The Morning We Saved Eleven Hundred Fish

The water was down two feet when I looked out the kitchen window at breakfast.

I had a cup of coffee in one hand and a piece of toast in the other, and I stood there long enough that the toast went cold.

I set the coffee down on the counter and went out the back door in my socks.

Then I came back in, pulled on my rubber boots, and grabbed my olive canvas jacket off the hook, because it was October in southern Illinois and the morning had a bite to it.

By the time I reached the bank, I could hear it. A low, steady roar coming from the dam, like water running through a culvert after a hard rain. Only it had not rained in eleven days.

Our pond is a hair over two acres. My dad and I built the dam in the summer of 2014, with a rented dozer and a lot of sweat, on the back ground of the home place outside Mount Vernon.

We put an old steel drain line through the bottom of it with a gate valve on the downstream side, the way the extension man told us to.

That valve had never been opened all the way. Not once in twelve years. We cracked it now and then in a wet spring to keep the water off the spillway, and that was all.

When I got to the foot of the dam, the valve was wide open and the water was blowing out the pipe into the ditch so hard it was cutting a new channel through the weeds.

The wheel handle that always sat on top of the stem was gone.

I stood there and looked at the bare square stem, and I knew. There was only one other person on God’s earth who had any reason to be down at that valve, and he lived on the other side of the water.

The Line Down the Middle

I should tell you how a pond ends up belonging to two men who are not related by blood.

My mother died when I was nine. My dad married Rodney’s mother when I was thirteen and Rodney was sixteen.

She was a good woman and still is, and she raised me like her own, which is more than I can say for how Rodney and I raised each other.

When Dad and my stepmother got too old to keep up the home place, they sold the house and the front forty to a young couple from Centralia and moved into a little brick place in town.

The back ground they split between Rodney and me, about eleven acres each, so we would both have somewhere to build.

The pond sat right on the line. Dad drew the line straight through the middle of it with a ruler on the survey, and he said, “There. Now you boys will have to get along.” He meant it as a joke. Mostly.

I built my house on my side first. I fix furnaces and air conditioners for a living, and I have for twenty-two years, so I know my way around a framing crew and a sheet metal brake.

My wife Bess is a nurse at the hospital in Mount Vernon. We raised our two boys on that lot.

Rodney put a double-wide on his side about six years ago, after his divorce. He hauls dirt part-time with an old tandem dump truck and does whatever else he can find.

He has a daughter who lives with her mother up in Effingham, and he sees her every other weekend.

The pond was mine in every way but the paper. I was the one who stocked it, with Dad standing on the dam holding the bucket.

Three hundred bluegill fingerlings and a hundred largemouth bass from the hatchery truck, and a sack of fathead minnows to get them started.

None of that mattered on the paper. On the paper, half the water and half the mud under it were his.