“I’ll give it some thought,” Noah told him.

It was a good day for fishing. Cloudless, warm. On the river the sun seemed embedded in the water like a pigment of color. Below the shoals where he fished, Noah could see the sun-colored water vaulting over a bedding of rock that stretched across the river before spilling into deep pools of eddies. Fish would feed in the pools, he had reasoned, and he had been right. Using worms he had dug with his folding army spade from damp soil near a seeping spring, he had caught fish steadily for an hour, mostly river cats, though some bream. The bream he released, the catfish he kept, threading them through their gills on long cords of binder twine. The cords were tied to trash trees, with the fish dropped back into the water. It was maybe two miles to the store, where the fish were to be delivered. They would die on the walk, but they would not spoil.

By three o’clock, he had seven fish worth keeping—five on one cord, two on another. He would take three more, making ten for the order. Ten fish would earn him a dollar, if he had counted right. And maybe he was wrong, he thought. It was not easy, making a sum. Other people could do it, but he could not. He could hear a thing, a saying, and often remember it clearly and exactly, as though the saying had taken root inside his ear and was growing there like a flower, yet he could not keep numbersstraight. It had always amazed him to hear people talk numbers like a tobacco auctioneer, adding and subtracting and dividing in their minds, without pencil or sheet of paper. Travis, his brother, was smart that way. Could make sums easily and quickly, could say his multiplication tables like a person singing a song from memory. He knew he was slow at such things, and it embarrassed him, but it was how God had made him and there was nothing he could do about it. His father had thought him simpleminded, pitied him for it. His mother had sided with God. “When God shortchanges you in one place, he overpays you somewhere else,” his mother had declared firmly.

It was his mother who decided that God had given him the gift of fishing. Had said it one night to his father when she did not know he listened, had said, “I swear that boy could catch fish with a safety pin. They just somehow go to him when he’s out there with a pole in his hand.” His father had called it luck. “God don’t mind being called a person’s luck,” his mother had countered. “You ever watch that boy when he’s fishing?” she had added. “Always puts the palm of his hand on the water before he starts. That’s God’s doing. Tells the fish he’s there, that’s what it does. Travis could wade neck-deep, naked as the day he was born, and wouldn’t get a nibble.” Until he heard his mother say it, he had never realized the habit. Afterward, he had never failed to do it. For his mother, maybe. For the fish to know he was there. Maybe for God. He did not understand why fish came willingly to his line.