The Muskie in the Hardware Store Window

“I put her mouth open a little,” he said. “Like she was coming up for that bucktail.”

I could not talk for a minute. He put a hand on my shoulder and left it there.

The brass plate I ordered from the trophy shop in town, the same place that does the bowling league plaques. It was a small plate, just three lines.

Ingrid Kovalchik. June 14. 44 inches. Released. Then I went to see Wendell. I went in on a Tuesday afternoon when the coffee crowd was gone. Wendell was behind the counter sorting screws into the bins, the way he has done every afternoon for forty-one years.

“Wendell,” I said. “I need to ask you a favor, and you can say no.”

He put down the screws and listened while I told him. All of it. The dock, the twenty minutes, the photo, the corkboard. Ingrid waiting in the truck.

When I was done he was quiet for a while.

“I wondered why she quit coming in,” he said. “She used to stand at that lure case for twenty minutes.”

“She’s ashamed,” I said. “And she didn’t do anything wrong.”

Wendell took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. He is a slow man, careful, a Lutheran from way back, the kind who reads the paper front to back every morning before he opens.

“That front window has had the same snow shovels in it every September for forty years,” he said. “I could use a change.”

I asked him one more thing before I left.

“Do you want me to take Royce’s picture off the corkboard?”

Wendell shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s his to take down. Or not.”

He was right. That was the whole point. I was not going to tear anything down. I was just going to put the truth up where people could see it.

We hung it on the last Saturday in September. It was one of those clear northwoods mornings when the air is cold and the sun is bright, and the pines behind the main street stand up dark against a sky with nothing in it.

I told Ingrid we were going to town to pick up a part. She came out of the house in her yellow rain jacket because the morning was cold, her red braid down her back, still half asleep.

I had my orange county hat on and my old flannel shirt. I had been up since four.

Wendell and I had hung the mount at first light, a little before seven, before the store opened. He had cleared the snow shovels out of the window, and we hung the fish on its walnut plaque against the pegboard backdrop at just the right angle, with the brass plate under it.

When we parked, I told Ingrid I needed to grab something from Wendell’s.

“I’ll wait in the truck,” she said, like always.

“Come with me this time,” I said. “Just to the window.”

She sighed the way thirteen-year-olds sigh, and she got out.

I will never forget her face. She saw the fish first. She stopped walking. Then she saw the brass plate and she read it, and I watched her read it again.