“It’d of been ten pounds if Noah had caught it,” Peavo grumbled.

“Damn,” Moody said again.

Littleberry held the fish up, presented it to the fishermen around him. Grinned.

From the hemlocks, far away, Noah watched the fishing. He could tell by the way the small, faraway figures acted when a fish was caught, could almost hear the whooping from it. He wished he were closer. He would have liked seeing how Peavo and Moody and Taylor were faring, and he wondered if the man called Littleberry was there, and how many fish he was catching. If he was as good as people said he was, he would have found his fishing spot early and put a claim on it, and he would know there were fish in it. Could have been sneaking to the spot for a week or longer, throwing food in it, Noah thought. He had known people to do such things. Once, in Alabama, he had met a man who had a small catfish pond and every few days the man would take a bucket of pellet-size dough balls to the pond and cast them into the water off a dock, and the fish would come to them like cows in a dry pasture stampeding to a feeding of lespedeza hay. The man had vowed he could catch fish with his hand by lying, belly-down, on the dock and scooping his hand into the churning foam when the fish were feeding. “I been finned many a time, doing it,” he had said seriously.

Near noon, he ate the two biscuits and one piece of chicken he had left over from the food Eleanor had brought to him.

He wondered if Eleanor was at the fishing.

Probably not, he reasoned. From stories he had heard of it, the fishing was a contest for men, like baseball was a man’s game, and the women kept themselves away from it. If any of them were there, they were likely girlfriends of younger, unmarried men, urging their men on with girlish enthusiasm, while their men flexed muscles and posed for the clicks of cameras. The women who stayed away would take the fish caught and cleaned by the men, and they would cook the fish and serve the men, making the same kind of balance that worked in their everyday life. And, among themselves, the women would complain about having to do all the real work, while the men played.

The women would be right, of course, Noah thought. More than once, he had heard his mother make the same complaint, saying her husband and her sons had no idea—not in the least—of what she had to put up with. His father had accepted the grumbling in silence and had advised Noah and Travis to do the same. “Boys, that’s one tree you don’t never want to climb,” he had said. “Believe me, it’s got thorns all over it.”

Eleanor would be one of the women doing the cooking in the deep-fry pots, rolling the fish in a mix of cornmeal and flour and slipping them gently into the hot grease of melted lard. If she ate with a man, it would likely be Taylor, and even then it would be an acted-out thing—Taylor saying in his kidding way, “You look like you need a place to sit,” and Eleanor replying, “Only if I don’t have to get up and get you second helpings.” The people around them would laugh, would make jesting remarks to Taylor.