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I dropped a ten on the table, along with the untouched pork, and left for Tennessee, the next few hours dribbling by beneath the drone of milled concrete pavement, the seconds marked by the metronome of expansion joints. Just inside the Tennessee state line, a state trooper pulled me over. When I explained my father was dying, he closed his book and told me to be careful. Then he gave me a ninety miles per hour escort through the next two counties.

He looked older than I had imagined, my father. The white of the hospital room and the glare of the lights made him even paler than normal, with the broken capillaries of too many bottles of Old Crow etched across his face like dendritic streams across craggy mountains. He was dying, the doctors had confirmed. A cancer was growing in his chest, liver and intestines. Surgery was not an option. It was only a matter of time. They offered a hospice. He chose to go home. I took him.

Two days later, he asked me to take him fishing. He said he’d watch me fish. He swore he was strong enough.

We drove past old haunts, old places where I had fished with him when I was a kid, back before he’d rediscovered the comfort that seemingly only a bottle of amber liquid could give. When we came to the river, he moaned with every jostle and bump of the truck on the rutted hog path down to the water. I stopped several times; each time he assured me he was fine, each time he cursed me and told me to “get on with it”. When we finally came to a stop, he spat blood on the grass as he exited the truck, pushing me away from helping him.

As I strung up my rod, I asked again if I could string him a rod.

“No, Jack. My days of fishin’, like most everythin’ else, is done. I’m a’ gonna sit up here and watch you, if you don’t mind,” he said with a voice so soft and weak, it cracked.

“I don’t mind”, I answered. Then I fished. God in Heaven smiled and I caught some dinkers, before bringing a really good fish to hand. I carried the good fish up the bank to let my father look at it and to touch it before I let put it back in its river home.

On the way home, he started talking. I pulled the truck over because his voice was so thin, I couldn’t hear him over the din of the tires.

“You know, I always thought you was a damned fool for fishin’ with that fly rod crap. I always thought you were tryin’ to show off, to show me that you was better’n me. And I damned sure thought you was full of sh*t for lettin’ your catch go. I always wondered why go to the trouble a’catchin’ a fish if all you was goin’ to do was to let it go? You always was different, Jack.”

I didn’t answer and started the car back onto the road. He grasped my elbow and told me to drive south, back towards a place we had lived when I was in the fifth grade, before I had been sent to live with my grandfather.

He slept the hour and a half that it took to get there and awoke, seemingly as if an internal alarm had gone off, just as we entered the town. I stopped the truck at a diner just outside of town; the diner had been there in 1966 when I was a kid and before my dad had taken up drinking. We had eaten there then…early morning breakfasts and late evening dinners before and after bird hunts and fishing trips.

“Do you remember this place, Dad?”, I asked as we sat down in a booth still upholstered in naugahyde that probably had been there in 1966 only I couldn’t remember. Can naugahyde last thirty years?

“Yeah, I remember. I remember bringin’ you here when you was just a pup. Remember those two setters we had…Jackson and Longstreet? Damn, they was some fine dogs”.

“Yessir! Yessir, they were the two best dogs I’ve ever seen.”

“Well, they weren’t that damned good, but they were fine. You’re mamma’s daddy gave ‘em to me. Only thing that man ever gave me that didn’t involve a butt-chewin’,” he muttered as he sipped the hot coffee that a blue eye-shadowed waitress had sat before him.

He sat silently for a time, not saying a thing; not acknowledging the plate of meat and two the waitress had set before him. I picked at my plate and watched him. He did not look like he should be out of bed, but I was not going to argue with him.

Then he looked up and stared at me, his eyes yellowd with jaundice and watery-weak.

“You never knew about this place, did you Jack?”

“What? What are you talking about? Of course I knew about this place. We ate here when I was a kid! You were just talking about it!”

“Not that, Godd*mmit!”

He paused for a minute and took a drink of his coffee.

“I never told you. I promised your mother I would never tell you. But I’m about to make myself a liar again,” he said, still staring at me, seemingly looking right through me.

“You never knew that I knew about the two moonshiners up there on the Knob, did you?”

When I was ten years old, I had gone fishing alone up on Gentry’s Knob. I had stumbled on two moonshiners and their still. They had beaten me black and blue and had threatened to kill my family if I told anyone what I had seen. Shortly thereafter, my mamma had sent me to live with my grandfather. I had never said a word about it and had refused to answer the questions my parents had asked about the bruises.

“I knew them bruises you carried didn’t come from no kid. I’d been in too many bar fights not to know what it looked like when a grown man beat on somebody. So I knew that you’d been beat up by at least one grown man, but I didn’t say nothin’ ‘cause I didn’t want your mamma to know. It was me that made your mamma send you off to your granddaddy’s”.

“I asked around to try to find out who it was that did that to you, but all I got was ‘mind your own milkin’’ talk. Then one night, I was sittin’ in here, havin’ a cup of coffee when I heard these two rednecks talkin’ too loud about some kid they was lookin’ for. It didn’t take long for me to figure it was the two that had done the beatin’ and it was you they was a’ lookin’ for. They must ‘ve gotten scared and had decided they needed to visit you again.”

“So I picked up the coffee pot off the hot plate on the counter and threw the coffee in the face of the one that was facin’ me. I swung back and cracked the pot on the head of the other. Those old steel pots hurt more than glass ones. Anyhow, I kind of went crazy and over did it, kickin’ and clawin’ and hittin’ em and all. The judge sent me to jail for fifteen days for destruction of property. Them two moonshiners got sent to federal prison up at Brushy Mountain. Seems they had a warrant out against ‘em for shootin’ at some of the Feds.”

I stared at him in wonder for I had never known. I had assumed they had sent me to live with my grandfather because I couldn’t get along anymore with my father. Sometimes... some things…you never know.

Two weeks later he died. I buried him where he’d asked – at the National Cemetery beneath the limbs of a great oak tree that had been a youngster when Grant and Sherman had passed this way more than a hundred and thirty years before. He’d asked me to say the eulogy and I had tried. I tried to tell the few who came about how my daddy had been at Omaha on D-Day and how he’d been a medic and how he’d dodged bullets and worse to try to save his fellow soldiers lives. I tried to tell about his time at Bastogne at Christmas 1944 and how he and his fellow troopers had been the bravest soldiers this country had ever produced. I tried to apologize for not loving my father as a son should, but the truth was, he wasn’t a lovable man and all those there knew it. I tried to say something about heroes and how our heroes are often flawed people who rise to courage when it is least expected. But I cried and I sobbed and the words wouldn’t come. I did mumble something about how it is that sometimes we don’t know who the heroes are in our lives until it’s too late.

My friend Eugene “Turtle” Wallace caught me when my knees buckled and led me back to the car.

A few weeks more and I finally snuck off to go fishing. When I opened the metal fly box to retrieve a fly, I saw a picture of me fighting the fish that I had caught while my dad had watched from the bank more than a month before. On the back of the picture was scrawled, in my father’s hand: “This is my son - in whom I am well pleased.”

© Doug Gilmore 2003

About the Author...Doug Gilmore of Adaire, GA, was instrumental in the founding of GOTC gatherings and their support of Casting for Recovery. Besides fly fishing, Doug enjoys bird hunting, woodworking and fine scotch.