The Name in the Lodge Record Book

We fried them in a cast iron pan with cornmeal and a can of beans heated right in the coals.

She said it was the best thing she had ever eaten. I believed her. It was the best thing I had ever eaten, too.

After lunch she lay on the warm rock with her hands behind her head and looked up at the pines. “Dad,” she said. “Did Grandpa used to bring you here when you were my age?”

“Not till I was 14,” I said. “But yes. This same rock.”

“Did you like it?”

“I loved it,” I said. “It was the only place I ever saw my dad really happy. And sometimes, at night, the only place I ever saw him sad.”

She turned her head to look at me. “Why sad?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And it was true. I had seen him more than once, sitting alone on the end of the dock after dark, long after the rest of us went in. I had never once asked him why.

That night, after she fell asleep, I sat on the end of the dock myself. The loons were calling across the bay, that long wavering cry that sounds like somebody looking for something they lost.

I sat right where I used to see my father sit. And I thought, for the first time in my life, that maybe a man does not come to the same lake for 39 years only to catch fish.

The Last Morning

Saturday was our last day. We had to be on the road by noon to make the border before supper.

Hailey set her own alarm for 4:45 and was dressed and zipped into her life jacket before I had the coffee on.

The lake was covered in fog. Not thick, but enough that the far shore was gone and the pines on the point were just gray shapes. The water was flat as a plate.

We ran slow out to the rock bar off the point, the one where my dad caught his biggest fish back when I was in high school.

I cut the motor and we drifted, and the only sound was the water dripping off the lower unit.

Hailey dropped her jig. On the third lift, she said, very calmly, “Dad. I’m snagged.”

Then her snag started swimming. Her rod went down so hard the tip touched the water, and the drag on her little reel started to sing.

“Keep your rod up,” I said. “Let her run. Don’t horse her.”

“I’m not horsing her,” she said through her teeth. “She’s horsing me.”

That fish took line four times. Every time Hailey got it close, it saw the boat and went straight back to the bottom. Her arms were shaking. I could see it through the life jacket.

I did not touch that reel. I want that on the record. I held the net, and I kept my mouth shut except to say “good” and “easy” and “you’ve got her.”

I looked at my watch when she hooked it and again when it came up the last time. Eleven minutes. The longest eleven minutes of my life, and I have stood in a delivery room.

When it finally rolled up beside the boat, in the gray light, all gold and olive with its white-tipped tail, I said a word I do not say in front of my daughter. She did not even notice.