Steven Cornelius was born and raised in Northeast Mississippi and is married to a beautiful, auburn haired second generation Irish woman with deep roots in Galway and Sligo. His love of books began at a very early age. When night fell on the farm and chores for the day were complete, he and his family sat around the fire and read until bedtime. Many of his childhood adventures are featured in his writing. He attended the University of Mississippi, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees while participating in Air Force ROTC. Steve completed more than thirty years Air Force service in the US and overseas. For the Distant Traveler Trilogy, he drew upon experiences and memories collected during assignments around the world. After retiring in 2015, Steve decided to get serious about a lifelong passion for writing. His most recent work has been published in Mississippi magazine (October 2022) and Louisiana Living (November 2022). He just finished a multicultural novel set in Cuba and Houston Texas featuring Hispanics as the main characters. Steve has written one hundred and five short stories collected in two volumes and posted stories on the Mississippi Folklore and True Appalachia webpages and has a following of more than 3,000 regular followers on each page.
Trot Line Fishing and Other Night Stories
By Steven Cornelius
I sit in the warm confines of my country home, head spinning from watching Covid driven stories of mismanagement, lies and other carnage spewing from our television. As a defense mechanism, I shrink my focus, limiting my world to the five acre patch my family calls home, immersing myself in nature as autumn gives way to winter and the number of days until the winter solstice shrinks to single digits. Regardless of what happens around me, good or bad, the seasons march on. Days grow progressively shorter and night comes early, bringing stinging, face chapping winds from the Canadian prairies’ northwest of Chicago. When the night air has a sharp bite to it, for a change of pace, I bundle up, walk outside and look up into the dark, endlessly deep winter sky. Such weather often brings flashbacks of my childhood. A rough and tumble time when escape from bone chilling cold wasn’t possible, and the end of each day saw our big, rowdy family huddled in a small wood frame house, giving thanks in a collective and muted celebration of surviving another day.
These days, as a much older man, when cold weather settles on Tennessee and attacks my thin southern blood, I retreat deeper into my comfy sofa, and then pause and reflect, longing for a return of summer and warm drawn out nights; carefree dusky evenings and rose colored twilights that linger until almost ten PM. Once in a great while, on summer nights when conditions are just right, the mosquitos retreat to the back of our property, allowing my wife and I move outside and relax on the front porch swing of our home. We take great pleasure in slowing things down, enjoying the fading heat and soft breeze washing over us, which brings the sweet aromatic smell of fresh cut clover grass from our neighbor’s field. Moving slowly back and forth on our creaking swing, we’re serenaded by a legion of tree frogs and hundreds of cicadas. Very vocal night companions whose raucous serenading are comforting somehow, a distant echo from my youth.
My love of the night sky started at an early age, before starting elementary school. I developed the habit of waking up in the wee hours, usually because of noise my dad made when he slipped out of the house and sat on the front porch for a three AM smoke. When the moon was full or near full, while the old man was on the front porch “burning one,” I slipped out the back door of our old shack of a house and made my way through a thin layer of forest and headed for a large field that lay between our small homestead and my grandmother’s house, always looking up, mesmerized by distant galaxies and moonlit clouds…driven across the sky by strong, invisible winds. I usually sought out an open spot near our weather-beaten barn, sinking into the cold, crackling, frost burned grass, sitting perfectly still for as long as it took. The show began when the night creatures forgot I was there. If my timing was right, one or both of a mated pair of great bard owls emerged from the barn loft, floating silently overhead, casting no shadow as they moved across our frost covered field. Silent harbingers of death, once the owls spotted prey, they swooped down, talons extended just before a strike…sinking those meat hooks into field mice, or on a good night for the owls, a rabbit. I have always admired owls more than hawks or eagles. They hunt at night or in the early dawn, virtually invisible and completely silent. Owls use surprise and stealth to scoop up field animals with barely a shrill squeak as they are carried skyward and dropped into well concealed nests to be devoured by their latest brood of owlets, with the occasional bite for mom or dad.
When I was about ten, I climbed out of bed one dark morning, two hours before sunrise and rambled through the same field near our house, looking up into the sweeping, inky blue sky. Stopping at my favorite spot in our cow pasture, I stood in a small circle of ankle deep frost white grass. As I looked into the black fading to purple sky at distant galaxies, the realization of how the stars and moon connect us to our ancestors hit me like a thunderbolt. The dusting of galaxies across the night sky has always been our most tangible connection to our ancestors—even from millennia ago. On this early morning, I sat down and willed myself to remain still for several minutes gazing up at the Milky Way, before casting my eyes toward a fingernail sliver of a moon. As I did so, I realized that five hundred or two thousand five hundred years ago, men who passed along their blood and DNA to me, stood around smoldering campfires, gazing up at essentially the same sky that I saw at just that moment. Maybe they sat on horseback or rode a camel, traversing distant lands; nomads or perhaps Roman Centurions headed from one military campaign to another. One thing remained a constant; as far as our naked eye can tell, the stars have not repositioned themselves since my Roman ancestors walked the streets of Rome, Palestine, Germania, Gaul or Britannia more than two thousand years ago.
Just before my dad died in late 1975, I decided to go home and visit. This was a rare weekend away from graduate school at Ole Miss, I was usually held hostage by unreasonable professors who loaded me and my peers with homework, working us hard. My dad was sixty two and a physical wreck from a hard life: he’d smoked camel unfiltered cigarettes since he was twelve and drank like a fish since his twenties. Injuries sustained in two severe car wrecks didn’t help his mobility either. On this almost warm afternoon, we sat on the front porch facing east, silently watching the afterglow of a late autumn sunset. After a few minutes, dad pointed toward his shop and we went for a walk. This was a rare event, because at that point in his life, he didn’t usually feel much like physical exertion and his legs didn’t work so well. That evening as we shuffled along the gravel road that runs in front of our old house, we occasionally stopped and looked up at the early evening sky, taking great pleasure from the subdued lightshow as dusk crept toward us from the eastern horizon. After a few hundred feet of walking on gravel, we veered off the road, moving though a dense pine thicket that separated our family home from my dad’s shop, carefully picking our way through waist high stands of sedge grass dotting open areas between the pines. Every few minutes, dad would stop to catch his breath, look around and then up at the night sky, soaking up the smells and sights of a little part of the world where he felt most at ease and in his element.
While we stood there, dad looked over at me and remarked, “One of the things I’ll miss most when I’m gone is the feel of a cool breeze on my face, the earthy smell of the fields and woods and gazing up at the night sky.” On this particular night, full of university education but short on life experience, I paused a moment before asking, “What makes you think that you can’t still see the stars and moon after you’re gone?” His mouth dropped open, eyes widening, unable to conceal a shocked look, that, after a few seconds, turned to one of alarm. In his mind, I’d just confirmed that one of his children was the village idiot. It’s certainly possible that I was the village idiot…who knows, maybe I still am. Nonetheless, I am completely convinced that though he has now been dead for years, he can still see his favorite part of Northeast Mississippi, just from a different, more cosmic point of view. I don’t know if he can smell the clean, earthy scent of damp earth and layers decaying leaves, and no one else can either. Who can really say until they cross the veil themselves?
For some reason, standing next to my dad that evening and gazed up at the night sky brought back memories of trot line fishing. My dad enjoyed being outside and fishing gave him a good excuse. He would often borrow my Uncle Ed’s small fourteen foot aluminum boat to string and then run a “trot line.” As best as I can tell, trot line fishing is a southern thing. A trot line is a sturdy line, several hundred feet long, weighed down by large stones or concrete blocks on each end. The line and attached fishhooks are kept just off the lake bottom by empty milk or Clorox jugs tied at ten feet intervals. Every six feet or so, a short “bait line” is tied to onto the long line, with a fishhook dangling about four inches off the lake bottom. A dozen or more plastic jugs bob on the lake’s surface to keep three times as many fishhooks spaced eight to ten feet apart from dragging along the bottom.
It is the ultimate, lazy or busy man’s fishing technique. Once a trot line is set in place, each hook is baited with chicken giblets (livers, gizzards, etc.) and any other fresh, bloody parts my dad could scrounge. If chicken guts weren’t available, we would catch a few Bream or Shad and chop them into pieces, even as they flopped around on the boat still dripping lake water. Once baited, the hooks attract fish and other crawling bottom critters from all over the lake. As everyone in my part of the south knows, dangling baited hooks close to the muddy bottom is a good strategy because that’s where the biggest catfish live. There are four main species of catfish: blue cat, channel cat, flathead cat, and white cat. In that particular lake we caught flathead and white Catfish, which we locals called mudcat because the red clay mud they swim over and through stains their skin an orangish yellow color. These catfish are good eating and sometimes grow so large in the lakes of North Mississippi that three or four will feed a big family for a couple of days.
The trot line owner can bait as many as twenty or thirty hooks, drop them back into the water and then go on to other things while slow moving catfish and sometimes a turtle crawling along the lake bottom are drawn to the smell of raw chicken hovering just above the lake bottom. Eventually, catfish take the bait, get hooked and can then be harvested by the trot line owner at his or her leisure. Typically, trot lines are checked or “run” and rebaited every other night. To run a trot line means launching a small boat, finding one end of your line and then pulling the line close enough to the water’s surface to see what, if anything, is on the hook. Each trot line owner uniquely marks his line, usually by painting or choosing distinctively colored jugs. Respecting other trot lines and their owners is very important. Poaching fish off a neighbor’s trot line is a big no no and has led to fights on and off the water.
I didn’t particularly enjoy trot line fishing, but I did enjoy riding in our old truck and being out at night with my dad, so I always begged him to go along when it was time to check his lines. I was really into the process of getting the boat out of our truck and the sights and smells of being on the water at night. We fished several lakes scattered around Alcorn County and each one of them gave off different smells at night. Summer starts a couple of months early in Mississippi and the blisteringly hot sun rises well before breakfast and bakes earth, water, fish and fowl and there’s nowhere to hide. After being bombarding by cosmic rays for endless days and weeks on end, lake waters radiates this absorbed heat throughout the night as they cool. Muddy banks and blue green water thick with nutrients that the fish and other aquatic organisms feed on is a recipe for a strong, but not unpleasant smell. In early August Mississippi, sane people stay out of the sun during the day, quickly realizing that it’s less stressful to venture out at night. I laughed out loud the first time I read Kipling’s line “That Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out into The Mid-day Sun.” He described time spent in India, but his poem could easily apply to summers in Mississippi.
On this hot August night, the blazing summer sun slowly relinquished its grip, replaced by a soft night breeze washing over us, rustling our clothes and drying our sweaty faces. The air coming off the water always felt good. On this night, it was at least twenty-five degrees cooler than on shore and felt a bit chilly on my exposed skin. My dad used a long boat paddle to push us away from the bank and yanked on the recoil starter, bringing the small outboard to life, gripped the outboard motor control arm, revving the engine and swung us in a wide arc away from the shore, the small motor groaning in protest as it pushed us across the lake. I sat very still and hung on to the side of the boat hull, white knuckled as we bounced across the water toward our first jug, the one marking the beginning of dad’s trot line. The slosh and slap of the water against the hull was occasionally punctuated by the distant, high-pitched whine made by tires on rainy pavement as semi rigs sped down the highway a quarter mile away, yellow headlights tiny pinpricks piercing the velvety darkness.
On this particular hot August night, I was a very busy ten-year old working the front of my uncle’s dull green boat. My job was to lean over the boat hull, and plunge my arm down into the dark, warm water, groping around for the main horizontal “trot line,” and pull it to the rippling surface. My dad would then grab the line, checking for catfish. On this night it was my bad luck to grab and pull the line about a foot from the first baited hook. That particular hook held a five foot long, ten pound water moccasin. The nasty pit viper swam by and intoxicated by the smell of rotting chicken parts, decided to swallow the bait and the fishhook along with it. The snake was very close to drowning and in full panic. As I raised the line to the surface, the very angry moccasin, desperate for air, flopped its thick brown body across my right forearm, coiling itself around my spindly little arm, straining to move close enough to sink its big, curved fangs into me. I yelled, screamed and pulled as hard as I could, but couldn’t get away from the damned thing! It writhed and squeezed my arm and slammed its angular head against my wrist, jaws opening and closing as it tried like the dickens to bite me. Even in dim lantern light, I could see those ¾ inch long, ivory white curved fangs. As the snake squeezed my arm harder and harder all the feeling and color left. The fingers on my right hand slowly turned purple, and my arm began to throb. I turned toward my dad, screamed bloody murder, yelling “Get this thing off me!” My dad calmly sat six feet away for what felt like an eternity, before moving our lantern close and in the dim light, took in the scene, before matter of factly saying, “Shut up and hold still.” He reached into his front pants pocket, removed a razor sharp Case XX pocketknife and leaned forward, making one quick slashing movement with his right hand, cleanly severing the snake’s head from its thick grayish brown body. The line dropped into the water and disappeared, ugly snake head and all. Thankfully, the threat of being bitten was now gone, but the rest of the thick, heavily muscled snake corpse continued to spasm and beat its bloody neck stump against my forearm. This went on for several seconds.
Drawing a deep breath and finally screwing up my nerve, I grabbed the dead snake’s tail and uncoiled it off my mottled, bloodless and throbbing forearm and dropped the carcass into the lake. I looked back at my dad and quietly said, “I want to go home now. I don’t want to fish anymore.” My dad looked at me sternly, “You pestered me for thirty minutes after supper, begging to come along and we’re not leaving until I’ve run the whole trot line.” For the next hour, I swallowed my fear and plunged my right arm into the dark water, wincing each time I pulled up the line so that daddy could grab the hook. The only other surprise on that scary night was pulling up an equally angry turtle. The dark gray/green reptile had also swallowed the bait and drowning. My dad cut its head off and dropped the hubcap sized turtle back into the water. Food for the other bottom dwellers. Ninety minutes later, I breathed a great sigh of relief as we pulled the boat out of the water, took our stringer loaded with catfish and loaded everything into the truck bed. We rode home in silence with me replaying that nasty encounter over and over in my head. I have not been very enthusiastic about night fishing since.
The Galway Review 