“I hope he shows up,” Lamar said to his wife at their early breakfast. “Something tells me he won’t, not after what happened to Matthew. I heard Taylor Bowers talking about it. He said the boy felt responsible for Matthew’s drowning.”

“That’s sad,” Arlene said. “He couldn’t do anything about it.”

“I know,” said her husband. “We’ll see. We’ll see.”

He sat at the kitchen table and watched his wife cutting cabbage at the kitchen counter. She would be at the work all morning, making gallons of coleslaw she would keep cooled in an old icebox they had kept after getting their refrigerator. His wife called herself the Coleslaw Queen on Fishing Day, and it was a title she had well earned. No woman in the valley could match her recipe of it. Yet, she had never complained about the work, and Lamar had privately suspected it was because the work kept her occupied and away from the fishing.

On this day, he envied her.

There would be melancholy among the fishermen because of the death of Matthew Reynolds and because Howard was so well liked. The death, happening as it had, would be tangled in the cobweb of talk made on the riverbank. There would be those who would call it a tragedy, and those saying it was an act of providence since the boy would never have been able to manage on his own. Some of the listeners would be boys who had made fun of Matthew in the few days he would spend in school each year, treating him like a mutant, and he knew those same boys would try to ward off the feeling of guilt by telling stories of something Matthew had done in their presence, something that had caused them to yowl in glee. There would be uncomfortable grins mixed with their stories.

On the river, someone would say something that would find its way back to Howard, bringing with it pain and sorrow, Lamar feared.

It would be a day with a slow ticking to it, he thought. A long day. And there would be many moods settling on it. Many moods.

By sunrise, Noah had left the shack and the lake, leaving behind his fishing rod. By ten o’clock, when the fishing began on the Hiawassee River with a pistol shot fired by Lamar Gathers, he was hidden in a ridge of hemlocks that had a distant view of the river, and there he rested and watched.

The first Fishing Day that Eleanor attended had been in her first year of marriage. It had been, for her, a festive, laughing event, staying with her husband as he fished from a shade-covered spot on the riverbank. He had caught eight fish weighing ten pounds, not close to the seventeen pounds of a man named Adel Jury. The memory of it, of seeing so many people together having fun, remained joyful for her, and she had returned each year for the starting of the contest. There was a giddiness about the starting. It was like a horse race, with horses bolting from behind the gates of slender stalls, the sounds of their hooves making thunder and the shrill shouting of people rising high in the air. At the fishing, it was the explosion of Lamar Gathers’s pistol shot and the sight of fishing lines whipping out over the river, flashing like cobwebs in the sun, arching, falling, splattering on the water. And always—always—there would be someone bellowing, “I got me one,” as soon as the hook struck the surface. It was as though Lamar Gathers had written a script that would start with comedy, for there would be a ripple of laughter along the riverbank.