The Morning We Saved Eleven Hundred Fish

Two Boys in Hoodies

Eli was sixteen that fall and Wade was fourteen. On a Saturday in October, neither one of them had planned to see daylight before ten.

Bess had left at six for a twelve-hour shift, so it was just the three of us in the house.

I knocked on Eli’s door first. “Get up. Get dressed in something you can ruin. The pond’s draining.”

He sat up in bed with his hair stuck out sideways. “What do you mean, draining?”

“I mean somebody opened the valve and it’s going out fast. We have about four hours to get every fish out of there before they suffocate. Get your brother.”

He did not ask who. He did not ask why. He was out of that bed and into a pair of jeans before I got down the hall.

That boy has always moved the second something needed doing, and I have never once had to tell him twice.

Wade came out of his room with his hood pulled up and one shoe on. “Are the fish going to die?” he asked me.

“Not if we can help it,” I said.

The two of them stood in the kitchen in their hoodies, and I told them what I knew. I did not tell them about the paper on Rodney’s porch.

I did not say their uncle’s name at all. It was not the time, and it was not something they needed to carry into that mud.

“Where are we taking them?” Eli asked.

That was the question I had been chewing on all the way up from the dam.

Mrs. Pruett

Mrs. Imogene Pruett lives two miles down the blacktop, on a farm that has been in her husband’s family since the 1890s. Her husband passed four years ago.

She is seventy-two, still drives her own truck to the feed store, and still keeps a garden that would shame a woman half her age.

She has a pond behind her barn that is near twice the size of ours. Her husband used to keep it full of fish, but since he died, the heron and the otters have thinned it out.

She told me once at church that it felt too quiet without the fish jumping in the evenings.

I called her at seven-fifteen. She answered on the second ring, which tells you everything about a farm widow at seven-fifteen on a Saturday.

“Barrett Okerlund,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

I told her. The valve, the water going out, the fish crowding up in the middle. I asked her if she would take them.

She did not even stop to think. “Bring them,” she said. “Bring every one. I’ll put the coffee on and open the gate.”

“It might be a lot of fish, Mrs. Pruett.”

“Then it’ll be a lot of fish,” she said. “Lord knows that pond could use the company.”