“Damn,” Peavo said in a grumbling voice, “them fish better taste good.” Then, to Noah: “Well, boy, I guess what they say about you might have been right. I know some boys that come out here yesterday, standing right where you been standing, and they didn’t get a nibble. I don’t know nobody else who could’ve done what you just did. Maybe Jesus, but that’s all.”

The drive from the river in Taylor’s car was Taylor-noisy. He gloated in taking his five dollars from Peavo and Moody, and he crowed joyfully over witnessing what certainly was a fishing miracle worth exploring for future benefit. No reason to worry, now, he said to Noah. Peavo and Moody would be talking and the talk would spread like a flash fire in a field of dry grass, and there would be a parade of people stopping by the store for no reason other than to see Noah in person—which would slow down the painting, but that would not matter. They would feel obligated to purchase something, like buying a ticket to see a picture show with a star actor. Business would boom, but it would be small change compared to what they could make on the river. Or on the road, Taylor added, his eyes shining with the sudden thought. If they did it right—if Taylor went along with Noah to handle the business end of things, to talk up Noah’s gift—they could make more money than either of them had ever seen, just by traveling around, place to place.

“Nothing gets to a man’s pride faster than somebody saying they can outfish him or outhunt him,” Taylor declared. “We’ll have more showdowns than Wyatt Earp.”

Noah listened patiently, and with amusement, and listening made him remember the story of a man in Elbert County during the depression. The man—Abel Cromer was his name—did not have a job, but he had a large family needing to be fed and clothed, and the sharecropping of a dry summer had not made ends meet. One night he had a vision-dream, the story went, and the next day he took some red clay from a gully and made a kind of dye out of it with water; then he applied it to his skin and to the skin of his wife and children, tinting them a pale red. Remembering his vision-dream, he went off in his secondhand model-T Ford to travel the South, claiming to be a descendent of Cherokee Indians. Made stops at schools along the way, announcing that for a little change and goods, he and his Indian family would give lessons about the way Indians used to live. The history he gave was lively, but made up. So were the songs and war whoops and rain dances. And the way to make arrowheads and to skin buffalo and to throw up tepees. All of it, made up. Still, a few years later he had returned to Elbert County a man of moderate means, and had purchased the farm he once worked as a sharecropper. Went by the name Indian Abel. Even had it put on his tombstone.