We got so we would fill the boat with fish - like a Banks doryman - and then go into shore where we would distribute them to the waiting crowds. It was a mad scene: us shoveling the squirming fish out on the bank - shouts and laughter as those on shore tried to recapture them and stuff them in bags, sacks, boxes - any kind of container for the trip home.  For several years we never kept any fish for ourselves and just gave them away to the blacks.  (We were all heart in those days). 

   But one time we thought, "Why don't we take some of these fish ourselves?  If they are good to eat - we can eat them!"  My tale now splits - like that of the herrings’ tails perhaps - into  what  transpired to us respectively as result of the Great Herring Fiasco.  Perhaps I ought to first relate  what I did with my share of the herrings.  I took them home, cleaned them and then put them down in some wooden tubs with salt (kosher salt from a Jewish butcher, I might add - long before I knew anything about the Jewish).  Now - I still don't know anything about the Jewish even after 15 years of marriage to a Jewess - (my second wife) - except they don't use kosher salt....  I put them in the walk-in attic of the house of the two-family home we lived in - and forgot them!  Months later the landlord, Andy Racanello, knocked on my door to ask, 

    "Yuz'all up here ever smell anyt'ing funny?"  I checked Jean (my Eye-talian wife).  Nope, we said.  Never noted anything here. 

    "We smell something funny lately down in our kitchen," says he. "Mind if I look around?"

    "How can I mind?, I say.  "It's your house." 

    Andy opens the door to the attic...as memory suddenly returns to me… Horror scene!  The wooden tubs have all burst.  Herring eyeballs and other parts too fierce to mention all gleam in the sudden light through the barrel cracks.  Salt crystals glitter on the floor in dried up pools of brine.  Brilliant green moss of some kind waves tentacles in the hot attic air - green grassy moss growing all over the wrack and ruin of the wooden barrels... 

   Andy stares dumfounded. 

   "Wha - wha's - this-s-s?" he asks.

   I search for the right answer.  All that occurs is "Herrings".

   "Herrings?  What's a herring?" says Andy.  (If I'd been smart, I would have said 'anchovies' and this paison would have relaxed...).

    "You got herrings in the attic?  You got herrings in MY attic?"

    Poor Andy, he never knew what to make of me.   

    For  his part Chuck  figured  the  kids  and  Maggie could  do  very  well  (if monotonously) on herrings for several months if necessary, so he could get "his head above  water" with his creditors, so he took several large sacks of herrings home, too.  Whatmore had a very large frozen-food locker in his cellar, and he told Chuck that he  was at liberty to draw on it as he might like for his own family's meals. Brother!  What liberties did he take!  He comes home with all these goofy  (really worthless) herrings - and he and Maggie clean them and package them up in meat wrapping paper: then they write all over them - like - "1-fish meal", "2-fish meal", "Fish-for-three", "Enough for party",  "Fish for big party", and such like nonsense (seemed like good idea at the time, no?) and they start packing them away in the frozen food locker. 

    But they have way more fish than the locker will hold.  So what to do?  Chuck always was a man of action - so he simply unloads all the (expensive) "Birdseye" fillet mignon, peas-and-pearl-onions, you know all that frozen stuff and stacks it in the corner of the cellar.  Then on about his business. 

    Then Whatmore (he owned a big chunk of Time magazine or somesuch) comes home one day - decides to go down to the locker and pull out some stuff  for dinner...