Littleberry fanned his face with his hat. “When they buried him, they buried his fishing stick with him. Somebody—I believe it was Peavo Teasley—said they ought to put a catfish in the coffin, just so he’d feel at home. I thought about that a lot over the years. Maybe we should of done it. I liked that old man, even if he was hellfire mad at me all the way to the end. He could fish. That’s God’s truth. He could do that. Beat me like a drum more times than I like to recall.” He paused, wagged his head. “But he was a plain fool when it come to this place.”

Noah turned to the lake and let his mind bring Hoke Moore back to him, and in seeing him again, he understood why Hoke Moore had appeared to him in Kentucky and had sent him to the valley. “No sir, I don’t believe he was,” he said quietly.

“Like I said, they ain’t nothing in that lake,” Littleberry said, pulling his hat back over his head.

Noah saw the water ripple thirty feet away, a ripple so small it could have been made by wind, if any wind was blowing. He moved to the shoreline of the lake and kneeled and reached to touch the water with the palm of his hand. Held his palm on it.

Littleberry walked down beside him. “What you doing?” he asked curiously.

Noah did not answer. He kept his hand on the water, his eyes holding on his hand.

“Peavo told me about you doing that,” Littleberry said. “What’s that all about, anyhow?” He laughed a short, nervous laugh.

The water around Noah’s hand began to darken and then to churn. Fish. Small as a blade of grass. Hundreds of them.

“God in heaven,” Littleberry whispered in an astonished voice.

He stepped back.

The fish nibbled at Noah’s palm like the giving of kisses, flitted across the water like darts of light.

“God in heaven,” Littleberry said again.

From twenty feet away, the water seemed to rise in a bow and the fish came up, throwing itself into the air like a torpedo. In its mouth was Noah’s silver lure flashing sunlight, the hook caught through its lip, the cut line dangling like a rope. Up, up. And then it fell, its body making a thunderclap against the water.

“God in heaven,” Littleberry repeated, his voice rising. He turned and walked away hurriedly, and he did not look back.

Noah stood, letting the water drip from his hand. He watched the rippling circles on the skin of the lake, watched the small fish slide away from the shoreline and disappear in the tea-colored water. And then he picked up the ax and his fishing rod and began to walk toward the shack, across streaks and splashes of morning light cutting through the shield of trees on the rim of the mountain.

Hoke Moore was home, he thought.

In a day, he would be, too.