Page 39 - WTP VOl. V #9

panion of his youth, the thing that dooms their fishing friendship, is our cousin’s boozing. Dad is a teetotaler, and he and my mother think it best to shy away from the drinking crowd. They’ve gotten a belly full of the hurtful things family and friends, emboldened by spirits, can say to one another.
sale of alcohol within its borders.
All through my growing up my father talks about the deleterious effects of alcohol on the brain and the other organs. When I am old enough to understand, he takes me to the parking lot of Gonya’s Garage behind our house to look at a wrecked car hauled in after a terrible crash. The crippled vehicle squats in the lot with its grille
Cousin Tom, on the other hand, seems to have spent his writing career embroidering a world
of perpetual adolescence where, after twilight deepens on the fishing river, a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon and a fishing story with more twists and turns than Rum Brook are always fitting bedfel- lows. Though absent from his writing are the sto- ries McNally tells my father of his combat jumps over Italy as a paratrooper and his lone survivor status during one incursion, where he saw Mus- solini and his mistress hanging by their heels. It says much for the intimacy of their friendship that Cousin Tom would tell Dad these things.
“Ipicture my father balancing atop the beaver dams, mak-
ing short casts to the expanding rings of rising trout as they sip insects o the surface.”
“He never liked to brag about the war,” my father, a World War Two Naval vet himself, says.
Years later, my wife and I visit Tom McNally at his Montana retirement home. While we are there
I begin to understand Dad’s lifelong aversion to gatherings where distilled spirits flow a little
bashed in. I can plainly see where an occupant was flung head first into the windshield, shat- tering the glass outward. But what I take away, and hold to this very day is those shards of red- stained glass among the windshield wipers, and the reek of alcohol spillage on the upholstery. In my memory the summer sunlight will flash for- ever off the brilliant facets of that red-dyed glass.
too freely. One image of Cousin Tom stays with me from our visit. He is poised in the basement beside a pool table, dabbing chalk on his cue stick for yet another behind-the-back shot. His face is flushed and he has barbecue sauce in his beard. His fifth or sixth Brandy Alexander rests on the rail of the pool table.
“Take a good look, Son,” Dad says. “This is your Cousin Billy Brown’s car. Out last night partying with his friends, I suppose. He didn’t make it.”
It is a scene that amuses my wife and me. After- ward, we wonder how my father’s judicious clan could produce such an intemperate kinsman. To us it seems as if this reeling old sot with the cue stick in his hand, standing beneath the mounted fish and bamboo rods on the walls of his retire- ment home, is merely a brute caretaker of some finer man’s artifacts.
It should come as no surprise that my father is a temperance man—perhaps the only progressive Catholic Democrat in my home state to subscribe to the ultra-conservative Maine Christian Civic League’s monthly newsletter. If Dad had his way he would reinstate the 18th Amendment, or at least make Penobscot County dry, prohibiting the
That is the report we take home to my father, who simply shakes his head and laughs ruefully.
Paul Corrigan has published his poetry in numerous magazines including Blueline, Poetry Northwest, Yankee, and Adirondack Life. Two of his poems were included in Maine Speaks, an anthology used in the Maine public schools. He has written about wilderness therapy and is currently at work on a memoir.
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