He turned to walk back toward the valley, thinking of the bass. He would not try for it until he was certain he was alone, and he knew there would be people making their way to the lake throughout the day, wanting to see the place where the boy had drowned. It was one of the reasons he had decided on his walk. To stay away. When people had had their view—all knowing it was an event they would be talking about for years, all gathering some sighting that would belong only to them, some fact that would make them part of the day and part of the telling of the day—they would no longer go to the lake. It seemed a strange thing to do, going to a place where someone had died, but it was the nature of people. He had done much the same himself a few times, coming upon car wrecks on the side of roads, standing around long enough to see what had happened and if somebody had been hurt or killed. Once, while riding with his mother and father, he had seen a wreck where a number of cars had pulled off the road to take a close look even though the sheriff ’s car was already there, and his mother had scoffed that it looked like a flock of buzzards hovering over a roadkill. Not the same, his father had corrected, and his mother had said, “Why not?” His father had looked at her with a small smile perched on his lips and he had replied, “They ain’t eating nothing.” His mother had made a little toss of her head and had said, as a last word, “Give them time.”

By late day, he judged, the people who were curious enough to walk the distance from the pull-off to the lake would be gone, and he would have the lake and the shack to himself, but he would take no chances. He would not try for the fish until early morning. The wait would make the fish restless, would aggravate it, as Hoke Moore had said, would make it eager to show its strength. What Hoke Moore had said was something he had always known: fish were a lot like most men. Work on their nerves and they would make mistakes.

He had wandered more toward the south than he thought and he came out of the woods near the church—Church of the Resurrected Christ—and he stopped to study it. It could have been the Methodist church of his boyhood, where he took his own baptism. White-painted frame building, high in its main body where the sanctuary was, fanned on the back end by a collection of small rooms for Sunday school classes. A bell steeple rose over the front of it, with a bell rope dropped inside, too high for the reaching hands of children. Tall, plain windows lined the sides—four windows to each side. A stovepipe made an elbow turn out of one wall, and the white planking around it was soot-stained. A coal stove would be inside, Noah thought, and in winter it would be fired hot enough to turn the iron as red as the workings of a blacksmith’s forge, and those who sat near it would blister and those who sat away from it would shiver.