The Johnboat Ramp at Lake Week

He closed the bail. He let the weight sink. He felt for the bottom, and lifted the rod tip a little, and sat there with the line between his fingers.

Then he turned his head and looked at me, and his eyes were wet, and he did not try to hide it.

“Thank you, son,” he said.

He had never called me son in eighteen years of marriage to his daughter. I had to look at the depth finder for a while.

Emma had been very quiet on the bench at the bow. Now she held out her own rod to her grandpa and said, “Grandpa, my hook came off yesterday. Daddy tied it but it’s not a good knot. Can you do it?”

I had tied it fine. She knew I had. I looked at her, and she looked right back at me, ten years old and as serious as a judge.

Walt set his own rod in the holder I had screwed to the gunwale.

He took her line in his right hand and the new hook in his left, and he held the hook against his knee with the heel of his weak hand and fed the line through the eye with his good one.

“Five turns,” he said. “Not four. Four slips. Back through the little loop at the bottom. Then you wet it, see, so it doesn’t burn. Then pull it slow.”

His hands were slow and they shook, and it took him the better part of three minutes. Emma watched every turn without saying one word. When he pulled the knot down tight and clipped the tag end with his teeth, she said, “That’s how you’re supposed to do it?”

“That’s how my dad showed me,” Walt said. “On this lake. Right about here, I’d say.”

“How old were you?”

“About your age.”

She cast her line out on the other side of the boat, and it was a better cast than his, and he told her so.

For the next three hours we caught fish. Not big ones. Emma caught four perch and a sunfish and named every one before she let it go. Walt caught two walleye about fourteen inches long for supper.

He talked the whole time. Walt had barely strung three sentences together since the stroke. Out there he told Emma about the summer of 1958, when his father lost a muskie off this same point.

He told her how her grandma Joan caught the biggest fish of the week on their honeymoon and never let him forget it. He laughed twice.

The mist burned off by eight. The sun came out hot. I put sunscreen on Walt’s neck and his ears and the backs of his hands, and he let me.

Around ten the pontoon ran along the far shore, fast, with the boys on a tube behind it, screaming the good kind of screaming. Walt watched them go by and smiled.

“Bradley always did like going fast,” he said.

At a quarter to noon, I was opening a sleeve of crackers for Emma when Walt’s rod tip went down.

Not a tap. Not a nibble. It just went down and stayed down, and the line started moving off sideways along the bar.

Walt saw it before I did. He lifted the rod with his right hand and set the hook hard, and the rod bent over into a curve I had not seen on that old rod in fifteen years.

“Get the net, Michael,” he said.