The Rod She Handed His Son

But the men Forrest had been trying so hard to impress looked at what he did and turned their backs on it, right there in the bait shop, in front of the whole Saturday crowd.

Down here, that is not a small thing. The bait shop is where men go to be men in front of each other.

Forrest had walked in expecting to be the hero of a funny story and walked out the one everybody went quiet around.

On Monday I finished my route a little before three. It was a long one, the north loop out past the old school, and I had a flat on a gravel road and changed it myself in the ditch while a herd of black cows watched me like I was the evening news.

Then I drove to the tackle shop on Highway 7 in Warsaw, still in my work clothes, and I asked the man at the counter for the same rod and the same reel.

He had to go in the back for the reel. With tax it came to three hundred and twelve dollars.

It was the furnace money. We had been setting aside a little every week since summer because the blower motor was making a noise Elwin did not like.

I told myself the furnace could make its noise a few more weeks.

I did not ask Forrest for a dime. I had thought about it. I had a whole speech planned on the drive over.

But Sunday night, when I told Iris I was going to replace it, she had asked me not to make Uncle Forrest pay for it.

“Why not, honey?” I had asked her. “He’s the one who did it. It’s only fair.”

She thought about it the way she thinks about a hard math problem, chewing the inside of her cheek.

“Because if he pays for it, it’s still the one he threw,” she said. “I want it to just be mine.”

I did not have an answer for that. I still do not. Some days my daughter is wiser than everybody in this family put together, me included.

When I carried that long box in from the truck, she saw it and set her pencil down very carefully and did not say anything.

Then she came over and put her arms around my waist and held on like she was eight again.

“You didn’t have to,” she said into my shirt.

“I know,” I said. “I wanted to. Grandpa would have wanted you to have it.”

That night she cleaned the new reel with the old toothbrush, even though it had never been used, because that is what Grandpa taught her you do.

Elwin put it on the rack in the garage, and the two of them stood out there in the cold looking at it like it was a new truck.

The next Saturday was the fall fish fry at Elwin’s mother’s place.

Nan is sixty-eight and has lived on the same forty acres on the Pomme de Terre arm since she married, and every October she fries crappie and catfish for the whole family out in the yard under the walnut trees.

She has a little wooden dock at the bottom of the hill that Elwin’s dad built in the seventies.

It leans a little to the left and two of the boards are new, but it holds, and every child in that family has caught a first bluegill off the end of it. Every child but one.