Free The Adventures of Jack and Billy Joe by A. Jeff Tisdale Page B

you were gonna be the troublemakers and you turned out to be lifesavers.”

Chapter Six
    The School Pond
    Mississippi summers begin early and end late. The boys had to make all their fishing trips begin early so they started early each day so they could be on time to run their paper routes, except on Sunday. The Laurel Leader Call newspaper didn’t have a Sunday paper. Today, they decided to try fishing the school pond. They hadn’t been there in a long time—at least a month.
    The summer was hot and the humidity was high but Jack and Billy Joe didn’t notice. They had a date with a few bream in that pond.
    “What kinda bait did’ja bring?” Jack asked.
    “Red worms. How ’bout you?” Billy Joe asked.
    “I went down to Branch Creek yesterday afternoon and dip netted about a hundred crawdads,” Jack exaggerated. “I think bream bite better on crawdad tails.”
    “Daddy told me Branch Creek had sewage runoff in it from the cotton gin.”
    “I ain’t gonna eat the crawdads,” Jack said. “I’m just gonna use them for bait.”
    “Yeah, I guess that’s okay,” Billy Joe agreed as the boys kept walking through the junior college campus.
    They turned into the road between the vocational school buildings. The vocational school had been established to teach the returning GIs a trade to help them go from army life to civilian life. Since this was farming country, agricultural courses such as animal husbandry, soil preparation and crop rotation were taught. They also had automotive repair and, in another area, watch and clock repair.
    Walking down the road to the pond, they came to two gates, which they climbed over rather than opening the gate to go through. A standard practice for boys.
    Behind the vocational buildings, the crops—corn, potatoes, peas, beans, peanuts and other row crops—grew neatly with a section for each. These were the results of the students’ agricultural training. It was the practice of boys going fishing in the school pond to gather any of these vegetables they wanted to be cooked pondside with their fish. The college didn’t mind.
    Jack and Billy Joe helped themselves to corn and potatoes. They would have liked to have some boiled peanuts but they took too long to boil in brine water and neither boy wanted to keep the fire going for that long.
    “Let’s don’t take more than we can eat,” Jack suggested. “We don’t want to make the school mad. They might tell us to quit takin’ their stuff.”
    “Yeah—I’ll pull four ears of corn and you dig up about six small potatoes,” Billy Joe said. “That’ll be enough.”
    They did that and continued on to the pond dam.
    “I got somethin’ new I’m gonna try to cook the fish today,” Jack said. “I get tired of burning my hands putting the skillet in and out of the fire. I brought a wire grill that Daddy gave me and I’m gonna use it on the dam.”
    “Okay, you play with your cookin’ stuff and I’m gonna catch some fish,” Billy Joe announced.
    Both boys put their packs down on top of the dam. It was a clay dam, roughly set with a flat place on top from much foot traffic. It also had small ledges all along its length on the pond side. On the side of the dam away from the pond, it sloped gradually to provide better support to hold the water pressure. At one end of the dam, a spillway had been left for the water to escape and continue to flow until it finally merged with Rocky Creek.
    The stream that fed the pond came from a spring that surfaced on college property.
    “You wanna run the nests in the spillway hole first?” Billy Joe asked.
    “Yeah. That’s a good idea,” Jack said, leaving his pack.
    The “spillway hole” is the little catch basin that had been dug out of the clay by the water falling over the spillway. The bream and shellcrackers who lived in that little pond would hide in little holes in the bank when a stranger, such as the boys, entered their water.
    The boys sat down on the edge of the basin