The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

The marine engineer took the whole jury through photographs of that spliced bilge wire and the disconnected kill switch lanyard, explaining in plain, patient language exactly how a boat rigged that way could run fine on a calm morning and fail catastrophically the moment real weather hit, and Walt Sherrow sat on that stand and told two hundred strangers what he had told two hundred neighbors at the vigil, that he had seen Jerry crouched at that motor housing before sunrise with a screwdriver in his hand, and that he had spent six years lying to himself about what it meant. Mark’s own thirty one second recording played twice for a silent jury, and I watched three of them cry the second time through, strangers who had never met my husband, weeping at the sound of his voice asking his own brother to get off his boat.

Jerry’s attorney tried, for a while, to argue that a spliced wire and a missing recording proved a theft and nothing more, that plenty of men panic and do something rash and stupid when they are cornered, and that no one could prove Jerry wanted anyone dead. It held together for almost two days. Then, on the stand, under his own attorney’s gentle questioning meant to soften him for the jury, Jerry broke down and admitted, in a voice that finally sounded nothing like the man who used to stand in my kitchen and tell me to let it go, that he had only meant to strand the boat, that he had never imagined a storm rolling in that same night, and that he had spent six years telling himself it was an accident too, because believing that was the only way he had found to keep sleeping at night, standing in my kitchen fixing my garbage disposal, mowing my lawn, and calling it love.

He was convicted on four counts of manslaughter and one count of felony theft. He is serving forty two years at the correctional facility outside Jefferson City, and I have not visited him once, and I do not intend to.

Delaney Feed and Farm Supply belongs to Emily and me now, free and clear, and we run it the way Mark used to, weighing every bag ourselves, never shorting a customer a pound. We put a small bronze plaque by the front counter with Mark’s name on it, and Josh’s, and Ben’s, and Luke’s, because a store that fed this town for two generations ought to remember who built it.

I still go to that vigil every summer. I stand at the front now, on purpose, where Jerry used to stand, because that spot on the shoreline belongs to my family and always did. I hold my candle, and I say all four of their names out loud when the chaplain gets to them, and for the first time in six years, when I say those names, I am not standing next to the man who took them from me. I am standing next to my daughter, and the lake is quiet, and for once in a very long time, so am I.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.