A/N: Disclaimer: The Grapes of Wrath was written by John Steinbeck and not me. The opinions on those with special needs reflect the general mindset of the 1930s and not the author's. The author is also not advocating fishing without a license.
~*Q*~
As Tom disappeared through the willows one way, his eldest brother Noah went the other, following the river that so called to him.
He could almost feel Tom watching him leave, watching him tear up their warped family even further, but Noah did not look back. If he did, he would not have changed his mind. The river was here, and Noah had responded, and he felt good and proud for choosing this path, the path along the Colorado.
But as the sun sank lower over the hills to his right, the future of the eldest Joad son became uncertain. He had no food with him; he had very little money. The farmers who owned property along this river were unfriendly and only left him alone when they saw that he kept moving, continuous as the current. He needed to find food and shelter. The river was not going to be the safe and beautiful haven he imagined.
But looking at the wide, slow river buried among reeds and at the way it flowed and shone in the late afternoon sun, Noah forgot his worries. He was not a stupid man. Maybe he looked it, with a broad face and wide eyes, but he was not. He was different, was all. Slower and calmer and more focused than the rest. If the restless farmers of the Southwest were ravens, pecking and squabbling over anything they could pick out of the dust, then Noah was a dove among men.
Noah was not a stupid man. He needed to get a line to fish - that was food. He needed to beg a place to stay or else hope he stayed dry and safe enough on the riverbank - that was shelter. The problem was keeping sure that the ones owning property along the river wouldn't drive him away. There was also the policemen. Policemen had no time for a damn Okie.
He was not stupid and he was resourceful, and so although he forgot his worries, they remained, lurking in the back of his misshapen mind.
Noah walked. He left a lonely trail of muddy footsteps along the bank of the Colorado. In the water, he could see fish, little quick flashes of silver throwing bubbles in their wake. He needed a line. He had no idea where to find one.
He could get one from town. Go into a general store and pick one up easy as anything. He did not know where the nearest town was, though, or if he was going the right direction. Noah wanted to follow the river, and had given no consideration to anything outside it.
The man walked far, far enough for the sun to sink and his feet begin to burn. Nobody was around, not even the policemen patrolling with their flashlights. It was a long time before he encountered another person. It was a man fishing at the edge of the river. He held a grimy oil lantern with a weak-sputtering flame that he held up close to the water's surface. He gripped a fishing pole loosely in one hand.
Noah never talked much, but the sight of the fishing rod gave him the will to speak up. "That yours?"
The man startled wildly. His lantern swung around, a firefly in the dark. "Oh," the man said. "Oh. Jus' you. Thought it might a been a cop."
"No," said Noah. "That yours?"
"Sure am glad you ain't a cop," the man said, nervous, breathing heavy. "I don't got a license, see? Can't afford one. Got a wife n' kids and we need food - we need fish."
"All right," said Noah.
"Heard that black crappies come at night," the man continued. "The light 'tracts them. My luck ain't no good, though. Maybe the season ain't right. I dunno nothing."
"That your fishing line?" Noah repeated.
"Oh, yeah. Bought it a while back. Why?"
"Can I have it?"
The man gave him a funny look. "No, 'course not. We need it to fish. You starving or somepin?"
"I need a line," Noah said. "Got an extry?"
In the dim lantern-light, he saw the fisherman's eyes dart toward his box of bait. "Yeah, got a string 'case this one breaks. No rod, though. And it's my only one, and I toldja, I need to fish."
"So do I."
The man was clearly uncomfortable. Turning down beggars was not in his nature, but in this land Nature was not kind to those who gave up valuables without getting anything in return.
"I could sell it," he said slowly. "Yeah, I could. Got money?"
"A little." He had thirty cents.
"I'll give it for two bits."
"Too much." That would leave him with a nickel, not enough to get far on. Noah was never good at bartering - too slow and gentle - but he gave it a shot. "How 'bout fifteen cents?"
"Two bits." The man was warming up to this idea, clinging to it. "Not a penny less. What if my line breaks and I don't got extry?"
Noah made an unhappy sound in his throat. "I don't got so much, mister."
"Take it or leave it."
Noah took it. The money and the line exchanged hands.
He left the man sitting by the river, futilely shining his light into the water and trying to coax out the fish. He was thinking hard. A line was not such a bad thing to have; surely he could use it in more ways than one. He could cut through bread with it instead of using a knife. He had no rod or hook, but he could tie something sharp like wood to the end of it and stick a worm on.
His anxieties soothed over after another quarter hour of walking. Now, although he felt secure in his ability to not starve, there was still the issue of finding a place to sleep. By this point, Noah was too tired to care. He came across a homey-looking patch of mud and curled straight up in it, half-sheltered by weeds that straggled near the river's surface. He let sleep catch him in its embrace.
~*Q*~
He dreamt of Ma and Pa. They stood there, tears making tracks in the dust on their faces.
"Ma," he said, but they did not answer. The dust spread and spread until they turned to ash, and he could do nothing. Because he had abandoned them. Without him, they would be swallowed by the earth.
He was almost glad when he was woken up, both by mosquitoes and a policeman's hard boot. "Get up."
He rolled out to see a young but tight-faced man in a dark uniform. The jolt came again as the cop kicked him in the side. "I said get up and get out. This ain't your property."
"It ain't no one's property," Noah responded softly, confused by the other man's anger.
"Is too," the cop said almost petulantly. "They's payin' me to get rid of the vagrants, and I ain't gonna get fired and end up in a gov'ment camp with the rest of you Okies."
Noah didn't like to raise a fuss over things he didn't understand, so he stood up and continued north. He had virtually no possessions of his own, but it gave him some comfort to squeeze his scrap of fishing line so it left marks in his palm.
The sun rose steadily. By the time it was around ten o'clock, Noah was famished. It was time to give his line a try.
He started by finding a sturdy bit of cattail reed and tying it around one end of the string. Then he dug around in the riverbank mud, loose and slippery yet feeling parched all the same, until he found a worm. It took some doing to stab through the soft middle with his dull excuse for a hook, but he finally managed and cast the whole wriggling thing into the water.
No fish came at first. He took the time to find a second reed and wind the line around it, like a handlebar, so the fish wouldn't pull his whole hand off when he tried to reel it in. Noah contemplated, as he dozed in the summery heat, that the prospect of having a fish big enough to yank off his fingers might have just been wishful thinking.
"Jes' wishful thinkin'," he said aloud to himself as a tug came on the line.
Something had taken the bait. Noah gave the line a frantic pull, and the reed slipped and bent under the pressure. He tried to ease up, gripping the line with his fingers, but the Dacron material bit into the flesh and made him cry out and jerk back. Then the cheap line, with no rod to support it, snapped right in half.
Noah's one consolation was that the fish, visible just under the surface, was now choking on the poorly-made fishhook. He stared dumbly into the water until the fish had floated up on its side; he extricated it with two fingers. It looked to be a largemouth bass, but it was painfully small and scraggly. It was only then that Noah realized he had no way of making a fire, so he peeled the fish right then and there and ate it raw. The fish was mostly skin and bones.
Hardly sated, distressed at losing his only real possession, Noah could do nothing but stand up and walk on. He washed off the fish bones in the river and kept them in his pocket. He was not entirely sure why. He thought maybe he would need them someday.
He tried to recapture the reason he had followed the Colorado in the first place, the peace and joy of floating freely in wonderful, life-giving, dust-clumping water, but it was not quite the same with a twisted stomach and the empty knowledge that he had only five cents to his name. The Joad family had been rich compared to the way he was now - a wanderer, a vagabond, following the religion of the river. In fact, he was almost beginning to hate it. It had given him false promises and he had been easily lured into its grasp.
Noah did not get angry - he could not remember a time when he had - but he began to get frustrated at himself, at the river, at Ma and Pa and Tom and God. He could not help the thoughts that seized, or failed to be seized by, his mind from time to time. It was like a grandfather clock missing the hand that made the minute hand tick. The hour and second still told the time, but with none of the precision they had otherwise. He was too slow to ever think things through on his own. There was sure to be something wrong with him.
"I'm touched in the head," Noah muttered, clutching his hair in both hands. "Always knew Pa was too nice to me."
Who'd hire a guy that couldn't even think right? Noah's steps faltered as the reality of his situation sank in. He was alone and he had nothing to rely on, not even a two-bit string. Sure as hell he'd starve out here.
Just as despair caught up to him, as he started to regard the river in a new kind of light, a man's steady voice interrupted him from behind: "You all right, son?"
Noah turned. It was a man, a very old man, hobbling towards him wielding a walking stick and an expression much less ferocious than the kind hungry farmers usually wore. Noah did not want to answer him; someone going out of their way to show sympathy - especially to a trespasser - was a rare occurrence in these times and he felt as though giving an answer would reveal some sort of incriminating evidence. Nevertheless, he shook his head to clear it and answered "Yes, sir."
The man scrutinized him carefully. "Whatsa matter?"
"There's nothin' wrong, sir."
"Pardon me for askin', but do other folks sometimes say there's somepin diff'rent about you? Meanin' in your head?"
"As a matter o' fact, I was jes' thinkin' 'bout that, sir," Noah answered, keeping his voice low to not betray his surprise and sudden hurt. "My pa pressed my head all outta shape when I was born, sir, and it might not a been put back right. Please don' mind me none."
"Oh," the old man exclaimed, as if just realizing the impertinence of his question, "I didn' mean no harm. I'm jus' attuned to folks, you see. If they's a li'l diff'rent I can spot it from a mile away. I could tell - I could tell you was actin' a li'l bit funny."
"A li'l bit touched," Noah said with an air of gloomy correction.
"Guess you could say tha'." The old man did not seem to want to leave. "Name's Eli."
"Noah."
"Noah, you have anyplace in partic'lar you was headin' off to?"
"No sir," the man answered with a shake of his head.
"Well," the old man said, "you might a noticed, I'm gettin' on in years. Can barely stand to walk up the porch no more. If by chance you don' mind helpin' an old man out, I could use a helper 'round the house an' for fieldwork. Couldn' really afford to pay you none, but I could feed n' shelter ya for free."
Minutes ago Noah had been anticipating a short and lonely future. This opportunity seemed suspiciously well-placed. "You sure? I mean, what's your reasonin', mister?"
Eli's only reply was, "Seems to be somepin special 'bout you, son, and I'd be honored ta have you around."
And so Noah moved in with Eli Banks after some deliberation. The man lived alone in a big farmhouse turned grayish with dust and age. It was nestled almost right up against the river, and Eli frequently took walks for as long as his old knees would allow. He had no other source of entertainment - his wife was gone off to California with her relatives, he spoke of no children, and he claimed that little pleasures like reading and cards strained his eyes too much.
Some people in Arizona had chosen to flee, but Eli had stayed, using the money from his formerly successful cotton farm to survive all on his lonesome. His only source of income nowadays was what little he managed to sell from his battered cotton fields and from the occasional brave tree. It was amazing what people paid just for a fresh green herb or leaf - whether they wanted to make tea with it or press it for a decoration or simply stand and inhale it and remember the good times, the better times, when green wasn't a rarity.
Noah helped him keep the house clean and as free of dust as possible. Right now, in late summer, was cotton season, so he helped to go out into the fields and pick the plants, sparse as they were. Many larger farms hired hundreds of workers and paid them by the bag - three, four, five cents each, or less if the farm could get away with it. Aside from the promise of a hot meal and a bed, Noah did his work for next to nothing.
Noah gradually grew comfortable in his new life. He was not particularly affectionate towards his new employer, but that did not come as a surprise. Even towards his own parents he had rarely expressed fondness. Day in and day out, he was content, assiduous, solitary. He answered Eli's questions when he deemed fit and nothing more.
The old man was fine with letting Noah be. On some occasions, he would pull out a dusty bottle of whiskey (Noah barely drank) or slip an extra penny into his hand (he accepted with quiet thanks and went on his way). And sometimes Eli sank into a dark mood, especially during the night, when Noah would find him talking to himself, pacing outside of a boarded-up door just beyond the kitchen and brushing his fingers along the well-worn wood.
Three weeks passed in this manner. It was enough time for Noah's thoughts of his family to fade a great deal.
One evening, Eli invited Noah on a walk along the river. Remembering the old love he had held for it, he accepted.
Eli ambled along, walking stick tapping against the riverbank mud. Noah followed behind two paces. He suspected that the old man had an ulterior motive - a story to tell. Thus he was not surprised when Eli said, in a measured, rehearsed tone of voice: "Abou' ten years ago, I had a daughter."
"Uh huh," said Noah, inviting him to speak.
"When she was 'round three years old, we noticed there was somepin diff'rent 'bout her. Somepin off. She didn' learn to walk or talk for a while. Even then, there was somepin…" He shook his head. "We could all tell tha' she was touched. My wife n' I didn' want her to go out with the other kids 'cause they might think it was catching. And we didn' want to have another in case it turn'd out the same way. So instead of bringin' her to one of them asylums, we put her in the basement."
Noah was feeling distinctly uncomfortable. His pa had chosen to be extra-kind to him, almost like he was fragile. He could have easily gone a different direction.
"She was happy down there, we think," Eli said. "My wife Lonna, she used to be a teacher 'fore she got hitched, so she thought it was important to give her schooling. Readin' an' writing' an' all. Girl never learned to read, but she could count. Give her beans for supper an' she'd count every one of them 'fore she ate, all the way up to fifteen." He chuckled, a sound soaked through with pain. "An' she'd find spiders on the ceiling and jus' fill her hands with 'em. Lucky she never got bit."
"Lucky," Noah agreed.
"Lonna tried to teach her housework and cookin' when she got older, as if she might find a man someday, but she had no mind for it. She got real upset when she was frustrated. Screamin' and kickin' til we couldn't get her back to the basement no more. Surprised our neighbors didn't ask if we was beatin' a dog or somepin.
"Finally it was her birthday. She was turnin' twelve, an' she wanted more than anythin' to be out of that basement an' digging aroun' for bugs in the water. We'd let her out sometimes when the neighbors weren't home, and that night Lonna convinced the neighbor's wife to go off to town wit' her for pork or somepin, I dunno what she said. The neighbor went with 'em - can't have two females travelin' so far on their own - an' their kids was too young to mind the house, so they took 'em with. So I let my daughter out by the river."
Eli took a deep breath. His voice wavered, and he held his cane in a white-knuckle grip. "I was jus' sitting there, watchin' her play all nice by the water, too old for that kind of splashin' but not mindin' none. Then I saw smoke comin' from the house an' realized that the fire we put on for stew had caught on the chairs. I tol' - I tol' her to get away from the water when I was gone, but she didn' listen, and there was no time. I rushed inside an' beat out the flames with a wet rug 'til the house was safe again."
"Then…then I wen' back out and saw that my daughter'd tried to go into the river further. I don' know why. I think she wanted to catch fish or somepin. But the only problem was -" and here he let out a strangled laugh that snarled up the rest of his words like a vine - "nobody'd taught her how to swim. She wen' all the way where it was deep, an' you know how bad the Colorado current can get, all the way from slow to fast in a coupla steps, an' it swept her offa her feet an' smashed an' drowned her up an' we never saw her alive again.
"My wife came home an' found me all alone...didn' take long after that for her to leave me. Went back to her family and hopped into a car headin' out to California. I don' blame her; no point in stayin' wit' a murderer. Ain't never been the same after that. And I ain't never stopped thinkin' 'bout my daughter, my Adelaide."
Big, injured tears were rolling down Eli's face, and Noah said nothing. There were no words he could conjure that didn't sound feeble and hollow. The old man heaved, leaning heavily on his walking stick for support, and his breathing evened out as he stared down at the river and into its cool depths.
"You remind me of her," Eli said quietly. "You kin talk more an' think more, but you got that same look in your eye. I seen it right away, like I said. An' so I wanted to hire you. Make sure ya know how to swim, you know."
Noah nodded once. "Thank you." He tried to muster up something more, something to really show him that he cared, but the best he could do was give Eli's shoulder a small squeeze. The old man's breath hitched a little bit, but he dashed the tears away with his hand.
"Come to the barn," said Eli. "I wanted t'show you somepin."
~*Q*~
Leaning against the barn wall, sunset light illuminating it from beyond the open door, was a fishing rod.
"Didn' know where to put it," Eli said, sounding rueful. "Not gonna use it, why not try to catch a fish in the pig slop? Woulda given it to you earlier, but I had to work up the nerve to talk to you first," he added quickly, watching Noah's face.
Noah picked up the rod and weighed it in his hands as if it were a great treasure. "Nice weight," he commented.
"Use it," Eli told him. When Noah blinked at him, he said, "Git out of my house an' go fishing. You told me why you left. If you've got the opportunity -" his voice cracked, but he remained steady, staring down Noah with a firm eye - "if you've got the opportunity, finish what you started. 'Long as you got the tools."
"I will," Noah said. "I'll leave tomorrow."
"One las' night in a bed, huh?" Eli remarked. "All righ'."
At dawn the next morning, Noah rose, washed his face, and packed everything he owned into a small bundle. The bones of the largemouth bass were still tucked into his pocket. Eli left grits and extra bread on the stove for him that he took along with too.
As Noah began his long trek north, following the river once again, his old affections towards it returned. There was something comforting to him about being able to take his own path even as he traveled in a straight line. He could fail, flee or triumph, and whatever happened depended on him, not the river. He could drown or he could swim; he could starve or he could eat; he could wander for the rest of his life or just maybe find his way down to California.
Around noon, Noah took out his fishing rod and baited it. And after a while he had caught the biggest rainbow trout he had ever seen.
~*Q*~
A/N: Thank you very much for reading, everybody! This story actually came about because of an independent reading project for school. One of our assignment options was pretty much to write a fanfic about one of the main characters, so I decided to upload this one here as well. I hope you enjoyed it; please send some reviews and criticism my way, especially about that last third.
Have a great day! As of this uploading, National Novel Writing Month 2016 starts in two days - I know I certainly will be busy, and I hope all of you that have projects will get something done that you'll be proud of!
~*Akirys*~