My grandson took up fishing this summer, got the bug bad, wants to be out on the water every day his mama will let him. So I went up in the attic to dig out my fathers old tackle box for him. Seemed right. Daddy taught me to fish out of that same box when I was about my grandsons age, down on the Chattahoochee, and now here was another little one ready to learn. Been gone eleven years and I still miss him every day.
I sat down up there in the attic to sort through it before I handed it over. Top tray was all his old lures, the little red-and-white ones he swore by. I lifted that tray out to check the tackle underneath.
And under it, down in the bottom of the box, there was something that was not tackle. Wrapped up in one of those soft rags he used to wipe down his reels. My daddy kept whatever this was down under his lures, in a box he carried to the river a thousand times, close to him but out of sight, and never said a word about it to a living soul.
I unwrapped that old rag right there on the attic floor. And I had to sit down on a rafter.
It was a lure. Just one. A hand-carved wooden plug, old, the paint worn to almost nothing, a treble hook on it gone brown with age. And I knew it the second I saw it, because I had heard about it my whole childhood and never once laid eyes on it.
It was my great-grandfathers lure. The one he carved by hand during the Depression when there was no money for tackle, the one my daddy said his own daddy caught a hundred dinners on when a hundred dinners was the difference between eating and not. It had come down to my father, and everybody assumed it was lost, and here it had been the whole time, riding in the bottom of that box under a tray of dime-store plastic.
There was a scrap of paper folded around the hook, my daddys hand, faded pencil.
For the next one in this family who loves the water the way we do. Do not fish it. Just carry it. So he knows he comes from somewhere.
He meant to give it to me at the river someday, I think, when the moment was right. But his heart gave out on a Tuesday with no warning, and the box went in the attic, and the moment never came.
It came now. Just late.
My grandson is nine, the same age I was on the Chattahoochee. I gave him the tackle box, the reels, all the red-and-white lures to fish with till his heart is full.
But that little carved plug I put in his hand separate, and I told him whose it was, four generations back, and what it meant, and that he does not fish it. He just carries it. So he knows he comes from somewhere.
He carries it in his front pocket every time we go. Every single time.