River Girl Read Free

channel of the lake itself, winding off toward the north and northeast. It was about two hundred yards wide with dead snags and cypress clumps here and there and dense timber hanging out over the east bank. There were occasional weed beds and I knew the bass would be feeding in them around sunset, but I had four whole days and wanted to go on up toward the head of the lake, farther than I’d ever been before.
    Two or three miles up I met another boat coming down, with two men in it. They waved and held up a string of bass, then they were gone behind and I was alone again. At times the channel was so narrow the trees almost met overhead, and it was cool in the shade with the breeze blowing in my face. At other places it widened out into long flats full of dead snags and stagnant, dark water, not muddy but discolored from rotting swamp vegetation, with the lowering sun slanting brassy and hot across it. Now and then a grindle would roll just under the surface, making a big, spreading ring on the water, and two or three times I saw big gars swimming by very close to the top. Innumerable arms and sloughs wound off on both sides into the timber, but I knew the main channel here and stuck to it. In another half hour, however, I was beyond the country I was familiar with and was going only on a sense of direction and sticking always to what looked like the larger channel.
    It was late when I rounded a long turn and saw just the place where I wanted to camp. The lake was about a hundred yards wide here, with an open bank under a towering wall of oaks on the right, and dead snags and big patches of pads along the left. The sun was gone now and the water lay still and flat like a dark mirror except for a boiling rise where a bass smashed at something near one of the snags. I cut the motor and started drifting in, and silence seemed to pour out of all the vast solitude and came rolling over me like a wave. I worked fast in the daylight there was left, stringing the trot line between two of the old snags and baiting it with the liver I had brought, then went ashore and built a fire to cook supper. After I had eaten I washed the dishes and sat down on the bedroll in the darkness, smoking and looking at the fire. The big bullfrogs had opened up their chorus and I could hear the whipporwills’ lonely crying up in the swamp, reminding me of the nights I had camped on the lake when I was a boy. The Judge and I had fished a lot in those days. My mother was dead, and there had been just the two of us for a long time. He taught me to use the fly rod, how to drop a cork bug forty feet away beside a sunken log and to set the hook when the surface heaved, exploding with the strike, and how to release a bass after it was whipped. He never kept them. Tomorrow, I thought, I might catch one the old boy had in the net and then released to fight some other day, and then I knew it wasn’t likely. He’d died six years ago, while I was overseas. It would have to be a very old bass to have fought the Judge.
    I took off my shoes and clothes and lay down on the blankets, but it was a long time before I got to sleep. I kept thinking of the fights with Louise and the endless bickering over money. Nothing had seemed to have any point to it after I came back from the Army, I had just seemed to drift aimlessly, taking the path of least resistance. I was twenty-three when I came back, and for a while I’d thought of going back to school under the GI plan, for I had finished two years at the state university before the war, but that had gradually fizzled out when I started going with Louise. Then Buford offered me a job as deputy as a favor to some people who had been friends of the Judge, and before long Louise and I were married. We had gone into debt for the house, and then there was a new car, a Chevrolet, and before that was two years old we bought the Olds. It wasn’t too hard, after a while, to start taking money from the same places Buford was taking