The Crappie Supper on Dale Hollow

Inside, Jonah had fallen asleep across the foot of the bed in his life jacket. He said he wanted to be ready in case the boat came back.

Carter was sitting up against the headboard with his knees pulled up, and he asked the question I had been dreading. “Did Uncle Jed leave us because he doesn’t like us?”

“No, baby. I think Uncle Jed has something heavy on him that we don’t know about. Grown people get like that sometimes.”

“Like when Pawpaw died and you didn’t talk at supper for a week?”

I had not known he remembered that. I put my arm around him and said yes, a lot like that, and he went to sleep against my shoulder.

I lay awake most of the night, thinking. Somewhere around two, with boat lights blinking on the water and Jarvis snoring beside me, I made up my mind.

I was not going to sit in a motel room waiting for Jed to decide when we got our vacation back. I had grown up on this water. I was going to show my kids the lake the way Daddy showed it to me.

At ten till six the next morning, I was standing at the marina’s rental dock with my wallet out.

They rented sixteen-foot aluminum fishing boats with twenty-five horse outboards, a hundred and forty dollars a day plus gas. Lenny was there drinking coffee from a thermos lid. He did not look one bit surprised.

“Thought you might be down,” he said. “Your daddy was Lucas Pruitt, wasn’t he.”

I stared at him. “How did you know that?”

“You stand like him. He bought minnows off me by the four dozen and told me where every brush pile on this lake was, then swore me to secrecy. I’m sorry about him. He was a good man.”

I had to look out at the water before I could answer. “Yes, sir. He was.”

Lenny filled the tank himself. He sold me four dozen crappie minnows, number four light wire hooks, slip bobbers and six-pound line, and he threw in a dozen chartreuse jigs for nothing.

Jarvis came down the dock with both kids and a cooler of drinks. He looked at me standing in the boat with my hand on the tiller, and he started to grin.

“You’re driving, I take it.”

“I’m driving. You’re baiting hooks.”

“Yes, ma’am, captain.” He handed the kids down to me and climbed in last. He had fished all his life, but not this lake. This lake was mine.

I checked our licenses before we left, because I am my father’s daughter. Jarvis and I had our annual licenses on our phones. Tennessee doesn’t require one for children under thirteen.

The water on Dale Hollow is the clearest I have ever seen. On a calm morning you can see fifteen feet down like you are looking through a window. The fog was lifting off the coves in slow white ribbons.

I ran us east past two points and up a long narrow cove on the north shore. I had not been up that cove in eleven years. I was not sure I could still find the spot.

But I found the big rock with the white stripe of quartz, and the leaning sycamore on the bank. I lined them up the way Daddy taught me, rock over the third tree, and cut the motor.