The Trout

A Story by JESSE HILL FORD

BY THE time Coy was eight he had been fishing with his grandfather five years — since he could first remember, when they fished for bream near Royal in the lily pad ponds belonging to old man Paris Austin. Later, after the dam at Muscle Shoals was built, they began journeying to a camp near Guntersville to fish in the backwaters of the Tennessee River. It was twenty miles from Royal, Alabama, where they lived, to the Tennessee River backwaters, and because Grandfather Rickman didn’t drive, they would have to get someone to take them there in the car, with their yellow cane poles tied to the outside of it and the minnow buckets rattling inside. Usually Catherine, Coy’s aunt, drove them to the fish camp on Goodluck Road, where they rented a boat and paddled out to the drowned trees where the white perch bedded, and there they would sit, with Catherine gone into Guntersville to visit friends for the day while Coy and Grandfather Rickman fished.

It was July, and the boat leaked, so that Coy took turns with the old man bailing out the boat with a pork-and-beans can, while they drifted and paddled among the trees the river had killed when the dam pushed it out of its banks. They had left the bank early that morning, and when Grandfather Rickman remarked that they had not got a fish and it was nine thirty, the paper label had come off the bean can and was sloshing in the Water at Coy’s feet. The water reminded him of summer leaves, and the snake doctors which lit on his cork or teetered now and then on the end of the yellow cane pole he held reminded him of airplanes. In the other end of the boat, Grandfather Rickman sat bent forward, looking intently at his own cork, floating beside a shattered gray stump. He seemed a very old and skinny man, hidden except for his face and hands by a long-sleeved shirt and cotton trousers and a felt hat which shaded his light-blue eyes.

Looking back at his own cork, Coy saw a remarkable thing, for it had gone down and under the surface in a swoop. He raised the tip of his pole at once and felt the tug of the fish for an instant before his line came up limp out of the water. The minnow’s head was all that remained on the hook.

“I think I had a trout,” he said.

“No,” said his grandfather, who always spoke in a hushed voice for fear he would alarm the fish, “it was only a gar.” And as though to prove the truth of what he said, Grandfather Rickman’s pole bent suddenly and he raised the ugly fish to the surface before the hook came with the old man’s minnow bitten in two. The gar thrashed the surface once before it faded back, slowly, like a sinking log.

“It felt like a big trout,'’ Coy said.

“The garfish keep the other fish from biting,” said his grandfather. “They’re mean.” He dipped his paddle in the water to move the boat on. “They’ll get all our minnows,” the old man said. “The scamps.”

Coy took up the bean can and began to bail. The water which leaked in was pleasant and cool to his bare feet, and he wished he knew how to swim, for the sun was merciless and hot. He wore only a pair of shorts, and everywhere else he was brown. He was always brown by the middle of June, lean and brown and growing, and Tennessee seemed far away, for his parents lived in Nashville and he went to school there and associated the city with wintertime. But he thought of Alabama as long summers and elm trees shading his grandmother’s house and the smell of cow feed when his grandfather milked every morning and nightfall; of dew on the early-morning grass and of days when the rains flooded the streets of Royal, and the very air which blew and sifted through the rain made the cushions of a chair damp to sit on. And there were the long days, such as this, when they fished until the water turned brassy gold with the sun’s decline and the honking of the car horn called them back to the bank.

Paddling back without fish on the stringer was a deep-hurting sense of defeat to Coy, a sensation of dying which his grandfather seemed not to feel, for to the old man, fishing did not have to mean catching fish. To the old man, fishing was a still and quiet patience, a hushed attitude of body, broken only by a laugh of pleasure when Coy pulled a fish out, or a cry of “Hey!” when the old man himself brought a white-sided perch up and into the boat. To Coy, paddling back with a full stringer of fish meant going back with a deep sense of victory in his breast.

“No,” said Grandfather Rickman, when they had reached the new spot and were fishing again, near an old bleached tree which had fallen from the bank out into the river, “you’ll know a trout if you ever feel one. It’s like hooking the bottom, and all of a sudden the bottom begins to move, and then it goes wild, and that fish comes straight up out of the water. It makes a trout mad to hook him.”

COY remembered seeing one trout, a trout Mr. Vilous Lee had caught in one of Mr. Paris Austin’s ponds. Mr. Vilous was a butcher, a vindictive fisherman who set out poles at several places along the bank trying to catch catfish, and he had seen the big trout the week before and had rigged an enormous pole with a minnow on the line nearly as long as his hand. Then he had crept far up the bank under the shade of a catalpa tree and waited. He had waited there all day from early morning until midafternoon, when Grandfather Rickman finally shouted, “Watch out, Vilous!” And with that the butcher had run down the long grassy stretch to the bank of the pond. The trout was already hung when he reached the big pole, and the butcher yanked the fish straight out of the water and, laughing in a wild, ugly way, he walked up the bank with the trout still dangling on the line. Coy’s father, who was there that day, had said the fish was a large-mouth bass and that, mistakenly, the North Alabama fishermen called these fish trout. But the fish was still a trout to Coy, and to Grandfather Rickman, and to Mr. Vilous Lee. Far up the bank, the trout had struggled free of the hook and fallen to the grass, and the butcher had flung himself on the fish, reaching his rough fingers through its gills and raising it high in the air, making the creature writhe and bleed to be held so cruelly.

They had ridden back into town and weighed the trout on the scales at the grocery where the butcher worked — six pounds. It was the biggest fish Coy had ever seen caught, and he had dreamed afterward that someday he would catch a trout, but, having caught one, he would not feel such a cruel delight. The butcher’s cruelty seemed somehow to be tied up with his taking a large spoonful of baking soda occasionally and gagging it down with water. Grandfather Rickman had said Vilous was ruining his stomach by the habit, and sure enough, only a few months before, the butcher had died. When Coy had come back to Royal from Nashville, at the summer’s beginning, he had gone to the grocery store and seen a new butcher behind the counter. The new butcher had worked in Birmingham, he said. His name was Clisby, and he didn’t fish.

“What happened to Mr. Vilous Lee?” Coy asked, dipping up a can of water from the bottom of the boat and pouring it quietly out into the river.

“Why, you know what happened,” Grandfather Rickman said softly. “He died. They buried him.”

“But why did Mr. Lee die?”

“They say it was his stomach. He had an operation in Birmingham. Then he came home and got all right, I thought. We went out to the ponds some last fall, before the weather got too cold.”

“And then what?”

“Well, he had a spell this spring, and we only went fishing one time.”

“Was he still taking soda, Grandpapa?”

“I think he had gone back to his bad habits. Yes,” Grandfather Rickman said, after a pause, “I’m sure of it.”

Coy thought of Mr. Vilous Lee dying, of a darkred something in his stomach which the doctors had not been able to help, and he remembered the butcher’s thick, freckled hands, and the strange sweet smell of his breath, and the wild, angry look of his eyes. Coy knew instinctively that the butcher drank, and that the smell was whisky, and he felt his grandfather’s dispassionate disapproval of the habit.

“I didn’t like him,” Coy said. “He hurt my feelings.”

Grandfather Rickman smiled. “You took his catfish off the line. He didn’t like for anyone to touch his poles after he had set them out. He didn’t think a fish was his unless he had taken it off the hook. You shouldn’t dislike him for that.” The old man spoke as though the butcher were still alive. “He gave us many a ride to the ponds,” he said, after a moment.

“But I still didn’t like him,” Coy said.

“Well, Vilous never understood children,” Grandfather Rickman said. “He didn’t know what to say to them. He couldn’t talk to a kid. But he was a good friend to me, Coy.” Grandfather Rickman’s voice had fallen now, for he had felt the butcher’s death again, and his face was grave and sad.

Coy bailed the water out, scraping the can until the boat bottom was just barely damp. Then, while he watched, the water began seeping in again. It came in so slowly that he had no patience for it, and he shifted his pole to fish on the other side of the boat, away from the snags beside the old tree, out away from everything, away from the bank, where nothing would bite, where he knew the fish would not be. But he was bored.

Then the fish struck. Coy felt him before he realized the cork was gone under, and he lifted the pole in his trembling arms, fighting against the strength of the fish with his own strength, going so hard upward with the light pole that it bent sharply.

“Easy!” cried Grandfather Rickman. “Play him easy!”

But the pole broke just then, and Coy pulled in the broken half and held it, his body frozen still by the sight of the trout coming out of the water and landing with a splash. The fish skittered sideways around the end of the boat toward the bank and went down deep again, moving back suddenly toward the river.

“Let him get tired,” Grandfather Rickman cautioned. But Coy was already drawing in the broken pole. He reached the line and began frantically pulling the fish in toward the boat.

“No!” cried Grandfather Rickman. “You’ll lose him! You’ll lose him!”

And just as the old man yelled the second time, the fish came out of the water again, and this time, as he landed, the hook came loose and the line went sick and limp. The trout lay near the surface an instant, nearly exhausted, not realizing it was free. But then, with a flash of its green body, it was gone. Coy drew the hook out of the water and held it in his trembling fingers. It was bent straight. Then he looked at Grandfather Rickman.

“Why couldn’t you listen to me?” Grandfather Rickman said. “That was a trout.”

Coy could feel himself collapsing inside to an indrawn knot of sorrow in his stomach. Holding the broken cane pole across his lap, he began to weep. “A trout,” he cried. “A trout!” There would never be such a victory so close again, and he felt the loss and the anguish slowly killing him.

“ There,” said Grandfather Rickman. “It’s all right.” The old man came cautiously forward to pick up the empty bean can. He sat down and began bailing out the boat. “You did the only thing you knew how to do. But if it happens again, don’t try to pull him out of the water. Wear him down first.”

Coy wiped his eyes on his arm, smelling the salt sweat and the sun in his skin. He nodded, struggling to recover. But he knew the trout would never strike again. It was gone back into the deep cool mystery of the green water, to remain there now, buried forever.