Joe Prichard

36 the minnesota review John M. Blair Joe Prichard They'll tell you Joe Prichard was twenty years running his trots, more hooks and lines than you could count, all run through with fishgut and chicken liver, held halfway between the surface and the bottom mud by strings of empty milkjugs, floating like half-moons sitting on thé horizon of the lake. Come near-dawn and Joe would take them up, pull perch and shellcraker, pan-brimmer, hung half-dead on little bent pieces of ten-gauge wire run through their lips or tangled deep in their gullets, up fron the brown guts of the water, and most of the next morning spent with a plyboard plank and a butcher-knife sharpened near-to-nothing. Some less professional would clean the fish dead, having let them smother, sucking slowly at an air too thin, but Joe kept his catch alive, sliding his blade through guts still warm, still moving, keeping the meat prime, and like a rainbow coat of mail he'd wear the glittering scales, dried and flashing on his pants legs, his boot-tops. And they'll tell you how one June some fisherman stealing from Joe's lines, or maybe just checking found Joe down halfway between the surface and the bottom mud, hooks tangled in his hands, lines caught 'round his arms, and about the shellcracker, the pan-brimmer, hitting, dodging at Joe's face, Joe's eyes— in little snatches taking back their own. ...