A day or so later, we took Krystyna to the same spot. She’d caught lots of glamorous fish on our trips—Atlantic salmon in Russia, sea-run browns in Patagonia, bonefish and sails at Key Largo—but never a crappie from our home waters. Jerry and I were eager to show her the fishing we’d grown up with. I set her up with a nine-foot fly rod equipped with a spin-cast reel with four-pound mono and a jig and minnow suspended under a Thill float. She cast to the brush top, the bobber dipped, and she pulled in a huge black crappie. This one we took home. It weighed two pounds, four ounces on the digital scale in our kitchen.

“That’s my fish,” Jerry said as we admired the beauty on the countertop beside our sink.

“Well, you can fry it if you want,” Krystyna said.

“No, I mean that’s the fish I caught the other day that Howell made me let go.”

Krystyna pointed out that there were no identifying marks or scars on the fish.

“I’ve been looking at these fish for sixty years. I’ve seen thousands of them,” he said, “and I can tell you this is the same fish.”

Later, Krystyna asked me, “Am I imagining things or was Jerry sulking a little at dinner?”

“You’re not imagining things,” I said. “My brother takes his crappie very seriously. You should see him with red snapper.” I told her about the lecture Jerry gave an elderly tourist in Bermuda shorts who stole a three-pound snapper from our fish cooler years ago down at Grand Isle, Louisiana.

“It’s just one fish,” the guy stammered.

“That’s right, and you can have one just like it. All you’ve got to do is walk down to the end of this dock, hand five hundred dollars to the captain of that charter boat, ride thirty miles out to the oil rigs, and you’ll have a whole box of snappers that belong to you.”

Jerry’s intensity, offset by a spiky sense of humor, was what made him fun to fish with. For my two sons and Jerry’s son, who grew up under his sometimes brusque coaching on the various boats he owned over the years, a trip with Jerry was not just a fishing trip. It was an adventure, wrapped inside a quest, and topped often as not with a hoedown featuring golden heaps of fried fish and, once the boys were grown, copious amounts of strong drink.

He liked his whiskey and he liked his cigarettes and they helped take him away earlier than I expected. We recently hit a year since our last crappie “thrash.” The wonderful brush top where Krystyna caught Jerry’s fish disappeared when the ice went out of the lake in 2007. But he and I—or rather he—found several new ones last April, not as good as our all-time miracle top, but good enough.

This year, with Jerry gone, I went back to fly fishing for trout in April, working my way through the Quill Gordons, then the Hendricksons, and finally the March Brown hatch. After that, more fly fishing on the Delaware, for shad in May, and for smallmouth, all summer long. Maybe I’ll kill a roe shad if I catch one, but otherwise it’ll be strictly catch and release. The fly boxes are sorted, and Pokey and Clara, our bird dogs, have gone into lap dog mode until we head for Montana next September. I’ve done my mourning for my brother, and I’m keen to get started on the next cycle of matchless days on streams or in fields with loved ones and friends. But I would be lying if I said I’m not going to make time for crappie jigging this year, maybe several days. I know some damn good spots that a fellow I used to fish with showed me.