The Old Man held a hook in two fingers of his left hand, having lifted it from a bulk box labeled “Mustad, 3/0.” His opposite hand pinched the bottom of a loop of waxed nylon line into a point and threaded it through the hook’s eye, looping it over the point and bend, then pulling it tight. He did the same for a hundred or so more, securing each neatly into the rim of a foam cooler, piling the line carefully in the bottom where it would not tangle or snag.
In years to come, we would add barrel swivels and other practicalities that made the lines work a little smoother, at least in the command of the less-practiced, but the first lines I saw were all built with a sailor’s practical command of knots and line and nothing else. A catfish could eventually twist off of a line made without a barrel swivel between the drop and the main run, but lines made in the old way were, for a master at least, faster to build and less expensive to create. And if the lines were run as promptly as meant to be, nothing ever had much chance to twist off.
A month later, I sat atop a cooler in a johnboat on a late spring day. The sun had risen behind us as we’d motored away from the landing, and now we were among the trees, gliding on level plane atop the yellow brown of the Yalobusha. The craft sported Old Men fore and aft, with me between. The pilot and master fisherman guided our boat through a shallow flat, dead timber standing by like old soldiers scattered on a parade ground. The Old Man’s chief companion sat in the front seat. Smoke from a Salem trailed in the breeze.
Out in the flat, the river’s current was subtle, but its effects over time were not. The trees, all standing dead, each leaned slightly in the direction the river went, and so helped fill in key information on days when the gates on the dam, far away and unseen, remained closed.
As the pilot steered into a gap and cut the power, the boat settled into a hole of its own making, rose once back to front as the trailing wave passed, then cradle-rocked still. Our wake broke along the shallows and around the timber with a quiet shush.
The Old Man looked at the ridges that rose far in the distance. He looked at the open places among the trees and at the fallen logs that floated just at the surface here and there. He looked at the stands of button willow behind us in the east and at the border of open water to the south. He took into account current and wind direction, upcoming weather and the angle of the sun, and he did it all without pausing to enumerate any of it in his mind or out loud. A passenger was welcome to watch and learn as he could, though. That was how secrets were shared.
“This would be a good place for a line,” he said to his companion in the front seat. To me, it looked like three other places we’d already stopped and left without speaking. How they would differ would be my own to work out in days and years to come.
On other days, the Old Man tended the garden he and my Grandmother oversaw. She’d spend winters studying catalogs from Jackson & Perkins, and late February invariably found her growing seedling trays under heat lamps or in a hothouse case. The pictures of vegetables and flowers the magazine promised could have been taken in the gardens where she and the Lord bade them rise.
Grandmother decided each season what she wanted to grow, and she worked alongside the Old Man tilling and stewarding the soil. Her magic wand was a certain hoe, its blade worn down to a fine razor by many sharpenings, and she wielded it with the skill of an Olympian’s foil.
From the pages of a catalog to the rows of barnyard-turned-garden, she, the Old Man and The Lord produced an array of vegetables fit to outshine any farmers’ market ever seen. From pimentos to beets, cabbage, lettuce and corn, purple hull peas, butterbeans, squash, cantaloupe, dill, cucumbers and climbing snap beans, zucchini, tomatoes and broccoli, they grew it all. Especially strawberries.
One corner of the garden was dedicated to strawberries, and Grandmother was dedicated to it.
She tended the full lot while the Old Man was at work, and the strawberries demanded all sorts of special dispensation. They occupied an expanding mass and were a perennial. All the rest were annuals, excepting some of the dill that returned wherever it would, but the strawberries required a specialized brand of backbreaking. Good strawberries don’t come and go each season, but are more like farm animals, part of the family. They produce through a portion of the months but must be cared for and protected through all of them and require an amount of love rarely spent on non-mammalian creatures.
They spread on their own and occasionally their range had to be pared down by tractor and disc, a necessary act that was both sadness and relief. There were still strawberries, but not as many.
Decades later, the Old Man looked at his land as he prepared to leave. He and my Grandmother had lived there for a long time. They regretted leaving, but were relieved to go.
“I’m tired,” the Old Man said, possibly the first time I’d ever heard him say it. “We are tired. But there’s still plenty of time left for fishing.”
The Old Man held a hook in two fingers of his left hand, which did not shake. He threaded a pinch of a trotline drop through it. This line had been tied by someone else, who’d attached a brass barrel swivel between it and the main line, but it was held in place between two stopper knots in the main run, made with the old way’s skill.
He led the drop down, looping it over the point and around the bend, then pulled it home.
“How many times do you reckon you’ve done that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but not for the last.”
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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