They were both standing now. Leon stretched and yawned. Floyd picked up his fishing pole and swung the line in to shore. Leon stretched again, then did the same thing Floyd had done with his pole.

“How come you ain’t done it to a girl yet?” Leon asked.

“I don’t know. How come you?” Floyd answered.

“It’s easier for you than me,” Leon said. “How can I even try to when everybody’d know? You’re different. Nobody would think a thing.”

“Bet my mama would!” Floyd laughed. “Swim before we go?”

Both shed their clothes in a minute. Clovis watched them dive into the creek and thrash about, churning up the dark water they had earlier been at pains not to disturb. Heeding a sudden alarm that swept her nerves, Clovis got up from the log and made her way back along the path rapidly, no longer constrained to caution and quiet.

The boys swam about and yelled, ducked each other, dared each other to stay longer under water, finally tired. Contentedly, they slipped into their clothes without waiting for their bodies to dry. Floyd took up his pole and the fish they had caught.

“You want ’em?” Leon asked.

Floyd shook his head. “Give ’em to Old Maggie.”

Where the woods met the fields they stopped. Without having to talk about it, Leon now took both fishing poles and the bait jar which Floyd had emptied and carried the twigged fish in the same hand as he carried the jar. Floyd went off at a trot. Leon followed, alone.

Old Maggie was glad to have the fish. She dearly loved a fish, she told Leon, in the same words and same way she had told him a hundred times before, as if she feared hers was a peculiar fondness he would find it hard to comprehend. Whenever he had a fish he didn’t need, she would be proud to have it. Saying so, she loosened the blunt-bladed knife stuck into the wooden side of her cabin door and began to scale the largest of the bream. Leon left her and made his way toward the big house.

Floyd would be there before him, eating in the kitchen. Lovey would scold him and tell him he was too late, that his mother and father had long since finished their meal. And when he followed her into the kitchen, she would load a plate with boiled peas wrinkling in their juice, roasting ears, and sliced tomatoes, and let him sit down and eat with Floyd, maybe on the back door step, because it was too hot to eat in the kitchen, and besides, the girls were busy there. Helping the girls would be odd little Pauline.

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