A Miracle of Catfish

by Larry Brown

  He tried something. He tried pressing his thumb down on the line where it rode above the rod, just out in front of the reel, and he found out that he could pull on the line that way. But whatever it was out there was so heavy he couldn’t move it. It was moving, but he couldn’t make it go where he wanted to, which was closer to the bank. So he just kept standing there with his arms getting worse and worse, and shaking more and more, and wishing he had some help.

  But that didn’t do any good. He wondered how long he could stand here and just hold it. Could he stand here until dark? Could he stand here until past dark, until his daddy missed him and came looking for him? He didn’t think he could. And then he didn’t have to try and decide anymore. The fish made a great surge and even though the line slipped off the reel, and the drag screamed, the line went limp. And Jimmy’s heart sank. Dang it! Dang it dang it dang it dang it dang it!

  He went ahead and reeled it in and looked at it. The hook was draped with little rags of flesh, little hunks of … what? Catfish mouth?

  Tore the hook out!

  […]

  57

  The fish in the pond stopped eating toward the end of October when the nights turned colder. Three cool and windy evenings in a row Cortez went up to the pond and threw the feed out and three evenings it lay there floating on the surface of the water untouched. It was kind of a letdown, but he’d been knowing it was coming, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, so he took a black rubber bungee cord and ran it through the handle on the lid of the steel garbage can and hooked it through the handles on each side to keep the coons out of it over the winter. And then he went back up to Sneed’s and got a length of chain and a padlock and ran the chain through the handles and locked the can around the big white oak so that the deer couldn’t turn it over. He’d already made up his mind that next year he was going to feed the fish in the daytime, screw what the fish man said.

  The leaves were starting to fall from the trees everywhere and the road he lived on was littered with them, maple and oak and sweet gum and hickory, curled in yellow and brown and orange, rustling dryly across the gravel, crackling lightly under his tires whenever he drove out of the driveway. He didn’t drive out much. The grass had gone to seed and he was using the new tractor to put out the big bales of hay for his cows, backing the long iron hay spear into the center of a bale carefully, then lifting it and taking off with it. The new John Deere was a farmer’s joy. It was smooth and quiet with a comfortable seat, and riding inside the glassed-in cab was like being insulated from the world. He had a heater if he needed it, an air conditioner if he needed it. It had power steering and four-wheel drive and a digital clock. The salesman had tried to get him to have a radio installed, but Cortez told him he didn’t need a radio. The main thing about it was that he could stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

  He drove it up to the pond one day and hooked the Bush Hog to it and mowed the rest of the grass and he didn’t worry about what was growing on the slopes. As soon as a few frosts hit it would be dead anyway. When he finished mowing he drove it back down to the house and backed the Bush Hog into the equipment shed and unhooked it. Then he found his grease gun hanging on a nail and put a new cartridge in it and greased the gear box and all the zerk fittings in the driveshaft.

  Now the days were shorter and the stars in the black sky seemed to be clearer at night whenever he stepped out after supper to sit for a little while on the front porch in the darkness, kind of watching to see if there were any more lights up at the pond. He’d gone up there the morning after he’d seen them the first time, looking for evidence of some sort, maybe some beer cans or something, but he hadn’t found anything. No tracks that he could see. And it might have been Jimmy anyway. He wished he could see him, but he didn’t want to go down there to his trailer just to see him. He didn’t know his folks, didn’t know what kind of people they were. The nights kept getting colder and he didn’t sit out long. He’d thought about calling that Carol, but so far he hadn’t. He was afraid he wouldn’t know what to say to her. It had been so long since he had courted his wife. Another life he once had. He’d had several already. One with her. One with Queen and her. Now this one without either one of them. Cortez asked himself out there one night: Why did you kill the one you loved to stay with the one you didn’t?

  His arm still itched under the cast and it was awkward washing his hands with it on. Awkward cooking, awkward doing anything that used your fingers and thumb.

  It seemed lonesome around the house now with the weather colder, the skies grayer. He didn’t care anything about sitting in the house and watching television in the daytime. So he got out and found things around the place to do. He’d turned all his heifers out into the main pasture with the rest of the cows now that the heifers were all bred, which meant he was feeding hay to thirty-four head instead of just twenty. But he had plenty of hay. More than enough to get him through to the first week of April. And then about a month after that he could start looking for at least some of his heifers to get in trouble. That’s when he’d have to be up at night a lot, driving up in the pasture, checking on them, seeing if they were in labor, walking around with his flashlight and wading the damp grass in his rubber boots to find them wherever they’d hidden themselves to have their babies. But he was looking forward to that, too. Early summer was his favorite time with his cows, when they’d had their babies and the babies were walking around with them, nursing, or picking up a hind foot to scratch delicately between their eyes at whatever was itching them. The grass would be green again then, and the sun would be bright, and the sky would be blue. White clouds floating. Re-birth. Nature having its way in the world. When was that spring coming that he wouldn’t get to see? He guessed he ought to put some flowers on his wife’s grave sometime. There was something else he’d been thinking about doing, too. But it was probably a foolish thing to be thinking. Especially after all this time.

  He patched some fences that needed patching and he cleaned a couple of truckloads of crap out of the barn and hauled it off and he took his little cane pole tepee apart and stored the canes in the barn so that he wouldn’t have to cut fresh ones next year. He put the tarp away. He put some paint on the front porch. He cleaned his machine gun. And then one day he got up early and cranked the new John Deere and backed it up to the chinaberry tree and started putting on his PTO post-hole digger. He wanted to replace that bad section of fence before it started raining all the time. It was a little harder to get it on with the cast, so it took him almost thirty minutes to get the pins in it and hook the driveshaft to it. But once he had it mounted, he climbed back up into the cab and looked over his shoulder and raised the three-point hitch and engaged the PTO lever with his hand. The auger started turning and he let it run for a minute, making sure everything was working okay, and then he disengaged it and pulled the tractor around by the side of the house and shut it off.

  He wished he had somebody to help him. He wished he had Jimmy to help him. But there wasn’t anybody to help him, not now, so he got into the truck and started it, and then pulled up the driveway, the bed loaded with creosote posts and tools and rolls of barbed wire. He had some new Red Brand that he’d gotten over at Moore’s in Pontotoc. It would only be a ten-minute walk back for the tractor.

  He pulled out of his driveway and turned right and then right again at the intersection where the Cutoff road ran into CR 434. It looked like there was nobody home at Jimmy’s trailer, no cars. The kids in school. His mama and daddy at work, he guessed. He didn’t see any of the little dogs.

  He drove on down the road toward Queen’s old house and stopped at the wire gap and opened it and drove on through and stopped the truck and got out and closed the gap. Then he drove down into the lower end of his pasture and pulled the truck up close to where the old posts stood leaning, the rusty wire sagging. He shut off the truck and got out and left the door open and headed back up toward his house through the pasture. The cows were eating from a
big round bale of hay with a steel hay ring around it. He’d once owned a Hereford bull that got his horns stuck in an empty one, and the crazy damn thing had dragged the hay ring around in the pasture for half a day until Cortez could get a rope around his head and tie him to the pickup and get a hacksaw and cut the thing off him.

  He wasn’t going to take the old fence down. No need to. He was just going to build the new one three or four feet inside it and tie it into the section that ran out to the road.

  He took his time walking up through the pasture. He saw that it wouldn’t hurt anything, once he got through with the fence, to take the post-hole digger off and put the Bush Hog back on, and clip all this down before the first frost hit. Make it look neater. Not that anybody was going to see it. Give him something else to do. All the stuff in the garden was gone and he hadn’t pulled his tomato stakes up yet. He’d thought about planting some turnip greens but he hadn’t gotten around to it. He wasn’t that crazy about greens anyway. But his wife had liked them, so he’d always raised some for her. He guessed he wouldn’t need a very big garden next year. But he was going to plant his peas and corn early. And probably cut back on his tomatoes. He didn’t need very many now.

  He fixed a jug of ice water when he got to the house, mostly out of habit, just in case he worked up a sweat, and set it up in the floor of the glassed-in cab. Then he started the tractor and took it down the road and drove by Jimmy’s trailer again. Now there was a little car there, looked like one of those Japanese models. There was a pickup sitting beside it, and he’d seen it and the car sitting there before in the middle of the day, but he didn’t know who drove the pickup or who it belonged to. He’d seen the woman he figured was Jimmy’s mama driving the little Japanese car. There was nobody outside. He went on down the road and stopped at the gap and opened it and pulled through and got back down and closed it. He needed to put a cattle gap down here, too. Stop having to open and close that gap. That might be a good thing to do in the spring. When he started feeding the fish in the daytime. He hoped Jimmy would come over and fish pretty often. He hoped the winter would go by pretty fast. Maybe he needed to call up that Carol. She sure had a nice big butt, kind of like Jimmy’s mama.

  He stopped the tractor behind his truck and left it running when he got down. The stakes and the twine were in the back end of the truck and he found his hammer and drove one stake at each end of the section he was going to replace, about three feet off the old fence line. Then he got the twine and unwound some of it and tied one end to the first stake, then stretched the twine tight and tied it off on the other stake. Just something to let him make a straight line. He got back on the tractor and backed the auger around and stopped it just short of the twine. He put the transmission in neutral and engaged the PTO lever, and the auger started turning. […]

  By noon he had all the posts in and tamped tightly with dirt and he drove the truck back up to the house for lunch. He took his shoes off and fixed himself a ham sandwich and ate it in front of the TV, washed it down with a glass of milk. The news was showing a bunch of stuff that had happened in Memphis. Some people had been shot. Some kids had been orphaned. He didn’t care anything about seeing any of that so he turned it over to the Western Channel to see if there was a good movie on, and there was, an old black-and-white one about John Brown, and he’d only missed about fifteen minutes of it. He sat there and watched about an hour of it and then he put his shoes back on and drove back down to the place where he was working. Both the vehicles were gone from the trailer by then.

  He spent half the afternoon building braces and stretching barbed wire and nailing it to the posts with fence staples, almost hitting his thumb once. He’d knocked his thumbnail off completely with a hammer twice in his life and he didn’t want to do that anymore. He was putting up five strands of wire. Most people put up four but he’d always liked five. Small calves could slip through four. He’d seen them do it. And a deer would crawl under it rather than jump it unless it was in a hurry.

  It clouded up a little after he got the fifth strand on and he was surprised to see that he was almost finished. […] He thought about stopping two hours before dark, but then he decided he wanted to get his tractor and his truck both back to the house tonight in case it rained, so he went ahead and tied everything together and cut all his ends off and wrapped them around the posts and tacked them down with the staples and then he was done. He stepped back and looked at it. Seventy feet of new fence and it looked pretty good. He stepped forward and caught a strand with his fingers and tugged on it. It didn’t move much. That was fine.

  […]

  When he drove the pickup slowly past Jimmy’s trailer, the old ’55 or ’56 or whatever it was was sitting out there with the hood up and he guessed that was Jimmy’s daddy with his head under it. Cortez was going to wave at him but he didn’t take his head out from under the hood. Cortez lifted his hand anyway and went on. He looked behind the trailer and saw the go-kart sitting out there by their little shed. He was surprised Jimmy wasn’t riding it this afternoon. Probably had homework.

  When he got the truck back to his house, he headed down through the pasture again, and the wind had come up a little. It looked like it was going to rain. And that was fine with him. Let it rain. Let it rain all night. All winter if it wanted to. He wanted to see what the pond would look like when it was full. He was yearning already for spring.

  58

  After listening to a bunch of whining and begging and pleading for about a week, Jimmy’s mama and daddy reluctantly agreed to let Jimmy spend the night with Herschel Horowitz, who had asked him over for a Friday night a few weeks before Thanksgiving. The plan was to cook hot dogs in the backyard, and then camp out back there in a green Coleman tent Herschel had, and then hang around Herschel’s house all day Saturday, mess around with some metal detectors Herschel’s daddy owned, go out to eat uptown, maybe some place like Applebee’s or Chili’s, or Captain D’s or the Rib Cage (they’d expanded from Tupelo), and then Herschel’s mama and daddy and Herschel would bring Jimmy home and deposit him safely at his trailer.

  So Jimmy took some extra clothes to school with him that Friday morning in a backpack he borrowed from Velma. His mama gave him two dollars in case he needed any money. His daddy didn’t seem to be interested in hearing about all the interesting arrowheads Herschel probably had. His daddy hadn’t been in very many good moods lately and he’d snapped at Jimmy a few times, once for leaving his tennis shoes in the floor by the couch, and once for leaving a kitchen cabinet door just slightly open.

  Jimmy tried to leave all that behind him, riding the kind-of-bumpy school bus home through the fall sunshine with Herschel that afternoon. Herschel lived out by Harmontown, on the other side of Sardis Lake, which meant the school bus route took an hour and fifteen minutes every morning and every afternoon. But Jimmy didn’t mind the ride since he got to see some new things. He got to look at the big muddy Tallahatchie River and the two trestle bridges that spanned it, one for trucks and cars, one for trains, and he got to look at the turnoff to Abbeville, and he got to look at Starnes Catfish Place. There was a sign with a large catfish out front. The catfish had a chef’s hat on his head. The school bus kept rolling. The driver had the wheel in both hands and he was singing “Queen of My Double Wide Trailer,” doing a pretty good rendition of Sammy Kershaw for a bus driver without a band.

  “Is that a good place to eat?” Jimmy asked Herschel, sitting next to him on the bus seat. Jimmy had the window. There weren’t a whole lot of kids on this bus, just the ones who lived in Harmontown, about eight of them.

  “Oh yeah,” Herschel said. “They got that all-you-can-eat catfish buffet in there. They got alligator and everything else in there.”

  “I got a good catfish pond I can fish in,” Jimmy said.

  “Oh yeah?” Herschel said. “Can you take me sometime?”

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “It ain’t mine.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “Th
is old guy lives up the road.”

  Jimmy hadn’t told his daddy about the big fish he’d hooked in Mister Cortez’s pond. It hadn’t been easy keeping it to himself, and he’d thought about telling his mama, but he hadn’t told her either, once he’d figured that she probably wouldn’t be as interested in hearing about a big fish as his daddy, and he couldn’t tell his daddy because he figured his daddy would try to sneak in up there, and he didn’t know, maybe Mister Cortez would catch him or something, something might happen, he didn’t know what, but he figured it was just better to leave his daddy out of it. What his daddy didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt him. But the main thing was that Mister Cortez had asked him not to tell anybody. So far he hadn’t.

  “How big’s the biggest fish you ever caught?” Herschel said.

  “Aw. I don’t know. Not too big,” Jimmy said, thinking of the little eight-inch catfish he’d caught. Just babies, really. He wondered if Herschel knew how to set a drag.