N.C. Happe

Introduction

We at Ninth Letter are delighted to feature N.C. Happe’s essay “How to Gut a Fish,” which is the Nonfiction and Grand Prize winner of the 2024 Disquiet International Literary Award.

“How to Gut a Fish” is an unsettling portrait of insinuating domestic terror, where the quiet, pervasive threat of violence between a parent and a child—initially “abundant in weakness”—wields as much power as when that threat erupts. A religious mystic, the father in Happe’s award-winning essay submits to visions but also demands obedience from the rest of the family to the life he has chosen.  With a careful and often devastating economy of language, N.C. Happe offers us a morning of fishing on a lake, followed by the ritual cleaning, scaling, and gutting of the day’s catch. A ritual whose lessons resonate, perhaps inevitably, into the future.

—Philip Graham, Editor-at-Large

How to Gut a Fish

N.C. Happe

Lake Superior is cold at dawn. Not a kittenish, cardigan sort of cold, but blistering. The sort that chaps the hands, dumbs the muscles. On the boat I shake but bite my teeth, concerned my father might mistake chatter for complaint. I am ten or eleven years old, still abundant in weakness. How I hold myself is among the few things I control. He sips his black coffee. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth. We ready the rods in silence.

Pink worms flounder in their Tupperware, pressed against the opaque plastic. In the milky light I fish one out, lay it on the lip of the boat. With my thumbnail I cut its body into segments. Little strings of entrails spill out, the goo of feces. My father and I sit hip-to-hip, bobbing wordlessly as we thread our lures through broken bits of worm.

He and I have come for the autumn salmon run. The good thing about being Minnesotan—and there are many good things—is the proximity to the Great Lakes. All lakes, really. But the Great ones especially. The abundance of agate, the fat trout, navigating the network of 200-or-so rivers by canoe. In the summers we walk along the riverbeds together, crushing zebra mussels with our heels. They break pleasantly underfoot, their shells fragile like new ice. We watch and wait for the swarming seagulls to come and tweeze the meat free with their beaks. My father calls it a feast. I like the way this spectacle pleases him but prefer to look away.

It is during this year of my life that my father rediscovers his religion. From his neck hangs a steel pendant carved in the likeness of Jesus; in the metal etching his right hand is raised, and the left surrounds the Sacred Heart. During church my father has begun to fish it out from beneath his undershirt, laying it flat against his sternum for fellow parishioners to observe. Even now, his collar shored up against the cold, I notice him touching his nape every so often to confirm its presence, as though the clasp may have fallen open sometime in the interim, the chain quietly slithering away. Soon my mother will leave our family home, and my father will receive his first vision from God. Trips like these—days out on Superior, sandwiches bundled in plastic—will cease to be a fact of life. But this morning the boat is as it always has been: cold, quiet, nodding gently to the wind. My father, too. A silent man, angrier than he ought to be, but in love with nature and the ways that we master it.

The gulls at this hour are muted. Eyes half-slitted, most stand one-legged back on the docks of the marina arranged in clumps like button flowers, beaks tucked neatly into the white hinges of their wings. Not even the fishermen appear to have woken. We cut our path along the water alone.

By the time the horizon begins to color, our rods are all arranged in a row at the back of the boat. We have six of them snug in their holsters, waiting for salmon to tease a bite. We sit with our backs to the wind and wait.

I have never thought of fishing as fun. My father says it is the cheapest way to pack a freezer. But some parts of it I like: sandwiches in saran wrap, Neil Young on the radio. The way a gust of wind can cause the hull to roll over itself like a big belly laugh. I like the way my father’s voice sometimes loosens into a long story or how he shakes me by the shoulder when I reel in a good fish. There are few things I do that make him proud, but this is one of them. Being marooned on the lake makes me feel small and endless all at once; when the wind is calm, I scoot up towards the bow until I can no longer see the boat beneath me. If I concentrate and spread my arms, I feel like a bird swooping over water.

My father makes a point of getting out early, well before the day trippers begin to swarm. Beginning our day in the dark is a misery in which we alone seem to participate. Part of me believes my father when he says this is good strategy, but another part has begun to notice the careful way we maneuver around the lake’s secluded margins, settling behind rocky outcroppings that obstruct the view of our boat. Over the years I have never shaken the queasy feeling of our returns to the marina, pussyfooting around the docks until any signs of authority—conservation officers, men in hats and frowns—disappear. I can tell by the way my father sits, stiff and unblinking, that he hates this stretch of the morning, too.

“Are you cold?” he says when the sky starts to blush. It is nearly sunrise, and we’ve yet to get a bite on the line.

“No,” I reply, cognizant of how tight my voice sounds. I am colder than I ever remember having been. Each lash of wind strips warmth from the bone.

“Good,” he says. “Me neither.” He hawks phlegm towards the water, wipes his nose along a sleeve. Like me, he tucks his hands back under his rump and holds himself upright.

He says nothing else.

It takes me a moment to notice him—how he’s hitched up his collar, sunken his chin behind the teeth of his zipper. His face, save for the red half smothered in birthmark, is as white as a knuckle. He looks just as cold as I am trying not to be.

I am smart enough to realize we are lying to each other. For some reason this makes me feel a little better: I will pretend to be warm until I finally am.

A minute or so later the day breaks. The sunlight follows, covering us one fragile inch at a time.

Most fish hook by the lip, some by the jowls. But by mid-morning, I haul up a small salmon whose lure angles further inward, stuck in an abdominal recess from which blood has begun to ooze. Not a nibbler, but a gulper.

A few fish are already in the mesh basket slung on the side of the boat, though most have been pulled in by my father. But this one is mine. Once he saw how little fight the line gave—producing strong but weightless tugs—he let me reel it in myself.

I can guess the salmon is female by the elegance of her shape: the body slender and long, the mouth free of the bullish, pincered curl of her male counterpart. When I prop her mouth wide to get a better look, she thrashes so violently that I nearly lose my grip on her altogether.

“Hold tight,” my father says, eyeballing me from his seat. I can tell by the tone of his voice that he is only half-interested; the fish is smaller than the ones we usually keep.

I try, but she doesn’t make it easy. Gills splayed, eyes wild, she slaps the boat with her tail until the fight goes out of her. After a minute or so she lays gasping and still, flush against the floor.

Female salmon are beautiful. Her glossy body, refracting the thin sunlight, is the color of tinfoil. The scales above her lateral line are freckled with black, but her belly bears a clean gradient of darkening silver. I wait for her to look at me, but she doesn’t; her wild gaze slants towards the sky.

The first time I attempt to leave my father’s I am twelve years old. I stake out at my mother’s home, locking each of the doors and windows behind me. In my backpack are the few shirts I own that I have not outgrown, a rock from my collection, and my mother’s gold necklace. I am wearing my best pair of jeans.

It is a blue morning, bright and marbled with clouds. Once I set down my backpack in my mother’s entryway and tell her my plan, she falls quiet. Her skin flushes a deep color, then pales. She begins to busy her hands. In the hours that follow she brushes her hair and brews coffee and makes a hardboiled egg that she does not eat. Together we wait by the entryway door for him to inevitably arrive. All the while she swallows her fear back, producing a low gulp that punctuates the silence. The time for breakfast passes, then lunch. She puts bread in the toaster—even butters it. Neither of us eat.

When he finally pulls into her driveway, she is in the bathroom.

She emerges at the honk of his horn. I stand in the entryway as I wait for her, but she hovers at her spot in the hall. I can tell from her voice that she’s begun to shake.

“You have to go out and tell him,” she says, her body eclipsed by drywall. It quickly dawns that she will not be rejoining me but will instead stay hidden in the recesses of her home. From the wash of sudden panic—my underarms prickling, my skin cool and damp—I also realize that I had expected some other version of events to unfold. In coming here, I had asked her to do something else, to be someone else. I wanted her to pretend to be brave with me.

“I don’t think he’ll listen,” I reply in a wan voice. I am afraid of being forced into his car.

She nods an empty nod but does not meet my eye. Instead, she looks in the direction of the idling Suburban in the lot. It is the one he has owned since my infancy, battered and eaten by rust. From the vantage of the entryway window, I can see him from behind his blue windshield. He is wearing his aviators and his navy hat.

When neither of us walk out, he lays his weight on the horn and does not let up.

I look at my mother until she meets my eye. This is my way of saying please. 

She tells me to go. This is her way of saying I’m sorry.

I walk out, and, as I had suspected, do not come back in.

Once her thrashing slows, I sit on my haunches and look again for the lure. Finding it is harder than I think it will be; even with my small hands, it is so far back that I can barely catch hold of it. My index and thumb travel down the trailing fishing line, pinch at the eye of the hook. The remainder of the metal, however, is embedded in flesh. With what little purchase I have, I spend the next few minutes fruitlessly wiggling the lure in its place. Slowly my fingers darken, and her mouth turns pulpy and red. When I become too nauseous to continue, I set her back on the floor and turn away.

“I can’t get it,” I say to my father, ashamed.

My hands, coated in blood and slime, itch to be scrubbed. Beneath my pant legs and canvas jacket my skin crawls. 

I want my father to take over, but he doesn’t. Instead, he searches the bag at his hip, the one where he keeps his pistol and Coca Colas, for a pair of pliers. Then he hands them to me.

“You’ll have to dig it out,” he explains.

There is a weightiness to his phrasing, as if he is expecting me to fill out a sentence he has only half finished. He taps his boot, clears his throat. He holds the pliers midair until I move to take them. There is a hard grammar to his silence, in the leveling way he looks at me, that tells me he will not intervene on my behalf. Eyes wrenched up, lips taut, brow furrowed and steep. It is a look that I recognize: he wants me to learn something.

I take the tool from his hands. He folds his arms and waits for me to begin again, searching for the buried tine.

Months later, when I run away the second time, we talk. My father has me sit on the couch across from him and asks me if I want to leave because of money. Over how little of it we have. His belief is not unfounded; my father hasn’t been steadily employed since my infancy. In my early childhood he took odd jobs in the warm months, cutting trees or slicing burl into sheets of veneer. But his body is failing him, and the work he once did has become harder and harder. In the cooler months he trades stocks from his desk in the basement, though there’s little evidence that this work turns a profit. Since last summer he has started scrounging animals from the yard for us to eat: stray mallard, unlucky turkeys plucking through the fallen sumac and buckthorn. He purchases ramen noodles in bulk, which my brother and I parcel out for dinners and, whenever there are leftovers, the next day’s breakfast. Over the past several years, every loose dollar—birthday money, scattered coins—has slowly disappeared from my jewelry box. It is true that our life here is tenuous, and that I recognize our financial precarity, but I cannot bring myself to lie. I have never once cared about my father’s money.

“No,” I say. “It’s not money.” My father’s gaze is hard to escape. My throat grows tight, closing around a feeling. It’s difficult to breathe.

Still, he insists. “It’s because your mother has more than me,” he replies.

I shake my head.

“She lets you do whatever you want. She never comes home. You get to run wild.”

“No.”

“Then what?” His voice rises. With one hand he makes a fist and brings it down on his knee. The gesture is rapid and looks painful, but the sound of its impact on denim is soft. Still, I can’t help myself; a part of me curls inwards and flinches away.

I have never found a way to tell him how I feel without hurting him. Even in our worst fights I have never gone for blood.

My father has begun to hear the prophetic voice of God, messages delivered to him in quiet telegrams. Since my mother left, his beliefs have strayed further and further from plausible truth. Most of my life I have feared my father, but in recent years this feeling has grown acute. Sometimes he launches into screaming fits that do not always have a source or sours into moods that span weeks without explanation. Whenever he walks into a room I grow tense, and my stomach puckers to a dry knot.

No matter how many times I practice, I cannot stop myself from recoiling when his fits begin. The truth is that I can live here, in our family home, but I can no longer live with him.

“The hook has to come out the way it went in,” he says as I work.

But I no longer need help. The pliers make it easy. I feel the way the metal travels through the body, plucks the hard cartilage of the gill. My clumsiness shreds everything open. Torn tissue hangs slack like punctured parachute. A minute later, I have pulled the hook back out of the esophagus. When I look down at the fish again, her gills flare open with blood. Eyes wide, jaw loose, expression fixed in a permanent gasp. Her tail pets the vinyl floor in defeat. 

I don’t look for long. It’s obvious that she won’t survive.

Normally, she would be too small to keep. Salmon licenses are not given by weight, but by number of fish. We often take more than we ought to, but don’t take the risk of a fine for nothing. Had I hooked her lip, she would be back in the water by now.

“Should I throw her back?” I ask flatly.

My father looks her over, then looks me over, and shakes his head. “Don’t pout at me,” he says.

He’s right: I am pouting. I don’t know why I am angry at him, but I am. One by one, I find each muscle that has puckered into a frown and release it. Slowly my face flattens to a sheet.

“She won’t live,” he says after a long pause. “Not now.”

With the tip of his knife he crouches, then punctures her skull. The blood lets a little more, then stills to puddle. Her gills cease to flare open and shut.

He sends me into the boat’s cabin to wash my hands in the sink.

When I come back up, he has pulled out an orange, one of many we have brought for the trip. He peels away the rind and separates the fruit into segments, offering a half from his hand. We sit and eat in silence, spitting pips into the water.

For most of my childhood, I struggle to describe the life I live with my father. I lack the vocabulary that reveals him, the words that make him identifiable to the people around me. Sometimes I tell my schoolmates that he is stubborn, religious, strict; in their eyes I can track a flash of misplaced recognition, and instantly the man that he is slips through my fingers. Worse, I find that my words do something violent to the truth, carve it into a new and unrecognizable shape.

When I realize that my words hurt more than they help, I cease to speak of him.

I cannot remember the first time my father tells me about his visions, or that he has been chosen.

“I have to be very careful,” he says one evening, his gaze drifting. His eyes, usually hard and unrelenting, grow fuzzy and moist. “Most people wouldn’t understand.”

He describes God’s messages like floating pictures, sheets of gossamer that have been hung in front of him. He can see faces, glimpses of where his life will be taken next. The future, the past. He can often see his ex-girlfriend, Gina, and predict whenever someone is going to call him on the telephone. God can administer to his mind directly, fill him with awareness that few others have. He can see when I’ve misbehaved or when I’m not being honest—even when I think that I am.

“I don’t know why he has chosen me, but he has.”

I nod, though I do not understand.

God has been careful that way, creeping into our lives on his hands. One day we aren’t religious, and the next day we are. He has us stay inside. He is worried about what the animals will do. What the neighbors will do. And, above all, what the terrorists are doing. My father has spoken so much about Saddam Hussein that I begin to look for him everywhere, suspecting his presence behind the woodpile or crouched in the linens closet. My father says he is inside a cave somewhere, chewing the heads off bats.

And I think: Minnesota has caves.

And then: Minnesota has bats.

This unknown man, whose picture I have only seen once. He—like our neighbors, members of the church, Hillary Clinton, government officials—becomes part of an expanding fiction that has overtaken our lives. Still, I look for him always, the ghost of my father’s illness.

My father has always had a short temper, but his capacity to anger—screaming, ripping a hole into something or someone—grow elastic with age. Everything begins to anger him. He is attuned to all the possible ways my brother and I might come to disrespect him or betray our faith. We make changes, grow strict. Pray hard, then harder. The vestiges of my normal life wear away until they all but disappear.

The stories my father believes about my brother and I grow more outlandish by the year. It is difficult to tell which of these stories come in visions, and which he comes to believe on his own. These stories are, in turn, passed along to anyone who will listen. The pastor at the Lutheran church down the road, the school administrators, parents of children we hardly know. I begin to hear stories from classmates and extended family members about my sexual deviance, or that I am selling my father’s oxycodone to the other children. I hear that I am addicted to prescription drugs, and then that I am in recovery from them. Friends begin to unexpectedly drift. My social circle winnows to a humbling few. I can’t track all of the rumors, but I can track who has heard them. One day a classmate or a teacher will meet my eye with a curious recognition, a scrutiny that goes unsatisfied.

For my brother, however, it is worse; one day my father makes a call to tell someone that he has secured a gun and plans to bring it to school. It is only a matter of time, my father tells this stranger, before someone turns up dead by his hand.

This is not the last story, but—in my memory—it is the last one that matters. Someone calls someone else, and soon we are being interviewed by child protective services.

One afternoon a woman with a clipboard sits at a table across from my brother and I. Her hair is feathered and brown. Her eyes are made smaller by a pair of thin wire glasses. She asks about a weapon then folds her hands and waits.

My brother looks to me. He is eleven years old, still red-lipped and nervous. As young as I was when our lives began to change.

For the first time I am out of options. I attempt to put my thoughts into words.

Much earlier than noon, but late enough to have eaten our sandwiches and a second blood orange, my father and I pull the boat back to shore. We have caught more than our fill for the day; the only thing that remains is to clean our fish and head home.

The day has turned out beautifully. The wind softens as we approach the docks, allowing the sunlight to sit awhile on the skin. It is still chilly outside but no longer freezing. My joints hang free and loose. My father whistles a song I don’t recognize.

The interior of the cleaning shed is damp and heatless. A rattling window overlooks the shore; outside, the low slosh of Superior. Bolted to the tabletop sits a white slab of cutting board and a utility sink with thin metal legs. It has room enough for two but little else. We enter, and my father pulls the door closed behind us. Instantly I fight an urge to hold my nose; it reeks of algae and blood. Once the door closes, the interior softens by a degree, and the miasma thickens.

Before we get to work, my father has us face the window to pray.

We thank God and his son, the lake and its fish. My hands, clasped together, are oily with penance. The prayer ends when my father makes the sign of the cross, draws his eye upwards towards the tin roof overhead. His nose is a dark cherry color. Even in here, I can see the heat of his breath.

He begins to search his bag for a knife as I rinse the first salmon in the sink. At first, I am sheepish; the water is frigid, and I wait in vain for the tap to warm. Finally, when it becomes clear that there is no boiler to heat it, I wet my hands to the wrist and begin to scrub, sloughing the fish slime into the drain.

The body quickly loses its slippery texture. Fingers gone dumb with cold, I lay the clean fish on the board where my father stands waiting with his knife.

I’ve filleted sunfish and pumpkinseed fish before, but I haven’t gutted salmon. My father cuts first to show me the way. With the tip of his blade he indicates the gill, the throat latch, the fins and the anus. He draws delicate lines along the animal’s scales, indicating the places I’ll be cutting and cleaning on my own fish. We have maybe ten or fifteen in our cooler, though they only ever give license for five. I return each instruction with a nod and a grunt.

He says, “Watch closely.” Then, he makes his first incision.

The tip of the knife sinks. A dribbling circle of red forms around it.

“Gently,” he warns me, “so you don’t puncture the intestines.”

He runs the length of the blade from anal depression to the head. I stay as still as I can but cannot help the way my mouth squirms and bows. A little twinge of something—pity, disgust—prevents me from focusing. It feels, in some ways, like a violation. Exacting an unspeakable harm.

“Look,” he says. “Watch me.”

I try my best to.

The red belly of the fish opens to his touch, unzippered like a dress pocket. Inside, flesh the color of sunrise. Blood oozes gently outward, producing a delicate, petal pink in the puddling water beneath. My father’s hands, ungloved, darken.

In go his fingers, soft and searching, to dig out the entrails. He scoops long strands of organ out with his hands. Intestines unspool like corded wool. He retrieves the liver, its shape dark and pillowy.

“There’s nothing we can use here,” he says to me.

Each part he places into a bucket between us, the walls of an interim grave.

When it is my turn to cut, he stands beside me to watch. I pull out the little fish who swallowed the hook, figuring a smaller body will be easiest to handle. Once she is washed and laid on the cutting board, I begin to follow the instructions he gave.

“Gently,” he says, his voice rich with encouragement. “Exactly like that. Yes.”

I warm with fragile confidence. I don’t just want his pride; I want to show him how proud he can be. My fingers go gummy with blood as I puncture the abdominal hollow. I ply the seam of the fish open, turn out her organs like change from a coin purse. Her severed gills splayed outward, supple strands of gut spill onto the table. The kidney, a soft pebble, I shuck with a spoon. I can tell by my father’s silence that I make no mistakes. I am too fixated to smell the blood, to wrestle my disgust to the ground. Instead, I focus. I listen. I make my cuts matter.

My hands know more than my mind can recall; they remember the bodies of sunfish, warm Julys spent fishing in Webster, Wisconsin. The spined fins of pumpkinseed, gills flared and gumdrop red. There is a tactile sort of truth in it—like riding a bike, drinking hose water, kneading a dough. Once learned, always remembered.

I bucket the wasted parts: the guts, the liver, the kidney, the fins. Then I begin to fillet. 

This part is easiest; it is one I have done many times before. The trick is to carry the blade along the backbone, to feel the white spurs of spinal column bite the teeth of the knife. That is how I know I am cutting as close as I can cut, taking as much meat off the bone as it allows.

The final product is a thing of beauty; bright flesh that is delicately marbled, interrupted only by the lateral line. I feel the bristle of pin bones, yet to be plucked. I look up to him, my hand a platter.

He doesn’t smile, but he nods. That is even better.

We paper the dead and put them on ice.

The last part I toss is the head and the spine, one still attached to the other. Blood slick on her cheeks like a coat of acrylic, her mouth slack and open. For a moment, I angle her head just so. I take a good look. Even now, I cannot seem to force an angle that allows me to meet her eye.

Here is something I learn: in prayers to the slaughtered, thank you means sorry.

The day I move out of my father’s home for good, he takes off his work shirt and puts on his church button-up. He wears a pair of tan slacks and his pendant of Jesus and the Sacred Heart. He asks my brother and I to sit down beside him. Each hand, like a bowled parenthesis, wrings the other in his lap.

Outside it is drizzling. He is saying goodbye.

It’s been weeks since our last talk. Things have gone back to normal, but not. I am tired. More tired than I ever remember having been. I don’t have it in me to run anymore; I can’t bother lifting a limb. Outside of bedtimes, my brother and I are meant to spend our nights in the communal area. Resigned to this rule, every afternoon when I come home, I lay on the living room floor and sleep. It is like rest after a blood-draw, dreamless and hard. At 10 p.m., my brother shakes me awake. I transition to my bed, and by the next day, the cycle repeats.

By the time we say our goodbyes, I have spent nearly a month of my life this way. I’ve missed dinners, lost weight. I’ve begun to ignore my schoolwork, allowing wadded papers to accumulate in my backpack. I like my new routine. I am coming around on a new sort of happiness, one that keeps its feet off the ground.

At first my father doesn’t comment on this habit. Then, as the time draws on, he tries to order me awake. Then punish me awake. When he finally realizes neither are sticking, he asks me to try to stay up. Just for one night.

I remember blinking at him, my eyes bleary and dry. I never do.

Weeks ago, when we had last spoken, he had asked me to give him one good reason I wanted to leave. Just one, he said.

I could think of no good reply.

“Answer me,” he said.

I wrestled with all the ways my words had failed me. The things I had told my friends, the school psychologist, my brother. I thought of the new man my father had become and the man he had always been. I was scarcely a teenager. All I had was the strength of my feelings, bundled in a knot that only time could unravel. I was shaking so violently it was hard to speak.

I gave him the only true thing I felt I could offer him.

“I am terrified of you,” I finally said. “I don’t think I love you. You make everyone around you afraid.”

The moment I said it, the air went out of me. I wrapped my arms around my stomach and bowed forward, as if a part of me might spill out.

His body went stiff. We stopped looking at one another. He nodded a few times, then blinked away tears. Then he stood up and left.

Weeks later, when we speak again, my father gives my brother and I two black trash bags to pack our belongings. But we own so little that each hangs billowy and loose. He says goodbye at the step but does not cross the threshold. My brother and I walk out into the rain.

My father pulls over at the same smokehouse we always pass on the road back to town. He steps out of the car whistling Neil Young, and I follow him inside. It’s a fluorescent-lit room made of wood beams and tin, boasting a single refrigerated display case at the mouth of the entryway. By now, I am used to our routine and hang back as my father browses his options.

My father selects several paltry strips of salmon jerky and watches the scale as the woman weighs and papers them.

“I’ll have to start the grill up once we get home,” he says to me and winks, then slides a bill across the counter. I nod and smile.

When we re-enter the car, my father cranks up the heat. The cabin fills with the aroma of fish and smoke as he unpapers a slice of jerky and eats it. The drive towards the Twin Cities is over two hours long; we spend the bulk of it in silence, listening to the low drone of classical music on the radio. Soon, the cold of the day sloughs off of me, and I sag with satisfaction against the passenger side window. The sunlight seeps in. The car smells of soil and sawdust and old sweat. It’s been a long trip, but I’m happy to have spent this time together. I feel like I have done a good job.

“It was a good day—” my father finally says, “a great day!”

Whether he says this to me, or to himself, I’ll never know. I doze against the window and my father turns the music down until the song is no longer a song, but a low and unrecognizable hum.

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An Interview with N.C. Happe

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