The Rod She Handed His Son

I did not know if Forrest would come. Erica called Friday night and said they would be there, and then she was quiet a second and said, “He hasn’t been sleeping, Lena. I’m not making excuses for him. I just want you to know.”

I told her I appreciated it. Erica and I have always gotten along. She works in the office at the elementary school, and she is the kind of woman who remembers every child’s birthday.

None of this was her doing, and I made sure she knew I knew it.

Saturday came up clear and cool. Nan was out in the yard by nine in her old red flannel shirt, setting up the fryer on the cinder blocks, and the men were hauling folding tables out of the shed, and the kids were already running down the hill to the water.

Iris carried her new rod down to the dock like it was made of glass.

She had a little bucket of crickets and her tackle box, and she sat on the end with her legs over the edge and fished for bluegill, catching them one after another and letting them all go.

Erica pulled in around eleven, and Gale got out of the car and stood by the back bumper with his hands in his pockets.

Forrest was not with them. Erica said he had gone out early to check his boat and would be along later.

Gale is the shyest child I have ever known. He is nine, small for it, with his mother’s dark eyes and a cowlick nobody can tame.

When grown-ups talk to him he looks at his shoes and answers in one word, if he answers at all.

He did not like to fish. Everybody in the family knew that. What not everybody knew, and what Erica told me later that afternoon, was why.

Two summers before, Forrest had taken him out on the boat, and Gale had backlashed the reel three times in an hour, and Forrest had yelled.

Not hit. Just yelled, the way men like Forrest were yelled at by their own fathers on their own boats.

Gale had cried and asked to go home, and he had never wanted to go out again. Forrest took it to mean the boy did not like fishing. Erica took it to mean something else.

Elwin told me once that their dad used to count fish out loud at the end of every trip, his and Elwin’s against Forrest’s, and Forrest always came up short.

Forrest was ten. He spent the next thirty years trying to win that count.

Gale wandered down to the dock about noon and stood at the land end of it, watching Iris. He did not come out.

He just stood there with his hands in his pockets, the way you stand outside a door you are not sure you are allowed through.

Iris saw him. She reeled in, set her rod down on the boards, and walked back to him.

I was up the hill helping Nan bread fish, but I could see them plain as day, and I stopped what I was doing to watch.

“Want to try?” she asked him. He shook his head and looked at his shoes, the way he always did, and I thought that was going to be the end of it.