“You go get some rest,” Taylor had advised, “and don’t start to thinking you’re to blame for what happened. You’re not. It just happened.”

He had left without speaking again to Howard and Ada Reynolds, or to Eleanor, and he did not know if he would see any of them again.

He had decided he would not fish in the fishing contest. It did not seem right, no matter what the men had said to him about it, telling him they were looking forward to watching him take on Littleberry Davis. There was a pall over the fishing, and if he had not caused it, he was part of it.

He reached to pull a leaf from the sassafras, rolled it in his fingers and held it under his nose. It had the scent of vanilla and he thought of a story about Indians using ground-up sassafras roots to drug fish in small pools of water. Many times, he had taken a root of the tree and washed it and boiled it in water for the strong taste of it. Sassafras tea. His mother had liked it better than the tea a person could buy in a store. In autumn, the leaves of the tree turned yellow, deepening to orange, then blood red. His mother had said no tree was more beautiful. Next to a maple, that is. A maple in autumn was about as grand as a tree could ever want to be. Soon, the colors would come again. The sassafras and the maple, the bright red of sumac, the gold of hickory. So much color it would look like spilled paint.

He walked for a long time, into the middle of the afternoon. Walked to the dam of the Chatuge and watched a boater in a sailboat skimming the waters, the sail having the look of a cloth napkin he had once seen in a restaurant, the napkin folded upright and placed on a plate. Sailing was not a thing he wanted to do. The boats always looked as though they were about to tip over. Watching them from shore was pleasing, though, a little like watching a horse run free in a large pasture.

He was sorry he had not fished the Chatuge. It had the look of a place where bass would thrive, and maybe on the way out, he would spend a few minutes throwing out his hookless lure, just to say he had been there if he ever again ran into Hoke Moore.

First, there was another bass waiting for him.

In a smaller place.

Hoke Moore’s bass.