The Jon Boat in My Driveway

The Offer

Rusty Cole is my husband’s older brother. He is forty-one, four years older than Corey, and until this past April he was married to a woman named Tammy who I liked fine.

Then one day she was not married to him anymore, and she was in Little Rock, and he was in a rent house out on the county road by himself.

Nobody in the family said much about it. The Coles are not talkers. My father-in-law, Harlan, is sixty-eight and drove a road grader for the county for thirty-one years, and the most he has ever said about anybody’s heartbreak is, “Well, that’s a shame.”

Rusty had not been himself since. He came to Sunday dinner at Harlan’s less and less, and when he did come he went out to the truck twice during the meal.

I am not a fool. I knew what was in the truck. I told myself it was grief and grief would pass.

That Saturday he showed up at eight in the morning with his jon boat hitched behind him. It is a twelve-foot aluminum boat, painted a dull green that has mostly worn off the bow, with a little old fifteen-horse outboard that Harlan gave him twenty years ago.

“Thought I’d take my buddy catfishing,” he said, leaning on the truck door. “River’s down. They ain’t generating till afternoon. We’ll be back by suppertime with a mess of fish.”

Eli had been asking his uncle to take him fishing for two summers. He came flying out the screen door in his sock feet before I could say a word.

He had his little rod and reel in one hand and his white bait bucket in the other, the one he had begged me for at the store.

I looked at Rusty. His eyes were clear that morning, clearer than I had seen them in weeks.

He had not shaved, but he had combed his hair. He looked like the uncle who had taught Eli to bait a hook off Harlan’s pond dock when Eli was five.

Corey was asleep in the back bedroom. He works nights on the line at the poultry plant, twelve-hour shifts, and he had gotten home a little after seven.

When he sleeps, his phone goes on silent until five, because otherwise he would never sleep at all.

I thought about waking him. I did not. I tell myself now that I did not want to steal his sleep, and that is partly true.

The other part is that I did not want to be the woman who said no to her husband’s brother when he was finally trying.

“Life jacket,” I said to Rusty. “He wears it the whole time.”

“Got one in the boat,” Rusty said. “Brandy, I’ve been running this river since I was his age. I’ll have him back by six.”

I knelt down and zipped Eli’s jacket, and I told him to mind his uncle, and I watched them pull out of the drive.

Eli was waving out the passenger window like he was going off to war. Then I went to work.

The Snag

From the top of the ramp I could see the whole thing laid out like a picture I did not want to look at.

There is a gravel bar that runs out below Darla’s, and at the end of it a big sycamore went down in a flood years ago and never washed out.

Its trunk lies along the bar and its top reaches out into the river, white and bare, with slack water behind it where the current curls back on itself.

Fishermen tie up on that snag all the time. Catfish hang in the eddy behind it.

In low water a grown man can walk the bar out nearly to the end of the trunk without getting wet above his knees.

But the river was not low anymore. I could see that from the lot. The gravel bar was half under, and the water sliding past the end of the sycamore had a shine on it that it gets when it is coming up.

Anybody who lives on this part of the White River knows what that means. The dams upriver turn on their generators in the afternoon when the power company needs the electricity, and hours later the water reaches us.

It can come up two or three feet, and it comes up cold.

Darla met me at the bottom of the steps. She is seventy-two and has run that bait shop since her husband passed, and she walks with a cane because of her hip.

Her face was gray. She said, “I told him twice, Brandy. I told him they started generating at two.”

“Where is he?” I said.