The Crappie Supper on Dale Hollow

“We are.”

“Is Uncle Jed going to be mad?”

“I don’t think so, baby,” I said. “I think he’s going to be hungry.”

We came around the point into that swimming cove a little before eight. The houseboat was tied off to two trees on the bank, the stern sitting out over deep water.

Una and Kip saw us first from the top of the slide. They started hollering and waving their arms, and Carter and Jonah hollered right back.

Tillie came out onto the top deck with a dish towel in her hand. She saw us and put the towel over her mouth.

And then Jed stood up.

He had been sitting on the back deck in a folding chair, alone, elbows on his knees. He stood up slowly and watched me bring the little rental boat alongside the stern, and he said nothing at all.

I cut the motor and Jarvis tossed him a line. Jed caught it out of reflex and tied it off to the rail cleat, two half hitches, clean and fast. His hands knew what to do even when the rest of him didn’t.

I lifted the cooler onto the swim platform. It was heavy, and I had to use my knee.

“We brought supper,” I said.

He looked at the cooler. He looked at Jarvis. He looked at my kids in their yellow life jackets grinning up at him. Then he looked at me.

“Stella,” he said, and his voice cracked right down the middle. “I don’t.”

That was as far as he got. He sat down on the swim platform with his feet in the water, put both hands over his face, and that big quiet man cried in front of all of us.

The kids went quiet. Tillie came down the stairs fast and stopped short on the back deck. In eleven years of marriage she had never once seen her husband cry.

I climbed onto the swim platform and sat down next to him with my own feet in the water. I didn’t touch him. I just sat.

“It’s crappie,” I said after a while. “Off Daddy’s trees. Carter caught the first one. Jonah caught the biggest. You’re going to hear about it all night.”

He wiped his eyes with the heels of his palms and looked out at the water for a long moment.

“I lost my job, Stella,” he said. “Six weeks ago. They closed my whole line. Thirty-two of us. I haven’t told Tillie.”

Behind us on the deck, I heard my sister make a sound.

He did not turn around. I think he could not. “I put my half of the boat on the credit card. Figured I’d find something before the bill came. I haven’t. Unemployment hasn’t even started.”

“Jed,” Tillie said, very quietly.

“When Jarvis said a hundred and five dollars like it was nothing,” he went on, “that was what I had in checking. A hundred and twelve. That was all of it.”

“And he said it in front of all those people like I was being stingy about a parking spot. I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell anybody. So I did the dumbest thing I ever did, in front of your kids.”

Jarvis had climbed onto the platform by then. He stood just behind us with a line in his hand, and when Jed said that, I saw something go out of his shoulders.