The Rod She Handed His Son

I picked up three extra Saturdays of mail that summer to pay for it. Elwin built her a rack for it in the garage.

She cleaned the reel every time she used it, with an old toothbrush and a drop of oil, exactly the way Grandpa showed her.

We launched at the ramp at Long Shoal a little before five. It was black dark and cold, maybe forty degrees, and the water was steaming in the headlights.

Forrest backed that red bass boat down the ramp in one try, smooth as anything. Whatever else is true about him, the man can back a trailer.

Forrest is thirty-nine. He drives a propane truck for the co-op, and he has fished bass tournaments since he was old enough to pay an entry fee.

He has a twenty-foot boat with a big motor on the back and a trolling motor on the bow, and he takes better care of it than some people take of their children.

He and his wife, Erica, have one boy, Gale, who was nine that fall. Gale was not with us.

Gale did not like to fish, Forrest said, and he said it in the voice you use to talk about the weather turning bad.

We ran up the lake in the dark with our hoods up, the cold coming through every seam.

Iris sat between us with her hands jammed in the front of her life vest and her face wide open, grinning into the wind.

Forrest cut the big motor on a long rocky point and dropped the trolling motor.

The first hour he fished a topwater bait in the dark, listening for blowups, and Iris threw a little crankbait off the other side, and neither one of them caught anything, but they were both happy.

He was decent that first hour. I want that on the record. He showed her how to read the depth finder, the way the shad showed up as a cloud near the bottom.

He told her the bass push the bait up onto the points in the fall. He said she had a nice cast for a kid.

Then she caught one.

It was a keeper, about fifteen and a half inches, which clears the length limit on Truman. She landed it herself and he netted it for her and said, “Well, look at that,” and put it in the livewell.

I took a picture of her holding it up in the gray light, her nose red from the cold.

Twenty minutes later she caught another. Then a third, off a laydown where Forrest had already thrown twice.

Forrest was still sitting on zero, and you could feel the boat get quieter, the way a house gets quieter when somebody is mad and nobody is saying it.

Around seven, with the sky going pink over the trees, Iris hooked the big one.

It pulled drag and jumped twice, and Forrest had to talk her through it, and when he lifted it in the net it was a fat largemouth that went a hair over four pounds on his scale.

She was shaking. She said, “Grandpa would have hollered,” and I said, “He would have,” and I took her picture holding it with both hands, and I sent that picture to Elwin at the mill because I knew he would want to see it on his break.