Charles Walkers earns the nickname “Trout” because his feet smell like dead fish. (He has an incurable foot fungus that causes his feet to smell; it is the same foot odor problem that Clyde “Sweet Feet” Livingston has years later.) Trout is the son of a very wealthy man whose family owns most of the land on the east side of Green Lake when Green Lake is considered to be the largest lake in Texas. Trout is loud, stupid, arrogant, and disrespectful. He attends Katherine Barlow’s evening class for adults in the one-room schoolhouse and consistently disrupts the lessons. Everyone is sure that Katherine will marry him because his family is wealthy, but she refuses even to ride on his motorized boat.
After Katherine is seen kissing Sam the Onion Man, Trout leads a mob of community members into the schoolhouse, which they destroy. When Katherine and Sam try to get away in Sam’s rowboat, Trout’s motorized boat runs into the rowboat and Sam is shot and killed.
Twenty years later, Katherine Barlow, then known as Kissin’ Kate Barlow, is living in an abandoned cabin. Trout Walker and his wife, Linda Miller (whom the Warden resembles), break into Kissin’ Kate’s cabin and demand to know where she has hidden all the money that she has stolen. Kate indicates that she has buried the money in the dried-up lakebed. Trout’s family, and future generations of Walkers, continue to dig, looking for Kissin’ Kate’s buried treasure for years.
