The Crappie Supper on Dale Hollow

“How do you know where the fish are?” Carter asked.

“Pawpaw put trees in the water right here,” I said. “Every winter. Fish live in the branches. If the trees are still here, the fish will be too.”

I set the slip bobbers at twelve feet, where Daddy always started in June, when the crappie slide off the shallow banks. I hooked a minnow through the lips for each of the kids and lowered the lines.

Nothing happened for ten minutes. Jonah fidgeted. Jarvis told him about a catfish as big as a dog, which was a lie, and Jonah knew it and loved it anyway.

Then Carter’s bobber twitched once, lay still, and slid under like somebody had pulled it down with a string.

“Reel, baby, reel slow,” I said. “Don’t jerk it. Crappie have paper mouths.”

He reeled with his tongue between his teeth. The rod bent. And up out of that clear water came a white crappie, flat and silver and speckled, flapping in the sun.

Jarvis measured it on the ruler sticker on the cooler. Ten and a half inches. On Dale Hollow a crappie has to be ten inches to keep. Carter’s first fish was a keeper.

He hollered so loud a heron flew off the bank. And I sat at the tiller and cried, finally, the tears I had not cried on the dock. Not sad ones. Different ones.

Carter stopped smiling. “Mama, are you okay?”

“I’m good, baby,” I said. “Your Pawpaw put that fish there for you. Eleven years ago, and he didn’t even know who it was for.”

He thought about that. Then he reached over and patted my knee twice, the way Daddy used to pat ours, and said, “Good job, Pawpaw.” I had to look away again.

After that the brush pile came alive. It was the kind of morning you get maybe twice in a lifetime. Every time a minnow went down, a bobber went under.

Jonah lost three fish in a row and cried hard over the third. Jarvis let him cry, then rebaited his hook and told him real fishermen lose the big ones.

On his very next drop, Jonah hooked a crappie that measured thirteen and a quarter inches, the biggest of the day. He held it with both hands like he could not believe the lake had given it to him.

I tied on a chartreuse jig and worked the outside edge of the brush, where the bigger fish sit. I caught six in twenty minutes. Jarvis caught four, lost two, and blamed the drift.

By ten thirty the sun was high and the bite slowed. We had twenty-eight keepers on ice. The limit on Dale Hollow is fifteen crappie a person, so we were under it for just Jarvis and me.

We sat in the quiet with the motor off. Jonah ate crackers. Carter trailed his hand in the water. Jarvis leaned back against the bow seat with his cap over his eyes.

“Your daddy would have liked this,” he said.

“He would have,” I said. “He would also have told you your knots were sorry.”

“My knots are fine.”

“Your knots are sorry, Jarvis.”

He laughed, and I laughed, and for a while I did not think about Jed at all.