The cardboard box sitting on my oilcloth kitchen table smelled like damp cedar and stale pipe tobacco, the kind of scent that belongs in a Michigan garage rather than an old farmhouse kitchen in East Tennessee. My thumb caught on the gray packing tape Elena had crisscrossed over the flaps, slicing it open with the little pearl-handled pocketknife our father had carried in his bib overalls until the day he died.
I didn’t rush. A man seventy-two years old learns pretty quickly that hurrying through a package doesn’t change what’s waiting inside of it, and whatever was packed away in that brown cardboard had traveled six hundred miles to find me after thirty years of silence. When the top flaps fell back, I saw the olive-drab paint first, chipped at the corners where the steel had rubbed against the bed of an old Ford pickup, and the rusty brass latch that always stuck if you didn’t press it just right on the left side. It was Bobby’s old tackle box, the one he had traded a two-shot Remington to a boy down at the creek for when we were fourteen, and the moment I laid my palm against the cool tin lid, the thirty-year gap between us felt less like a chasm and more like a door I’d simply refused to open.
I carried the box over to the kitchen table and set it down right beside the tin can where I keep my spare spark plugs and wire nuts, though my hands felt heavy and clumsy in a way they hadn’t when I was bucking square bales back in July. The kitchen was quiet except for the electric refrigerator humming in the corner and the slow, steady drip of the kitchen faucet that I’d been meaning to put a new washer in since the first frost. Outside the wavy glass of the window, the sun was dropping low behind the ridge, throwing long gray shadows across the side pasture where the tall fescue was going to seed because my knees weren’t what they used to be when it came to climbing up on the tractor deck. I looked down at the brass latch, my fingers hesitating for a second as the memory of 1994 came rushing back with the sharp, uninvited sting of woodsmoke in the eyes.
I had sold our father’s John Deere B to a scrap dealer from over in Morristown for eighteen hundred dollars cash, every single cent going straight toward tin and roofing nails to keep the hay barn from caving in during that wet spring, never once stopping to think that the red iron belonged just as much to Bobby as it did to me.
He had driven down from Lansing in that primer-spotted Dodge Dart three days after the sale, his boots kicking up red dust as he pulled up by the horse trough without so much as a wave. I remember him standing out there in the middle of the empty shed where the tractor tires had left twin black rings in the dirt, his arms crossed over his chest like he was holding himself together against a cold wind that only he could feel. I walked out from under the lean-to with a grease rag in my hand, ready to tell him about the rafters and the dry rot, but he didn’t give me the chance to get my tongue around the words.
He just stood there looking at the vacant floor space where the drawbar used to rest, his jaw working side to side before he finally looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘You could have called.’ That was the last sentence we ever spoke to one another, thirty years of birthdays and holidays and Christmases swallowed up by pride and stubbornness until the telephone line between us rusted right through.
I clicked the brass latch of the tackle box, and it popped open with that familiar, dry snap that sounded exactly like it used to back when we sat on the bank of the creek behind the old mill, baiting our hooks with dough balls and talking about the trucks we were going to buy when we turned sixteen. Inside the top tray, among the tangled snarls of red plastic worms and Jitterbugs with rusted treble hooks, lay two fresh, stiff pieces of heavy cardstock that didn’t belong in a fisherman’s kit from the last century. They were non-resident fishing licenses issued by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, both of them printed out crisp and clean for the upcoming spring season, smelling faintly of brand-new printer ink. My name was written on the first one in Elena’s careful, looping cursive, but the second one, right beside it, bore Bobby’s name in a hand that had grown shaky and uneven at the edges, like he had fought every single stroke of the pen just to keep the letters straight.
I picked them up together, holding the two blue cards side by side in my palm, and my throat went tight and dry because I knew without looking closer that he had bought them both at the same counter, on the same Tuesday afternoon, before his heart finally gave out in January.
Tucked right underneath the top metal tray, resting against a bundle of old snelled hooks in a yellowed paper packet, was a folded piece of lined notebook paper torn out of a spiral-bound ledger. I pulled it out slowly, my thumb catching on the rough, ragged edge where someone had ripped it away from the wire binding in a hurry. It was Bobby’s handwriting, unmistakably his, though the loops were smaller now, cramped and leaning hard to the left like he was writing while the car was moving or while his breath was running short. I unfolded it on the oilcloth table under the warm yellow glow of the overhead pendant lamp, my glasses sliding a little down the bridge of my nose as I leaned in close to read the words he had left behind. The note was short, only two sentences written with a blue ballpoint pen that had skipped a little on the crossbar of the T’s, but it hit me harder than any fist ever could have when we were boys fighting behind the milk house.
It said, ‘I got the tags for the river. Let’s call it even.’ And just like that, thirty years of righteousness and bruised pride evaporated into the kitchen air, leaving me sitting there in the quiet with a dead man’s handwriting and a rusty green tin box.
I didn’t move for a long time, just staring at those seven words while the old house settled around me with a series of small, familiar pops and groans in the floor joists. The sun slipped entirely behind the ridge outside, turning the sky from pale orange to a deep, bruised purple that signaled the first real cold snap of late autumn coming down from the mountains. I thought about Bobby sitting at some kitchen table up there in Michigan, probably looking out through a frosted window at snow he didn’t have the strength to shovel anymore, thinking about the bend in the creek where we used to catch smallmouth bass on hot August afternoons. He hadn’t called me, and I hadn’t called him, but somewhere underneath all those miles and all those stubborn years, he had decided that an eighteen-hundred-dollar tractor wasn’t worth losing the only person left on this earth who remembered what our mother’s kitchen smelled like on baking day. He had carried that old grudge around just like I had, but while I was busy convincing myself that he was the one who walked away first, he was quietly buying two fishing licenses for a river we hadn’t stood beside since we were boys with grease behind our ears.
The kitchen was nearly dark now, the corners swallowed up in shadows except for the small pool of light under the pendant lamp where the green tackle box sat open like a confession. I reached out and touched the edge of Bobby’s license, feeling the slick plastic coating under my calloused finger, and I realized how much energy I had spent over the decades keeping that old anger warm in my chest. Whenever someone asked about Bobby down at the feed store or over at the county co-op, I’d always just shake my head and say he took up with the auto plants and forgot where he came from, making myself out to be the forsaken brother left behind to tend the dirt. It was a comfortable story to tell yourself when you didn’t want to admit that you were just as proud and just as hard-headed as the man who drove away in that primer-spotted Dodge Dart. The truth was simpler and uglier than that, because pride is a poor substitute for a brother, and nineteen-ninety-four was a long time to stay mad over a piece of red iron that was probably rotting in a scrap yard outside of Knoxville right now anyway.
I stood up from the table, my knees giving a dull, familiar crack that echoed in the empty room, and walked over to the telephone hanging on the wall by the pantry door. I picked up the receiver, listening to the steady dial tone for a few seconds before I punched in the number Elena had written on the small sympathy card that came tucked inside the shipping box. It rang three times before a woman’s voice answered, soft and tired, carrying that flat Midwestern accent that always sounded a little out of place when it talked about things happening down here in our hills. “Hello?” she said, and I had to clear my throat twice before the words would come out right through the tightness in my chest. “Elena,” I said, keeping my voice steady by sheer force of will. “It’s Arthur. The box got here safe an hour ago.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line, just the sound of distant traffic or wind blowing against a Michigan screen door, before she let out a long, shaky breath that told me she had been waiting by that phone all day. “I’m glad, Arthur,” she whispered softly. “He kept those licenses in his wallet for three weeks before he went into the hospital.
He talked about driving down south as soon as the dogwoods started blooming. He wanted you to have them.”
We didn’t talk long, just a minute or two about the weather up north and how the arthritis had been acting up in my left shoulder ever since the first frost hit the bottomlands. She told me Bobby hadn’t suffered much at the end, that he had gone to sleep in his own bed with the radio playing softly on the nightstand, and I thanked her for taking the trouble to pack up his old gear and send it down the long road to Tennessee. When we hung up the phone, the kitchen felt different, less heavy somehow, like the air had finally cleared after a summer thunderstorm had rolled over the ridge and washed the dust off the corn leaves. I walked back to the table and looked down at the tackle box again, tracing the scratched paint with the tip of my finger where Bobby’s name used to be written in black magic marker before the weather wore it clean off. He had always been better at fixing things than I was, whether it was carburetor linkages or stubborn lawnmower decks, but fixing a thirty-year silence was the hardest job either of us had ever tried to tackle.
The next morning came in cold and clear, with a hard skim of white frost glazing the top rails of the cattle pens and the dead weeds along the ditch bank. I didn’t make coffee right away like I usually did at five-thirty, but instead I walked over to the closet by the back door and pulled down my old canvas hunting coat that still smelled faintly of gun oil and marsh mud from years ago. I reached into the tackle box sitting on the kitchen table and slipped the two fishing licenses into my breast pocket right alongside a spare pocketknife and a packet of wooden matches. The metal latches of the box clicked shut with a sharp, crisp sound as I lifted it by the wire handle, the old wooden spools of line and heavy lead sinkers rattling around inside like dry bones in a box. I stepped out onto the porch, pulling my woolen cap down over my ears as the crisp morning air hit my face, and started walking down the old wagon track that leads past the rusted-out skeleton of the barn roof I built thirty years ago.
The grass was stiff under my boots, crunching down with every step I took as I headed away from the house and down toward the creek where the sycamores grow tall and white along the cut bank. It was the same path Bobby and I used to run down barefoot when we were ten years old, carrying our cane poles over our shoulders and arguing about whether red worms or crickets made better bait for the big redeyes hiding in the deep hole below the riffles. The sun was just clearing the top of the ridge now, spilling a pale, watery yellow light across the water and turning the riffles into a string of bright, dancing silver coins. I walked down to the water’s edge where the old flat rock sits half-submerged in the current, the place where we used to sit side by side until our pants got soaked through with river spray and the shadows stretched clear across the pasture. I set the green tackle box down on the dry moss at the base of the sycamore tree, letting the old metal settle into the earth just like it belonged there after all this time.
I opened the lid one last time, taking out both fishing licenses and sliding Bobby’s card right into the crevice between two smooth river stones at the water’s edge so the current wouldn’t carry it off before the spring thaw reached the valley. Then I sat down on the flat rock, my old joints complaining about the damp cold coming off the water, and laid my own license out flat on my knee where the morning sun could hit it. I reached into the box, pulled out a brass-bodied Spinner that Bobby had rigged up with a pork rind thirty years ago, and tied it onto my line with fingers that were stiff and clumsy against the nylon. I stood up, drew back the rod just like he taught me behind the milk house when we were boys, and cast the lure out into the dark, swirling water of the deep hole below the riffles.
The line whistled softly through the cold air, the little silver spinner landing with a clean, light splash right where the current breaks against the submerged sycamore root. I didn’t catch anything, and I didn’t really expect to on a frosty November morning with the leaves down and the fish lying deep in the mud, but as I stood there on the bank with the sun warming the back of my coat, I let out a long breath and finally called it even.
