The Bass The Weigh Master Threw Out

That is where the four witnesses come in, so I will tell you who they were.

Hubert Cole was seventy-eight, a retired school bus driver who had fished that point for forty years, and he sat in a lawn chair beside me. Ellen Pike ran her husband’s pontoon along the shore taking pictures for the club page.

Sam Reyes, sixteen, the marina’s dock hand, stood on the end of the fuel dock with a boat hook. And Earl had closed his shop for two hours so he could stand next to me with his arms crossed.

At nine-forty, Caleb’s rod bent double.

I know the time because Hubert looked at his watch and said, “Well, that’s something.”

It was more than something. The fish hit a plastic worm that Earl had given him, weedless-rigged on a twelve-pound line, and it did what a good bass does. It ran for the stumps, it jumped twice, and it threw water all over the little boat. Caleb had the rod up and his feet planted, and his mouth was moving. He was talking to it. I could see him talking.

“Don’t horse him,” Hubert murmured. “Don’t horse him. Good boy. Let him run.”

I stopped being able to talk at that point.

It took eleven minutes. I counted them on my watch because I needed something to count. Caleb worked that fish back toward the boat a few feet at a time, and when it got within reach he stood up, in a jon boat, in the middle of a lake, and scooped it into the net with both hands.

He sat down hard on the bench seat. Then he held the fish up out of the water toward the bank where I stood, as high as his arms would go.

I heard Hubert say, “Lord have mercy, that’s a six-pounder.”

Back at the marina, the quiet stretched on.

Rick Bohannon stood at the weigh station under the white tent with the microphone in one hand. He is a big man, six-three, with a gray crew cut and a voice that carries. He had been the club’s weigh master for nine years. He wore a green club windbreaker with his name stitched over the pocket, and he held the scale like a man who believed it belonged to him.

Behind him, my nephew Brady stood with his own fish bag. Brady was fourteen, a long skinny kid with his mother’s dark eyes. His fish had weighed three pounds, eleven ounces, and until Caleb came up the ramp, that had been good enough for second place, the best finish of his four years in the club, behind a six-pounder nobody could argue with.

Brady was looking at the boards of the dock. He had not lifted his eyes since his father said the word disqualified.

My sister Lorna stood on the far side of the tent with her arms wrapped around her own ribs. She looked at the boards too. In sixteen years I have never seen two people stare at the same boards so hard.

“Weigh master’s call is final on the day,” Rick said, in the same calm voice he used to read out the standings. “I had a report the boy was assisted. He’s a twelve-year-old. A twelve-year-old doesn’t land a fish like that without a hand. So the results move up. Brady Bohannon, three-eleven, first place. Congratulations, son.”