The Catfish Off Grandpa’s Old Dock

“Put that down, buddy. It’s gross.” My daughter-in-law said it from the open door of her car, and my grandson looked at the coffee can of worms in his hands like it had turned to something dirty.

We had been digging nightcrawlers behind my garden since seven that Saturday morning. Mason was eight, and he had dirt to both elbows and a grin on him that I had not seen since Easter.

Brittany got out of the car and stood at the edge of the gravel in her clean white sneakers. She did not come any closer to the garden than that. She never did.

“Mason, set it down and go wash your hands at the spigot,” she said. “Use soap. Grandma has soap out there, right?”

She looked at me when she said that last part, and I nodded, because I did.

He set the can down on the porch step very carefully, the way you would set down something that mattered, and went around the side of the house. I heard the spigot squeak and the water run.

Brittany waited until he was gone. Then she told me, not loud, not mean in her voice, just finished, like a woman reading off a list she had already decided on in the car.

“We signed him up for indoor soccer,” she said. “It’s Saturdays, nine to noon, at the sports center in town. It starts next week. So he won’t be coming out here on Saturdays anymore.”

I stood there with a garden fork in my hand. I asked her if there was another day he could come out, maybe a Sunday after church, or an evening in the summer when the days ran long.

“Sundays are family day,” she said. “And honestly, Irene, I don’t love him out here. The worms, the fish, the smell of it. He comes home and I have to wash everything he owns. Fishing with Grandma is gross. That’s what he says to his friends now, and I don’t correct him.”

I did not believe for one minute that Mason said that to his friends.

But she was his mother and she said it, and I let it sit there in the air between us like a bad smell of its own.

Mason came back around the house shaking his wet hands. He hugged me around the middle the way he always did, and I could feel him look over at the coffee can on the step.

“Bye, Grandma,” he said. “Will you keep the worms for next time?”

I told him I would keep them in the cool cellar. Brittany buckled him in and backed out of my lane, and I stood there watching the dust settle on the road for a long while after.

Then I went and sat down on the porch step next to the coffee can and put my hand flat on the lid.

I did not cry. I am sixty-three years old, and I have learned to save crying for things that cannot be fixed.

My name is Irene Mueller. I live on eighty acres in southern Illinois, the same farm my husband Lou was raised on, with a pond at the bottom of the east pasture and a dock that Lou built with his own hands.

He built it the summer our son Kevin was born. He cut the posts from locust trees on the fence line, because locust will stand in water for fifty years and not rot, and he set them himself in the cold of that spring.