To celebrate Mother's Day, we'll be publishing a series of stories about mothers all week long. It's about mothers' friendships in the outdoors, mothers hunting and fishing, and what would happen if we weren't where we are now. Or who are we without them? Fittingly, we're naming this series “Thank You, Mom.”
It takes time for a son-in-law to earn a living, and considering I slapped her in the face with a catfish tail, it doesn't look like I got off to a good start with Mary. It was. Sounds worse than before. The catfish was dead, but I've seen live catfish hit much harder.and that was Other accidents. Maybe I shouldn't have cleaned the catfish in Mary's kitchen, but that was her idea and she just got too close while I used the skinning pliers. Some of her good skin tore off faster than I intended, and the force sent the ropes of her tail and entrails, along with their fluids, into Mary's cheeks. slapstick.
I paused for a moment, observing the fish's blood and the mucus flowing from her knuckles, and waited for her to speak. She had never scolded me before, but I thought that might be about to change. Instead, she wiped her cheek with her hand and said, “Okay, let's get this over with now.” So she twisted the catfish's head off and it cracked open like a bag of pork rinds. I dropped the decapitated head in the garbage can, slit the stomach with my pocket knife, stripped out the remaining internal organs, and handed the skinned fiddler to Mary. She took it to the sink and washed it out.
Technically she wasn't my stepmom at the time, but I had been dating her daughter Michelle for a few years and was really trying to earn a living. That day, we all went catfishing–Michelle's father, Larry. Mary, Michelle, and me. I took them to one of my favorite bank fishing spots. It's a bay that is choked with lily pads in the summer but fills with channeling cats and bullheads in early spring. The pad is too thick.
So I tried using worms, but they didn't have much of an effect. She always nibbles on chicken livers, but Mary didn't like that she was using up good quality liver to feed the fish, even though she could have fried it. But she came back because her cat was biting. She can barely bait the hook and set the rod on the forked pole before the catfish runs with it. Larry caught three great ones in a row straight off a clump of yellow liver bass. If she's ever done liver fishing at all, you know how hot the bite was. Because the liver almost never hits anything like that. She only had one tub of liver, so she quickly ran out of food.
We parked the truck, walked the quarter-mile to the spot, and pulled the fish onto a rope stringer wrapped around a hickory branch that Larry and I carried each end. It was a March day when the forest looked like winter, but the warm air and daffodils belied it. However, the sun set early and it was pitch dark by the time I arrived home.
I don't remember exactly how the idea of cleaning fish in the kitchen came about. Skinning catfish is an outdoor job. But perhaps we didn't have flashlights, so Mary's kitchen was well lit. She was always pragmatic and had a “first solve the problem at hand” type of attitude.
I couldn't have made a bigger mess in her kitchen with my vomit in the bucket, and to top it off, I slapped her in the face with a dead catfish. Perhaps the relationship between her mother-in-law and her son-in-law would be less severe. But then 25 years passed, and she shared many meals, laughs, and a few tears in the same kitchen. Surely today, if I had to clean up a catfish mess and I didn't have a flashlight and it was getting dark, Mary would offer to clean up the catfish in the kitchen and she would help too. She might step back a bit while I use the skinning pliers.
