The Fishing Pond in the Back Pasture

Dale

Dale Ritter came out in late February to look. He is a big, slow man about Steve’s age who has done dirt work in three counties, and he walked that low spot twice with a probe rod before he said a word.

“Good clay,” he said. “You’ll want the dam on the south end and a pipe spillway so you don’t wash out in a gully washer. I can’t dig it till it dries out. July, probably.”

“What does it run?” I asked him, with the savings book in my coat pocket.

“For this size, the way I’d build it, about forty-nine hundred,” he said. “That’s the dozer, the track hoe, the pipe, and my time. Could be a little less if the ground cooperates.”

Forty-nine hundred dollars. I did the math right there. That left me eleven hundred out of the six thousand for the fish and the dock and whatever else a pond needed.

And in the middle of March, Brooke and Ryan and the kids went to Disney World without me.

Ryan called me twice that spring. Both times it was about nothing, his truck, a storm that took out a line of poles near Allerton. He is a lineman for the electric co-op, and he was working sixteen-hour days.

Both times I waited for him to bring it up. Both times he didn’t. And I didn’t either, because I had promised myself I would not put him in the middle, and that meant I could not even ask.

The Dirt Work

Dale brought his equipment out on the eighth of July. It was ninety-one degrees and the pasture was dry enough to crack. Steve moved the cows to the north ground so they would not be in the way.

By the first evening, there was a hole. By the second, there was a dam on the south end, packed down hard with the track hoe going back and forth over it. By the third, there was a pond, except for the water.

“Now you wait,” Dale said when he was loading up. He took my check and folded it in half and put it in his shirt pocket with the notepad. “Rain’ll fill it. Might take till fall. Might take till spring.”

“How will I know when it’s ready for fish?”

“When it’s got about six foot of water in the deep end,” he said. “Talk to the hatchery. They run a truck to the co-op in Corydon every October. They’ll tell you what to put in.”

Then September came in wet. It rained four inches in one week. I went back there every evening to look.

The water came up slow and brown at first. Then it started to clear. By the end of September there was close to seven feet in the deep end, and frogs, and a pair of wood ducks that came and went.

Steve set the dock posts that month, while the water was still low on the north side. Six treated posts, sunk in with a post-hole digger and a lot of words I will not repeat at church.