The Nail Knot by Galligan John

Author:Galligan, John [Galligan, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781440532412
Publisher: F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 2011-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

On her way across the yard, Junior called, “Let it soak, Daddy! Burgers are here!”

Melvin O’Malley propped his rod against the porch rail and gathered a bacon cheeseburger into his huge hands. Junior set a soda on the porch beside his chair. He ate like a man who had crops rotting on the vine. In a matter of seconds, he was done with the burger. He began snorkeling into his soda. “Oh, Daddy,” Junior sighed, sitting down on the step beside me.

“Ice cream,” he replied.

“In a minute. Let your belly rest.” She handed me a burger. “So what do you eat usually?” she said. “Dog food?” Pretty much, I told her. “Vegetables ever?” “I eat cress from the streams.”

She nodded, chewing. I changed the subject, told her Shelly Milkerson had a key to the Pêche Tôt. So, probably, did Dickie Pee. And of course there was Ingrid. As for the second yellow sally on Jake Jacobs’ line, that knot, I said, was amateur, the work of a non-fisherman. Which, I declared, along with the wheelchair, left out Dickie.

“You’d be surprised about Dickie,” she replied. “He still plays softball. Left field.” I tried to picture this—and succeeded. I saw him tossing hair from his eyes, backing up under a fly ball. “But you’re right,” Junior said. “Dickie does know knots. He used to fish the creek a lot. As for me, I don’t have a clue. So show me,” she said, “the knot you mean.”

She took Dad’s rod and reeled it up. “Shush,” she said over his protests. “They’re not biting anyway.”

She swung the bobber up and I caught it. I showed her the hook.

“Like that,” I said.

She bit off a French fry and bent in closer. The monofilament was piled in six neat wraps above the hook eye, a small tag end sticking out. Dad tied a decent knot. Or someone did.

“Does that knot have a name?”

“A clinch knot. A textbook clinch knot.”

“And what’s on Jake’s rod now?”

“A mess. A granny. Somebody just trying to fasten a fly on there as fast as possible.”

She mused, “Too bad I didn’t see the knot I broke.”

I agreed. She flipped the bobber back into the grass. Her dad began to grunt and mumble. Junior reeled up and cast farther, to the edge of a toppled woodpile. The old man went quiet.

“Daddy’s real precise,” she told me. “He likes things a certain way. He sat here all day,” she said, indicating that very spot on the porch, now occupied by the hulking old man in his scallop-backed metal lawn chair. “He was watching that hayfield, making sure I cut it in the right pattern.”

I looked across the highway, across the pasture and the stream, to the field on the hill. The hay rows were horizontal, nicely ruled against the tree line. Junior stretched her back as she looked with me. “I’ve been sitting crooked on that hill all day,” she said, and she scooted across the step and put her back against her dad’s right foot.

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