The Crappie Supper on Dale Hollow

“I shouldn’t have called you cheap,” Jarvis said. “That was a sorry thing to say. I’m sorry, brother.”

“You didn’t know.”

“Didn’t matter whether I knew. I shouldn’t have said it.”

Jed nodded. Then he turned around on the platform and looked past us at Carter and Jonah, still standing in the rental boat holding the rail.

“Carter. Jonah. Come here a minute.”

They looked at me. I nodded. Jarvis lifted them up one at a time, and they stood there dripping in their life jackets in front of their uncle.

Jed got down on one knee on that wet platform so he was eye level with them. He is a big man, and it was not easy. His knee popped.

“I left you on that dock last night,” he said. “That was wrong of me. It wasn’t because of anything you did. I was upset about grown-up things and took it out on you. I’m ashamed of it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Will you forgive me?”

Jonah considered this with great seriousness. Then he said, “I caught a thirteen inch crappie.”

Jed laughed, a wet, surprised laugh. “Did you really.”

“It was the biggest one. Mama said.”

“Then I guess you’re the one that’s going to teach me where they’re at.”

Carter was quieter. He looked at him a long time, the way he looks at people he is deciding about. Then he stepped forward and hugged him around the neck, life jacket and all.

“It’s okay,” Carter said into his shoulder. “Mama said you had something heavy on you.”

Jed closed his eyes and held onto him.

I looked up. Tillie was at the rail with both hands pressed flat to her chest, tears running down her face, looking at her husband like she was seeing him for the first time in six weeks.

She came down and knelt on the platform beside him. She didn’t fuss at him for keeping it from her. That came later, privately, and it was none of my business.

On that platform she just put her forehead against the side of his head and said, “You big dummy. You should have told me.” He said, “I know it.” That was all.

Then Una, who has her mother’s sense of timing, leaned over the top rail and hollered, “Is anybody going to make supper or not? I’m starving!”

Everybody laughed. The spell broke, and the evening came back to us.

The houseboat had a gas grill bolted to the rail on the back deck, just like Lenny said. Jarvis lit it. I laid out foil on the folding table and buttered the fillets while Tillie cut potatoes and onions.

Jed would not sit down. He carried the cooler, he wiped the grate, he set paper plates in a careful row along the rail. Finally I handed him Lenny’s fish basket. “You’re on fish.”

“I don’t know how to grill fish.”

“Then you’re about to learn,” I said. “Four minutes a side. Don’t touch it. Don’t poke it. Daddy said frying is for people who don’t trust the fish.”

He loaded the basket, laid it on the grill, and stood over it like a man guarding something important. For four minutes a side, he did not touch it once.