Sometimes Lazy Brothers

My brothers loved getting out of work at home, unless it was work they enjoyed, like hauling out the big two-man crosscut saw to cut logs into pieces that fit the stove.

This was great fun in the fall after school when the air was nippy and a hot meal waited for when Dad got home from the garage.

I know this because I was the little kid who sat on the fat log to give it weight, so the saw blade wouldn't buckle from a shifting log.

I climbed up onto the log and pretended it was a horse, the way it was suspended between two wooden sawhorses. There were no reins, so I had to lean down and grab the "horse's neck" and hold on.

The rasping sound as my brothers made the saw flow back and forth in a steady sleepy rhythm, the sweet smell of the wood, and the silence as the shavings piled up on the ground, were great moments for me.

My brothers worked intently, no talking, just push and pull and push and pull, keeping up the rhythm. When they sawed off a hunk of log, I had to get off so they could shift the big log over and cut off another piece.

They worked hard at this and they worked hard at fishing, but when they needed the fish cleaned, I did it.

I watched and learned, then grabbed the scaler and a slippery fish, set it down on the fish stump, and made those scales fly. They stuck to everything in sight, like tiny circles of jewelry.


We hadn't heard of filleting a fish back then. No one had heard of this process of eliminating the fish bones. Instead, the method was to slit the belly open after removing the head and the tail and tossing them in a bucket.


I used to examine the innards of a fish, never being squeamish, probably because I was very young and the young rarely have a clear picture of things the way an adult has.


It was fascinating, really. But the mess of yellow eggs in a female wasn't a nice thing to see, though, because it meant a whole bunch of baby fish never made it past their mother's belly.


My brothers would disappear like flies after a doughnut, as soon as they handed me the pail of fish and a knife.


I always worked in a summer sun, all alone and peaceful at the fish cleaning stump out by the shed.


Sometimes I got really big fish they caught from the Catfish Creek with stick poles, a string, and bait, and those big fishes' insides were something to see.


Sometimes I got a bucket of tiny smelt caught with huge nets at midnight on the beach of one of our local ports in Lake Erie.


Big hands made hard work cleaning those tiny fish, but my little girl hands were just the right size to do it.

Mom always fried smelt fish, dipped them in yellow corn meal, crisping them up until their bones were as soft as the meat itself. We ate platefuls of smelt when they were in season.

The larger fish were eaten with a keen eye looking for bones, a glass of water, and a piece of bread in case we missed a bone and it got stuck in our throats. They stuck sideways and they hurt. I hated eating fish for that reason, back then before anyone heard of filleting.


My brothers tried to get out of doing the dinner dishes and cleaning on a Saturday morning, and they saw no reason they shouldn't sleep a weekend away. They weren't allowed to, so they never knew that "pleasure" as long as they lived at home.


Some of my five brothers were lazier than the others, but when it came to summer jobs, they worked hard.


But so did my sisters and me.


In fact, we three girls did a lot more work at home than those boys did.


Maybe that was because they whined a lot when they didn't want to do the job.


Maybe it was because boys think they have better things to do, like tinker with a car engine or ride a bike on a gravel road.


I'll go with the whining reason. There's nothing worse than listening to a grown boy whine. They probably practiced it in the woods. They probably rated each other, then voted on the best whine, then took it home and used it on Mom.


It's what they did, I bet.


I'm almost sure of it now.


Yep.


The perfect whine.


A lazy brother's best friend.