Who we is....part whatever

I ain't talkin' "Haul the loaded bass boat down to the lake and smack the water with plastic baits until your arm's sore fishin". I'm talkin' kick back on the river bank and dip a worm or cricket or crawfish or minnow off the end of a cane pole fishin'.

Fishin', by Gawd.

Remmel Dam is the spillway between Lake Catherine and the continuing Quachita River. When they'd open that puppy up after spring rains the river side would be frothing with catfish and bluegill, alligator gar, smallmouth bass, everything. And that's about when grandma would look up and say:

"Yoo kids load up yer granpa's truck. We's goin' fishin'. Git now."

Six or eight cousins would thrash and bungle the poles and cricket traps and minnow buckets, grinning like shit-eatin' sheep. We're goin' to the river! Grandma would tear down the old highways in that old '63 Chevy, fishing gear and kids dangling out the back like something out of a Steinbeck novel. You just can't have good retarded fun like that these days.

It was always the same drill when we got there:

"Johnny, fetch them lawn chairs!"

"Jimbo, don't you dare spill that minner bucket!"

"Cathy, git my snuff out the glove box!"

"You kids watch out fer moccasins, hear!? Steve-bo, you watch out fer these kids!"

We were already doing all that, but she still had to bark out anyway.

"Wayne, go over thar in that mud bank and dig us some worms!"

Wayne was the sixth of grandma's ten children… my uncle. When he was an infant his brother Herman was rocking him in grandma's old rocker in front of the pot-bellied wood stove - I guess a little too vigorously – and dropped him headfirst onto it. Wayne's brain quit developing after about the age of 3. Herman always blamed himself, even though the doctors claimed they were 90% certain Wayne had been born that way. It was kinda fun having a twenty-five-year-old uncle behaving like he was three. We thought he was cool, other than the drooling every now and then.



So Wayne rambled off with an old coffee can to dig for worms, and the rest of us set to unraveling fishing line and bumping into each other. Grandma plopped down in her lawn chair about 20 yards downstream…we new better than to try to fish near her. The last one to get up in her fishing space found out that a cane pole can double as a damn good switch. And boy could that woman administer a switchin'.

Just a couple minutes later I heard thrashing around in the tall weeds behind us, by the mud bank Wayne had gone to. We all turned to see Wayne loping out of the weeds to grandma, blubbering, holding one hand to his chest and the coffee can in the other.

"Wayne, what in the world is wrong with you, boy?"

We all scampered over to see what was up. Grandma had Wayne's free hand in hers, looking it over. It was purple and swollen and covered with tiny holes. Wayne sniffed, "Mama, them worms bites."

I grabbed the coffee can. It was half full of baby moccasins.