Potato Patch
The rocks were slick and he carefully made his way along them. He wasn’t as agile as he was as a child and he stepped with care. There was a light breeze and the sounds of chickadees and the steady whoosh of the water seemed to be all around him. That made him feel much younger than he was. He was looking for the pool where he used to fish as a boy with his father, when they camped here all those years ago. It was where the trout gathered to feed and to rest and where he caught his first fish. But he was worried that he went the wrong way. He couldn’t remember and that made him uneasy.
Then he saw it. It was calm and glistened like stained glass in the light. It was exactly how he remembered it being. He felt a deep relief.
His father had always told him to fish the head of the pool, the faster water, so that’s where he began, perched on a rock. The clouds moved over the sun and everything became dull. Then the clouds continued and the sun returned. The colors beamed like a movie.
He cast and put the worm near the entrance of the pool and allowed the current to take it. It felt good to hold the rod and watch the line leave the reel as it disappeared farther and deeper into the stream. But before the worm could make its escape, he dropped the bail, preventing the line from feeding too far into the water, hoping the worm would soon feed a fish.
It had been a long time.
As he waited, memories returned, not as scenes or photographs, or anything he could ever describe or even recollect, but as sensations too strong for a single moment. It was as if a lifetime forgotten had suddenly been remembered. There was a penetrating warmth to it. Then, when he began to bring the line in, slowly and with rhythm, flashes of his father came to him—him sitting on a rock in a wide-brimmed hat, his eye glasses wet and smudged with fingerprints; him in the glow of the campfire, smoking a cigarette, quiet and composed, watching the embers crack and pop. And his father drunk and crying in the kitchen in the middle of the night after everything went bad. He imagined the worm beneath the surface and hoped a fish followed close behind.
Cast after cast there was nothing. A limp, loose line returned every time. His broken reflection in the moving water. The sun moved and he moved with it. The shadows had turned and he thought about returning to camp, but he didn’t want to go back empty-handed, so he rebaited, stood, and cast.
As soon as the line hit the water there was a strike. It was violent and broke the surface. He snapped back and felt the setting of the hook. The feeling rushed through him like a drug. He pulled the fish from the water, its smooth green spotted skin and pink stripe shining in the sunlight. He used a rock on the fish. He slit its belly open, removing the insides and the little heart, which still beat, and threw everything back to the stream, then he rinsed the fish and placed it in the kill bag and made his way back to camp where his wife and one-year-old son were waiting around a warming fire.
S.E. Wilson
S.E. Wilson lives with his family in Franklin County, North Carolina. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in Chiron Review, The Berlin Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Arkansas Review, The Louisville Review, New World Writing Quarterly, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere.
