The Name in the Lodge Record Book

Katie

He told me all of it that night, on the phone, with me sitting on the back step and the crickets going in the ditch.

It took him almost an hour. I am going to tell it the way he told it to me, as near as I can.

He married a girl named Sue when he was 20, the year he got out of the Army. Katie was born the next spring.

The marriage did not last. Sue took Katie back to her folks’ place near Brainerd, and my dad got her summers and every other Christmas.

He met my mother a few years later. They married in 1986, and I came along the next year.

Katie spent two summers with us at the old house on the county road. I was too little to remember any of it.

In June of 1989, when she was 10, he took her to Canada. Just the two of them in his cabin, fishing out of a rented boat, with the other men in the next cabin over.

It was the third year of the trip, and the only year she ever came.

“She outfished all of us,” he said, and I could hear him smile, even through the phone. “Every one of us. Jim was so sore about it he wouldn’t speak to her for a day.”

She caught that walleye on the last morning. Off the point, in the fog. My father netted it, and Ken, 17 years old, held the board.

A year later, in July of 1990, she drowned at a family picnic on a lake near her grandparents’ place.

She went off the end of a dock after a ball. She was 11. Nobody had her in a life jacket. My father was 300 miles away, at work.

“I didn’t do the right thing after,” he said. “I didn’t know how. Your mother wanted to tell you when you were old enough. I asked her not to. I asked everybody not to. Jim, your aunt, all of them. I thought if nobody said her name, I could keep standing up.”

My mother kept that promise right up to the end. She died in 2021. I sat with her in the hospital for six weeks, and she never said one word about it.

“Canada was the only place I let myself think about her,” my dad said. “Up there on the dock at night. That was the deal I made with myself. I’d go back every June, and that’s where I’d get to be her dad.”

“And you never brought another girl,” I said.

“I couldn’t stand to see another little girl in that boat,” he said. “I thought I’d come apart right in front of everybody. So I made it a rule, and nobody ever asked me why. That’s on me, not on any of them.”

He was quiet a long time. Then he said, “When Hailey opened that tackle box on my table, Matt, with those jigs all sorted by color. Katie did that. Exactly that. I couldn’t breathe. And I said the worst thing I could have said to that child.”

“You did,” I said. I was not going to pretend he had not. “She cried all the way home, Dad. She thought she did something wrong.”

“I know it,” he said. “I know it. I haven’t thought about anything else since I saw that book.”

Then he said, “Ken told me she wrote something under her name. Under Katie’s. He said it was small, and he showed me.”

“For Katie too,” I said.

My father did not say anything for a while. When he did, his voice had gone thin. “I’ve been reading those three words in my head every night for a month,” he said. “That child never even knew Katie was alive. And she wrote that.”