The Crappie Supper on Dale Hollow

Around eleven my phone buzzed on its one bar of signal. Tillie. “Are you all okay? He hasn’t moved. He’s been on the back deck since five staring at the water. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

I wrote back. “We’re fishing. Kids caught a mess of crappie. Where are you tied up?”

She sent a map pin. They were tied off to the bank in a deep cove off the main channel, four miles from us. Daddy used to take us there to swim off the rocks.

“Stay put,” I wrote. “Don’t tell Jed. We’ll be there before dark.”

“Stella, what are you doing?”

“Bringing supper,” I wrote. “Somebody has to. We have all the groceries.”

We ran back to the marina at noon. Lenny met us at the fish cleaning station, a long stainless table with a hose and a tin roof out at the end of the main dock.

He looked in the cooler and whistled through his teeth. “Twenty-eight. Off your daddy’s trees?”

“Off his trees,” I said.

“Well, I’ll be.” He pulled a fillet knife in a worn leather sheath from his back pocket. “Use mine. That rental knife won’t cut warm butter.”

I have cleaned crappie since I was ten. You cut behind the gill plate to the backbone, turn the blade and run it along the spine to the tail, then flip the fillet and slide the knife between meat and skin.

I did all twenty-eight. Jarvis rinsed and bagged them, and the kids took turns hosing scraps off the table to the sunfish waiting below. It took a little over an hour.

Lenny held up one of the bags to the light. Fifty-six white fillets, clean as paper. “Your daddy fried his,” he said.

“Grilled,” I said. “The last night of every trip. Foil and butter and lemon pepper. He said frying was for people who didn’t trust the fish.”

Lenny laughed out loud. “That sounds like Lucas.”

Before we left, he went to his own truck and came back with an old wire fish basket, the kind with a long handle that folds shut. He handed it to me.

“Houseboat’ll have a gas grill on the back deck,” he said. “Use this so they don’t fall through. Bring it back at the end of the week.”

“Lenny, you don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t.” He looked at me with those rained-on eyes. “But that man was sitting on something heavy when he left here. I’ve seen that look on men my whole life. You go feed him.”

I had seen the look too. I had just been too hurt to name it.

We packed the fillets on ice with two sticks of butter, lemon pepper, potatoes and onions to roast in foil, a can of baked beans, bread, and a pound cake from the grocery in Celina.

Everything that was supposed to be supper on that houseboat was in our coolers. Tillie and Jed had been living on cereal and the snacks in her bag.

At six thirty we loaded the rental boat. Jonah rode up front with Jarvis, Carter in the middle with the cooler between his knees. I idled out of the marina and opened the motor up down the main channel.

The light on that lake in the evening is hard to describe to anybody who has not seen it. The water goes blue to green to copper, and the bluffs turn the color of honey.

Carter kept turning around. “Are we going to surprise them?”