The Jon Boat in My Driveway

The first thing I saw from the top of the ramp was my son’s sandy head, small and still, out on the White River.

He was sitting on the middle seat of a little green jon boat, tied to the end of a dead sycamore, and nobody else was in it.

I had driven the eleven miles from town in fourteen minutes, which is not something I am proud of.

My hands were still shaking on the wheel when I stopped the truck in the gravel lot above the bait shop and cut the engine.

Kim Pruitt had called me at ten till four. Kim sits two pews behind us at First Baptist, and she had stopped at Darla’s for crickets on her way home from her sister’s.

She did not say hello. She said, “Brandy, is Eli supposed to be by himself out here?”

I told her no, he was with his uncle. There was a pause on the line that I will remember the rest of my life.

Then Kim said, “Honey, his uncle is in the back room at Darla’s with a cooler. That boy has been tied up on the snag since one o’clock.”

I asked her if he was all right. She said he was sitting up and he had a fishing pole, and he waved at her when she waved.

She said, “I’d go get him myself, but I can’t swim a lick and I’ve got my bad knee. I’m standing right here till you come.”

I was out the door of the farm supply before she hung up. I am a cashier there, six days a week, and I left a man standing at my register with a sack of deer corn and a mineral block.

My manager, Jeff, just pointed at the door and said, “Go.”

So that was how I came to be standing at the top of the boat ramp below Darla’s Bait and Tackle on a Saturday in October, in my gray work hoodie and my jeans, looking at my nine-year-old boy alone on a river I have known my whole life.

I want to tell this right, so I have to go back to that morning, when Rusty pulled into our yard with the boat behind his truck and a grin on his face I had not seen since spring.