The Dealer Who Made It Right

Thirty Five Years and One Good Woman

I should tell you who I am before I tell you what my son did, because none of it makes sense without the first part.

My name is Horace. I am sixty seven years old. I was born in Keokuk, Iowa, at the southern tip of the state where the Des Moines River meets the Mississippi, and except for two years of trade school in Cedar Rapids, I have never lived anywhere else. I spent thirty five years working Lock and Dam Nineteen, the big one, the one built during the Depression that still holds back enough water to make half of downtown Keokuk possible. I started as a deckhand on the lock wall at twenty two. I retired as a lockmaster at fifty seven, with a pension, a bad shoulder, and a wife named Theresa who had put up with more overnight shifts and flooded Christmases than any woman should have to.

Theresa and I met at a church potluck, over a dish of scalloped potatoes she still swears I only complimented to get her phone number. She was right. I was twenty two and had no idea what I was doing, and she spent the next thirty nine years teaching me. She raised our son mostly on her own during the years the river had me working nights and holidays. She kept the house standing during two floods that put water in our basement to the rafters. She never once complained about the life a lockmaster’s wife has to live, which is a life spent waiting.

What she did do, every single year, was pull out the road atlas.

We kept it in a drawer in the kitchen, a Rand McNally atlas so old the spine had been taped twice, and some evening every winter she would spread it open across both our laps on the couch and trace the whole length of the Mississippi with her finger, from the little lake up in Minnesota where it starts as a creek you could step across, all the way down through Iowa and Missouri and Arkansas to where it spills out into the Gulf past New Orleans.

“When you finally retire,” she would say, “we are going to drive every mile of this river. Not fly over it. Drive it. I want to see every little town along the way.”

That was the plan. That was always the plan.

She did not get to see me retire. Her heart gave out on a Tuesday morning in our kitchen, with the coffee maker still gurgling and that same road atlas still sitting on the counter from the night before. I was fifty nine. I worked another two years after that because I did not know what else to do with myself, and then I finally hung up my hard hat, and I made myself one promise standing in that empty control house on my last day.

I was going to take the trip anyway. For both of us.