Ghost Letters by Stephen Alter

Author:Stephen Alter
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2008-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

23

Salvilinus frontinalis

Ezekiel Finch kneels beside the slate-lined tank and watches the tiny fingerlings swarming through the clear, cold water. The sight of their tapered bodies wriggling against the gentle current fills him with a feeling of satisfaction and regret.

Late last year, on a bright November day, before he sailed from Hornswoggle Bay, Ezekiel had cast his fly line into the ice pond near his house. A fat brook trout took the fly and he played her into shore. She was full of roe, and when he held her over a basin and squeezed her belly, the eggs had squirted out like seeds from an overripe tomato. After collecting these, he released the fish back into the pond and cast again. The autumn colors in the trees were as full of gold as a pharaoh’s tomb. Within an hour, Ezekiel had landed twelve trout, most of which were ready to spawn. Finally, he had hooked a male brook trout that leapt on the surface of the pond, in a fierce struggle to throw the hook. Holding the line firmly, Ezekiel drew the fish to shore. The male trout was smaller than the others, a bright orange and mottled green, its spawning colors as gaudy as the maple leaves. In the basin, hundreds of clear trout ova were mixed with white milt from the male, just as they might have been fertilized in the pebbled shallows of the pond.

Later, the eggs were transferred into three glass jars, full of water and gravel, which were taken aboard the Moorish Queen. Throughout the long voyage to India, Ezekiel had the water siphoned out and replaced each day to keep the eggs alive. Ezekiel himself had turned his back on New England, with a sad, stern look on his face. He was a hardy, self-made man, not given to outward emotions, but as he sailed beyond the headland and caught a last glimpse of the high slate roof of the Yankee Mahal, his eyes glistened with remorse.

Stone by stone, he had built that house, dreaming of carrying Camellia over the threshold one day. It was to be a home in which they raised a family and lived in contentment for the rest of their lives. But the dream had frozen over as quickly as the surface of the ice pond in December. Ezekiel had nothing left to live for there. His ships, with their cargo of tea and ice, had made him a wealthy man, but none of that mattered, now that Camellia had refused to give him her hand in marriage.

The only thing Ezekiel took with him from Massachusetts, to remind him of bright autumn days like this, was the brood of fish eggs. In the foothills of the eastern Himalayas above Ajeebgarh, he planned to stock a pond with trout. Everything else he left behind, his house with all its furnishings, his horses, his orchards, his land. Never again would he see the foliage turn gold in autumn, or feel the crunch of snow beneath his boots, or touch Camellia’s soft brown hair.

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