Excerpt from Jimmy Catfish of Codfresh Lake

by Bill Russo

Here's an excerpt from an early chapter of Jimmy Catfish of Codfresh Lake. Anse Peckins (Proprietor of the only store for 10 miles in all directions) is using a wagon drawn by his twin mares Jennie and Josie to take newly married Cisco and Amanda to their new home on a strange lake. It is composed of three sections. Anse warns them about the middle section, called THE BRACK:.............................

"What's the Brack?" Amanda asked.

"The short of it is that it's a long story. But we're going to be on this wagon for a while, so I guess I got time to tell it. Codfresh Lake is like no other body of water in the world. It was formed sometime in the 1930s. The old timers say it was the great New England Hurricane of 1938 that started it all.

During that massive storm, whole forests of giant Maple trees were uprooted and tossed around like autumn leaves. Raindrops as big as baseballs fell upon the land, swelling the rivers and forcing them over their banks.

Until the great hurricane, the Swan River in Dennis Port was a lazy little salt water stream that ran from Nantucket Sound for about three miles until it emptied into Swan Pond. During the storm, the river swelled a hundred fold and burst all the dams on the pond sending torrents of icy salt water towards the town of Harwich. At the same time, in the opposite direction, a tiny fresh water stream from Chatham headed West toward Harwich and kept doubling in size every few hundred feet. The river charged into three or four different ponds and lakes, one after another; exploding their banks, as it careened towards a crowded forest called
'Six Mile Hollow' in Middle Harwich.

The two opposing rivers surged towards each other like two trains on the same track. Entering the hollow, they snapped long pines and uprooted fat Maples. Pushing aside huge boulders like they were made of paper; the rivers crushed the few Oaks in the hollow and splintered the many birches.

When the two mammoth water trains finally met and grappled head on; a frothy foam shot a thousand feet into the air, and people swore that from as far as fourteen miles in either direction, they heard the waters scream like tortured, feral cats.

Those bulging rivers swallowed the hollow whole, flooding a swath of land six miles long and two miles wide. But the merging of the waters didn't happen. The salt water did not mix with the fresh water and the fresh water remained separate from the salt.

Near the contact point in the middle, the waters partially mingled; but at either end they kept their original constitutions. It ended up that the water divided itself into three separate lakes within a lake.

We call the whole thing, the Codfresh Lake; but we have names for each section.

The part to the West is 'Little Sea'. It has blue water with choppy little waves. It is a mini ocean running for two miles and it is bursting with cod, flounder, fluke, and scallops.

At the east end, is a two mile section of calm, fresh water - that's called 'Freshlake'. It's brownish in color and looks dirty, but the water is good and it's chock full of some of the finest fishing in the country. You'll get plump trout, chubby bass, and pickerels longer than a yard stick.

The eerie and forbidding middle section is called "The Brack". The water is the gray color of a World War Two battleship and it's about half salt, half fresh, and all mean.

There's some weird things in it. Nobody fishes in the Brack anymore since old Marty Johnson lost an arm there."

"How could he lose an arm while fishing?" Amanda asked.

Anse Peckins lifted his Red Sox hat and scratched his bald head with all four fingers of a cupped hand. The wind tugged at the wispy fringe of gray hair that was revealed when he removed the ball cap.

Reining in the horses, he brought the wagon to a stop. He placed his ball cap back on his head and looked around. Whispering as if he were telling State secrets, he said: "The fish Marty hooked got away. It escaped by biting his arm clean off."

"That is crazy," said Cisco who up to that point had not said a single word during the ride, either to Amanda or to Peckins. "Fish can not bite off an arm, leastwise not lake fish."

"You're right about that," agreed Anse. "Regular fish can't. But the fish in the Brack are not ordinary fish. They look like catfish but they act like sharks and alligators. They will eat anything. You'll see. Your house is right near it. If you spot a deer or a wolf walking in the Brack, there's a good chance one of those giant catfish will strike at it just like a gator. I've seen 'em Mr. da Silva. They can jump five or six feet right out of the water. They are big - five or six
feet long and probably weigh 40 to 60 pounds or more. I don't think there's enough food on the bottom of the lake to sustain them, so they have become killers."

A short time later they arrived in Codtown - a village consisting of just two streets, arranged like a printed plus sign, containing Peckins' store and about two dozen houses and barns. Peckins said that the town had a population of about 200 people counting what he called the 'downtown' and some outlying homes and farms. -0-

JIMMY CATFISH OF CODFRESH LAKE 
is a prequel to a short story in the collection titled Swamp Tales: Horrors from the Hockomock Swamp and the Marshes of Cape Cod. It is 99 cents in the Kindle store and is usually in the top 100 sales chart for short reads. The new book is scheduled for paperback and Kindle in June.