The Catfish Off Grandpa’s Old Dock

“This was Grandpa Lou’s,” he finally said. It was not a question.

“It was,” I said. “And he would want it used. A rod hanging on the wall is no good to anybody. He used to say that about people too.”

Mason looked up at me with Lou’s own eyes, blue and serious. “Can I use it Saturday? At the derby?”

I had to look off at the barn for a second before I could answer him. “I believe that’s what it’s for,” I said.

We walked down the east pasture to the pond with the grass wet on our shoes.

It was already hot, the kind of June morning in southern Illinois when the air sits on you before nine o’clock and the cicadas have not even started yet.

The dock was right where Lou left it. The boards had gone gray and soft in the weather, and the cattails had crowded in thick along the bank, but those locust posts stood as straight as the day he set them.

I set us up at the end of the dock in the shade of my sun visor and nothing else.

I had brought a coffee can of nightcrawlers from the cellar, and some chicken livers in a little jar, because channel cats love a stinky bait.

“First thing,” I said, “you bait your own hook. A fisherman baits his own hook. Your grandpa would not let me bait his, and I tried once in 1979.”

Mason looked down into that coffee can, and his nose wrinkled up, and I saw his mother all over his face.

He reached in very slowly and pulled out a big crawler, and it wrapped around his finger, and he nearly threw it in the pond.

“It’s okay,” I said. “He can’t hurt you. Thread him on like you’re putting on a sock. Up the hook, not through the middle.”

He did it on the first try, more or less. He wiped his hand on his shorts and looked at me to see if I would make a face.

I did not. I told him that was a fine job of baiting.

The second worm, he did not wrinkle his nose at all. The third, he was telling me about his teacher while he did it, and did not look down once.

I showed him how to push the button on that old Zebco and swing the rod and let go, and where to aim, off the end of the dock by the old stump where Lou always said the big cats lived. After seven months off the water, his first cast went about six feet. His tenth went thirty, the way it used to every summer we fished that dock.

We sat. That is most of fishing, the sitting. A red-winged blackbird hollered at us from the cattails.

The cows came down to the far bank and drank and looked at us like we were the strangest thing they had seen all week.

Mason talked. He told me about soccer, that he was okay at it but he did not love it, that the building smelled like rubber and the coach yelled. He said he was not supposed to say that.

“You can say anything you want on this dock,” I told him. “That’s the rule. Your grandpa made it. What gets said on the dock stays on the dock.”