“And where you from, Noah Locke?” Whitlow Mayfield asked.

“Georgia. Down near Elberton,” Noah answered.

Whitlow nodded, and the nod seemed to swim through his body. “I been there,” he said. “Had a cousin that lived down there, named Wally Mayfield. You know of him?”

Noah said he had heard the name, but did not know the man.

“You didn’t miss much,” Whitlow said dryly. “Sure couldn’t call him one of your leading citizens.” Then: “You in the war?”

“I was,” Noah answered simply.

“Japs or Hitler?”

“Hitler,” Noah said.

A shadow seemed to fall across Whitlow’s face. His forehead furrowed. “What group was you with?” he asked in a quieter voice.

Noah hesitated before replying. He again glanced at the men who were listening. There was something expectant about them, something he could not read in the dark coating of their eyes. “The Forty-second Infantry,” he said.

Whitlow dipped his face, nodded slowly, rolled his lips to-gether; then he looked up and pushed a smile across his face in a motion that carried pain. “You looking for some work, Noah Locke?”

“Not especially,” Noah told him.

“You got a farmer’s look about you,” Whitlow said.

“I done my share of it,” Noah replied.

“Sharecropping?”

“Yes sir.”

“You quit it?”

Noah thought of the question, wondered if people quit farming, or if farming quit people. “Just never went back to it after the war,” he said.

“It’s nineteen forty-eight. That’s been three years,” Whitlow said. “What you do for a living?”

Noah again hesitated, considered how his answer would sound; then he said, “I pick up a job here and there, but mostly I do some fishing.”

A look of surprise flashed in Whitlow’s eyes. “Fishing?”

“Yes sir,” Noah said.

“How you make a living, doing that?”

“Sell the catch, make some trades.”

“People buy fish, when they can go out and catch them on their own?” There was astonishment in the question. The men listening offered smiles.

“Some do,” Noah said.

“Well, now, that’s a new one on me,” Whitlow said. “I’ve heard of just about every kind of job a man can do, but never met a man who was a walking-about fish seller. Hard to see how a man can make a go of it as a living.”

“I get by, that’s about all,” Noah replied.

“You must be pretty good at it, then,” Whitlow said playfully.

“Good enough, I guess,” Noah told him.

The smile that Whitlow wore wiggled across his face. “Friend, if you good at it, you come to the right place at the right time.”

Noah did not reply, sensing he would hear the same story told to him by Hoke Moore. No reason to mention Hoke Moore, though, he thought. A man telling a story wanted to think it was his own. There was no harm in letting Whitlow Mayfield have the stump to himself.

“We got a little fishing contest that goes on here every year,” Whitlow explained. “Cost two dollars to get in on it. We meet over at the river and spend the day fishing and acting fools, and then we have us a fish fry that goes on into the night long enough for some of the boys to get rowdy when the good people go home. Draws a crowd and we wind up with a little money to help out at the school. It’s coming off in a week from today. You good enough, you could walk away with twenty dollars, since the man that catches the most by the steelyard gets the prize.”