Big Elm Point

I sat on the bank until everyone else stopped caring whether we caught any fish, until it was clear they weren’t biting, wouldn’t take a red worm if it swam right into their suction-cup mouths. My daughter had gone off to line up her horses over the sandstone outcroppings that made such perfect mountains for the animals to struggle across.

    I wanted in on that game, to be face to face with Chloe’s serious eyes, portraying the bravest stallion who leads his herd to safety from lurking wranglers and mountain lions. I wanted to follow my mother and father through the field toward the old Stiner Cemetery lot, study the gravestones over the nineteenth century bones that tended the land before its two rivers were neutered into this slow cresting lake.

I wanted to go examine the weathering trunk of the fallen elm that gave this point its enduring name, Big Elm, pronounced Ellum by everyone I ever heard say it. I wanted to think about why no drunken fishermen had chopped it into firewood and grilled their catch over the ghosts of its resin.

    To imagine the living tree, and to remember the mornings in third grade when I cried because I dreaded Mrs. Sharp and her gingham dresses, how I prayed when the school bus brought us into view that her blue Ford ltd wouldn’t be parked at the end of Sharps Chapel Elementary. How one morning my mother took pity on me, drove us past the school to Brantley’s Market where we got a bag of peanuts and two Cokes, and took us to Big Ellum Point where she let me throw rocks into the water until noon.

At nine years old nothing made me happier than my father bringing home a new lure from White’s Truck Stop at Raphine, Virginia, or for my Uncle Gerald to get home from work and say, Let’s go cast a line before it gets too dark.

Late spring evenings arrived like birds landing, and the full span of summer reached out for us, waving like the cattails I tried to catch from the car window as the gravel rolled us past. The hours creeping, sunset alive over the trees, while the years folded up as quickly as notebook paper drawn thick with pictures of muscle cars and basketball logos, pages folded up and gone, tucked into the pockets of our blue jeans.

I wanted to swim back from those cast-away days, the wash of the past, and on with the present, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the fishing line. The water hardly moved unless I reeled in and split the surface with my floater, looking perfectly still though moving without cease, does that sound like water or time? I threw out, reeled in, and watched the orange eye staring back at me for three solid hours before it finally bounced and raced under. All the other things I could be doing, and I watched the empty hook glisten back through the water. A pair of Canada geese came jeering over us and splashed down in the opposite cove— the ferry operator packed up his thermos as the elms and poplars spread out their long shadows across the rim of Norris Lake. So much was happening, the evening so alive in its subtle approach, that I hardly noticed the second bob of the floater, the fresh and writhing worm casting its ancient spell, but the fish bit hard and raced so that I could hardly lose it this time.

    All I had to do was hold on until Chloe came with her net and brought him up into the air, a bluegill twice the size of her palm. How beautifully the hook slid out of his lip, how clean he looked in her tentative hands glittering in the late sun, the hour of Cezanne, hour of golden spilling, the silken arc as she tossed him back toward the rest of his silvery-blue life.