The Rod She Handed His Son

The rod sat on top of the water for one second, the cork handle bobbing like it might change its mind, and then the weight of the reel took it down and it was gone.

Iris leaned over the side of the boat in her orange life vest and watched the place where it had been.

The sun was just clearing the oaks on the far bank of Truman Lake, and the water was so calm you could see the rings spreading out until they faded into nothing.

She didn’t make a sound. Her sandy blond ponytail hung down over the shoulder of that life vest, perfectly still, and she just looked at the water like she was waiting for it to give the rod back.

“Fish need a fighting chance,” Forrest said behind us. He said it to the lake, not to her.

Then he pulled his camo cap down low over his eyes, turned to the console, and reached for the key.

I was sitting right behind her with a travel mug of coffee in my hands. I had my teal windbreaker zipped halfway, and I remember setting the mug down and pulling the zipper all the way up to my chin, slow, because my hands needed something to do that was not reaching for my brother-in-law.

My name is Lena. I am thirty-five years old, and I carry mail on the rural routes out of the Warsaw post office in Benton County, Missouri.

I have been doing it for nine years, and I can tell you which gravel roads wash out every spring and which dogs mean it.

I want to tell this right, because people who hear it secondhand tend to make Forrest into something worse than he is, and people who love him tend to make it smaller than it was. It was not small. But he is not a monster either.

So let me start where the morning started, which was in the dark, three hours before that rod went into the water.

Forrest picked us up at four fifteen. Elwin, my husband, was pulling a double shift at the feed mill in Clinton, which happens every fall when the grain comes in, and he had been promising Iris a sunrise trip on his brother’s boat since her birthday in August.

When the double came up, Elwin felt terrible. He called Forrest himself and asked him to take us anyway.

Forrest said sure, he was going out regardless, he had the Thursday night jackpot coming up and wanted to check some points before the water cooled off any more.

Iris had slept in her clothes so she would be ready. When Forrest’s headlights came up the drive she was already on the porch steps with her new rod in one hand and her little tackle box in the other, bouncing on her toes in the cold.

That rod was her birthday present. A seven-foot medium spinning rod and a good reel to go with it, the kind of setup a grown man would not be embarrassed to bring to a tournament. Together it came to just over three hundred dollars.

We are not people who spend three hundred dollars on a child’s birthday.

But my dad, Jim, taught Iris to fish on his little aluminum johnboat from the time she was four, and he passed two years ago this winter, and she has not stopped fishing since. It is how she keeps him.