The Bass Boat in My Machine Shed

The Morning the Boat Left

Arnie went to the bank Monday morning when it opened. I took a personal day from school, the first one I had taken since my mother’s funeral.

It was a bright, cold spring morning, the kind we get in northeast South Dakota in April when the sun finally means it.

The fields were still brown, but the ditches were starting to green up.

Jake came over first, in his old pickup, an old green Ford with a rusted-out wheel well that had been his grandpa’s.

He backed it up to the shed door so straight I could tell he’d practiced.

Arnie came behind him in his own truck, still wearing his seed cap from the co-op.

He handed me an envelope from the bank. Inside was a cashier’s check made out to Tammy Ruud for $38,000.00.

Jake had already pumped up the trailer tires with a compressor we dragged out of the corner.

He checked the lights, the safety chains, the winch strap, the hitch pin. He did it twice.

Then he cranked the trailer jack down onto the ball, and I heard the coupler latch. That’s a sound I’ve heard a thousand times in my life. It never sounded like that before.

I went into the house and got the keys off the nail by the back door where they had hung for three years. A floating keychain shaped like a little orange bobber.

I walked back out and put them in Arnie’s hand.

“They’re Jake’s,” I said.

“They’re Jake’s,” Arnie said. “But I paid for most of them, so I get to hold them first.”

Jake laughed. It was a good sound. He pulled the boat out into the sunlight slow and careful, and the sparkle in the blue caught the light like the boat was glad to be out.

I stood in the shed door and watched it go down the driveway behind that old green Ford. Then I turned around.

The shed floor looked bare. There was a clean rectangle on the dirt floor where the trailer tires had sat for three years, and a little pile of mouse nest by the back wall.

I swept it. I don’t know why. It seemed like the thing to do.

That afternoon Arnie drove me to the county treasurer’s office at the courthouse.

That’s where you transfer a boat title in South Dakota. The lady at the counter was someone I went to high school with.

I signed the boat title over to Jake. Then I signed the trailer title.

Jake paid the tax and fees out of his own pocket, and he wouldn’t let Arnie help with that part.

When we walked out, the woman at the counter said, “Good for you, Tammy,” real quiet, as the door shut. I don’t know how much she knew. In a town that size, probably all of it.