“That was a nice cast, boy, your daddy’s been teaching you something right down there in Florida.”
“Now, don’t start in again, Hiram. The child wasn’t the one decided to pick up and move off. We’re blessed to have him visit for the summer.”
“I ain’t saying anything different, Martha, I was just commenting on a nice cast. Say, though, that bobber’s riding awful low. You didn’t put more than one sinker on there did you, boy?”
“Hiram…”
“Because you don’t want to fish too deep out on this part of the lake, no sir.”
“We didn’t come out here to talk that kind of foolishness. Just reel it in, child, and we’ll pull off some of those weights.”
“Did I ever tell you why folks don’t fish out on this part of the lake much, boy?”
“Hiram, will you hush up?”
“It’s family history, Martha. Boy should be getting some education, shouldn’t he?”
“Your family history, Hiram Sapp. All those queer goings-on are on your side of the tree.”
“See, boy, this ain’t a natural lake like all them big ones up above where your mama lives in Ohio, or like that big Okeydokey lake down there in Florida.”
“He knows it’s Okeechobee, child, he’s carrying on.”
“Government came in here forty and fifty years ago and bought up land all around this country. They’d pick low places in the river bottoms and build their dams. They made Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley down in the flatlands way over west of here, and big old Cumberland where your mama and that man have their houseboat and a whole passel besides them. And they made our little lake here.”
“It was for the TVA, child. My daddy was one that worked on the big dam at Wolf Creek.”
“And he’d never let you hear the end of it, neither. Old cuss never did answer me how flooding folks’ land is supposed to control floods. Anyway, I was saying that those agents come in and bought up the land. All kinds of land. There’s whole towns under some of these lakes.”
“Not big towns like you think of, though.”
“But they was towns just the same. And churches and graveyards–Lord, what a frightful thing that was, they had to move all the graves–and schools and farms, boy, hundreds of farms.”
“And one of those farms belonged to your old uncle Ruel Sapp.”
“Who’s telling this, Martha?”
“I’m just keeping your feet on the path, dear.”
“Well, not all the people that lived around here wanted to sell their land. But government can do something called condemning your property, which meant they could give you five dollars an acre and force you out. That’s what happened to a lot of folks.”
“A lot of folks.”
“And there was some that fought it such as they could. Some hired lawyers from up at Danville and some shot the agents, but you look around and see what this boat’s floating on, boy, and you can see where it got them. But old Ruel, now–”
“Your Uncle Ruel was a crazy man, child.”
“Martha…”
“It’s a hard truth, but it’s the Lord’s truth.”
“Well, I don’t reckon it can be denied that Ruel was touched. But the greatest of these is charity, Martha, as well you know.”
“Hiram, I’d rare back and slap you cross-eyed if this child wasn’t sitting here. There was never any kin of yours that I didn’t take to my heart. Charity.”
“I’m sorry I spoke it so, Martha. Ruel was a hard man to get to know. See, boy, he didn’t like people coming around his place.”
“He was an old hermit.”
“I guess he was. But as to his place, it was left him by his daddy, and his daddy had it from his daddy, and on back like that I don’t know how far. And he took care of it all by himself practically his whole life. He never got married.”
“He was married to that piece of ground, Hiram. That was everything a body ever needed to know about Ruel Sapp, how he loved that place and that place particular. It was pretty, right down here by the river and with that fine stand of live oaks and all.”
“I don’t know about pretty, but your grandmother’s right about his loving his land. Ruel wasn’t about to give it up easy, but he had eyes and ears. He saw his neighbors being moved out no matter what kind of hell they raised. He knew he didn’t have nothing like a chance of stopping this lake, sure, but our Ruel, he was crafty.”
“He was that.”
“As soon as the agents came by to offer him his thirty pieces of silver, Ruel started in digging a trench. His place was in a bend in the river that wasn’t quite an oxbow but it was close enough. Now, it didn’t take him long–”
“It took him better than a year.”
“Who’s telling this, Martha?”
“There’s nobody at all telling it right.”
“They came around with the buy outs a long time before they started the work, so Ruel had better than a year to dig a big trench plumb across his place. It was a canal like y’all have got down there in Florida. He had it stretched clean across that oxbow, twenty foot wide if it was an inch, and fifteen foot deep.”
“It wasn’t quite that big.”
“He ran it right through the middle of his pole barn, too, so a body could have floated a boat down there and looked up at Ruel’s tobacco hanging down while it cured.”
“Except that he didn’t put any burley out that last year he was so busy with that canal.”
“Boy, you know the old catfish, don’t you? Your Uncle Ruel dug that trench to catch him some channel cats. That makes every kind of sense, don’t it?”
“You don’t have to nod when you don’t believe him, child.”
“What you need to understand about those big catfish is that they grow their whole lives. Sure, it slows down some as they get real big, but your channel cat can sit down there at the bottom of the river and let the food flow right to him for years and years and just grow and grow. You going to tell the boy any different on that one, Martha?”
“That’s what I’ve always heard, too. Daddy said he saw the skull of one once that was three feet broad.”
“All right, then. Ruel Sapp caught him some cats in his homemade canal and netted off sections of it with good hemp rope. The he started in feeding them.”
“Slopped them like you would hogs, folks said.”
“That’s right, that’s right. Not just scraps and such, though. He fed them corn and sweet alfalfa hay and smoke cured hams and cord wood. When one was proving out to get bigger than the others, he hitched his mules to the rest and hauled them out. He had to shoot them nine or ten times each with his old Remington 270, and they flopped around so much they knocked the front porch of his house down. Then he broke them up with his axes and saws and fed them to the big one he had left.”
“Is that what happened to that porch? I thought it blowed down in a storm that last fall before they rose the lake up.”
“Martha, will you stop trying to confuse the boy? That big catfish, now, he must have been near on the size of a steam locomotive, but since Ruel kept him out of sight in the barn a man’s hard up to say for sure.”
“Your granddaddy didn’t see any of this, child, it was told him by his granddaddy Suel Sapp, old Ruel’s brother.”
“I don’t need to have seen it, I heard it told enough to know the truth of what happened. The next thing our Ruel did was start storing up his worldly goods. All of his clothes and such, and his bedstead with the feather mattress still on it and his spare boots and his butter churn and the pot belly stove and his Bible, anything he might need went in.”
“Don’t forget the stock.”
“He gave away most of his cattle and his team of mules and so on. But a bull and two or three good milking Herefords went in, and all his chickens. By this time, it was late in that last fall.”
“It took them all winter to fill the lake.”
“That’s right. But Ruel’s place wasn’t all that far above the dam. Matter of fact, if we let her keep drifting, we’ll see the dam as soon as we get past Fiddler’s Point, yonder.”
“Tell the rest of it, Hiram.”
“Boy, one morning, our Uncle Ruel woke up early, as it was his habit. He walked his canal end to end and cast off his good hemp nets. Then do you know what he did?”
“He jumped in the channel with the catfish.”
“Hush up, Martha. He wrapped up a good plug of tobacco in some oilcloth and then he jumped right into that catfish channel.”
“‘And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered.'”
“Amen to that, Martha. Because that is what happened, boy. The Lord prepared a great fish, as you might say, but our Ruel’s been in its belly for a sight longer than three days and three nights.”
“Now, Hiram, don’t scare the child.”
“Ain’t nothing to be scared of, boy. Just reel in, there, so you don’t hook into your Uncle Ruel’s roof, and we’re all fine. Matter of fact, to be extra sure, I’ll let you drop in the package. Hand it to him, Martha.”
“Here, child, just slip it over the side. It’s got some ham biscuits in there, and a twist of Mammoth Cave chew, and a shirt your granddaddy can’t wear any more on account he’s got so big and soft.”
“This is all muscle, boy, don’t you believe a word that woman says. I’ll need it, too, in case you catch any muskie and I have to wrestle them down. Now that’s a fish that gets big around here.”
