The Boy Who Sat Still At Sunrise

Sunrise

I set my alarm for four-thirty. When it went off, Asher was already sitting up in the bunk with his life vest on over his striped T-shirt, buckled, with his shoes on the wrong feet.

We fixed the shoes. I pulled my hair back in a ponytail, put on my old gray hooded sweatshirt, and filled a thermos.

We crept out past the bunk room where Todd and the boys were still snoring.

The sky was already gray and going pink when we got down to the side dock.

In June that far north, the sun comes up a little after five, and I wanted us on the water when it did.

The motor started on the third pull. I let it idle a minute the way my uncle taught me.

Then we pushed off and went out slow, barely above a crawl, across water so flat it looked like glass.

Mist was lifting off the lake in long soft curls. When the sun came over the trees, all the pines on the shore turned gold, one after another, like somebody walking down a hall turning on lamps.

Asher whispered the whole way out. He did not have to. Nobody was there to hear him.

But he had decided, all on his own, that whispering was how you talked on a fishing boat.

“Largemouth like warm shallow water in the morning,” he whispered. “They hide under lily pads because it’s shady and the little fish come there. They eat crawfish and frogs and even ducklings sometimes.”

“Ducklings?” I whispered back.

“Sometimes,” he whispered, very serious. “It’s sad, but it’s nature.”

We came around the point into the bay, and there were the lily pads, just like Grandpa said, a whole green carpet of them along the north side with yellow flowers just starting to open.

I cut the motor and let us drift, then let the little anchor down quiet.

I baited the hook with a nightcrawler, and Asher cast. It was not a pretty cast. It went sideways and a little short.

But it landed right along the edge of the pads, and the bobber sat up and stayed.