Once Travis had found a young owl near the barn, its wing somehow broken, and they had tried to mend it with sticks and adhesive tape, but the owl, with its sorrowful eyes, had died during the night and the death had numbed Travis, causing him to hide himself in a cave he had gouged out of hay stored in the barn loft. It had taken long coaxing to get Travis out of his cave, he remembered. He had said, “Come on, I’ll take you fishing.” It was a trick that always worked. Fishing. Travis loved fishing, though he had no gift for it. Sometimes, he would switch poles with Travis when he knew a fish was about to hit his own line, would say to Travis, “Here, hold my pole. My arm’s getting tired.” Each time, with each catch, Travis would fidget with excitement. “Look, Noah, look, I caught me one,” he would cry, dragging the fish to the creekside.

An ache swept him, thinking of Travis. A sadness heavy on his arms and shoulders and chest.

It was hard to picture his brother in prison, dressed in the stripes of prison wear. Travis was five years younger, but had become old in prison. The last time he had seen Travis—before leaving Elbert County to take up his fishing trade—Noah had felt lost. Sitting in a cold room, prison guards keeping a hard watch over them, he had been mostly silent. Travis, too. They had made small talk about the sharecroppers now working the farm of their childhood and about the death of their parents and about Noah’s plan to travel and fish. It was good, going away, Travis had mumbled, nodding his head monotonously. Getting away from all the drag-down times they both had lived. Yes, that was good. Wished he could tag along, he had said, but things being as they were, he guessed he’d be too old to do much more than take up space on some porch when he finished his time.

“I wish I wasn’t here,” Travis had said softly.

“Wish you wasn’t, either,” Noah had replied.

“A man’s a fool to put himself behind bars,” Travis had added. “And I been fool enough for me and you and a whole lot more.”

Noah had not answered him.

“Hope you come to see me when you find your way back down here,” Travis had said.

“I will,” Noah had promised.

“You get a chance, write me a letter sometime,” Travis had said. “Since Mama died, nobody’s wrote me a letter.”

On his travels, Noah had written two letters to Travis. One from Alabama and one from Kentucky. Both painfully done with uneven letters, like that of a child. Both short of words. Both saying where he was, and where he thought of going. Both ending with, I keep thinking about you.

A trough of wind blew across the lake, making the moon’s orange-yellow light shimmer on the surface of the water. Noah could hear it making a hiss against the porch wire, felt it against his face, thought of it as something sent to him by Travis.