Grandpa Ray’s Stories

The summer I was sixteen, my uncle Sal let me help load the Mary Ellen before she went out to Georges Bank. I went down into the hold to grab a coil of rope, sat on a bunk for one minute, and woke up forty miles out to sea.

Uncle Sal was not going to turn a boat around for one dumb kid. He radioed my mother, who said things into that radio I won’t repeat in front of you, and then he handed me a pair of boots three sizes too big. “You’re crew now,” he said. “Ten days.” I had a date that Saturday with a girl named Patty.

On day six a storm came up out of nowhere. Waves higher than the wheelhouse. The radio went dead, the net winch jammed with the nets still out, and Uncle Sal looked at me — the smallest one on board — and said, “Ray. Can you fit under there?”

I bought the ring with three months of crew money and then carried it around for two more months, because I couldn’t figure out how to ask. Every plan I made, I talked myself out of. Too fancy. Not fancy enough. Her father would be there. Her father wouldn’t be there.

In the end I hid it in my tackle box, in the little compartment with the sinkers, because Patty never touched my tackle. That was the one place I knew it was safe.

Then one evening in August we went down to Good Harbor Beach to fish off the rocks, and her line snapped, and before I could stop her she opened my box to find a sinker. She opened the little compartment. And there it was.

She just held it up and looked at me. I was standing there with a bucket of bait. I said, “That was supposed to go different.” She said, “Ask me anyway.” So I got down on one knee on a wet rock, still holding the bait bucket, and asked her.

She said yes before I finished the sentence. We forgot all about fishing. On the way home she made me promise never to tell anybody she found it herself. I kept that promise for fifty years. Sorry, Patty.

The summer you were seven, your mother let me take you out on the pier for the first time. You wore the orange life vest even though we never left the dock, because you said rules are rules. You got that from your grandmother.

I showed you how to bait the hook and you said “absolutely not,” so I baited it and you held the rod. Forty minutes. Not a bite. You told me fish were probably at school. I told you that was the most sensible thing anybody had said all day.

Then the rod bent nearly in half and you screamed so loud the gulls took off. You reeled with your whole body, tongue sticking out, and up came a little striped bass, maybe ten inches, flapping and furious.

You looked at it for a long time. Then you named it Gerald and made me promise we’d let him go. So we took the picture, and you gave Gerald a little speech about being careful, and we let him back into the harbor.

Fifty years of fishing, and I’ve caught things that would fill a truck. But if you ask me what my best catch was, it was the day I spent forty minutes catching nothing with you, and then one fish named Gerald.