by Paul Ham for the Winter 2025 issue
My great grand-daddy started with cats, and by my daddy’s time we were farming carps too. GGD tinned up catfish roe, added some ash and glue, and sold it off to the fancies as caviar.
GGD, being a pissed off sort, when Fish and Wildlife threw rat poison in his farm pond, did what he did and drank. After he was done drinking, he picked his shit up, and said fuck you Fish and Wildlife I will fuck you with my brilliance.
Cats are fat and slow, but they fuck like kittens. He started digging and in 5 months he had a quarter-acre flooded into a pond on the sun-side of the holler. Using sheet metal and tarps, he pushed and caught sunlight into heat, and gave the 28 cats he caught the night before 2 summers and 2 springs every year.
Few years later, he called them his Nancies. GGD crammed 8 or 10 or so generations from those original 28, bred for size, firmness, and flavor, and them Nancies didn’t need any ash or glue and he didn’t need to sell them off as caviar, he sold caviar.
Around that time carp started showing up in the waters. Fuckers ate everything, and if you caught one you’d just throw it up on the bank for trash.
GD knew asian folks love carp and love their roe. Just like GGD, GD knew the myths of the catfish, how the natives worshiped her, how when you land one, you do look her right between the eyes and thank her, as the cats have souls and they pass on whether in you or around you. The asians did the same with the carps, they got the same whiskers and placid eyes, age and wisdom part of their fucking morphology.
GD looked one he caught right between the eyes, and he built a second farm pond.
GGD was the moonshiners in us, GD knew he could do better, and my daddy said he wants us good and to leave the fucking holler. Idk we all got shit we need to do, and my daddy and me we got some drinking to do. 🏁
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7 responses to “American Feral”
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Writer here. I grew up in Pennsyltucky, loved fishing for catfish. You fish for cats at night, in deep muddy cricks, cast (chicken liver), sit your rod up on a stick and then smoke and drink and wait. Around that time is when we started finding carp in the Susquehanna, and if you caught one of those beasts you’d literally just throw them up on the bank, an effigy to those monster koi.
In modern farming and cultivation, we’ll ask: what is native, and what is foreign or invasive? At what point can I take a non-native species and after selective breeding and cultivation create a species bred to thrive in a specific environ? At what point is it native/landrace? How many generations? 5? 10? 28?
Instead, we embrace them as feral. I have 7th generation non-native tobacco and flowers in my seed back; I have 5th generation maize selected to thrive in my city. They aren’t native, yet they are feral and thrive here.
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thanks! what do you think of the numbers in the piece? in reality, the numbers I heard in this piece don’t quite make sense; but they work in the sense this is a spoken story, and ofc allegory. were they distracting?
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as in it’s impossible to catch 28 catfish in a night (8 would be a miracle); and 8-10 generations in “few years” is another whale’s tale. my struggle is those are the numbers I heard when I wrote this… in the end it doesn’t matter, but f they bother me.
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they weren’t distracting at all, reading it — looking at it again, there are quite a lot of numbers (“in 5 months he had a quarter-acre”, “gave the 28 cats he caught the night before 2 summers and 2 springs”)… and to me it seems exactly right for the voice to be very specific and certain about amounts, like a farmer might be, even with exaggerations that are not unknown to fishers…
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