I was thirty-two years old and still thought Loftus could talk to fish. The last time I saw the old man was at the camp in Holly Springs in the summer of ’81. It was a Saturday morning and I was taking the two-lane black-top south from Memphis, the one that got Mr. Peabody in so much trouble with the governor. The air conditioning was broken, and I was riding with the windows down like I used to in Daddy’s ’56 Chevy.

My shirt was stuck to my back and driblets of sweat trickled down my rib cage. Through the cracked windshield I could almost see steam rising off the asphalt. Buster, my English bulldog, sat beside me. His tongue hung out the side of his mouth and he looked over at me with bloodshot eyes as he passed a flatus of odorous methane.

“Damn good thing the windows are open, Buster!”

When I got to Holly Springs, I stopped at Big Ed’s convenience store and bait shop, the one that pumped Shell gasoline. I filled my tank and then went inside leaving Buster in the car. I bought a box of saltines, a big wedge of cheddar, and a six pack of Bud. Loftus liked sardines, so as much as I hated the smell, I got him a tin.

As we left Big Ed’s, Buster moved over and hung his head out the passenger window. The gravel road to the camp was full of potholes and my car’s shocks weren’t the best. I hit my head on the headliner four or five times and by the time we got to the creek, I had a damn headache.

I stopped in the middle of the ford and opened the door so I could watch the water rush under. The last time I’d visited the camp I couldn’t get across because the creek was swollen tight as a tick.

When I pulled up to the cabin, the Beagles were going crazy. Buster backed away from the window and sat his fat ass on my lap. Daddy and Loftus keep twenty of the little dogs in a pen out back. They used them for rabbit hunting in the fall. Loftus knew all their names but I don’t think Daddy knew but one, a female called Tizzy.

I didn’t see the old man anywhere, so I honked the horn a few times. When he didn’t materialize, I went into the cabin. It was a two room affair with a tin roof and a small kitchen. I forgot to duck when I walked in and caught my cap on a fish lure hanging from the ceiling. There must have been two hundred of them hanging upside down like bats in a cave.

The place smelled of piss and mildew. That’s because Loftus kept a rusty fruit-juice can next to his bed so he wouldn’t have to tread through the house when he needed to pass his water at night. At his age, that was a minimum of three or four times.

Figuring Loftus was at the dock, I walked down the path with Buster trailing me. The trees were thick in that part of the camp and sunlight filtered through the leaves and hit the ground like spotlights. It kind of reminded me of the way Jimmy Durante closed his TV show.

Every fallen branch looked like it could be a copperhead and that always gave me the willies. The more I thought about those creatures the more my heart pounded. I picked up my pace and by the time I reached the dock, I was wheezing and gasping for breath. Buster was too, for he’d had to run to keep up with me.

I could see the old man sitting on the dock, his feet dangling over the side. Turning toward the sound of me coming through the trees, Loftus squinted against the sun and said, “Cornell, that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said trying to catch my breath.

As I walked out onto the dock I saw that he had a rod and reel in his hand. His float was bobbing up and down a little from the breeze. No sign of a fish on the end of that line.

“What you out of breath for, boy?” he asked.

“Thought I saw a damn copperhead on the path.”

“Ain’t no copperheads in them woods. There was, I’d know it. I’ve got the sense.”

“What is it exactly?”

“It’s what a man feels inside. How he communicates with the critters.”

God only knew how old Loftus was. Even Loftus himself didn’t know because he’d been born before the turn of the century when they didn’t keep good records in the rural areas. I’d always figured he was in his nineties. A sheen of sweat glistened on his ebony skin and the deep furrows on his face reminded me of a freshly plowed cotton patch. The iris of his eyes had yellow rings around them and when he looked at me I got the feeling he could see right into my soul.

“How long you had it, Loftus?”

“I’ve had the sense as long as I can remember. My momma had it, too, but not as strong as me.”
            I sat beside the old man and dangled my feet off the edge of the dock, and he told me two or three stories about his special sense. Stories he’d told me the last time I was here and the time before that and so on. You know how old people are.

“Damn, Loftus, all that copperhead talk got me so worked up I forgot I had this sack of saltines and cheddar. I’ve got some beer, too,” I said.

“You bring me some sardines?”

“Sure did.”

“Let’s go sit under one of them shade trees,” he said. “Damn if it ain’t hot enough out here on this dock to fry an egg.”

I helped him up and he pulled his line out of the water and set the rod on the rough wood planks. We wandered back to the bank and I helped him down off the dock and steadied him as we walked over some rocks to a big maple tree. The old man limped a little and I figured his arthritis was acting up again.

We sat on a soft patch of mass, and I pulled out a Bud for Loftus, wiped off the top with the heel of my hand and pulled the tab for him. He spit out a wad of Beechnut and it landed in the water and sat there like a big bug.

Loftus rolled the top off those damn sardines and I thought I’d gag. Then he threw them in his mouth one after the other until the whole tin was empty. He didn’t even bother to wash them down with the beer. I sliced off several pieces of cheddar and handed them along with a handful of saltines to the old man.

While we ate I glanced out at the lake. The wind was calm, the water clear, and the sun bright. You could see some good sized small mouth bass darting back and forth just under the surface.

“Were you fishing for small mouth?” I asked.

“Small mouth ain’t biting this time of year. I taught you that and when to fish for catfish, too,” he said with a tad of irritation in his voice.

“I don’t care as much about hunting and fishing as you and Daddy,” I said.

“You ought to pay more attention to critters. You can’t figure people out too good if you don’t know nothing about critters. Take those small mouth. See how peaceful they is, swimming around in that shallow water?”

I nodded.

“They know what’s going on around them. We make one move toward that water, they go deep.”

“Anything that goes near the water will scare them off. That’s no big deal,” I said.

Loftus pulled a bag of Beechnut out of a pocket in his overalls. He plucked out a few strands of the tobacco that was the color of his long fingers, rolled it into a ball and stuck it in his cheek like a squirrel.

He sat quietly for a few minutes staring out across the lake. “I’m going to prove a point to you, Cordell. I’m going to show you those small mouth has got brains just like you and me.”

“I’ll take your word. If you say it’s so, then it is.”

“Go up to the cabin and let all the Beagles out except Tizzy. Then you come back here and see I’m right. You listening?”

“I’m listening.”

“Them dogs drink here every day when I walk them. You let them out, they’ll make a beeline for this spot. The small mouth know them dogs and won’t pay no attention to them. When you go back and let Tizzy out and she comes down here those bass is going deep.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Your Daddy took Tizzy to the vet a week ago and she just come back yesterday. She’ll be a stranger for awhile.”

“You expect me to believe those fish are going to be scared off by one dog out of twenty?”

“Sure do. I’ll tell you something else. Your Daddy was talking about taking Tizzy to the vet for a couple of days. When we went looking for her, neither one of could find her. She’d done crawled under the cabin. She knew what your Daddy was going to do.”

I could tell Loftus was dead serious as we say in Mississippi. So to pacify the old man I went back through that snake infested woods two times; once to let the Beagles out and a second time to set Tizzy free. The small mouth went deep the minute she walked up to the water’s edge.

Loftus didn’t say a word, he just grinned from ear to ear. What teeth weren’t missing were either broken or so darkened by tobacco that I wondered if they’d ever been white.

Suddenly, the old man poked me in the ribs and said, “Look at that fool. Casting with that rod like he knowed what he was doing. Right in front of your Daddy’s dock, too.”

I glanced out at the end of the dock and saw a man sitting in what looked like a spanking new aluminum john boat. He had a casting rod with a Shakespeare reel in his right hand.

Loftus got up and steadying himself on my shoulder, limped off toward the dock. By the time I got there, Loftus had asked the man something but gotten no reply.

“I say what you fishing for, mister?” Loftus asked in a shrill old man’s voice trying to stretch his words across the twenty yards that separated the two men.

“Crappie.”

“Any luck?”

“Not yet.”

“You got to talk real nice to crappie or they won’t come to dinner!” Loftus yelled.

 I could tell the man was trying to ignore Loftus by pretending not to hear the old man.

Loftus picked up his rod and took the spinner off and replaced it with a night crawler he pulled out of a fruit-juice can. He threaded the creature onto a hook and added an additional lead sinker.

He cast his line out next to the man’s boat and started chanting. “Here Mr. Crappie, see what Loftus has for your dinner, a nice fresh, juicy worm. Come on, boy.”As the old man yelled at the fish he hit the dock rhythmically with the heel of his brogan.

I could feel my face flush from embarrassment as I stood beside Loftus with my mouth open like a Venus flytrap. The man in the boat looked at us like we were crazy.

The old man kept yelling at the fish and hitting the dock with his shoe. Suddenly, the line went taut and Loftus let the fish run a bit before reeling him in. When he lifted the crappie out of the water it looked to be at least three pounds.

I’d swear on a stack of Bibles, I watched Loftus pull ten crappie from in front of the man’s boat, from behind it, and once right from under it all the time talking to those damn fish as if they were his personal friends.

The man in the boat shook his head, started his outboard, and roared off madder than a wet hen. Loftus doubled over with laughter and I thought for a moment the old man was going to fall off the dock.

About two months later, Loftus went to that great fishing ground in the sky. Daddy threw him one hell of a funeral. Folks came to pay their respects, from as far away as Memphis, Little Rock, and Jackson. Most had hunted and fished with the old man at the Holly Springs camp.

Daddy and I were sitting on the dock after the service sipping on beers and dangling our legs over the side. A big crappie cleared the water a few yards off shore and flipped his tail.

Grinning from ear to ear, Daddy said, “Old Loftus used to come out here every day at one o’clock. He’d hit the heel of his brogan on the dock and feed the fish, all the time yelling, ‘Come here, little fish!’ Damn if it didn’t work every time.”

 

Mike Glasscock