unfinished. Unfinished. The fishes were less than the blank paper. All beyond the fish—north, south, east, and west–was greater than the fish. I taped the fish mandala on the wall behind my laptop.
*****
Holly Stovall is a writer, academic and teacher. She has published narrative histories, literary criticism and creative nonfiction in various journals and online media outlets, including Letras Hispanas, Peace and Change, In These Times, Inside Higher Ed’s “University of Venus” blog, and The Australian Journal of Environmental Education. She has a PhD in Spanish literature, an MA in Women’s History, and is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing (fiction and nonfiction) at Northwestern University.
