The Catfish Off Grandpa’s Old Dock

He thought about that. Then he said, “Mom gets scared of the water. She told me about her cousin. That’s why she doesn’t like me out here.”

I put my hand on his back, on the yellow vest. “I know, honey. Your mom loves you more than anything. Being scared for somebody is one of the ways people love them. You remember that.”

He nodded. He did not say anything else, and neither did I. We just watched that red and white bobber sit on the flat water by the stump.

At a little after ten o’clock, the bobber went under. Not a little tap.

It went straight down and stayed down, and the line started peeling off that old Zebco with the drag clicking like a cricket.

“Grandma!” Mason yelled. “Grandma, what do I do?”

“Hold on and reel,” I said. “Rod tip up. Let him run if he wants to run. Don’t horse him. He’ll tire before you do.”

He hung on. He reeled. That old rod bent nearly double, and I thought for one awful second the fiberglass would go, but Lou had never bought a cheap thing in his life, and it held.

It took him three or four minutes. Then the fish rolled up by the dock posts, a big gray channel cat with his whiskers out, and I got down on my knees on those old boards and lifted him up by the lower lip.

I set that fish on the dock, and Mason dropped down beside it with his mouth wide open.

I unhooked it for him. Then I showed him the side fins and the top fin, and the hard spines in each one.

“Those will stick you,” I said. “They don’t poison you, but they’ll make your hand ache for a day. Hold him behind the side fins, like this, careful, and put your other hand under his belly.”

He did it. He stood up on that dock in the hot bright sun, sunburned across his nose, grinning in that yellow vest, and he held that big channel catfish up with both hands like the trophy he did not have yet.

I stood up beside him, and I was smiling so hard my face hurt.

I got my phone out of my blouse pocket and took his picture, and then I held it out at arm’s length and took one of the both of us.

The old rod was lying on the dock at our feet, right where he had set it down. I made sure it was in the picture. I wanted it in the picture.

“Grandpa Lou’s rod caught it,” Mason said.

“You caught it,” I said. “His rod just helped.”

We weighed that fish on the little spring scale Lou kept in his tackle box. It was a hair over three pounds.

Then I let Mason put it back in the pond himself, and he watched it swim off under the dock.

“Why did we let him go?” he asked.

“So he can be here next time,” I said. “And so he can make more fish. Your grandpa let the big ones go off this dock. He said the pond was a bank account, and you don’t spend the whole thing.”

We fished until noon. He caught two bluegill and a little bass and lost one more cat right at the dock.

We ate bologna sandwiches on the end of the dock with our feet hanging over, and he never once took that vest off.

When Kevin came at two, Mason ran up the pasture to the truck with the old rod in his hand, telling it all before Kevin could even get the door open. Kevin listened to every word.