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Fiction Short Story

Uncle Joe

by Grady T. Kirbo

Jimmy Joe Jeeter was known around our little town as Uncle Joe because to most folks, he was a member of the family. He always had a pocketful of pennies that he gave to us ragamuffins so we could buy gum balls down at the five and dime. If a man was down on his luck, Uncle Joe would always show up at the door with a bag of turnips and vegetables that he claimed were just about to spoil in his cellar and damn if he knew what to do with them and would you please kindly help him out by taking them off his hands.

For the better part of his sixty years he had lived on a little scrub of a farm, growing potatoes and corn and making moonshine. It was a known fact that every sippin' man in three counties would begin to get dry in the mouth at the very mention of Joe's honey dew water. One reason that his product was so revered is that Uncle Joe never made more than he needed to keep food on the table and a roof over his head that didn't leak. People always seem to want things they can't have and Uncle Joe's moonshine was just that sorta thing. His stuff had a certain mystique about it that made people in Omaha treasure Joe's squeezin's like city folk swoon over a rare bottle of the finest wine. Uncle Joe never cared much for money, but he did have a fair measure of practicality in him. Making a little 'shine now and then took the pressure off of Joe so he didn't have to work eighteen hours a day on his worn-out land just to get by. Making mash also left him time to do what he loved most in life; going down to the Chatahoochi river and getting a line wet. A better man for fishing never walked the earth.

There are relatively few masters at anything in life. Uncle Joe was a master. He wasn't just really damn good, he was a member that elite segment of society who can immerse themselves in their particular calling and bring forth new dimensions that others only dream of.

His philosophy was that being a fishing man was sorta like being a preacher; you have to rustle up a powerful lot of convincing to get man or fish to take the bait. The only difference was that the preacher man did a lot of whoopin' and hollerin' to get the job done whereas Uncle Joe was content to do a little subtle convincing. But, as Uncle Joe used to say, "bait is bait." I guess the important thing is whether or not you reel them in.

Uncle Joe took me fishing now and again. He generally liked to head out in the early evening with a mess of worms fresh and wiggling that he kept on hand if the largemouths were a little sluggish and the bream were biting instead. Then he'd take off a steady clip down to the riverside where he kept his old wooden fishing dingy. Joe never said a word while we were hunting for a spot; all we heard was just the chug, chug of the small Evinrude pushing us along. We wore lazy straw hats and sipped on lukewarm Cokes to wash out the dry from our mouths. When Uncle Joe located just what he was looking for, his eyes would narrow and he'd grunt to himself as he cut off the engine and slipped the anchor over the side.

The Chatahoochee River was always alive at this time of the evening. The feeding fish made perfect circles on the water that looked like falling raindrops. Occasionally a Kingfisher would swoop down to pick up a minnow for dinner. Near the shore, the bullfrogs would intermittently croak to get warmed up for the evening's serenade.

Uncle Joe would grunt and point out a likely spot for me. "Just lay your ol' jitterbug right close to them water lilies and reel it back slow and steady," he'd say. "Remember to take your rod back nice and easy to about two o'clock and swing through till she's pointin' right at the spot you want to hit, with your finger on the reel just a smidgen so's you don't get yer line all fouled up." Then I was on my own. After a while, if I had hooked a couple, I would watch Joe work. The rod extended from his shoulder to the very tip as he rippled it back and forth. His eyes would half close as he cast as if to feel the essence of the cast and to see where he wanted the lure to plop with a gentle splash and then just sit there for a moment before he began to wobble the jitter-bug with his distinctive frog walk across the water and around the lily pads. Uncle Joe could lay a jitter-bug next to a lily pad gentle as a falling leaf and wobble it back over the water with that pluga, pluga, pluga sound that drove the large mouth bass crazy. He mumbled, grunted and talked under his breath with every cast as if to reassure his quarry that biting his hook was pre-ordained and therefore inescapable. With every success, he would solemnly gaze at his fish and give it a benedictory nod before attaching it to his stringer.

Along about dusk, Uncle Joe switched to a fly rod so's to go along with the evening feeding of the river fish on insects on the water. We were about 15 minutes into the fly fishing when without so much as a howdy do, Uncle Joe hollered out, "God damn, boy, get the net, get the net, Jesus Almighty, get the net! I just sat there mortified. Uncle Joe cussin'? He led the choir at church. But the reason was on me in a flash: Uncle Joe had a fish, a big fish, a goddamn really big fish. We could make it up to the Lord a little later. Right now, there was a big mother of a fish to catch. I got the net. This fish, however, had no intention of getting into the net. He was fifteen yards out, and doing the fish equivalent of the New York Rockettes fish dance. He burst from the water in a cascade of water and strength, undulating back and forth on his tail and shaking his head as if to say, that we weren't getting out of there alive. Then he dropped into the water and made a run for the border. The low limbs of the trees at the bank of the river loomed and he intended to wrap the line up and worry about the jitterbug in his mouth later. Joe's line whined as it stripped off the reel and his thumb began seeping a little blood as he struggled to keep the line from getting fouled during the run.

But this fish didn't know Joe. Ever so slowly he tightened the drag on the reel until the reel couldn't take it anymore and neither could the fish. He didn't make that tree-lined border and the Calvary was moving in. Back and forth the big bass swam. He danced and shook some more, he made five more runs coming close as you could spit on the trees on his last try. Forty-five minutes had gone by and Uncle Joe's arms were trembling in pain. Then, tragically, almost, he was finished. He tugged and pulled on his way in, but we had him and I had the net and with a plunge, had him in the net. Getting that bass in the boat was another thing. With a final shake and his great weight, I toppled half over the side and he was almost gone again. But Uncle Joe had me by my breeches and with what was left of HIS strength, hauled me and the fish back in our little boat. My God, he was big. "Uncle Joe, look'a here. This is the biggest bass in the whole goddamn history of Omaha, or I bet even Georgia, or the whole world," I said grinning from ear to ear. Joe grabbed the net and then hit me with his fishing pole. "Don't take the Lord's name in vain, boy, unless you want to burn." I figure that Joe was all cussed out, and one good heartfelt goddamn on his part was all the fish or he, deserved in life.

There was no doubt about this fish. It was big; splendiferously big; big enough to feed everybody at the First Baptist on Easter Sunday. The was the fish of a lifetime of fishing, one you could brag about, lie about, claim as your own fish for the next forty years as it grew in size, stature and importance in the folklore of rural Georgia. Ah, what a fish.

"Whatcha gonna do with him," I said as I stumbled over my seat, and upset the fishing poles and tackle box, landing with my face on Uncle Joe's boots. I was not humiliated. We had the world's biggest large mouth bass.

"Gonna weigh him." Uncle Joe took out his scale and hooked on the bass. "God Da.... I mean, praise God, twenty-three and one half pounds. I never seen the likes."

Then everything fell still. Uncle Joe just sat there, every now and then putting the bass in the fish holder filled with water so the big fish wouldn't die, the mosquitoes backed off for a moment, and I stared at Joe and the fish wondering what on earth Joe was doing. Joe handed the fish to me. "Hold him for a minute."

Joe rummaged around in his sack and produced a small Kodak camera. "Gonna take your picture," and he did, me and that fish.

"Ok, gimme the fish." "Are you gonna have him stuffed, Joe? Gonna put him on the wall, show him to everybody in town, send him to the museum in Atlanta, gonna do a little braggin, gonna, gonna??? How 'bout I take your picture? Gonna eat him on Sunday?"

Joe didn't say a word. Suddenly he eased the big bass over the side, holding him by the gills so he could breath. All of a sudden, the fish give a slip of his tail and was gone, I mean GONE!!!! What?

"Looka here boy, not everything belongs to us. That was the Lord's fish. He must be the oldest fish in the Chatahoochie River. He sure don't belong to us." With that we started the engine and headed home.

I still have that picture. I look at it when I'm alone sometimes, to remember Uncle Joe, to find a little peace, and to make sense of the world when things seem to be just a little too crazy to understand.