Tyee Capital of the World

The last known pho­to­graph of Uncle Joe never made it to the pages of Mom’s photo album. Some folk said he looked into the open mouth of that giant Chinook, saw its tongue mov­ing and he went a bit crazy. They said that after all those years fish­ing the straits he finally got soft in the head just as the photo was being taken and let the fish fall from his fin­gers back into the ocean, watch­ing it sink and dis­ap­pear, before fol­low­ing it, almost like in slow motion, over the gun­wale of that row­boat, slip­ping through the waves with­out even bat­ting an eye. He floated a few inches below the sur­face for a moment, they said, and then dropped like a stone to the bot­tom of the chan­nel, food for the fish he had spent forty-seven years fish­ing, catch­ing, killing and eat­ing. People were too stunned to stop him, they said. Just watched open-mouthed as one moment the shut­ter clicked and the next he was sink­ing. Body never found. A father­less and hus­band­less fam­ily left to start out again all by them­selves, since most folk aside from tourists kept their dis­tance from Uncle Joe, and Mom never had any­thing to do with his wife or her two brats. Hard to man­age in Campbell River but she kept it up right to the end, herd­ing us all away from the griev­ing widow at the memo­r­ial ser­vice in the church social hall, and then after, while she sipped warm tea and ate a sand­wich, she didn’t so much as glance at Aunt Doris. They packed up real quick and went down to Ladysmith, I recall, and I’ve not seen them since. But I’ve not for­got­ten Uncle Joe or the empty white cof­fin at his memo­r­ial ser­vice, where some­one put a large photo of him on top, from hap­pier days, when he was sin­gle and didn’t have to wear glasses.