Darren said to be up by six and I was up by five-thirty, lying in the dark listening for him to move around downstairs, not wanting to be the one still asleep when he came to get me. When I heard the toilet flush I got up and dressed in the clothes I'd laid out the night before, an old sweatshirt of my mother's with the sleeves rolled twice, and went down to the kitchen where he was already standing at the counter with two mugs poured, one coffee and one milk with just enough coffee in it to call it something else.
He didn't say much over that. He looked at the window a while, at the dark still sitting over the yard, and said the fish would be up early feeding before the sun got too high, and that was reason enough to be up ourselves. I drank what was in my mug too fast and it burned a little going down and I didn't say anything about that either.
We went out back of the house first for worms, Darren carrying a coffee can with the plastic lid punched full of holes and a flashlight held under one arm, the beam swinging low and yellow over the grass. He showed me where to dig, along the shaded side of the garden where the ground stayed damp, and I got down on my knees in the wet grass and turned the dirt over with a hand trowel, the worms coming up pale and quick, disappearing back into the loose soil if you didn't grab them fast. My knees went through with cold from the ground before I'd caught more than four or five. Darren dug beside me without kneeling, standing bent at the waist, and had twice what I had in half the time, dropping them into the can with the dirt still clinging to them.
Red clay came up in a few of the deeper turns of dirt, that rust-orange colour the Island's known for, staining the creases of my knuckles the way it stains everything it touches, tire treads and boot soles and the knees of every pair of pants I owned that whole summer. Darren rubbed his hands off on his jeans without looking at them, the same red already worked into the denim from other mornings like this one.
The drive out to Crapaud took maybe twenty-five minutes, Darren driving with one wrist over the wheel and the window cracked despite the cold, the radio off. He talked some, pointing out whose land we were passing, a name here and a name there that meant something to him and nothing yet to me, and I nodded like it meant something to me too. I thought he was cool for knowing all of it, for knowing which gate to slow down at, which dirt lane cut back through the trees toward the water without a sign to mark it. He drove like a man who'd driven that road a hundred times in the dark and didn't need the light to know where it bent.
We parked where the lane widened out into a patch of gravel and walked in from there, a rod in each hand, mine a cheap spincast rig with a plastic reel that had come from the toy aisle more than the sporting goods one, red and yellow, a decal of a fish on the side already half peeled off. Darren carried a real rod, the kind with the reel mounted underneath instead of on top, and he walked ahead of me on the path like the ground owed him nothing.
The brook when we got to it was narrow enough to spit across in places, the water clear over a bed of sandstone rock, amber where it ran shallow and thin, going green in patches where algae had grown up on the stones underneath, tall grass sprouting thick along both banks with a few white birches leaning out low over the water, and a tiny step of a waterfall no higher than a curb dropping the current down into a shallow pool. Darren found the spot he wanted without much looking, a bend where the current pooled up under the little falls, and set his own line first before he came back to bait mine.
He held my hand still with one of his and worked the hook through the worm with the other, quick, no wasted motion, the worm curling around itself on the hook the way they do. Then he had me try it myself on the next one, walking me through where to pinch and where to push the barb through, and the worm twisted at the wrong second and the hook went into the pad of my thumb instead, not deep, just enough to catch, a bright bead of blood coming up right away. I didn't say anything. Darren looked at it a second, said that happens, and worked the hook back out careful with his fingers, and that was the whole of it, no fuss made either way.
He showed me the cast after that, a short easy motion, wrist more than arm, and told me to watch the line and not the water. My first cast went into the tall grass behind me instead of the brook in front, the line snagging up in the stalks, and I had to walk back and pull it free, trampling down a patch of it doing it, the grass swaying and dropping bits of seed head into the water downstream of where Darren was fishing. He didn't turn around for that one. My second cast made it into the water at least, short of where his had landed, and I stood there holding the rod the way you'd hold something you were afraid to have been trusted with.
Darren fished the way he did everything else that morning, without much talking, watching his own line more than mine, and I understood without being told that the quiet wasn't for company. I reeled in and cast again, and again, the little reel making a small plastic clicking sound each time, a birch leaf or two shaking loose overhead each time I snagged the backswing, and after a while I stopped waiting for him to say anything about how I was doing and just did it because there wasn't much else to do standing in a brook at six-thirty in the morning.
It was better part of two hours before I felt anything on the line worth calling a bite, a light tugging that I set the hook on too hard and too late both at once, and when I reeled it in there was a small fish on the end of it, not even the length of my palm, olive-brown with a row of short spines standing up stiff along its back, more spine than fish it looked like. I didn't know how to get it off without one of those spines going into my hand, and had to call over to Darren to come do it. He came, unhooked it in two seconds flat without a word about it, said that's a stickleback, and turned back to his own line before I'd even seen where he set it down. I put it back in the water and watched it go, quick, gone into the brown water like it had never been there.
We stayed another half hour after that without either of us catching anything more, Darren's line still and his eyes on it the same as before, and I went back to casting into the grass more than the water, working out a rhythm that mostly kept the line where it belonged. A stand of birch grew up thick just past the falls, white bark catching what little light came down through the branches, unbothered by us so long as we kept still. The morning had gotten lighter by then, the kind of grey light that comes before the sun properly clears the trees, and somewhere off in the grass a bird was going at the same four notes over and over.
That's when we heard someone coming down the path behind us, boots on wet ground, and a voice calling out Darren's name before we could see who it was. It was Carson, a buddy of Darren's from high school, coming through the tall grass with his own rod over one shoulder, heavier through the middle than I'd have guessed from the voice, and the two of them shook hands the way men do when they haven't seen each other in a while but aren't surprised by it either.
Darren's whole voice changed talking to Carson. He laughed at something Carson said before Carson had even finished saying it, and asked after people I didn't know the names of, and the two of them fell into talk the way water finds a channel it's used to running in. I stood a little back from it with my rod still in my hand, not fishing anymore, just holding it, and neither of them looked over at me for a while.
I reeled my line in slow so it wouldn't make noise doing it, and set the rod down against a tree, and said I was going to go wait in the truck. Darren said something back, alright then, or something close to it, not looking away from the man he was talking to, and I walked back up the path alone, past the tall grass I'd snagged the line in twice, past the little waterfall and the bend where Darren's line still sat untouched in the water, out to the gravel patch where the truck was parked.
I got in on the passenger side and left the door open a crack for the air and sat there a long while with my thumb where the hook had caught it, a small dark mark on the pad of it that would be gone by the next day. I could still hear the two of them down through the grass, not the words, just the shape of the talking, easy and loose in a way the morning hadn't been with just the two of us in it. I picked at the dried mud on my sneakers and watched the lane for movement and didn't think much of anything in particular, just waited, the way you wait for something without being sure yet what it is you're waiting to feel.
Darren came up the path alone eventually, rod over his shoulder, and didn't say much getting into the truck, just started it up and pulled out onto the road same as he had going in, one wrist over the wheel, window cracked. He asked if I'd had a good morning. I said yeah. He said that was good, and turned the radio on this time, and neither of us said anything else about it the whole way home.