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Second Prize Winner!

Congratulations go out to Linda Dickinson McCurdy for taking second place in our Historical Short Story contest. Linda won a $25 gift certificate to Lazy Lion Books. Keep writing Linda!

Fishin'
By Linda Dickinson McCurdy - Willow Spring, NC

            They made a ragtag pair: the old man tall still, even with 60-odd winters weighing upon his balding head and the lad shorter than the cane fishing pole slung over his shoulder. But they were ragtag in a good way, he thought: grandfather and grandson spending a day at their favorite fishing haunt, a crescent of shore on Panther Lake near Angus Farley’s place. Old Angus didn’t mind so long as he got some peach jam that the missus put up every summer. A fair enough trade. That was something he wanted the boy to know. He shifted his own pole to the other shoulder and realized how little time they had left together. Not enough for him to be able to tell the boy everything that he wanted to tell him. Not nearly enough.

            He glanced at the towhead strutting alongside him, trying to whistle despite openings left in his grin by recently departed milk teeth. It made him smile even though his heart ached that he would never teach the boy how to shrill between his front teeth loudly enough to reclaim the most errant pup or to imitate the soft cooing of the turtledoves that nested in the eaves of the ramshackle barn. It pained him that things his grandfather had taught him eons ago would not be passed along.

            The boy looked up at him. “Pepaw,” he said, “when we get to the lake, I’m gonna catch a catfish as big as a whale.”

            He wiped sweat from his brow with his faded red bandana. “What are you gonna use for bait, then?”

            “I’ll use some baloney from my sandwich,” he decided.

            “Do whales like baloney?”

The boy shrugged. “I guess. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try some of Memaw’s blackberry pie.”

“What if he don’t like that?”

The boy regarded him as if he’d lost his mind. “Everybody likes Memaw’s pie.”

He boomed a chuckle that sounded normal even to him. The boy joined in with his high-pitched giggle, causing the old man’s laughter to ebb. He would never hear that laugh deepen in the throat of a young man, one who maybe would put away his fishing pole and take up cars and girls. One who would remember the Christmas when Pepaw fell on his can trying to clear the icy steps so they could go to church and how he had laughed so hard at the sight of his Pepaw sitting at the foot of the stairs, still holding his snow shovel out in front of him like some kind of bizarre baton that he had wet his brand new corduroy pants, earning a scolding from his mother and his grandmother and a piece of root beer candy, given on the sly, from that same Pepaw when they had both changed.

The boy also stopped laughing and regarded him. “Are you okay, Pepaw?” he asked.

Bless the young ones, the old man thought. They see with innocence what is hidden in our hearts. “I’m fine as frog hair, young’un. I just got to thinking about what Memaw would do if she thought we used her pie for fish bait.”

That thought inspired silence between them until they reached the lake. They climbed over an old tree that jutted out into deeper water, baited their hooks with nightcrawlers and cast the lines out. The old man noticed how the boy did this with a more sure hand than he had last summer. Just one more thing reminding him how quickly time passed.

As they rested on the mossy bank and waited for a greedy fish to take the bait, he said, “This is a good day, Timmy.”

The boy looked over at him. He had been close to napping, lulled by the still air and the somnolent buzzing of the greenhead flies. “Sir?”

“I said, it’s a good day.”

“Yessir.”

“It’s days like these that you store up.” He paused, struggling to express what he felt. He was ordinarily a man of less than few words. Now, looking at the gray-blue eyes turned up to him, so like his own, he tried again. “You know, sometimes things seem so bad that nothing makes them better. That’s when you take a day like this out of your memory and recollect.”

“That helps?”

“After a fashion. It’ll remind you that no matter how bad the time you’re going through is, it isn’t important. It’s the good times, the times like now, that matter, the times that people hold onto.” He swallowed. “In bad times.”

“Are bad times comin,” Pepaw?

“I don’t know, son. Nobody ever knows.” He kissed the top of the boy’s head and ruffled his sweaty hair.

They fished until a rumble of thunder and a flash of heat lightning convinced the old man that their afternoon should end.

There was a moment, right before they reached the gravel path that led up to the house, when he almost told the boy everything. The boy’s mother was watching from the front glider, however, and the boy took off running as soon as he spied her, ruining the opportunity. He himself continued plodding toward the porch as she picked the boy up and kissed him, holding him tightly as the old man approached. She looked at her father and he shook his head. She relaxed, mouthing “Thank you.” He patted her shoulder as he passed by. Entering the house, he took the empty creel through the kitchen where his wife was frying chicken and placed it on the top shelf in the pantry.

He found it there months later, when he happened into the pantry to find a jar of preserves for his wife: “There are so many people here, Clarence; we need some more bread and butter pickles. Whoever would have thought so many people could have known one little boy?”

He stared at the battered wicker creel, passed on to him from his own grandfather sixty years ago and found no answer.

©2004 Linda Dickinson McCurdy