Berries and Bushwa 

With the first event to which a young human attaches emotion, his memory is born and, though he’s been alive for some time, his lifetime truly begins.

Kennet Fiskare pinned his awakening to the year 1924, on the porch of a house. Maybe his family’s house behind the Fisher Hotel. Maybe the veranda of the hotel itself. Perhaps the porch of his grandparents little cottage on Candlelight Island. It didn’t matter. The emotion of the moment wasn’t tied to the location, but the people present.

Kennet was five in 1924, and he already took for granted how people made an immediate impression not on his eyes, but in his nose and mouth. Synesthesia was an unknown word and folks would’ve dismissed a little boy who claimed they had a unique scent. Cologne, perfume, soap and water, good honest sweat—of course people had scent. They would’ve raised skeptical, even concerned eyebrows if this same boy shared that he could taste them, too. That the very air around them had a particular flavor.

He learned quickly this was something not to be shared.

In his first memory, Kennet sat in the lap of his paternal grandfather, an old man who smelled green and watery and tasted like dirt. Being five, Kennet had eaten his fair share of the earth, either accidentally or on purpose. His grandfather’s presence tasted like mud found at the precise place where river met land. Around the edges of this damp, organic flavor was a metallic twinge, a little oily, a little old, and so insistent that it blurred the fine line between taste and scent and filled Kennet’s whole head. It was strongest at the old man’s waist, where the long, gold chain of his watch looped from a little pocket in his vest, across his belly to a button on the other side. A few inches of chain hung down from the button, and off the end dangled a large, gold fish, articulated in three sections. 

Whenever Kennet crawled in his grandfather’s lap, or was caught, pummeled and pulled there, his fist always closed around the fish hanging from the end of the chain. The gold scent would leap into his palm and stay there until his mother made him wash.

He called his grandfather Farfar, the Swedish word for father’s father. Most people called him the Big Bear, or, by the time Kennet was born, the Old Bear, a play on his given name, Bjorn. He was a big, old bear with a big, gold fish at the end of his watch chain. Along the chain were strung three smaller gold fish, one for each of the Bear’s cubs.

“This is Uncle Nyck,” the Bear said to his grandson, touching the first little fish. “My oldest boy, just like you. And his real name is Kennet, just like you.”

This namesake uncle was not present on the porch of memory, nor present for much of Kennet’s life. Uncle Nyck didn’t live in New York State, but far away across the river, in a whole different country, where they spoke more French than English. He made no scent or taste manifest in Kennet’s nose and mouth, which made the boy wary and suspicious whenever this relation was mentioned. He noticed people shook their heads when they spoke of Uncle Nyck. His name was always attached to an event called the War. Voices dropped into mumbles when they talked about Uncle Nyck and the War. Glances went sideways and down-ways, and deep sighs followed. Like right now, as Kennet rose up and down with the sigh that passed through his grandfather’s chest.

Most of all, Kennet noticed more people said Uncle Nyck was just like him, rather than saying Kennet was like his Uncle Nyck. This was disturbing. Kennet was an orderly child and to his mind, younger should follow older, just as night follows day.

When the Old Bear was done sighing, he touched the next little fish along the chain. “Who is this?”

“Pappa,” Kennet said. In a few more years, he’d begin using Dad, but right now, Emil Fiskare, lounging in the vicinity with his slightly different muddy taste, and slightly spicier scent around his edges, was Pappa, his feet up on the porch railing, blowing smoke rings. Quiet, even a little sleepy. His head tilted toward one shoulder as he looked out at the river.

Emil had inherited his French mother’s dark hair which, by 1924, was already thinning and retreating into a point above his brow. But it was his father’s brow, smooth and strong above a fine, straight nose and right-angled jaw. Emil wasn’t a tall man, and he walked with a slight limp. From hip to knee, his left leg was a constellation of shrapnel scars, bits of metal blown there in the War. Kennet was particularly fascinated with the divot in his father’s thigh where, if you pressed, you could feel something under the skin. Something hard and tantalizing and unobtainable.

“That’s a Hun’s gold tooth,” Emil said, straight-faced and earnest. “He blew himself up trying to blow me up. His head exploded in a hundred pieces and his gold tooth went into my leg. Now it’s mine. Finders keepers, right?”

Kennet took such a tale at face value when he was five. Later he’d cast his doubts on the story’s veracity. The lump was probably another piece of metal. Still, he liked the idea that his father had a bit of gold inside. It gave bravado to his limp and lent an air of romance to his short stature, thinning hair and quiet, almost abstracted demeanor. As time went by, Kennet mused that the gold tooth was slowly dissolving, sending its noble atoms and particles through his father’s veins. One day, Kennet would stake his very existence on the idea, but that would be many, many years later.

Right now, on the porch of memory, Kennet’s grandfather picked up the third little fish on his gold chain and asked the boy, “Now, who’s this rascal?”

Kennet flung out an arm and pointed straight at his Uncle Erik, as if accusing him of piracy most foul. From his chair, Uncle Erik grinned back, caught in the act of being merely wonderful.

Much to his mother’s despair, Kennet’s five-year-old vocabulary was peppered with words he’d learned from Uncle Erik, a man who smelled and tasted like everything and called wonderful things darb, swell, hotsy-totsy, jakes, the cat’s pajamas, or—Kennet’s particular favorite—berries.

Everything Uncle Erik did was berries. How he looked, how he dressed, how he lit a cigarette. How the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt showed his ropy forearms and their down of golden hairs. How he nonchalantly turned his hand to check the time on his silver wristwatch. Wristwatches were a piece of men’s fashion that became popular after the War, but people said, “That Fiskare swell was wearing one before the Armistice was signed.”

Most berries of all was how Uncle Erik talked.

When he wanted a kiss, he said, “Give me some cash.”

“You’re pulling my leg,” he said, when he didn’t believe something.

“Tell it to Sweeney,” he said, when he thought someone was pulling his leg.

He said, “I’m going to iron my shoelaces,” instead of saying he was going to the bathroom.

“Bullshit,” he’d say in masculine company. “Bushwa,” if ladies were present. He referred to ladies he liked as chicks, dames and dishes. Men he liked were eggs and birds and cats. If Uncle Erik really admired a man, he said, “That fellow knows his onions.”

If Kennet was good, Uncle Erik called him a pal. But if annoyed with his little nephew, Uncle Erik would call him a punk.

Kennet tried to know his onions and not be a punk. While he loved his father with the unquestioning faith of water being wet and sugar being sweet, Kennet secretly believed the sun rose and set on his handsome and wild uncle. So it was with a bit of forlorn resentment that he stared at his uncle’s lap, which was occupied by the slumbering form of Kennet’s little brother, who, enviably, was also named Erik.

The Fiskares repeated their names and, people said, repeated their tragedies. Like Emil, the elder Erik Fiskare walked with a slight limp. Rather than a golden war wound, the tiny hitch in his gait was a souvenir from the polio outbreak of 1894. The disease killed his twin sister, Beatrice, and blew the hearts of the Old Bear and his wife into a hundred pieces.

The jeweler who made the fobs for the Old Bear’s watch chain had carved a little fish for Beatrice Fiskare, but in silver. For a year it hung at Bjorn’s waist but after the little girl’s death, Marianne Fiskare wore it pinned inside her bodice. It made a lump you could see. It dug into Kennet’s cheek when he hugged her. The fish was like a piece of shrapnel Marianne carried outside her body.

War hurts men on the inside, Kennet thought in his orderly, this-follows-that manner. And it hurts women on the outside.

Kennet’s little brother Erik had also been born a twin. People talked about this birth the same way they talked about Uncle Nyck and the War, in hushed voices and sideways glances and deep sighs. Little Erik’s twin was born dead. She had no name, because she barely had a body, and what little she possessed disintegrated. It fell gently into a hundred silver pieces, Kennet imagined, which were kept carefully put away, somewhere in somebody’s house. In a place where they wouldn’t hurt too much.

The bachelor Uncle Erik had been touched to the bone when he learned his new nephew would be named after him, but he’d sooner punch himself in the nose than consent to being called Old Erik. And no namesake of his would be called Little Erik. “Like some punk,” he said. “So we’ll take a cue from the Brits. I’m Major and he’s Minor.”

He said it with his usual air of careless confidence. He declared the new names the same way he declared something was berries or bushwa. Because it was. So henceforth and forthwith, the elder Erik Fiskare was Major, and the younger Erik Fiskare was Minor. People who weren’t in the know thought Major was a military rank (the man hadn’t served a lick of time in the army, but he didn’t discourage the notion), and they thought Minor was…well, simply a name. A little outlandish, but maybe it had Swedish origins. It was none of their affair. Besides, Major and Minor suited the pair well—that tall, blond, dashing rake and the little blond nephew who toddled after.

So memory was born in that time and place, in the company of the men Kennet  Fiskare loved best. Born among bears and fish, earth and river, berries and bushwa, Major and Minor.

And silver and gold.