Because what I worked out of that cork handle was my father’s fishing license from 1997, rolled tight in a sandwich bag, and a photograph of a nine-year-old girl holding up a bass with both hands.
The girl is me.
It is not somebody’s cast-off rod. It is my daddy’s rod.
He died in June of 1998 and my mother sold near everything that fall because she had to, and the rod went in a lot at an estate sale in Pontotoc County along with his tackle and a Zebco reel he’d had since the sixties. I was twenty-three and I did not fight her about it and I have thought about it about four hundred times since.
There are two initials scratched into the underside of the reel seat with a pocketknife. My daddy did that to everything he owned.
Cletus found it at a flea market outside Tupelo in the spring of that year. He did not know it was my father’s when he picked it up — he told his brother he bought it because it was seven dollars and looked like a decent old rod — and then he turned it over in the truck and saw the initials.
He spent three weeks after that finding the rest of it. The license was still folded in the butt cap where my father kept it, which is where every man of that generation kept a license, and the photograph was in the tackle box that the same dealer still had in a bin.
He put them both back in the handle. Sealed it with a cork plug and a little glue.
I don’t fish. I have never fished a day since I was nine years old. He knew that.
He was going to hand me a beat-up rod and let me be disappointed about a necklace, and then tell me to look at the reel seat.
He never got to. I leaned it in the corner of the garage and let him see exactly how little I thought of it, and two weeks later he went down in the driveway and I could not even get to the phone.
Wrapped around the license, in his handwriting:
“Tressie — it’s your daddy’s. I checked it three ways. Don’t hang it on the wall. Take our grandson out with it.”
Our grandson is eleven. He’d asked for Grandpa’s rod not knowing it was his great-grandpa’s first.
We went out to Trace Lake in April. I sat on the bank in a folding chair and told a boy every fishing story I have, which is nine, and he caught two little bream and put them back.
The recliner’s in the den. He sat in it maybe four times.
The license is in a frame on the wall in the hall. The rod is not on any wall. It’s in the garage by the door where a rod belongs.