It has always been my practice to fictionalize the setting of a story, yet I have chosen an actual area for this offering—that region around Hiawassee, Georgia, and Hayesville, North Carolina.

However, the valley created for this purpose—the Valley of Light—is purely fictional, and the characters are residents only in my imagination.

In that area, there is a peculiarity in the spelling of the Hiawassee River. In Georgia, it is Hiawassee; in North Carolina, it is Hiwassee. In order to keep readers from being confused, and to keep editors from scribbling question marks in the margins of my manuscript, I have chosen to use Hiawassee. Call it prejudice on behalf of my home state.

In this story, there is a great bass and a lot of catfish. Regard the obsession with catfish another prejudice. As a young boy, when I fished Beaverdam Creek and the Broad River, it was for catfish.

To me, the catfish is a noble creature and, when properly prepared, a memorable feast, even if my digestive system now tends to quarrel with me when I leave one of those wonderful, all-youcan eat fish cafés that help define the culture of the South.

The Valley
of Light

ONE

He made his way to the lake watchfully, crossing the bulldozer-built dam that was covered in weed-grass across its ridge and in trash trees growing on the waterside. It was late afternoon. The sun was behind him, his shadow making a long ghost that wobbled over the weed-grass. Grasshoppers sailed away from his footsteps.

At a clearing among the trash trees on the east end of the dam, he stopped and surveyed the ground. The lake had not been fished in a long time, he believed. Weed-grass grew high, with no look of being trampled. Left-behind bait cans were old and rusty. A coil of nylon line dangled like a spider’s silk from a limb of one of the nearby trash trees, causing him to smile a smile that did not show on his face, knowing the spit of frustration the miscast had caused in some fisherman. A child’s cast most likely. Not easy for a child to make a cast with nylon. Would be better to teach him with braided line.

He thought about the fishermen who had abandoned the lake. Once, they had come to it from the logging road, he reasoned, bringing their families in wagons or trucks, chairs to sit on, fishing early to late with long bamboo poles and cork floats, eating their sausages and sardines and baked sweet potatoes, and at day’s end taking home their stringers of bream and bass and catfish, muscle-weary, smelling of fish slime and worms.

The water of the lake was the color of dark tea in the late-day shadows. Acid from trees. He closed his eyes, listened. The water lapped softly against the bank, rolled in, seeped back. The lapping sound was like a slow and lazy pulse beat. A dozing lake. Not much different from an old man sleeping in sunshine. Just enough breathing to keep alive.