And maybe his mother had been right, Noah thought as he listened, staying out of the talk between Taylor and the two men making the bargain. Some things learned as boys were carried like souvenirs into manhood.

A side bet was made, Taylor putting up five dollars on Noah’s ability to catch the orders before sundown, and Moody and Peavo putting up two-fifty each, saying he wouldn’t. Howard turned down the opportunity to make his own wager. Didn’t believe in gambling, he said, and he looked at his grandson and his grandson nodded agreement.

The side bet gave way to an agreement that Taylor and Moody and Peavo and Howard and his grandson would go along with Noah for the fishing.

“Just to make sure there’s no shenanigans,” said Peavo.

“Just to make sure you don’t stand around throwing rocks in the water, or talking your heads off, scaring off the fish,” said Taylor. “Way the two of you go on, they’ll be trying to find their way to the ocean.”

There had been other bets, other dares, in Noah’s travels. Men believing he could not catch fish when the weather was odd, or when the water was too hot or too cold, too shallow or too deep, or when the moon was in the wrong phase. He had never made a wager with anyone on what he could or could not do—at fishing or anything else—but he had watched money being exchanged among others when he took fish some vowed he could not take.

Each time there had been bets, he remembered Burl and Cork.

Burl and Cork were old men when he was only a boy—sharecropper Negroes who loved to fish after a rain, when field work was stopped and the creeks of Elbert County were swollen with wash-off water. They had believed there was something wondrous about him, having watched him catch fish, and over time they had begun inviting their friends to meet them at the creeks, making sly boasts about the white boy who could make fish come to his hook just by touching the water, and the fish could not resist him. Magic, they called it. Their friends had put down their nickels and dimes against a catch, and then had stared in amazement when the fish took the hook.

He gave the bettors the fish he caught. Among themselves, they agreed with Burl and Cork: he had magic. Said it loud enough for him to hear.

On some days there had been as many as twenty gathered to watch him fish. Watching as silently as owls. Shaking their heads in disbelief.

“Told you so,” Burl and Cork had said proudly. “Told you so.”

FIFTEEN

At the Hiawassee River, running north out of the lake called the Chatuge, Howard Reynolds and his grandson watched Noah bait his hook as Taylor and Moody and Peavo kept their wager alive with rule-making. Sundown, they agreed, would be when the sun’s light disappeared from the top of a hemlock that grew on a nearby hill. To be counted, a fish had to be seven inches long, and there was joking about how the measurement would be made—Moody saying seven inches was pretty much the length of his goober and Peavo countering that if they went by Moody’s goober, they’d be keeping minnows so small and skinny you could read a newspaper through them. Had to be a river cat. No bream or bass or trout or crappie or sucker fish. Any fish that got away after being pulled in and put on the stringer still counted-even if the stringer slipped from its tie-off or if a turtle made a meal of the fish. No help from Taylor, not even to string the fish. Noah had to do it all on his own.