The Morning We Saved Eleven Hundred Fish

The Count

It was twenty minutes to twelve when we drove back up my lane. The pond was gone.

Where it had been there was nothing but a wide bowl of gray mud with a puddle in the middle, and the valve still roaring out a thin stream of brown water into the ditch.

Wade sat on the tailgate and added up his notepad. He went over it twice, moving his lips. Then he handed it to me.

One thousand and ninety-six, with a line under it. And under that, in his careful handwriting: plus four in the bucket, Mrs. P counted.

One thousand one hundred fish. In six trips, in three coolers, two miles down the road, between breakfast and lunch on a Saturday in October.

“We did good,” Eli said.

“We did good,” I said.

Rodney Comes Home

Rodney’s pickup came up his driveway a little after one o’clock. I watched him park it and get out and walk across the top of the dam.

He stopped about halfway across and stood there looking down at the bowl of mud for a long time.

I was in the yard hosing off the coolers. The boys had gone in to shower. I shut off the hose and walked out to the end of the dam to meet him.

He did not look good. He looked like a man who had not slept, which I found out later was true. His jacket was dusty and his eyes were red around the edges.

“Where are they?” he said. Not hello. Not anything.

“Where are what?”

“The fish. There ought to be dead fish all over this mud. The contractor said there’d be a mess to clean.”

“They’re at Mrs. Pruett’s,” I said. “The boys and I moved them this morning.”

He stared at me. “All of them?”

“Eleven hundred. Give or take a few that didn’t make it.”

He looked down at the mud and then back at me, and for a second I thought he was going to laugh. Then his face went hard.

“Contractor’s coming Monday,” he said. “You had no business.”

“They’re alive,” I said. “That’s the only business I had.”

He opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, and then he closed it. He turned around and walked back across the dam to his truck and got in and drove away. He did not look back.

Sunday

We went to church Sunday morning, all four of us. I sat in the pew beside Mrs. Pruett, the way we have for years, two rows from the back on the left.

During the last hymn, she reached over and squeezed my hand, and she did not let go until the organ stopped.

That afternoon, Rodney’s mother called. My stepmother. She is eighty now and does not get out much, and her voice on the phone sounded small.

“Is it true what he did?” she asked me.

“It’s true,” I said.

She was quiet a long time. Then she said, “I’ll pray for him.” And then, “I’ll pray for you too, honey. You did right by your daddy.”