to it. In another half hour, however, I was beyond the country I was familiar with and was going only on a sense of direction and sticking always to what looked like the larger channel.
It was late when I rounded a long turn and saw just the place where I wanted to camp. The lake was about a hundred yards wide here, with an open bank under a towering wall of oaks on the right, and dead snags and big patches of pads along the left. The sun was gone now and the water lay still and flat like a dark mirror except for a boiling rise where a bass smashed at something near one of the snags. I cut the motor and started drifting in, and silence seemed to pour out of all the vast solitude and came rolling over me like a wave. I worked fast in the daylight there was left, stringing the trot line between two of the old snags and baiting it with the liver I had brought, then went ashore and built a fire to cook supper. After I had eaten I washed the dishes and sat down on the bedroll in the darkness, smoking and looking at the fire. The big bullfrogs had opened up their chorus and I could hear the whipporwills’ lonely crying up in the swamp, reminding me of the nights I had camped on the lake when I was a boy. The Judge and I had fished a lot in those days. My mother was dead, and there had been just the two of us for a long time. He taught me to use the fly rod, how to drop a cork bug forty feet away beside a sunken log and to set the hook when the surface heaved, exploding with the strike, and how to release a bass after it was whipped. He never kept them. Tomorrow, I thought, I might catch one the old boy had in the net and then released to fight some other day, and then I knew it wasn’t likely. He’d died six years ago, while I was overseas. It would have to be a very old bass to have fought the Judge.
I took off my shoes and clothes and lay down on the blankets, but it was a long time before I got to sleep. I kept thinking of the fights with Louise and the endless bickering over money. Nothing had seemed to have any point to it after I came back from the Army, I had just seemed to drift aimlessly, taking the path of least resistance. I was twenty-three when I came back, and for a while I’d thought of going back to school under the GI plan, for I had finished two years at the state university before the war, but that had gradually fizzled out when I started going with Louise. Then Buford offered me a job as deputy as a favor to some people who had been friends of the Judge, and before long Louise and I were married. We had gone into debt for the house, and then there was a new car, a Chevrolet, and before that was two years old we bought the Olds. It wasn’t too hard, after a while, to start taking money from the same places Buford was taking his.
Maybe it’s just as well the Judge isn’t here any more, I thought. He never cared that much for money.
It was a beautiful morning, very still and cloudless, with patches of light mist hanging over the lake in the early dawn. I got up and picked up a towel and ran down to the boat. Stepping into it, I pulled out into the channel with the oars, took off the shorts, and dived in. The water felt warm, but it was clean, and I swam down until I felt the bottom under my hands and then came shooting up, bursting clear of the surface like a seal playing. Beyond the wall of the oaks along the bank I could see the sky in the east growing coral now, and across the vast and breathless hush of early morning I heard the explosive smash as a bass hit something among the pads along the other shore.
I pulled hurriedly back to camp and got the fly rod and some bugs and came back, letting the boat drift silently among the snags. Tying on a cork bug with a dished-in face, I began working out