hand fishing
by Jack B. Bedell
My parrain loved catfish. He’d take it fried, but what really got him going was a sauce piquant. He grew up on the prairie outside of Lafayette, and every summer they’d go hand fishing along the basin.
He always said you could taste it when a fish was pulled out of the water on a line. The best meat came off catfish you coaxed out by hand. The big ones holed up under cypress stumps and in burrows along the bank, and all you had to do to get them out was reach your hand up in the hole and grab them by the lip.
The only tools you needed were a rope tied around your waist to loop through the gills of any fish too big to take out with your fingers and a pair of good boots to keep sharp stuff out your feet. Whenever you came up with a fish, you tossed it up on the bank for your family to fillet and get the pot started with onions, green peppers, celery, and Rotel.
By the time you’d cleared all the catfish you could find out of the water, your people would already have the rice on and the sauce piquant pots simmering. After that, it was just stomachs growling while you dried off and a few songs to sing before the bowls were filled and the spoons went to work.
Nonc tried to teach me all that once in the fresh water behind our camp, but I could never get used to reaching under tree roots without knowing what was there, or grabbing something that didn’t want to be grabbed.
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University. His most recent collection is Color All Maps New (Mercer University Press, 2021). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.