I pushed the white envelope across the table, past the ham and the deviled eggs. “That is the closing statement for the sale of Clement Fish Hatchery,” I said. “Five million eight hundred thousand dollars. It was sold in the spring, and I did not tell anyone, because I wanted to see how my family would treat an old man who they thought had nothing left.” Tasha put a hand over her mouth. Her father opened the envelope himself, read the first page, and passed it to his wife without a word. In the front yard, a mockingbird started singing as though it had not heard a thing.
Rodney could not look at me. “Dad, I was going to pay it back. I swear to you.” “Eighteen savings bonds, son,” I said. “Thirty one thousand dollars. Every one of them signed with my name in a hand that was not mine.” I laid the redemption slips beside the plates, the yellow envelope open at last. “Your mother and I bought those bonds a little at a time, a twenty five dollar bond for every birthday you ever had, so you would have a start in this world. And you cashed them like a man emptying a sock drawer.” The room was so quiet that I could hear the old clock in the hallway.
Tasha turned slowly to her husband. “Rodney, you told me that money was an advance on the hatchery. You said your father had agreed.” “I thought he would,” Rodney said weakly. Her father, a big man from Albany with farmer hands, folded the slips and set them down square. “Son,” he said, “I raised my daughter to marry a man who tells the truth when it costs him. Is that what I got?” Nobody answered. Lula Mae would have known what to say. She always did. I touched the red and white bobber beside my plate, and for a moment I could almost hear her voice.
A red and white bobber from a pocket of long ago gave one son the weekend to bring his father back to the head of the table in Valdosta.
“Here are my terms,” I said, and I kept my voice kind, because Lula Mae always said you catch more with patience than with a net. “You will repay every dollar, with interest, to the account where those bonds belong, in monthly payments that I will set. You will sell whatever you bought with that money, Rodney, and you will not borrow a cent to do it. And you will say plainly to your wife and to her parents what you did and why. If you do all of that, there will be no police report. If you do not, I will let the bank handle it.”
That afternoon I drove to the hatchery, and I found a surprise waiting. The men who ran the ponds, Willie and Dalton and old Mr. Pettus, who had stocked bass with me for forty years, were standing by the loading dock in their rubber boots. Somebody had heard what happened. They did not say a word about it. They had simply come to check the aerators and feed the fingerlings on a Sunday, as though it were any other day. Willie handed me a cold drink and said, “Mr. Rawls, the fish do not know the difference between rich and poor. They only know who shows up.”
The money consequences came quickly. Rodney sold the new truck and the jet ski within two weeks and took the loss on both. Tasha moved their joint account to a different bank and put her own name first. Her father, who owns a feed store in Albany, quietly declined to loan them the money for the new house they had been planning, and said that he would reconsider when he saw a full year of honest payments. Rodney took a second job at the hatchery on Saturdays, hauling bags and cleaning screens for the new owner, for hourly pay and not a dollar of favor.
I could have stopped there, but I did not. With part of the sale money, I set up a scholarship in the name of my late wife. The Lula Mae Rawls Fund pays for rods, reels and tackle boxes for every child in Lowndes County who has never held a fishing pole. It also pays for a summer morning at the hatchery ponds, with a picnic, a lifejacket and a patient teacher. Fifty children came to the first morning. Not one of them caught a fish, and every one of them went home sunburned and shouting, which is exactly how Lula Mae would have wanted it.
Tasha came to see me alone, a week later, with a pound cake in her hands. She said she was ashamed that she had sat at that Easter table, laughing along with the toast about her father in law and his old fish ponds. I told her that shame is only useful when it turns into something else. She nodded. Then she told me, with tears in her eyes, that she was expecting a baby in the spring. I laughed out loud, hugged her, and told her that the first child to arrive in this family after all this trouble would learn to fish from the day it could hold a bobber.
Rodney made his first payment on the first of the month, in person, at my kitchen table, with a check and a handwritten letter. I did not read the letter in front of him. I only nodded and put it in the drawer where Lula Mae kept her recipes. A month later, he asked whether I would show him how to set a trotline the way my father had. We went down to the pond before sunrise, the two of us, with a thermos of coffee and a bucket of worms. For a long while we said nothing at all, and that was a kind of apology too.
The following Easter, the whole family sat at the same table. The ham was dry, the deviled eggs were perfect, and a new baby slept in a basket by the window. In the center of the table stood the red and white bobber, a little chipped, the one Lula Mae carried in her pocket for fifty years. Rodney lifted his glass of sweet tea. “To Dad,” he said, “and to Mama, who taught us what a bond is really worth.” I looked at my son, and then at the little bobber, and I felt it tug at something deep in my heart. It was the sweetest bite I have ever had.