When I was in my mid-single digit years, the Old Man used three converted cattle ponds on his place raising catfish to sell. The operation thrived for a while then played out, but it taught me a lesson I hope I’ll never forget.
One afternoon, a man and his wife came by and wanted a small quantity of fish. Just a sample amount, really, maybe five or 10 pounds.
Catfish from these ponds were generally harvested by way of a two-man seine, a net several yards long and maybe five feet wide, but the Old Man was still working a regular job at the time and wasn’t home, and none of his cohorts were available either. Still, no more than the day’s potential customers required, my Grandmother suggested she, the couple and I could fish in the nearest pond and get what they wanted.
I took pride in rigging out rods for Grandmother and the two guests. The first three rods stood ready to fish when I grabbed them but nobody else had to know. I passed these three rods along and reached for a fourth for me. The last one I picked up was the only one without a weight, hook and float in place.
Just weeks before, I’d been coached to tie what I still think of as my Uncle Buddy’s fishing knot, in actuality a work of art called the improved clinch, so I grabbed the first hook I could find, a tiny, long-necked specimen meant for bream, and tied it on as quickly as I could, forgetting in my haste to add a weight or float. My knot wouldn’t have earned any praise but, no matter, the game was afoot. Tally-ho.
The first of the three ponds lay within sight of the house. Two sides of this small body of water stood thick and tall in cypress, a third had a wire fence down the middle of its levee and the open side already had the other three people fishing on it when I took a chunk of liver from the bait can and loaded my weightless hook.
“I’m going around to the next pond,” I said to no one in particular since, if I made too big a point of it, Grandmother probably wouldn’t have let me get out of sight near the water. She was deep in conversation with the visiting lady and the man was bent on catching fish.
Around the hedge, just out of sight from where they were standing lay the next pond, one whose levee had recently suffered a breach. It held water, but not too much. I climbed down the grassy bank, walked a few steps out onto the bare mud flat and immediately saw a catfish as long as my arm circling my way in the scant pooling that remained. The sun was in my favor and I lowered my hook into his path. Seconds later, when he inhaled the bait, I bent the rod double and swung him up out of the water. The hook came untied at the apex of the arc.
I can still see the line snaking backward, un-weaving itself through the knot’s intricacies and pulling the last loop down through the eye like something from a cartoon, but when it finally slipped free the fish fell flopping onto the mud flat, where I pounced on him. I gathered him behind the pectoral fins as I’d been taught, left the rod and walked back to where Grandmother and the guests were standing. I couldn’t have been out of their sight an entire minute.
When I walked up holding the big catfish like the champion grabblers I’d seen in the state game and fish magazine they were amazed, and I told the story just as I’ve written it here, the unvarnished truth. It sounded so goofy it almost had to be a lie, but who would intentionally tell a lie that goofy? The man stared at me in disbelief, then demanded to be shown where I caught him. Grandmother and the man’s wife had already caught a fish apiece and he had zero, and being skunked by two women and a young child evidently meant quite a lot to him.
The man asked if I had catfish in a box and, at the time, I didn’t know what he meant. In retrospect, what he thought was I knew where “the” catfish box was, a submerged confinement for keeping fresh fish contained and at the ready, but then I didn’t even know what such a thing was, and we didn’t have one anyway that I know of.
I did take him to where I had spent 15 seconds fishing and, at the sight of the big mud puddle, I could tell he thought I was putting him on. He picked up my rod and the loose line floated in the breeze.
“This doesn’t even have a hook on it!” he exclaimed, and then he was doubly certain I was lying. He asked me about “the box” again two or three times and seemed aggravated when I wouldn’t point him to one. Maybe he thought we were keeping good, eating-sized fish for someone else? How would I know, anyway? I was always big for my age but still, I was probably 6 years old. Why would a child be complicit in some kind of catfish hold-out scheme? Maybe he thought I’d cottoned on to one element of a semi-nefarious operation and didn’t realize what it was that I knew? But I had brought along an un-ready rod to drop nearby just for cover, so I must know something?
I’ve turned this memory over many times. There were some submerged brooding boxes for catfish to hide in while they were small, but you couldn’t get to them from the bank, and the fish I’d produced hadn’t come from any such thing anyway.
When they left an hour later with four fish, mine plus three caught by Grandmother and the lady, he was nonplussed to say the least. I don’t remember seeing them again but, even at a young age, I knew what I’d found. The story was perfectly true, but I saw then if one could believe his bluff so well he forgot he was bluffing, the art of the fish tale could take him far.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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