The Morning We Saved Eleven Hundred Fish

Pop

On the sixth trip, the last pool was nearly gone, and most of what was left in it was big old bass, down in the last cool water.

I got the net under one of them and lifted, and it was so heavy I thought I had snagged the old stump.

It came up out of the water thrashing, and it was the biggest bass in that pond. I had never caught him. Nobody had. I had seen him jump twice in twelve years.

He was close to six pounds. Long as my arm from the elbow down, with a belly on him like a feed sack and a dark stripe down his side.

Wade came out to take him from me. He did not put him in the bucket right away.

He stood there in the mud holding that fish in both arms, very gently, like you would hold a baby. The fish was tired and mostly still.

“This one’s Pop,” Wade said.

I did not say anything. I could not.

My dad died two winters ago, in January, of a heart attack in his recliner with the television on. The boys called him Pop from the time they could talk.

He was the one who held the bucket the day we stocked that pond, and he was the one who used to sit on the dam on summer evenings with a fishing pole and never seem to care whether he caught anything.

Wade had been twelve when Pop died. He had cried at the funeral in a way that made grown men look at their shoes.

He had not talked about his grandpa much since. I had worried about that more than I ever told Bess.

“Okay,” I said, when I could. “Pop rides in the front cooler.”

Wade put him in the blue cooler by himself, with his own aerator, and rode in the bed of the truck with his hand on the lid the whole two miles.

The Last Fish

At Mrs. Pruett’s, we tipped every other cooler first. Wade made us wait. He wanted Pop to go last.

When the last of the bluegill had gone over the side, Wade knelt down at the end of the dock with the big blue cooler beside him.

He reached in with both arms and lifted that bass out of the water, and he held him for a long second in the morning sun.

“You be good,” he told the fish, very quietly. “Somebody’ll come visit.”

Then he leaned over the edge of the dock and put him in the water. He did not drop him. He held him under, in both hands, until the fish got his breath back and kicked free.

The bass hung there for a second, just under the surface, so you could see the whole long shape of him against the dark water. Then he turned and went down, slow, into the deep part of Mrs. Pruett’s pond.

Wade knelt there until he was gone. Then a while longer.

Mrs. Pruett stood beside me with her hand on my arm. When I looked down, there were tears running down her face, and she did not wipe them.

“That’s the finest thing I’ve seen in a long time,” she said. “Your daddy would have been so proud of that boy.”

I had to look out at the water for a while after that.