The Bass The Weigh Master Threw Out

Earl was behind the counter when we came in. He was seventy-one, thin as a rake handle, with a gray mustache and a John Deere cap he’d had since the Clinton administration. He took one look at the bundle in my arms, and at the boy, and at the roll of tape, and he set down the bait net he was holding.

“Is that her?” he said.

“That’s her.”

“Well, lay her out.”

I unwrapped the blanket on the glass counter. Earl put his reading glasses on, bent over, and stayed bent over for a while. He ran one rough finger along the lateral stripe. Then he took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt, though I do not think they needed it.

“Son of a gun,” he said softly. “Six-two. That’s a fish.”

“Mr. Pruitt,” I said. “I’d like to ask you something, and you can say no.”

“Don’t ask it.” He was already pulling the stepladder out from behind the counter. “I closed this shop for two hours that morning so I could stand on that bank and watch your boy fight a fish. I’m not about to say no to a mount.”

“It’s not just a mount. It’s…”

“I know what it is.”

He climbed the ladder. He took down the picture of his father’s 1964 crappie, carefully, with both hands, and he looked at it a second and said, “Dad would’ve voted for the boy,” and he leaned it against the wall behind the register, where it would not get lost.

Then he reached down for the fish.

I handed her up. The two of us hung her together, Earl on the ladder with his hand on the mounting board, me holding the level, Caleb below with the stud finder he’d brought from our garage like he thought it was his job. It took four tries. Earl swore at the drywall anchors once, in a quiet and respectful voice, and apologized to my son.

When she was up, she looked as though she had always been there. A big green bass leaping out of the paneling above the register, with her mouth open and her flank in the light from the front window. The whole shop looked different around her.

“Now the card,” Earl said. He climbed down and went into the back, and came out with an index card and a black marker. He wrote on it in square block letters, slow, the way an old man writes when he wants it to last. He held it up for me to read.

Caught by Caleb Wilder, age 12. Alone in a jon boat. 6 lb 2 oz. Witnessed by Hubert Cole, Ellen Pike, Sam Reyes and Earl Pruitt.

Caleb tilted his head back and read it, all of it, his lips moving. Then he read it again.

“They put my name on it,” he said to nobody.

I put my hand on my son’s head. For one long second none of us said a thing.

Then Earl cleared his throat and looked over at me, a little hard. “You know who buys minnows in here every Saturday morning at six?”

“I know.”

“Six-oh-five. Every week for nine years. A dozen fatheads and a half dozen shiners, in a quart bucket with a blue lid. He pays four-fifty and he’s never once asked me if he could pay less.”

“I know, Earl.”

“I want you to understand something.” He set the marker down. “I did not hang that to humiliate a man. I hung it because it is true. If it happens to hang in front of Rick Bohannon’s face every Saturday, that’s his business, not mine.”