The Whitefish Nets We Brought Back

The Offer

My name is Inga Lindquist. I am 51 years old, and I fish commercially for whitefish on Lake Superior out of Bayfield, Wisconsin.

I did not start out to do it. I married into it. Arne Lindquist fished these waters for 30 years, and his father before him, and I spent most of those years in the fish house cutting fillets and keeping the books.

Arne died two winters ago, in February, at 56. His heart. He was shoveling snow off the tug’s deck at the dock, and he sat down on the fish box, and that was all.

There are only a handful of commercial licenses left on the Wisconsin side of the big lake. The state stopped issuing new ones a long time ago. When a fisherman dies or quits, the license either passes to someone or it is gone for good.

I could have sold it. People told me to. A license like Arne’s, with the tug and the nets and the history of catch that goes with it, is worth a great deal more than most houses in this county.

But Arne’s two deckhands were still on the dock that spring, looking at me, and the tug was still sitting there with ice in her scuppers, and I could not make myself do it.

Toivo had worked beside Arne for 20 years. He is 62, with a gray beard and a quiet way, and he knows the bottom of this lake the way I know my own pantry.

Pete Lindahl was younger, 27, a local boy Arne had taken on at 19 because his own father had walked out and somebody needed to teach him to work. Arne taught him. He was good.

So the first spring, Toivo ran the tug and I learned. The second spring, I ran the tug and Toivo watched me like a hawk. By this past June I was a fisherman, and nobody on the dock called me anything else.

Except Lyle.

Lyle Lindquist is Arne’s cousin, four years younger than Arne would be now. He grew up on these same docks. He had a license of his own once, the one his father left him.

He sold it in a bad year, back when the price was low and the fish were scarce and he had a wife who wanted to move to Duluth. He got a small amount for it. The wife left anyway.

He has watched those licenses climb in value every single year since. And he watched Arne, who kept his, build the life Lyle thought should have been his.

I understood that, in a way. I want to say so plainly. A man can make one bad choice when he is young and scared, and spend the rest of his life staring at it.

But understanding a thing is not the same as excusing it.

Lyle came to my kitchen in April. He sat at Arne’s place at the table without being asked, and he put a cashier’s check on the oilcloth in front of me.

It was for $40,000.

“That’s fair,” he said. “More than fair, Inga. You’re a widow. You don’t need to be out there in the cold, hauling nets with two hired men. Arne wouldn’t want that.”

I looked at the check. A license and tug like ours would bring two or three times that from anybody honest. Lyle knew that better than I did.

“Arne wanted me to have it,” I said. “He said so in the hospital in Duluth, the year before, when they put the stent in. He said keep it if you can, Inga. Keep it for Pete and Toivo.”

“Arne said a lot of things.”

“He did. That was one of them.”

Lyle took his check back. He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket. He did not get angry. He just smiled at me in a way I did not like.

“The lake’s hard on a woman alone,” he said. “Nets go missing. Engines quit. You think about it.”

I thought he was talking about the weather. I should have known better. Lyle has never once in his life talked about the weather.