That is the thing people who have never raised fish do not understand. Catfish do not wait for anybody. Not for a phone call, not for a sheriff, not for an apology.
The only thing that saves a pond at dawn is moving water, and you either have it in the next hour or you start counting dead fish.
So I did not call Orrin. I did not drive over there to argue. I turned around and ran for the house.
“Roscoe.” I shook his shoulder hard. “Get your boots on. The aerators are gone and the fish are piping. I need you on the tractor in two minutes.”
He was up before I finished the sentence. That boy had grown up on a pond levee, and he knew what piping meant the way other children know what a fire alarm means.
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He came out the back door pulling a T-shirt over his head.
Our tractor was an old green one, older than Boone, fifty-some horsepower with an open roll bar, no cab, and a seat patched with duct tape since Roscoe was in grade school. It started on the second try. It always did.
What I needed was a paddlewheel that runs off the tractor’s power takeoff, the shaft at the back that turns whatever you hook to it.
Every catfish farmer in the Delta keeps one or two for emergencies, for when the power goes out in a storm or an electric motor burns up at two in the morning.
We did not own one. We had always borrowed. And the man we always borrowed from was Thurman Ainsworth, two miles down the gravel road, who had raised catfish since before I was born.
I called him from the tractor step at 5:52. He answered on the first ring, which told me he had been up checking his own ponds.
“Thurman, it’s Marnie. My aerators are gone and I’m at one point one. Can I take your spare wheel?”
There was a short quiet on the line. I could hear his truck idling. Then he said, “Gone where?”
“I’ll tell you later. Can I take it?”
“It’s hitched to nothing, sitting by the shop. Come get it. I’ll meet you there.” He hung up. He did not ask another question, and I have loved him for that ever since.
I drove the tractor down the gravel road wide open, which on that old green machine was about fifteen miles an hour, with Roscoe standing on the step holding the handle and his hair blowing straight back.
The sun was just coming up red over the beans to the east.
Thurman was waiting by his shop in his overalls with a cup of coffee in one hand.
His spare paddlewheel sat on its frame in the grass: a long orange drum with steel paddles welded on it, a gearbox at one end, and a driveshaft folded back on top.
He did not say good morning. He just set his coffee on the hood of his truck and helped Roscoe and me back up to it and get it on the three-point hitch.