The Fish Fry I Held on the Road

The Freezer in the Garage

Let me tell you what I had to work with, because this is the part that mattered.

I am not a rich man. I run equipment at the paper mill in the next town over, and Dana does the books for the elevator two days a week, and we get by on a gravel road eleven miles out of town because out there the taxes are low and a boy can run. But I had one thing in abundance that fall, and it was fish.

I had fished the opener in May with my buddy Pete, and every calm evening since, off a fourteen-foot Lund on the chain of lakes behind our place. I kept within my limit every trip, cleaned them on the board by the garage, and the chest freezer out there was stacked with vacuum-sealed walleye fillets going back to spring. Bags and bags of them. Dana said I fished like a man outrunning something, and maybe I did.

I counted the bags Friday night under the garage light. I had enough fillets to feed a lot more than one family. I had been feeding one family off that freezer all summer. Now I was going to feed a road.

Saturday morning I drove into town. I bought four gallons of peanut oil and a case of pop and three hundred paper plates and two big sacks of cornmeal, and the whole trip came to about ninety dollars, and I paid it in cash and did not think twice. I had spent nine years saving the peace with Royce. Ninety dollars to break it felt cheap.

I borrowed Pete’s propane fish fryer, the big one he takes up to Lake of the Woods, with the deep basket and the thirty-pound tank. I set it in the bed of my truck on a sheet of plywood so it would not slide. I mixed my breading the way my own dad taught me, cornmeal and flour and salt and a good hit of pepper, in a dishpan on the tailgate.

And Eli. Eli I put to work.

I gave him the plates to stack. I gave him the pop to load in the cooler with ice. I showed him how to lay the fillets out on the cutting board so they would be ready, and how to stand back from the oil, always back, and he listened to that part with his whole body because I told him it was the most important job of all, keeping the little kids clear of the burner.

He had not sat still in a chair in eight years. He worked at my elbow for six hours that day and never once drifted.