Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

The indicator bobbed down the current along the edge of the bridge pool.

Up on the bridge, a man in a seed cap leaned over the concrete rail and looked down at us. I knew him.

Elof, who hauled feed for the co op for thirty years before he retired. He lifted his coffee cup to us.

“Rolf Engstrom,” he called down. “I thought you fished the oak hole on opening day. Seventy some years, isn’t it?”

Dad did not look up from his indicator. “Not this year,” he said, and that was all.

But Elof stood up there a minute longer, and I saw him look upstream toward the bend, where the creek came down from the forty acres six miles above us.

Then he nodded slowly and went back to his own line.

Word gets around a valley like ours. It does not need anybody to carry it. It just moves, like water.

At a quarter to six, another truck pulled off on the shoulder and an old man climbed out slow, with a folding canvas stool in one hand and a cane in the other.

I knew him before he even got his door shut.

Ward Lindahl is eighty five. He farmed the ridge above the bridge his whole life, and he and Dad have fished together off and on since before I was born.

He is the man who taught me to bait a hook.

He did not go to the far side of the bridge where the other men were standing.

He came straight down the path, one careful step at a time with the cane, and I waded out and went up to take his arm.

He did not say a word about the oak hole. He did not ask why we were here.

He just unfolded his canvas stool right beside Dad’s lawn chair on the gravel, sat down, and opened his own fly box.

“Rolf,” he said, picking out a fly.

“Ward,” Dad said, watching his line.

“Fine morning for it,” Ward said after a while, squinting at the sunlight coming off the riffle.

“Fine morning,” Dad agreed.

They sat there side by side, two old men in their hats on a gravel bar in the sunshine, and fished.

I stood in the shallows below them with the net in my hands and had to look away for a minute.

Dad’s indicator went under at twenty past six.

He lifted the rod tip, smooth and quick, the way his hands still remember even when his knees do not, and the rod bent down toward the water and the line went tight and hummed in the current.

“Get the net, Halsey,” he said, not loud, the way he used to tell me to grab a wrench.

I was already moving. The water was cold through my waders, pushing hard against my shins.

The fish came up once and flashed in the sunlight and went down again, deep, toward the bridge pillar.

“Easy,” Ward said. “Easy now, Rolf. He wants that pillar. Don’t you let him have it.”

“I know what he wants,” Dad said. He was grinning. I had not seen him grin like that since before Mom’s funeral.

He leaned forward in the lawn chair and turned the fish with the rod, slow, and brought it in.

I slipped the net under it. A brook trout, ten inches, maybe a hair more, dark green on the back with those red spots ringed in blue.

It lay in the wet mesh with its gills working.