fisherman's tale

fisherman's tale

fiction
edward w pritchard

Somehow my wife always knows things and as usual she figured out I was feeding the local vagrant at the lake. I fished up there a lot and I had been taking food to the man I had met releasing a snapping turtle one day.

The man was named Boswell and he was releasing a turtle with a little girl, Megan. She died about a year ago.

One day recently while I was fishing I had called police officer Johnson to stop up at the baseball field near the lake where I fish. Dispatch said Officer Johnson was on another call and wasn't available. I asked Boswell, who people now call the vagrant,  to say something to the one team for me. The players had been drinking and were using a lot of very vulgar language. Their were a lot of children up near the field and they shouldn't hear that kind of bad language. Boswell had been a champion cage boxer here in town, I am too old for such a confrontation and I asked Boswell to say something for me. That's when I noticed he had lost weight. As he walked over from his usual spot at the lake he took his shirt off. I saw he had lost about twenty pounds of muscle through the chest and shoulders. Of course he had no trouble getting the drinking baseball players to behave. After that I started taking Boswell food when I went fishing.

Out of the blue my wife started making me a basket to take up to the Lake with a double order of food. She is a great cook and Boswell and I enjoyed the fare. I might ad I am not much of a cook, I was a chef's helper in the army but my skills as a chef are very limited. I figured out that my wife had heard about the turtle release story with Boswell and the little girl Megan when she started putting a lot of bacon in our basket for the lake. I can't eat bacon. Somehow my wife through her network must have found out about the little girl who had  died of cancer and the turtle release I had witnessed a few year ago. She put in the bacon for me and Boswell to feed to the snapping turtles.

My wife is a good egg I guess.