Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

Dad looked at him a long time over the top of his coffee cup.

“You don’t own the creek,” he said. “Nobody owns the creek. You own the dirt on both sides of it.” Then he smiled, just barely. “But I’ll show you. Next opening day. You pick me up at a quarter after four, and you carry the chair.”

“Yes, sir,” Dustin said, and I saw his shoulders come down for the first time since he got out of the truck.

“And if you’re late,” Dad said, “I’ll tell you so.”

Ward laughed out loud behind them, a big rusty laugh, and up on the bridge I heard Elof laugh too.

And just like that the men up there turned back around and went back to their fishing, as if nothing had happened at all.

Dustin stayed. I did not expect him to, but he did.

He sat on Ward’s stool, and Ward took my spot by the water’s edge, and I stood in the shallows with the net and listened to my father teach my son in law about trout.

He told him about reading the water, where the current folds over on itself and the fish sit underneath it out of the push.

He told him about the spring seeps that keep the creek cold all summer long.

He told him how the oak hole had changed over the years, how the big flood in 2008 tore out the bank on the far side and pushed the hole six feet closer to the tree, and how the fish moved right along with it.

Dustin listened. He did not look at his phone once. He asked good questions, and when he did not understand something, he said so plainly.

At twenty to nine, Dad’s indicator went under again. He brought the fish in slow and I netted it, and it was the third one, the limit, a pretty brookie as long as my hand from wrist to fingertip.

He laid it in the creel with the other two.

Ward said, “That’s a limit, Rolf,” and Dad said, “I can count, Ward,” and Dustin laughed so hard he slopped coffee down the front of his shirt.

But Dad did not reel in. He made one more cast, just to watch the indicator ride the current, he said.

It went under almost at once, and he lifted the rod, and the line went tight again.

It was a tiny thing when it came to the net.

A brook trout no longer than my finger, maybe five inches, perfect, its spots like little red jewels and its belly as orange as a sunset over the bluffs.

Dad told me to bring it over. I knelt beside his chair and held the net in the water by his knee.

He wet his hand in the creek first, the way his father taught him, so he would not hurt it. Then he worked the hook loose with two fingers, as gentle as you would handle a baby bird.

He held the little fish in the cold water a moment, letting it breathe, his old hand cupped underneath it.

“You go on now,” he said to it, soft. “You go on and grow. You come back next year. I’ll be right here waiting for you.”

He opened his hand. The little brookie sat there a second, then flicked its tail once and was gone into the riffle, back toward the bridge pool and the long cold water upstream.