I set it down, pulled the tray, and the second I saw what was underneath, I froze, because I was looking at two Pflueger Supreme reels, black with age, and a hand-carved wooden plug painted like a bluegill with one eye rubbed clean off.
I have not seen that plug since 1989 and I would know it in the dark.
It belonged to Nadine’s daddy. Curtis Ambrose. He took me out on Guntersville the second weekend I ever came around his daughter, before he’d decided about me, and he put that plug on my line and did not say one word for four hours except to tell me I was reeling too fast.
He died in 1991. His boat and his gear went to Nadine’s brother, and her brother went through a divorce and a bad stretch, and by the time anybody thought to ask about the tackle it was gone. Sold, all of it, off a card table in a yard in Scottsboro.
I held that plug on my own porch for a while before I could put it down.
Then I turned the box over and looked at the underside of the lid, and there it was, scratched in with a nail the way men did in those days. C.A.
It was his box. She didn’t buy me somebody’s cast-off box at a yard sale. She found her father’s box.
Under the reels, in a sandwich bag, was a photograph I have never seen in my life. Curtis in the bow, me at nineteen in the stern with my hair, both of us squinting. She must have taken it herself off the bank. And with it, a note on the back of a church bulletin.
Took me eleven years of yard sales and two ads in the Sand Mountain Reporter to find this. A man in Rainsville had it in his shed. He wanted five dollars for it and I did not correct him. Daddy always said you’d do. Give it to a boy someday. — N.
Eleven years. She was going to yard sales for eleven years. I thought she was going for the pie plates and the Depression glass.
I said you really splurged, huh, and I let her hear the meanness in it, and she just looked at me, and I have been trying to read that look for a year. It wasn’t hurt. She was waiting for me to open it, and then she was gone in the night and I never did.
My grandson is eleven. His name is Curtis, after a man he never met, which was my wife’s doing and I fought her on it in 2014 like a fool.
He was standing right there in the yard by his daddy’s truck when I got to the bottom of that box, and I called him up on the porch and I put that bluegill plug in his hand and I told him about a man who wouldn’t talk to me for four hours until I slowed down.
We went out on Guntersville the last Saturday in April. He reels too fast. I did not correct him.