The Patch at the Boat Ramp

On the water

We launched at the ramp at five minutes to seven. Tobin was standing at the top of the hill with a cup of coffee, and he lifted it when he saw us. I lifted my hand back.

The lake was cool and quiet and the sun was just coming over the ridge. October on Bull Shoals is my favorite time of the whole year. The water starts to turn over, and the bass come up chasing shad on the points, and you can see the bait flicking on the surface in the early light.

We ran out to a long point I know off the main lake, and Hobart threw a topwater bait right where the shad were boiling, and on the third cast a good spotted bass came up and took it.

“Well, now,” Hobart said, and he laughed out loud.

By nine o’clock, when the topwater bite slowed, we switched to jerkbaits along the bluff walls. Hobart is a patient fisherman. He works a bait slow, and he does not get excited, and he catches fish.

We talked the way we always do, about his grandkids and his church and his knees, and about Dad. We talked about everything but the patch.

I kept looking at the bow anyway. Every time we came off plane, I opened the front compartment and checked it.

Dry. Dry. Dry.

By ten-thirty Hobart had six keepers in the livewell, two largemouth and four spotted bass, every one of them a good fish. In Arkansas the daily limit on black bass is six, and he had his limit.

“I don’t think I’ve had a morning like that in five years,” he said.

“Want to keep fishing?” I asked. “We’ve still got time.”

“No,” he said. He leaned back in his seat and looked out at the bluff with his face in the sun. “No, I want to sit here a minute and then go in. I want to remember it.”

So we sat. The lake lapped at the hull. A heron flew across the cove.

After a while, Hobart said, “Your daddy would be so proud of you, girl.”

I didn’t trust myself to answer that one either.

The dock

We came back into the ramp cove a little after eleven. The sun was high and bright and the water was flat, and I idled slow toward the courtesy dock.

There was a truck in the lot I knew.

Ansel was standing at the end of the dock. He had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders up, the way he’d stood in my driveway on Wednesday. He was watching the boat come in.

I could see his face change as we got closer. I could see him looking at the bow.

He had come down to tell me something. I could see that on him too. I found out later that Tobin had called him that morning and told him I was out on the water with a client, and Ansel had not believed him.

I tied off the boat. Hobart climbed out, slow, with the cooler in one hand, and set it down on the dock. He looked at the patch on the bow. Then he looked at Ansel.

Ansel took his hands out of his pockets.

“Tess,” he said. “About the boat.”

Hobart turned around and looked at him, the way you’d look at a man across a job site.

“I came to say,” Ansel started, and stopped. He looked at the bow again. “I came to tell you I’d figure out some way to pay. I didn’t think,” he said, and his voice went thin. “I didn’t think it’d be back in the water.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

“I didn’t think so either,” I said.