The man in the ball cap took off his sunglasses and tucked them in the pocket of his shirt, and for the first time I saw his eyes. They were tired and honest. “Mrs. Tidwell, I am Agent Rusty Hollis with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency,” he said, loud enough for the whole pavilion to hear. “I have been working the marina for three months, and I want to thank you. Your tip is the reason we have this list.” He unfolded the paper. “There are nineteen names on it. Eighteen of them are strangers to you. The nineteenth one is sitting at this table.” I am Lorene Tidwell, eighty years old, and I did not look at my grandson.
I had stood on that dock in August with a sandwich in a paper bag and looked into a tackle box that held no lures. I walked back up the hill, and I called the sheriff of Marshall County the next morning, and I told him what I had seen. I did not know what else to do. Earl would have known. In 1971, he carved a bobber out of a wine cork that never cracked, and he never wasted a word. I told my daughter nothing, because I wanted to know first who stood behind my grandson.
The pavilion was still. A pot of baked beans cooled on the table. A boy of ten dropped his hot dog in the dirt and stared. My daughter Janet had stopped clapping, and her hands hung in the air. Colby stood by the grill with his paper plate, white to the lips. Agent Hollis looked slowly along the long row of folding tables, past the cousins and the uncles and the family friends, until his eyes stopped on a man in a pressed polo shirt at the end of the second table, who had been nodding along all afternoon. It was my son in law, Gary Pruett.
A folded list from a stranger in a ball cap gave one widow the length of a family picnic to bring her grandson back to the lake in Guntersville.
I gave my terms with my cane across my knees. “Colby, you are twenty six, and you have a good mind, and you have been a fool. Agent Hollis tells me that if you tell the court everything you know, and if you go into the drug court program at the courthouse in Guntersville, you will not go to prison. That is the choice. You will move out of my boathouse tonight. You will sleep at the center in Albertville. And when the judge says you are well, I will take you fishing, and you will not get any other chance from me.”
My grandson put down his plate and sat on the bench, and tears ran into his collar. “Grandma, it started when I hurt my back on the dock at nineteen,” he said. “Uncle Gary gave me a pill for the pain, and then another, and then he said I could make money if I just drove a few packages. I thought I was being clever.” He rubbed his face. “I have been selling to my own friends from high school. One of them is in the hospital. I came to this reunion planning to take your house, and I am so sorry I ever looked at you that way.”
But Gary Pruett had never been a man to wait for a verdict. He leapt up from his chair, snatched the list out of the hand of the agent, and sprinted for the boat ramp, evidently planning to throw it into the lake. He got forty feet. My daughter Janet stepped out from the table and caught his sleeve. Two cousins in fishing hats rose from the next table and stood side by side across the path. And a state park ranger, who had been eating a slice of cake by the water fountain, set it down and walked unhurriedly into the way, with his hand on his belt.
Gary stopped in the middle of the grass, with the list gripped in his fist and the whole family watching him, and a bass boat horn sounded faintly on the lake. Agent Hollis came up behind him, quite calmly, and held out his hand. “Mr. Pruett,” he said, “I have a copy of that in my truck, and one in my pocket, and one in Montgomery. Please give it back.” Gary opened his hand. The list fell out, and a breeze lifted it, and my daughter caught it against her chest and turned and looked at her husband, and said nothing at all.
The consequences were serious and merciful. Gary was arrested at the pavilion, and in the spring he pleaded to a federal charge and received eight years. Colby entered the drug court program and finished it in fourteen months, one step at a time, with a mentor from the marina named Bubba Chandler. Janet moved into my lake house for a season, and we sat on the porch at night, saying very little. Agent Hollis came by in July with a catfish he had caught and a bag of sweet corn, and he stayed for supper.
In the name of my husband Earl, who passed in 2023, I started the Earl Tidwell Fund. It pays for recovery programs for young people and for fishing camps and mentoring for boys and girls who need a steady hand, in Marshall, Jackson and DeKalb counties. In the first year we sent sixty three young people to summer fishing camp and paid for thirty one recovery stays. One was a seventeen year old from Scottsboro who caught his first bass off my dock, shouting, and who asked me whether the water was always so clear.
On a morning in May, a year after the reunion, I sat on the end of the dock in my old canvas chair with a thermos of coffee, and Colby sat beside me on an overturned bucket, with two cane poles propped between our knees. His eyes were clear. The mist lifted from Lake Guntersville, and an eagle rose out of the pines. At the end of his line, a little cork bobber that Earl had carved bobbed gently on the water. “Grandma,” Colby said, softly, “I think I have a bite.” I put my hand over his, and we reeled it in together.