The Morning We Saved Eleven Hundred Fish

Monday Morning

Monday came up clear and cold, with frost on the grass and the sun bright over the trees.

I had a service call at ten across town, so I was home, standing at the fence at the edge of my yard with a cup of coffee, when the first dump truck turned up the lane at seven-thirty.

It was a big one, a tri-axle with the contractor’s name on the door. Behind it came a white company pickup, and behind that a flatbed with a track excavator chained down on the deck.

Rodney came out of his double-wide to meet them. He walked out to the head of the lane in a clean jacket, waving them toward the dam.

He did not look over at me. I do not think he had looked at my house once since Saturday.

The pickup pulled up beside the dam, and a man got out. He was about sixty, gray-haired, with a clipboard and a pair of reading glasses pushed up on his head.

His name, I learned later, was Harlow. He had been running dirt jobs for that contractor for twenty-five years.

He walked to the edge of the dam and looked down at the bowl of mud for a long time. He bent down, picked up a handful of the gray clay, and rolled it between his fingers.

Then he looked past Rodney, across the dry pond, at me. Standing at my fence with my coffee.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Rodney opened his mouth to answer. I watched him do it from forty yards away. I watched him stand there with his mouth open, and I saw the moment he decided to tell the truth.

“That’s my stepbrother,” Rodney said. “Half the pond’s on his side.”

Harlow looked at him. “Half?”

“The line runs down the middle,” Rodney said. His voice had gone flat. “Our folks split it.”

Harlow

Harlow did not say anything to Rodney for a minute. He just looked across at me.

Then he walked around the end of the dam and came across the yard toward my fence, and I set my coffee down on the post and met him there.

“Morning,” he said. “You the other half of this pond?”

“I am.”

“You sign anything with us?”

“No, sir. I didn’t know anything about it until Saturday morning, when I saw the water going out.”

He nodded slowly, like I had told him something he already knew. He looked over his shoulder at Rodney, standing alone out on the dam, and then back at me.

“Heard in town somebody moved a pile of fish out of here Saturday,” he said. “Down to the Pruett place.”

“That was me and my boys.”

“How many?”

“Eleven hundred.”

He let out a low whistle. Then he looked at me for a long moment, over the top of the reading glasses that had slid down on his nose.

“You going to stop me from digging?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to stand in front of your trucks. But I’m not going to tell you it’s all right, either, because it isn’t.”

He nodded again. He took off his reading glasses and folded them up and put them in his shirt pocket.

“I’ve been doing this twenty-five years,” he said. “I have learned one thing. I do not dig a hole that two families are fighting over. I’ve seen what happens. The work stops halfway, and it’s my crew standing there with the meter running, and somebody ends up hating somebody for twenty years.”

“I understand,” I said.

“I don’t think you do,” he said, but kindly. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it because I’ve got a brother too.”

He turned around and walked back across the yard and out onto the dam, where Rodney was still standing.