Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

Dad looked at it a long while. Then he looked up at me, and his eyes were bright under the brim of that green hat.

“Creek doesn’t know whose name is on the deed,” he said.

I held the net and did not trust myself to say anything. Ward reached over and patted Dad’s knee twice, and went back to his own line without a word.

The limit on that stretch is three trout a day, and they have to be eight inches.

Dad laid that one in the creel on a bed of wet grass, the way his father taught him, and I went back out and stood in the shallows.

By seven there were maybe ten men up on the bridge and along the far bank, and I saw more than one of them look down at Dad in his lawn chair, then look upstream, then look back again.

Nobody said anything out loud. They did not need to.

Everybody along County P knew Rolf Engstrom, and everybody knew the oak hole, and by now, I guessed, everybody knew about the yellow signs.

Dad caught his second fish at a quarter past seven, a fat little brookie about nine inches.

Ward caught one too, a brown trout, and turned it loose, because he said brown trout are for young men with good knees.

Ardis, who keeps the egg route along the ridge road, slowed her car on the bridge on her way through and leaned out the window.

She waved at Dad. He lifted his hat to her. She did not stop, but she drove off slow.

At half past seven, I heard another car slow down on the bridge above us and stop, and I looked up and saw my daughter’s face at the concrete rail.

Kenna had on her church sweater. She must have been driving into town for the women’s breakfast at church, the way she does the first Saturday of every month, and County P is the only road to town from the old place.

She was looking down at her grandfather in his lawn chair on the gravel bar. Six miles from the oak hole.

Six miles from her own back pasture.

I watched her face. I saw her understand it. She had not known.

I could see that as plain as day, the way you can always tell with your own child. Dustin had never told her he had not told Dad.

“Hi, Grandpa,” she called down. Her voice was not steady, and she held onto the rail with both hands.

Dad looked up and smiled at her and lifted his hat, same as he had for Ardis. “Morning, sweetheart. Fish are biting. You go on to your breakfast now.”

Kenna stood there a second longer. Then she got back in the car and turned around in the wide gravel at the end of the bridge and drove back the way she had come. Not toward town. Toward home.

Dad watched the car go until it was over the hill. Then he looked over at me in the water.

“Halsey,” he said. “I told you I didn’t want to be the cause of anything.”

“You didn’t do anything, Dad. You went fishing on a public road.”

He did not answer that. He made another cast, and I noticed his hands were not quite as steady as they had been before.

It was twenty minutes to eight when I heard Dustin’s truck coming down the long hill. I know the sound of it.