Published Tuesday, April 15, 2008 8:30 AM
Updated Tuesday, April 15, 2008 8:30 AM

 

My Hometown

Chapter 2: The Calm Before the Storm


This is what started everything …

Dawn is just a faint smear of color staining the dark horizon behind him. To the west, far beyond the lake’s great dark windowpane, the first flickers of the approaching thunderstorm pulsate a muted yellow inside the chests of the great storm leviathans reaching for the top of the sky.

A heavy stillness settles about the early morning as if God Himself dare not breathe.

This is Death’s Quiet.

Even the leaves dare not rustle.

Cyrus Ledbetter sits in his favorite lawn chair at the dock’s edge casting his line weighted with three clamps of lead shot and hooked with a big hunk of stew meat out into Tellers Lake. The lead weight is the size of an old cats eye shooter marble, and is designed to take this bait clear to the bottom of the lake.

That’s where the bigguns live.

Both the stew meat and his breakfast of biscuits and sausage gravy come from Nick’s Dew Drop Inn. Nick’s gravy alone can qualify as its own food group. The doctors have told him to lay off the rich foods, but the way Cyrus sees it, if you can’t enjoy a good breakfast of Nick’s cathead biscuits and sausage gravy, what’s the point in getting out of bed in the mornings?

Cyrus gives the rod a few gentle tugs, scooting the stew meat bait along the bottom out where the ancient creek bed used to wind before the Corps of Engineers backfilled the lowlands here and formed Tellers Lake.

Few remember that little tidbit of lake history. The water in this bend of Blessew Creek ran deep, deathly still and very cold before it emptied into the Achewee River.

Even now, beneath some 80-odd feet of Tellers Lake, the water still runs deep and cold.

Cyrus and his best friend Red Granger used to fish this bend in Blessew Creek back when they were boys. This was where he and Red first hooked the great demon spawn Big Blue, the king of all Striper bass, hooked him right in the side of the snout … set the hook deep, too.

It was the first time Cyrus had ever heard a fish roar.

The monster was massive back then and that was more than 50 years ago … back when Red first hooked him … that’s when the war started between Red and Big Blue.

Like Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, the great white whale, they’ve battled ever since.

The slightest ripple disturbs the glass pane of liquid onyx, the faintest gurgle of roiling wake.

Poor Cyrus … his hearing isn’t as sharp as it used to be.

Only Cyrus and Red know that Big Blue has a hankerin’ for beef.

The great fish wears the scars as medals of Honor … valor, perhaps … battles neither won nor lost, but survived.

The first is the remnants of an old tear tracing a jagged line up from the corner of his large mouth to betray a perpetual leering kind of smile. It is a deep rivulet from an embedded, ancient hook that had long ago dissolved away.

His routine is methodical, instinctive.

Food.

Meat.

While some insist there is a working evil mind behind those cold, steely gray eyes, certainly the soul of the Devil himself is trapped beneath his leathery back, there exists simply that which eons of evolution and close to a century of survival left behind.

Instinctive cunning.

There is no cold vile heart beating inside that white underbelly, simply the heart of a really big fish.

Only a few have ever laid eyes upon him, and fewer still lived to tell the tale of their encounter with Big Blue.

Over the decades, yes, many have hooked him, though most dismissed the violent returning yank to be the unyielding pull of deadfall or lake bottom, or perhaps a stubborn old snapper that refuses to budge from its home of sludge and sediment.

It is said that to look upon the great beast will exact a precious toll … the last beat of a terrified heart … or the final whispered remnants of a departed soul.

If the great monster Striper bass could smile, he would have just then.

He smells meat and with a great swishing of his massive tail, skids along the lake bottom to strike.

So great is the Striper bass in size, this is what creates the ripple some 80 feet overhead.

Cyrus had dozed off and didn’t feel the first tug on the other end of his line. Only when the muted flashes of lightning flicker beyond the far shore and the cascading rumble of thunder rolls across the lake does he stir.

Just as fear’s icy talons slither around his heart.

One other secret that only he and Red Granger share with Big Blue is the great Striper’s love of direct A/C current, a phenomenon that occurs when God’s finger points down from Heaven and touches Tellers Lake.

A jagged white snake of lightning uncoils from the dark cloud’s underbelly.

God’s finger.

The bellow of thunder follows.

That’s when Big Blue strikes and so fierce is the drawing of 20-pound test from Cyrus Ledbetter’s Eagle Claw HG Baitcast XG reel that it begins to smoke.

He jerks back hard to set the hook and sees his graphite rod bend from tip to tail. The reel’s whine is a banshee scream.

“God in heaven help me,” Cyrus utters and starts to stand, but even Cyrus knows he is too late for God’s help now.

That’s when Big Blue explodes from the water, all six-and-half-feet of him, his massive head and large mouth looking like a garbage can with fins.

And he roars.

Cyrus gasps and like candle flame to a gust of wind, his breath is stolen from him and he sits back down.

The line snaps like a strand of hair and is left to dangle, floating on the first whispers of the storm’s squall as it creeps across the lake.

To the last, I grapple with thee …

His final words riding the wings of his dying breath, his toll paid to the ferryman to carry his soul across the River Styx.

This was the second time Cyrus Ledbetter ever heard a fish roar … and his last.

It set in motion all that is to follow in tiny Tellers Gap.

To be continued …

Next Week: Good Morning Teller’s Gap.