The Pond I Bought Back With My First Pay

I dug the roots out of the edge of the old stand, careful, a few at a time so I would not hurt it. They came up thick and white and smelling like the bottom of the world.

Then I walked them down the bank and planted them one at a time along the east side, where he had planted them the first time, pushing each one into the mud with my thumb.

I was on my knees in the mud for most of an afternoon. My jeans were soaked through. A redwing sat on a fence post and scolded me the whole time, the way they do.

Somewhere around the twentieth root, I started talking to Grandpa out loud. Nothing important. I told him about the hospital and Biscuit and the dock. I told him Vern said ours was better than his.

When I ran out of roots, I sat back on my heels and looked at the bank. It did not look like much. Little green spears in the mud. But I knew what they would be by July.

“Everything needs a place to hide sometimes,” I said. And then I did cry, finally, with nobody but the redwing to see it.

I sat in my car on the lane that night with the heater running and my muddy gloves on the seat beside me, and I typed the text to my sister four different ways before I sent the shortest one.

“Grandpa’s pond. Saturday evening. Bring nothing.”

I did not explain. I did not say that I had bought it. I did not know if Mom had heard from somebody at church, or if Vern had said something at the elevator, or if Brittany knew anything at all.

Three dots came up and went away. Came up again. Went away.

Then one word. “Okay.”

I told Vern on Friday that my sister might be coming. He only nodded. “I’ll bring the tackle box down,” he said. “There’s something you’ll want.”

Saturday was a spring evening, warm for May, the kind of evening Grandpa used to call a fishing sky. The sun came in low over the pasture and turned everything gold, the water and the grass and the new boards of the dock.

I went down early. I wore my green flannel shirt and an old ball cap with my ponytail pulled through the back, because that is what I wore every summer at that pond from the time I was twelve.

The cattails had come in tall and green along the east bank, with last year’s brown heads still standing among them like they were keeping an eye on the new ones.

I had Grandpa’s cane pole. Mom had given me his fishing things after he died, in a cardboard box I had not opened in three years. The pole was in it, and the bobber was still on the line.

I sat on the end of the dock with the pole in my hands and the line in the water, and I did not even bait the hook. I just sat there and let the evening come.

I heard Vern before I saw him. He came down the pasture slow, a white-bearded old man in his overalls and seed cap, the grass swishing against his boots. He was carrying a tackle box.

It was pale old metal, the hinges rusted, with a strip of masking tape on the lid where somebody had written a name in marker a long time ago and the weather had taken most of it.