I dug it out, and the second I saw what my wife had hidden in there, I had to sit down on the shed step, because it was a letter from a man in Vermont with a photograph clipped to it, and the photograph was of the rod I was holding.
Appraisal for insurance purposes. H. L. Leonard and Company, Central Valley, New York, split bamboo, nine foot, circa 1928, original wraps, restorable. Fair market value, if properly restored, four thousand two hundred dollars.
Four thousand two hundred dollars. She paid five for it at a yard sale on Maysville Pike.
Della knew what it was before she paid the five. That’s the part I keep getting stuck on. She had picked up my father’s old rod-building book in the winter and read the whole thing, cover to cover, a woman who never once in her life put a line in the water, and she’d been going to yard sales and estate sales for two years looking down into buckets of junk poles for a certain kind of wrap and a certain stamp on the reel seat.
She found it in April. She mailed photographs to a fellow in Vermont who does nothing but look at old bamboo, and he wrote her back the letter that was rolled up in the handle of it.
And she wrapped up a five-dollar rod with the rust still on the guides and handed it to me and let me say real generous, Della, right to her face.
Her note was rolled inside the letter.
You’ve wanted a depth finder for three years and never bought one because you always spend it on somebody else. So here’s your depth finder, and a boat lift, and whatever else, if you want to sell it. Or you can fish it, which is what I think you’ll do, and then I’ve got you something you’d never in a hundred years have bought yourself. Either way you’re welcome. Quit saying I don’t listen. — D.
Quit saying I don’t listen.
A month later her heart went in her sleep and that rod stood in the corner of the shed for eleven months with a four-thousand-dollar letter in the handle and me telling everybody at the co-op that my wife’s last gift to me was somebody’s cast-off pole.
I sent it to the man in Vermont in the fall. He rebuilt the guides and refinished it and he charged me about half what he should have, and when it came back it was the prettiest thing I have ever had in my two hands.
I didn’t sell it. She knew I wouldn’t and she let me think the choice was mine, which is how that woman ran our entire marriage.
My grandson gets it when he’s old enough to be careful, and the letter goes with it, and the note goes with it, and I have written the whole story out on a card so somebody knows what it is after I’m gone.
I still don’t have a depth finder. I know where the fish are.