What we Long For

Cyril Dabydeen

Frogs keep circling the yellow and black snake in the trout stream acting more by instinct, it seems; and the owner of the fish farm, Yorick – he calls himself – tall, but roundish, looks at us with a strange doubt in his mind; and the farm is not far from Dwyer Hill, which is why we’re here,  not very far from Ottawa.  And he wants to sell the whole damn operation – he calls it that – for two million dollars. Could we be buyers? “No one really knows how many fish I have here; the Income Tax people, they can never tell, dammit!”

“Why can’t they?” I ask.

“Arseholes they are,” he growls. “But… You?” A bloated expression adorns his face, pantomime more or less.

“We’re just vacationers,” I reply.

“From America?”

Er, no. Do we look American, if swarthy-hued? I cast a sideways glance across the stretch of the farm; but the frogs and the snake  preoccupy my mind. Not how many rainbow trout the kids can catch? The headline blares out  in my  mind: “Attack of the Bullfrogs!” Imagine frogs in all of eastern Ontario charging into the goldenrods across swampy areas  in the  Ottawa Valley.  Yorick keeps looking at me, still  asking where  I come from.  Not where we are heading? Odd, I see frogs coming from everywhere and going berserk. An entirely new situation, with the  landscape itself changing because of climate.

The kids start laughing their heads off.

But it’s the struggling snake now,  and maybe I’m thinking too what we have in common. Oh? Not with the bullfrogs?  One lonely reptile in distress, you see; and Christ, we ought to save the snake.  But the fish-farm owner Yorick shakes his head dolefully; he’s yet determined to sell his “operation.”  He  berates the government again, the tax people, politicians, all of Ottawa. He grits his teeth. Now, because, we’re…from where?

America?

“Kill it!”one of the kids cry out.

“No,” I hiss back.

“It must!”

“Must?”

“Kill it-kill it!”

Janey, eight years old, says, “Let’s get some more, Dad.” She just wants to catch more trout, determined in a way I haven’t  seen before. “More, please,” she begs.

“No,” I say.

“The fish..?” Jordan, ten years old, lets out.

Now the frogs  make strange sounds; they are of different sizes, a male and female frog, maybe; and smaller ones form a circle, pinning the snake to the side of the bank.   Yorick appears alarmed,  like an omen of things to come? Indeed he wants to sell the farm, the whole damn operation.  Maybe too it’s his sense of what keeps disappearing over time, as I also contemplate with the kids again yelling out, becoming more excited. The adults are too. And I watch the male frog hold on to the  snake’s tail.

Mark simply says, “It’s strange how the snake can’t bite the frog.”

“It’s now happening, so real,” I answer,  imagining a different scenario, maybe somewhere else, not the Ottawa Valley.

What am I thinking really? Places on the horizon, and memory also.

“What’s real?” asks Gina, the kids’ mother. She and I are friends;  and she’d talked about maintaining her blood sugar level; indeed, she wants to do more travelling because “life’s too damned short.” She will go  to South America to see real anacondas, she told me. Mark, her new husband, humours her, with a guffaw.  “Maybe she will go alone,” he chimed in.

“Kill it!” I hear again, from one of the kids.

“No,” I reply, adamant.

Yes,  going to South America to see snakes, pythons; and how many species of snakes are there really? Is the fer-de-lance the deadliest?  Now I  imagine cobras all across the Ottawa Valley, through there’s none here actually. But garter snakes? Oh, the frogs keep circling the one vulnerable snake; as the owner of the fish farm turns his head away, but keeps being intrigued by us. Who are we anyway: from Morocco, or Syria (somewhere like it)?  Or from India… Afghanistan? Landscapes, the curve of space with gravitational  pull, see. Why does Yorick want to sell the farm anyway?

Maybe he wants to do something else–travel, like Gina wants to?

Janey, my daughter, and Jordan, the boy, keep it up. Now Jordan wants to kill the snake. Really kill it?

Oh, Janey wants us to get more fish, which is why we’ve come here, she tells me,  now like our first and last meeting this summer.

Yorick comes by with bushy eyebrows and glares at us;  and he could have been Polish from way back; and are we still potential buyers?

Mark mutters something to Gina, his wife.

Immediately Yorick scowls.

Imagine the idea of being the owner of the farm; and the kids fishing all their lives;  and  snakes and frogs always being around, in our bona fide territory. Yes, more frogs coming around; but the snake shifts position…about to circle the frogs.  Round and round, in a dizzying spiral.

Gina and Mark are glued to what’s taking place in the pond.

So am I.

Not the kids?

Yorick   shrugs, indifferent. And Mr York, the kids call him. What’s he really thinking? My mind simply drifts to another place, with snakes being everywhere.  Gina looks at me and wrinkles her forehead. Mark, well, he’s bent on getting more trout.

The snake makes a sudden movement, almost diving down in the water; but the frogs are close to it, so surprising.  Again the kids holler as they follow the snake’s evasive action. Excitement grows. Mine too?

We wait to see what will happen next.  Yorick does also, like he’s seeing this scenario for the first time.  Instinctively Gina comes closer, hand in  mine. My daughter Janey also comes closer.

I imagine frogs, larger that before, swelling up, behemoth-like, ah.

A  real struggle going on right here in the Ottawa Valley, you see.

Yorick snarls. At me? Yes, he will  sell the goddam farm because he’s tired of the Tax Department wanting to suck the lifeblood out of him.

It isn’t worth it.  He hates the federal government, hates politicians most of all. He looks at me, as if to say, What d’you know?

I keep nodding.

He grimaces. More pantomime?

Yes, where did we come from? And why don’t we want to buy the farm anyway? The kids turn and look at me.  Then slowly they turn to look at the snake again. And the trout will make ripples in the pond, this way and that…water all around; yes, the landscape coming closer, converging, I think. Now like our being nowhere else, but here…held together.

Mr York, as the kids yet call him,  lowers his head. Humming to himself, he is. Sounds, flashbacks, because of another land, somewhere. The Second World War, I must know?

Only me. Yorick keeps looking at me.

What else I  don’t know?  What no one will ever really know!

The snake and the frogs slowly start disappearing, going back to some region afar…far from the pond, maybe. A colourless place, somewhere.  And maybe  the farm will be no more; and see, we aren’t here at all at Dyer Hill, if only in one new planetary place: come to think of it; though the kids will holler louder all the while. Yes, hollering their hearts out, about the present. A great big clash now,  more than what I can imagine, or will remember.  Everything really close now, the bramble and sage too, and thicker brush, foliage all around as trees converge,  then slowly retreat.

The kids look away from us, the adults; and from Mr York.  Yes, another time…or place; and who will live out his time on the farm? The  trout and the other animal species,  including the frogs and the snake…being alive. All things must come and go, I yet think about.

Yorick (Mr York) makes a snarly face, which seems all.