Seining

You make a seine by splitting a burlap feed sack along the seams, stretching it out, and wrapping each end around a bean pole. My grandfather shows us how, my brother and me, the three of us squatting on the creek bank in our old clothes. He tells us this is how he would fish for supper when he was a boy, and he even did it a few times after he was grown, when he had to.

The early fog draws back off the water into the trees, leaving a film of mist on the car, which is pulled into the brush under a willow. The crickets and katydids are slow and quiet. They’ll get louder as the morning warms up.

Once or twice a summer he takes us out like this, just the three of us, out in the country, so he can show us places. One year he took us over into Todd County to look for the house he grew up in. Another year he took us up to Pine Bluff to try to find the cave he would sleep in when he went out hunting. Today, he’s taking us seining.

It takes three people to fish with a seine. Two take the bean poles and stand them straight up in the water, with the feed sack stretched out between them. The third one holds the sack up in the middle so it won’t droop down. Then you walk up the creek, holding it like that, so the sack is like a net, and when a fish swims toward you, the two on the ends try to close the bean poles around it, trapping it.

After we make our seine, we find a place where the bank flattens out, the grass growing down into the water, and we wade in. We start working our way upstream, through the sheltering trees. My grandfather and brother work the poles, and I hold the net up in the middle. I watch the water striders drifting along the surface and the minnows flashing at my legs as we walk through them.

When he takes us out like this, my grandfather tells us stories.

The year he took us to Todd County, we had to leave the car parked at a blind man’s house and walk back through the woods a long while. We saw a red fox skitter past a caneberry thicket. We saw a possum’s skull lying in a patch of wild asparagus.

That time, he told us about growing up without a father, a father who was drunk and never home. About being his mother’s oldest child, the only boy, with three younger sisters. About his mother telling him, when he was 13, that she just couldn’t feed them all anymore, and that he would have to leave, go out on his own.

When we got to my grandfather’s house, it was nothing but part of the rock chimney rising up above the thistle and the goldenrod, some of the floorboards, and a few foundation stones. We walked around it, and he would stoop down now and then and pick something up off the ground. But it would be just a rock or a bit of cinder, and he would pitch it off into the weeds.

Today, as we work our way up the creek, we scramble a few times, trying to catch something, and we almost get a couple of bluegill, but they’re too fast for us. We come to a gravel shallows and stop for a few minutes. My grandfather searches around until he finds some small white rocks that are round but flattened off on two ends. He doesn’t know what they are, but they’re all over this part of the county. “People used to call them mule’s teeth,” he says.

We head on upstream, pass under an old iron bridge, and suddenly the water gets deep. He calls this the baptizing pool. This is how he knew about this place. A mile or so downstream, the creek runs behind a church he used to pastor...