Up to Low by Brian Doyle

Author:Brian Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV039060
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Published: 2004-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

A few days later I took Baby Bridget fishing. She wasn’t as good at fishing as she was at berries.

I put on my bait just right so my hook didn’t show and straightened out my leader and checked my spinner and let my line out nice and even and slow until it touched bottom and then raised it up gently a couple of feet and moved it up and down very gently and quietly and then I looked up over the water to the mountain across the river and out of the side of my eye I saw that Baby Bridget was watching me and I laughed and soon after I got a bite and hauled in a nice pickerel. You can’t win at fishing when you spend most of the time watching the other guy.

We pulled the boat up on a small sandbar and cleaned our fish on a big white log. Baby Bridget couldn’t clean fish because of her arm. But she was good at washing them after they were cleaned. Except the first time. She was swishing our biggest one around in the water and it squirted out of her hand and slid out into the deep water and disappeared.

The sun was hot and the fish blood was bright red on the white log and Baby Bridget was looking at me as though I was going to hit her or something. She was still crouching in the sand with her hand still in the water and she was looking at me as though I was going to go over to her and slap her across the face. Then her eyes filled up with water and the water spilled out and poured down her cheeks.

I told her never mind, it was just an old fish, but it didn’t do any good. She just crouched there crying as if she was waiting for me to go over and hit her.

All of a sudden the sun went in and it started to hail. It does that in the mountains around Low, especially on some hot summer days. Before you know it, it’s not sunny any more, the wind comes up, a lot of hail is dumped on you and then, all of a sudden, it’s over, and the sun is back again.

We waited under a tree and didn’t say a word. When it stopped we got in the boat and headed home.

Baby Bridget only said one thing all the way home.

She said this: “Sometimes the hailstones come down as big as walnuts.”

I was worried about her, so later I told Dad about it and Dad said that it was probably because Mean Hughie hit her bad one time. He told me that when she had her accident and lost part of her arm, Mean Hughie hit her for getting in the road of the binder. He hit her while the blood was pouring out of her poor arm. I asked Dad how he knew what happened and he said that one of the kids was there and told Gerald, Vincent, Joseph, Sarsfield and Armstrong about it.

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