Mark Fratesi, who owns a country store in the Mississippi Delta, is an outstanding perpetrator of practical jokes, a skill shared by my boyhood best friend and mentor, the beloved old black man known by everyone as Jaybird.
At his store, Mark sells all kinds of fish bait, including worms and crickets for bream fishermen. Jaybird and I always bought our crickets from Mark before going after the biggest, scrappiest, best-eating bream of all: the Chinquapin.
