Idgie Says: I am VERY pleased to be able to announce that one of my contributors of lovely stories over the years, Scáth Beorh, has just signed a 2-book contract with Emby Press for his Middle Grade novel October House, about a clan of foster children from Northern Ireland; and also his Dark Horror novel Blood, an epistolary novel with similarities to Bram Stoker's Dracula. This novel has been commissioned by Emby Press and also concerns vampirism, set in Ireland.
October House will be released this coming October (2014) and Blood will be released in October 2015.
I am so pleased for him and excited to be able to say that "I knew him when...."
I hope you enjoy this current short story from him as much as I did.
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Quiet Times with Daddy
Scáth Beorh
My daddy was fond of taking me fishing on Stone Lake, where
we’d fish for bluegill bream and catfish. I had to be real quiet, though. I
couldn’t scuffle my feet in the boat. And I couldn’t talk either. A whisper
every now and again was alright, but it had to be about fish. And not just any
fish. I liked sharks, but those were off limits while freshwater pole fishing.
I told everybody I wanted to be an chondrichthyologist when I grew up. They
usually just smiled and looked over at whatever parent was present, usually my
mama, who would smile back and roll her eyes and shrug her shoulders and bask
in the bookworminess of her weird little boy.
Daddy was a hunter, even when he was
fishing. The strong, silent type (I take after my soft, chatty mother), once we
had slipped out over the weedy green waters and were stalking our unseen prey,
there was no horseplay nor idle chit-chat allowed. We were there to fish; to
master the elements; to bring home not one or two denizens of those murky waters,
but a whole string; a freezer full, which we would clean and freeze in plastic
milk cartons against the unforgiving Winter months when cold showers are
preferred to fishing on cold, windy lakes .
One cool October morning daddy and I
went without a boat, so we ‘borrowed’ one from a fisherman who wasn’t there. I
was really worried about that, but Daddy said it was okay, as long as we
brought it back in the same condition we had found it in, or better. Or better? He taught me to scull that
day, and said I did real good. I felt proud.
The next
weekend we took a long road-trip out to an old well which Daddy had drunk out
of when he was a boy. I felt excited about that. The way he painted the
good old days, I longed to go back and spend time with him when he was a boy;
run through the woods with him; hop trains with him; work at the docks heading
shrimp with him. Anything. I didn’t care. Just as long as I could spend time
with him.
When we got to the wooded area where
the well was, we realized we hadn’t brought anything to drink out of. But on
the rim of the well sat a tall wax paper cup somebody had left. Daddy said the
sulfur in the water would kill the germs, if there were any to kill. That sounded right to me. When I think
of those moments in the cool “fishing weather” breeze of that morning, I can
still feel the icy water burbling down my throat. I can still smell the strong
scent that was a little like rotten eggs, but not too much. That day we also
found some wild scuppernongs. While we sucked the meat out, we checked to see
how far we could spit the skins and the seeds. Daddy won, but he was a lot
taller than me. His went soaring yards away. Mine only went a few feet.
Not long
after my sculling adventure on Stone Lake, I learned how to drive in our
brand-new ‘74 Impala. Daddy took me to part of the Old Spanish Trail. Daddy was
long-suffering with me as we sped along haphazardly in that 400 horse power
monster across big clumps of grass and uneven red bricks which I imagined were
being quickly lain down in front of us by Spanish soldiers who hoped we would
be patient enough for them to finish their job. Decades later I was to read
somewhere that the road was actually begun in 1915, to connect New Orleans to
Florida. Sometimes it’s just better to never learn the truth.
A year
earlier, to the day, (it was my birthday) Daddy had taken me to an 19th-century
farmhouse ruin in the backwoods of railroad and steamboat town of Pollard,
Alabama. There as we moved carefully through the old boards with nails in them,
I found a hand-made brick. Daddy said I could take it with me, as a souvenir. I
proudly covered my birthday surprise in cellophane paper so it wouldn’t wear
away. For years I used this brick as a doorstop in my bedroom. The last time I
ever saw it, sometimes in the mid-Eighties, the paper had been taken off it,
and it lay next to the house in the back yard.
A few months
after my driving escapade along the Old Spanish Trail, we went to another part
of the woods near Holt, Florida and stumbled across a briary pig-trail running
through a tract of land filled with long-leaf pine and oak. That day Daddy
showed me the difference between water, white, red, live, scrub, and Spanish
oaks; and taught me how to call like a bobwhite and a whippoorwill. We also found
an old door laying over a pile of sticks and trash.
“Hey, hey!
Will ya look at that! Wonder what’s under that!” Daddy cried
out. He was always a little boy again when we went out on adventures in the
woods. We had stopped bringing my little sister Pat after the very first time.
She hated the woods and stood at the head of the trail and cried until Daddy
got so disgusted with her that we got back in daddy’s fishing truck and drove
straight home... at least 60 miles.
“Careful
about snakes, daddy,” I warned him as I stood frozen, waiting for him on the
very safe pig-trail. I just knew he was going to get bit. I wasn’t about
to go out in that jungle! He kicked at the old rotten door, stomped on it a
few times, and then stood up and waited.
“See. That’s
what you do,” he said. “It’ll run any ol’ snake outta there, but you gotta make
some noise.”
“What kinda
noise, Daddy?”
I was imagining the biggest
rattlesnake in the world. Fangs as big as the fingers Daddy playfully jabbed at
all us kids, pretending his hand was a snake head, calling his fingers ‘fangers’.
“Noise like
I just made. Weren’t ya watchin’
me?”
His voice
was serene. Very kind.
“Now, them
ol’ water moccasins,” he said. “They’re another story altogether. They
won’t move when you make noise. No sir. You have to get a ol’ stick or somethin’
to move ‘em with. A long one, though. They won’t just bite you once. They’ll
bite you ‘til your dead.”
My adam’s-apple
was stuck in my throat, and I didn’t even have a fully grown one yet. BITE YOU ‘TIL
YOU’RE DEAD. BITE YOU ‘TIL YOU’RE DEAD.
“Hey-hey!
Look-a’here! Look what we got here!”
I was half
way back to the car.
“Where you
goin’?” Daddy asked me. “Come on back here! Look what we found!”
What WE
found? Hmmmmm...
I crept
gingerly back down the shady path until I got just behind my daddy. I was still
expecting a snake, a dead snake, a thousand baby snakes, a snapping turtle...
something dangerous.
But no. Daddy had found us a 1920’s
typewriter. Man, he was so proud of that thing! So while I watched out for
rattlesnakes, Daddy moved all the debris and sticks and the door which had been
used to cover the machine. We loaded it up in the trunk, took it home, cleaned
it up with some of Daddy’s brushes he had gotten from NASA when he had worked
for them as an aerospace engineer.
The next day we drove into Downtown
Pensacola and ran down a ribbon at an out-of-the-way typewriter shop. This was
one of those places where the friendly men talk about fishing and cars and the
good ol’ days. I breathed in the clean, rustic scent of lubricating oil and
leather. The store smelled like the barber shop and the shoe repair store in
Flomaton, but nothing like my Uncle Paul’s bait shop in South Flomaton where we
got earthworms and crickets and blood bait.
The men working
at the repair shop were nice. One of them showed me the inside workings of a
typewriter. The flywheel. The gadget flip. The jam-keys. The thumb-snap. The
finger-pinch. The paper-rip. And, of course, the ribbon we had come to buy.
Daddy laughed good-naturedly. The men all smiled and called me a fine young
man.
As I would
sit pecking away on that machine into the wee hours of the morning, typing up
my poetry and stories, I knew that I would make my living as a writer one day.
Not only did my daddy give me a love
for people, he also gave me a burning desire for exploration which has taken me
around the world, and through many a forest. I hope he is proud of the woodsman
I have become; that he always hoped I would be.
Not long ago
Daddy went fishing with some of his boyhood buddies. He’ll be back for me one
day, though. He needs me to scull the boat.