The Bass,the river and Sheila Mant

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The Bass, The river and Sheila Mant
There was a summer in my life when the only creature that seemed lovelier to me
than a largemouth bass was Sheila Mant. I was fourteen. The Mants had rented the
cottage next to ours on the rivers; with their parties, their frantic games of softball,
their constant comings and goings and goings, they appeared to me denizens of a
brilliant existence.
given anything to be invited to one of their parties, and when my parents went to
bed I would sneak through the woods to their hedge and stare enchanted at the
candlelit swirl of white dresses and bright, paisley skirts.
Sheila was the middle daughter ---at seventeen, all but out of reach. She would
spend her days sunbathing on a float my Uncle Sierbert had moored in their cove,
and before July was over I had learned all her moods. If she lay flat on the diving
board with her hand trailing idly in the water, she was pensive, not to be disturbed.
On her side, her head propped up by her arm, she was observant, considering those
around her with a look that seemed queenly and severe. Sitting up, arms tucked
around her long, suntanned legs, she was approachable, but barely, and it was only
in those glorious moments when she stretched herself prior to entering the water
that her various suitors found the courage to come near.
These were many. The Dartmouth heavy-weight crew would scull by her house on
their way upriver, and I think all eight of them must have been in love with her at
various times during the summer; the coxswain would curse at them through his
megaphone, but without effect---there was always a pause in their pace when they
passed Sheila's float. I suppose to these jaded twenty- year-olds she seemed the
incarnation of innocence and youth, while to me she appeared unutterably suave,
the epitome of sophistication. I was on the swim team at school, and to win her
attention would do endless laps between my house and the Vermont shore, hoping
she would notice the beauty of my flutter kick, the power of my crawl. Finishing, I
would boost myself up onto our dock and glance casually over toward her, but she
was never watching, and the miraculous day she was, I immediately climbed the
diving board and did my best tuck and a half for her , and continued diving until she
had left and the sun went down and my longing was like a madness and I couldn't
stop.
It was late August by the time I got up the nerve to ask her out. The tortured will-I's,
won't-I's, the agonized indecision over what to say, the false starts toward her house
and embarrassed retreats---- the details of these have been seared from my memory,
and the only part I remember clearly is emerging from the woods toward dusk while
they were playing softball on their lawn, as bashful and frightened as a unicorn.
Sheila was stationed halfway between first and second, well outside the infield. She
didn't seem surprised to see me--- as a matter of fact, she didn't seem to see me at
all.

She turned---I took the full brunt of her long red hair and well-spaced freckles


tomorrow night at nine. Want to go?
One of her brothers sent the ball sailing over the leftfielder's head; she stood and
watched it disappear toward the river.

I played my master stroke.
I spent all of the following day polishing it. I turned it upside down on our lawn and
rubbed every inch with Brillo, hosing off the dirt, wiping it with chamois until it


gleamed as bright as aluminum ever gleamed. About five, I slid it into the water,
arranging cushions near the bow so Sheila could lean on them if she was in one of
her pensive moods, propping up my father's transistor radio by the middle thwart so
we could have music when we came back. Automatically, without thinking about it, I
mounted my Mitchell reel on my Pfleuger spinning rod and stuck it in the stern.
I say automatically, because I never went anywhere that summer without a fishing
rod. When I wasn't swimming laps to impress Sheila, I was back in our driveway
practicing casts, and when I wasn't practicing casts, I was tying the line to Tosca,
our springer spaniel, to test the reel's drag, and when I wasn't doing any of those
things, I was fishing the river for bass.
Too nervous to sit at home, I got in the canoe early and started paddling in a huge
circle that would get me to Sheila's dock around eight. As automatically as I brought
along my rod, I tried on a big Rapala plug, let it down into the water, let out some
line and immediately forgot all about it.
It was already dark by the time I glided up to the Mants' dock. Even by day the river
was quiet, most of the summer people preferring Sunapee or one of the other
nearby lakes, and at night it was a solitude difficult to believe, a corridor of hidden
life that ran between banks like a tunnel. Even the stars were part of it. They weren't
as sharp anywhere else; they seemed to have closen the river as a guide on their
slow wheel toward morning, and in the course of the summer's fishing, I had learned
all their names.
I was there ten minutes before Sheila appeared. I heard the slam of their screen
door first, then saw her in the spotlight as she came slowly down the path. As
beautiful as she was on the float, she was even lovelier now--- her white dress went
perfectly with her hair, and complimented her figure even more than her swimsuit.
It was her face that bothered me. It had on its delightful fullness a very dubious
expression.


anything.
She let herself down reluctantly into the bow. I was glad she wasn't facing me.
When her eyes were on me, I felt like diving in the river again from agony and joy.
I pried the canoe away from the dock and started paddling upstream. There was an
extra paddle in the bow, but Sheila made no move to pick it up. She took her shoes
off, and dangled her feet over the side.
Ten minutes went by.








things. Big largemouths. Micropetrus salmonides,
Now I have spent a great deal of time in the years since wondering why Sheila Mant
should come down so hard on fishing. Was her father a fisherman? Her antipathy
toward fishing nothing more than normal filial rebellion? Had she tried it once? A
messy encounter with worms? It doesn't matter. What does is that at that fragile
moment in time I would have given anything not to appear dumb in Sheila's severe
and unforgiving eyes.


She hadn't seen my equipment yet. What I should have done, of course, was push
the canoe in closer to shore and carefully slide the rod into some branches where I
could pick it up again in the morning. Failing that, I could have surreptitiously
dumped the whole outfit overboard, written off the forty or so dollars as love's
tribute. What I actually did do was gently lean forward, and slowly, ever so slowly,
pushes the rod back through my legs toward the stern where it would be less
conspicuous.
It must have been just exactly what the bass was waiting for. Fish will trail a lure
sometimes, trying to make up their mind whether or not to attack, and the slight
pause in the plug's speed caused by my adjustment was tantalizing enough to
overcome the bass's inhibitions. My rod, safely out of sight at last, bent double. The
line, tightly coiled, peeled off the spool with the shrill, tearing zip of a high-speed drill.
Four things occurred to me at once. One, that it was a bass. Two, that it was a big
bass. Three that it was the biggest bass I had ever hooked. Four, that Sheila Mant
must not know.




She shuddered, quickly drew her feet back into the canoe. Every instinct I had told
me to pick up the rod and strike back at the bass, but there was no need to --- it
was already solidly hooked. Downstream, an awesome distance downstream, it
jumped clear of the water, landing with a concussion heavy enough to ripple the
entire river. For a moment, I thought it was gone, but then the rod was bending
again, the tip dancing into the water. Slowly, not making any motion that might alert
Sheila, I reached down to tighten the drag.
While all this was going on, Sheila had begun talking and it was a few minutes
before I was able to catch up with her train of thought.

wanted.
I 'm thinking more of UVM or Bennington. Somewhere I can ski.
The bass was slanting toward the rocks on the New Hampshire side by the ruins of
Donaldson's boathouse. It had to be an old bass--- a young one probably wouldn't
have known the rocks were there. I brought the canoe back out into the middle of
the river, hoping to head it off.


mean, it might be a while before I get started and all. I was thinking of getting my
hair styled, more swept back? I mean, Ann- Margret? Like hers, only shorted.
She hesitated.
We were. I had managed to keep the bass in the middle of the river away from the
rocks, but it had plenty of room there, and for the first time a chance to exert its full
strength. I quickly computed the weight necessary to draw a fully loaded canoe
backwards----the thought of it made me feel faint.

I dug in deeper with my paddle. Reassured Sheila began talking about something
else, but all my attention was taken up now with the fish. I could feel its desperation
as the water grew shallower. I could sense the extra strain on the line, the frantic
way it cut back and forth in the water. I could visualize what it looked like---- the
gape of its mouth, the flared gills and thick, vertical tail. The bass couldn't have
encountered many forces in its long life that it wasn't capable of handling, and the


unrelenting tug at its mouth must have been a source of great puzzlement and
mounting panic.
Me, I had problems of my own. To get to Dixford, I had to paddle up a sluggish
stream that came into the river beneath a covered bridge. There was a shallow
sandbar at the mouth of this stream---weeds on one side, rocks on the other.
Without doubt, this is where I would lose the fish.

if it's even worth it. I wouldn't even do it probably. I saw Jackie Kennedy in Boston
and she wasn't tan at all.
Taking a deep breath, I paddled as hard as I could for the middle, deepest part of
the bar. I could have threaded the eye of a needle with the canoe, but the pull on
the stern threw me off and I overcompensated ---the canoe veered left and scraped
bottom. I pushed the paddle down and shoved. A moment of hesitation... a moment
more.... The canoe shot clear into the deeper water of the stream. I immediately
looked down at the rod. It was bent in the same, tight arc-miraculously, the bass
was still on.
The moon was out now. It was low and full enough that its beam shone directly on
Sheila there ahead of me in the canoe, washing her in a creamy, luminous glow. I
could see the lithe, easy shape of her shoulders, the proud, alert tilt of her head, and
all these things were as a tug on my heart. Not just Sheila, but the aura she carried
about her of parties and casual touching and grace. Behind me, I could feel the
strain of the bass, steadier now, growing weaker, and this was another tug on my
heart, not just the bass but the beat of the river and the slant of the stars and the
smell of the night, until finally it seemed I would be tornapart between longings, split
in half. Twenty yards ahead of us was the road, and once I pulled the canoe up on
shore, the bass would be gone, irretrievably gone. If instead I stood up, grabbed the
rod and started pumping, I would have it---as tired as the bass was, there was no
chance it could get away. I reached down for the rod, hesitated, looked up to where
Sheila was stretching herself lazily toward the sky, her small breasts rising beneath
the soft fabric of her dress, and the tug was too much for me, and quicker than I it
takes to write down, I pulled the penknife from my pocket and cut the line in half.
With a sick, nauseous feeling in my stomach, I saw the rod unbend.

Through a superhuman effort of self-control, I was able to beach the canoe and help
Sheila off. The rest of the night is much foggier. We walked to the fair--- there was
the smell of popcorn, the sound of guitars. I may have danced once or twice with
her, but all I really remember is her coming over to me once the music was done to
explain that she would be going home in Eric Caswell's Corvette.

For the first time that night she looked at me, really looked at me.

Funny. Different. Dreamy .Odd. How many times was I to hear that in the years to
come, all spoken with the same quizzical, half- accusatory tone Sheila used then.
Poor Sheila! Before the month was over, the spell she cast over me was gone, but
the memory of that lose bass haunted me all summer and haunts me still. There
would be other Sheila Mants in my life, other fish, and though I came close once or
twice, it was these secret, hidden tuggings in the night that claimed me, and I never
made the same mistake again.


The Theme of “The Bass, the river and Sheila Mant”
Theme of 'The Bass, the River and Sheila MANT' shows the narrator struggle
between his desire to catch the biggest bass in his life and his desire to impress
Sheila. He desperately tries to conceal the rod with the big bass as Sheila
chatters away, having absolutely no idea what is going. The narrator struggles
to ask Sheila to the dance, whom he has intense feelings for.

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