I took the paper with the gold seal from the hand of my son, there on the dock at sunup, with the mist rising off the water and a bluegill rippling the surface, and I unfolded it with care, because I could see my husband all over it. It was a deed of conservation, recorded with Stone County on the Wednesday before Euel passed. Five acres, more or less, being the water and its banks, were placed in a perpetual easement. The water could be fished and walked and loved. It could never be drained, filled, or built upon.
I read it out loud, slowly, over the sound of the frogs. Kirby had taken off his cap and was holding it against his chest as if he were at a funeral. At the bottom, in the square carpenter printing of Euel, was a line that the clerk had not typed. Iola, water is the only thing out here that pays you back. Do not let the boy sell it for a dollar. I had to stop. My voice had gone. I laid the paper in my lap and looked out across the water at the place on the dock where my husband had fallen asleep.
“I went to the courthouse yesterday,” Kirby said, in a low voice. “To check the title for Ridgecrest. The clerk said, Mr. Teague, the file is flagged. She brought it out. It was recorded eleven days before Daddy died, and nobody told you or me. The man from Ridgecrest was in the lobby, and I showed him the stamp.” He gave a short, wet laugh. “He said it was the first time in nineteen years that a quitclaim had been beaten by a fishing hole.”
I looked at the hatchery receipt in my other hand. It was a yellow carbon, dated the Tuesday before the funeral, and stamped Paid in Full. Under Deliver To, in the pencil of Euel, was the name of Kirby and the number of our road. Under Species, channel cat. Under Quantity, there was the figure that had been crossed out and written over in a harder hand, 1,000. And below that, in the box that said Instructions, three words. Let him stock. Kirby leaned over and read it, and bit the inside of his cheek.
The things a man loves, he plants for those who come after, and he leaves a note in the water for them to read.
“A thousand fish, Mama,” Kirby whispered. “He ordered a thousand catfish for me. He knew what I was thinking of doing, and he ordered me a thousand fish.” His shoulders began to shake. “I wanted to drain it for six lots of houses. And he paid for the stocking in advance, so I would have something to do with my hands.” He crouched on the dock and put his face into his arms. I leaned over and put my hand on the back of his neck, as I used to when he had a stomachache. I felt the heat of him through his collar.
We sat there a good long time. The sun came over the ridge and lit the water gold. A kingfisher dove and came up empty, scolding, and flew off to try the other end. When Kirby could speak, he said that he had been in debt. Not to Ridgecrest. To a man in Little Rock, for a failed venture in used trailers, nine thousand dollars he had borrowed against his own paycheck. He had thought the cut on the lots would erase it. He had thought it would be quick. “I could not look at you,” he said. “That is why I said mud hole.”
I told him that I could not give him nine thousand dollars. I had six hundred and ten in a coffee can, and the rest was in the roof. But I could give him a job. “Saturdays,” I said. “Stocking, feeding, mowing the banks, running the honor box. Ten dollars an hour, cash.” He looked at me with the eyes of his father. “Mama,” he said, “that would take me five years.” I said, “Then it will take five years.” He laughed, wiped his nose, and put out his hand. We shook on it, there on the old boards.
The thousand fish came on the first Saturday in May, in an oxygenated tank on the back of a hatchery truck. The driver, a young man with a clipboard, backed down the lane with exquisite care. Kirby and I stood on the dock in our rubber boots and watched the little silver bodies pour out of the pipe into the green. They were no longer than my finger, and they darted off like thrown pins. Kirby counted out loud. When he reached a hundred, he stopped and said, with a catch in his voice, “Daddy would have liked this.”
Mr. Pettaway came that morning, with his folding chair. He dropped a ten in the can, then reached into his pocket and added another. He said it was for the fish. Within the month, there was a line at the gate on Saturdays, and a sign that Kirby painted himself, in white barn paint on a new sheet of plywood. Children Fish Free. A man from the paper in Mountain View came to write a story. A little girl in a pink cap caught her first bluegill, and shrieked, and the whole bank cheered.
By autumn, Kirby had paid off a third of his debt. By the following spring, half. His wife, Marla, came out on Sundays with the baby and a quilt, and sat on the bank with a thermos, watching her husband show a row of eight year olds how to bait a hook. He is good at it. He has patience he never had. When a child tangles a line, he does not sigh. He kneels and unpicks it with those big careful fingers, and says, “That is all right. We do it again.”
Euel dug this water hole in 1979 with a rented dozer and a borrowed level. I have often wondered if he knew what he was making. A place for fish, I suppose. A place to sit. But it turned out to be something larger, a kind of well of the family, from which every one of us has drawn something at the hour we needed. On the evening of the first anniversary of the stocking, I took the coffee can from the end of the dock and poured out the tens on the kitchen table. Nine hundred and forty dollars. I counted it twice.
Then I did a thing I had not done in three years. I took a pole from the shed, the old cane pole with the cork bobber, and baited the hook, and walked down to the end of the dock. The sun was low on the water. I dropped in my line and sat on the bottom step, beside the can of rusted hooks. After a minute the bobber trembled. Behind me, in the gravel, I heard the truck of my son pull in, and the slam of the door, and the sound of his boots coming down the boards.