Grazing the Dead - Part I

copyright 2005 by Blake Lamar

Grandpa was old. Old people die. Benjamin was supposed to understand that. He didn’t understand it when he was four years old and his father left, but now he was twelve and he knew that after you’ve been on this Earth a long while, some important part of you would wear down and fail. And you would die.

But Ben wasn’t ready for Grandpa to die. Grandpa was going to take him down to the river and show him how to catch a real catfish with his bare hands.

“It’s like petting a baby kitten,” his grandpa had told him. “Be real gentle and caress its belly. Let it think your hand is a soft bit of mud. Then when you feel a gentle current of water brush against your skin like a warm breath, plunge your hand into the gills behind his head and pull him out. But you have to feel him first. If you think he’s too big, just let him be. No since letting him drag you under the water with him. Kids older than you have drowned in this river. And don’t listen to their friends who say they were just having a swim. The river’s too shallow most of the year that any normal kid couldn’t stand on his own two feet, and too raging the rest of the year to be dumb enough to try and swim in it.”

He had been excited to go noodling with Grandpa in the river, but he also had nightmares of being taken under the water by some giant catfish. And he was afraid of losing his hand inside them. But Grandpa used to do it all the time when he was a kid. So it must be okay.

He was sitting in his room crying, now. The funeral was three days ago and he still woke up each morning wondering if Grandpa would be sitting in the living room asking if he was ready to go. It was summertime and he didn’t have to worry about school so they could spend all day at the river. Even if he was too afraid to stick his hand into the deep holes underneath the bank, Grandpa could teach him how to weave a net from the tall grass that grew beside the river, and they could seine minnows or try to scoop up some crawdads. Above all they could sit there and Benjamin would get a glimpse of what it was like to have a father around to do things with.

Disclaimer: This is a rough draft with a quick brush up. Normally my rough drafts don't end up this clean, so you are witnessing something quite rare, dear reader. I've never gone noodling before, so I could be quite wrong on the mechanics of it. My apologies.