The Whitefish Nets We Brought Back

Tuesday

We were on the water by five-thirty Tuesday morning. The sun comes up early in June this far north, and by the time we cleared the breakwall it was full light.

Toivo had worked out over coffee where the other gangs were most likely to have gone, from the way the first one moved. He drew it for me on the back of an envelope.

“Same current,” he said. “They’ll be lined up southeast of the marks, like ducks.”

He was right about two of them.

We found the second gang by nine. It came up easy, and there were fewer dead fish in it than the first, because it had been set a little deeper where the water stays colder.

The third took until two in the afternoon. That one had dragged across a rock ledge and torn badly. When it came over the rail, there were holes in it you could have put a calf through.

Pete looked at it and his face fell.

“We can’t fish that,” he said.

“We can mend it,” Toivo said. “Arne could mend anything. So can she.”

He meant me. And he was right. I had spent thirty winters in the net shed beside Arne with a net needle in my hand. I just had never done it on a rolling deck with my back aching.

We did not find the fourth gang Tuesday. We dragged until six and the line never came tight once. Pete was so tired he fell asleep sitting on a fish box on the ride in.

When we tied up, Lyle’s pickup was in the lot above the dock.

He was not doing anything. He was just sitting there with the window down, looking at our tug, looking at the totes of spoiled fish we were carrying up to the dumpster.

I did not walk over. I did not wave. I carried my barrel up to the dumpster and dumped it, and walked back down to the tug, and I let him watch me do it.

Toivo saw him too. He did not say anything then. But I saw his jaw set, and I know Toivo, and I knew he was saving it.

The Fourth Gang

Wednesday morning we went back for the last one.

I prayed before we left. I am not one to make a show of it, but Arne and I had been married at the Lutheran church up the hill, and I said a few words in my head while I was untying the bow line. Just asking for a little help.

We dragged from six until almost ten. Nothing. Pete was quiet. Toivo was quiet. The sun was hot on the deck and the lake was a perfect, cruel blue.

At ten-fifteen the line came tight.

We pulled it up slow. And when the grapple broke the surface, there was net on it, and on the net, bobbing in the water right beside the hooks, was an old wooden float.

I knew it at once.

Before Arne switched over to plastic floats, the year we were married, he used to carve his own out of cedar. He had only a few left by the end, and he kept one on every gang for luck.

This one had his initials on it. A.L. He had burned them in with a nail heated on the wood stove in the net shed, maybe 25 years ago. The letters were still dark and clear.

Toivo reached over the rail and took that float in his big hand. He held it a minute and then gave it to me. I did not know until then that he had been crying a little too.

“He’s still with us,” Toivo said. “He wanted that one found.”

I sat down on the fish box. The same fish box. Right there on the deck in the middle of all that work, I sat down and held that cedar float in my lap, and I could not stand up for a good long while.

Pete did not say anything. He just went on coiling line very carefully, so I would not have to look at anybody.

When I could stand, I stood. And we brought that last gang aboard.