The Fishing Pond in the Back Pasture

The Fish Truck

The hatchery truck came to the co-op parking lot in Corydon on the second Saturday in October. I had to trade a Saturday off with another carrier to make it.

“What size pond?” he asked me.

“Half an acre. Brand new. Never been stocked.”

“Then you want two-fifty bluegill and fifty largemouth,” he said. “Bluegill first, they’re the food. You can add catfish later if you want. Don’t keep any bass for three years. Let them grow.”

He netted my fish into plastic bags full of water, with oxygen blown into them and a rubber band around the top. The bluegill were little things, two inches maybe. The bass were about the same, with a black stripe down their sides.

It came to four hundred and ten dollars. I paid him and set the bags in a cooler in the back of Steve’s pickup, and drove home with the windows down so I would not miss any noise from the back.

Steve and I floated the bags in the pond for twenty minutes, the way the young man said to, so the water in them would come to the same temperature as the pond. Then we opened them, one at a time.

I will never forget watching those little bluegill go. They hung in the water a second, like they did not believe it. Then they scattered.

“Well, Grandma,” Steve said, “you’ve got a pond.”

The Dock

Steve built the dock over the winter, out in the machine shed, with a propane heater going. I made him take the lumber money out of the pond fund, and it came to six hundred and ninety dollars.

That was the last of the six thousand. Four thousand nine hundred to Dale, four hundred and ten for fish, six hundred and ninety for the dock. I wrote it down in the back of my savings book, and then I closed the account.

The dock was simple. Treated two-by-sixes for the deck, and no rail at all, because Steve said a rail just gave kids something to climb.

He carried it back to the pond in sections on the hay wagon in April, when the ground had firmed up. He and our neighbor Jeff bolted it onto the posts in a single afternoon.

When it was done, Steve stood at the end of it with his hands on his hips and looked out at that water, and he did not say anything for a long time.

“Ryan would have lived on this,” he said finally. “When he was ten.”

“I know,” I said.

“You going to tell him?”

That was the question I had been circling all winter. I had not told Brooke. I had not put one picture of it anywhere. I did not want it to be something I was holding over anybody.

But I had to tell Ryan, or it was just a hole in the ground with fish in it.

The Phone Call

I called Ryan on a Thursday night in late April. He picked up on the fourth ring, and I could hear the television and Beau yelling about something in the background.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Hi, honey. I won’t keep you. I just wanted you to know your dad and I put in a pond, back in the low spot in the back pasture. It’s stocked. Bluegill and bass. Your dad built a dock.”

“In the frog hole,” he said.

“In the frog hole,” I said. “It’s half an acre now. If the kids ever want to come fish, it’s there. Any Sunday. That’s all. You don’t have to say anything.”

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks, Mom.” And then Beau needed something and he had to go, and that was all.

He did not call back. Not that week, and not the next. I told myself it was storm season and he was working, which was true. I told myself a lot of things.

On the Sunday after that call, Steve and I went to church and sang “Shall We Gather at the River” for the closing hymn, and I had to stop singing partway through and just hold the hymnal.