The Bass Boat in My Machine Shed

The Boat Landing

The last Saturday of April was the first warm one we’d had.

Seventy degrees and no wind, which in northeast South Dakota in April is close to a miracle. The ice had been off Pickerel Lake for ten days.

On a Saturday like that, everybody who owns a boat puts it in. The public landing fills up by eight in the morning.

Trucks and trailers park clear up the road, and the men stand around the ramp drinking coffee and giving each other advice nobody asked for.

Jake had asked Cole to come along on the boat’s first trip. Cole drove home from Watertown Friday night just for it.

Arnie was going too, because, as he put it, he’d paid for most of it and he was going to sit in it.

I packed a cooler of ham sandwiches and bars and drove out about ten to bring it to them.

I parked up the road and walked down. I could see the sparkle blue from the top of the hill.

Jake had already backed it in. The boat was floating at the end of the dock, tied off fore and aft, and the three of them were loading rods and the minnow bucket. Cole was laughing at something Jake said.

I set the cooler on the dock, and Arnie sat right down on it and helped himself to a bar before he even said hello.

Then I heard a truck I knew on the gravel behind me.

Rick’s pickup came down the hill pulling nothing. Brittany was in the passenger seat.

I learned later they had driven out to the lake to look at a cabin somebody was renting for the summer. Rick hadn’t known his old boat would be there.

He parked at the top of the ramp and got out. Then he saw the boat.

He stopped so still, with one hand on his open truck door, that a man behind him had to walk around him.

He shut the door. He walked down the ramp and out onto the dock, past the men with their coffee, who all got quiet. Everybody at that landing knew whose boat it used to be.

Brittany got out of the truck and followed him a little way, then stopped at the foot of the dock, holding her purse in front of her with both hands.

Rick walked straight toward the boat. Toward me, really. I could see his face working. I didn’t know what he was going to say, and I don’t think he did either.

Before he got there, Cole stood up in the boat.

He’s taller than his dad now. I forget that sometimes. He stood up in that sparkle blue boat with a fishing rod still in one hand and put the other hand up, not like he was going to hit anybody, just like he was stopping traffic.

“Dad,” he said. “Not one word about Mom. Not on this dock.”

What Cole Said

Rick stopped about ten feet away. The whole landing was quiet. You could hear the water slapping against the boat and a red-winged blackbird somewhere in the cattails.

“I need you to hear this. I’ve known about the thirty-eight thousand since I was sixteen,” Cole said.

Rick’s mouth opened and closed.

“I heard Mom on the phone with the lawyer. In the kitchen. She thought I was asleep. I heard her ask if there was any way to get it without hurting you.” Cole’s voice shook a little and then didn’t. “Without hurting you, Dad. That’s what she asked.”

“Cole,” Rick said.

“She never said one bad word about you to me. Not once in three years. She cooked for two hundred kids every day and came home and mowed that whole yard by herself, and she never said one word.”

I wanted to tell him to stop. I didn’t. He wasn’t being cruel. He wasn’t even loud.

He was just saying it, plain, the way his grandpa used to say things, and I understood that he had been carrying it as long as I had.

“I saw the Cancun pictures,” Cole said. “I’m the one who showed Mom. I’m sorry about that part. I shouldn’t have. But I’m not sorry she sold the boat.”

Rick looked at the boat. Then he looked at Arnie, who was sitting on the cooler eating a bar like he was watching the weather.

“You asked me to live in town with you this summer,” Cole said. “And work at the seed barn. I’m not going to. I’m staying out at the farm with Mom. Arnie needs help with planting, and I already told him yes.”

That was the first I’d heard of it. I looked at Arnie. Arnie shrugged with one shoulder and kept chewing.

“I’m not saying I won’t see you,” Cole said, quieter now. “I want to see you. But I’m staying with Mom.”