The Jon Boat in My Driveway

The Old Man’s Word

I did not know what to say. I had been married to Corey for twelve years and never heard a word of this. Corey sat there with his mouth a little open.

“I’m not here to make excuses for him,” Harlan said. “What he did, he did. He left a nine-year-old boy on cold water with no life jacket on, in Arkansas, where the law says a child under thirteen wears one in a moving boat, and a tied boat is no better with the water coming up. He knows it. I raised him to know it.”

He reached in his jacket and set something on the table. It was a youth life jacket, still with the tag on it, orange and black, sized for a boy from fifty to ninety pounds.

“Bought it at your store yesterday,” he said. “That young fella at the register rang me up. You were on your lunch.” He pushed it across the table toward Eli, who had crept into the kitchen doorway.

“This is yours, Buddy. Not the boat’s. Yours.”

Eli came and picked it up and held it against his chest the way he had held that bucket.

“Next Saturday,” Harlan said to me, “if you and Corey say so, I’d like to take him fishing. On my pond, or on the river, wherever you say. He’ll wear that the whole time. I’ll wear mine. I won’t take my eyes off him and I won’t have nothing in that boat but coffee.”

I looked at Corey. Corey looked at me. I said, “The river. He ought to go back to the river and have it go right.”

“The river,” Harlan said. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And Rusty?” I asked.

Harlan set the cup down. “Rusty is coming to my house tonight for supper. Him and me and Corey are going to sit at that table. I’m going to tell him some things I should have told him a long time ago.” He looked at his son.

“You’ll come?”

“I’ll come,” Corey said.

“He asked me to tell you something,” Harlan said to me. “He said he couldn’t come get the boat because he couldn’t look at you yet. He said that’s the truth and he’s ashamed of it.”

“Tell him the boat’s not the thing I’m waiting on,” I said.

“I’ll tell him,” Harlan said. “I think he knows.”

Before he left, Harlan walked out back with Eli and looked at the catfish in the stock tank. Eli told him the whole thing about counting to a hundred and dipping the water with his hand.

Harlan listened with his hands in his back pockets and nodded at every part.

“That’s a good fisherman,” he said when Eli was done. “A good fisherman takes care of what he caught.” He looked over Eli’s head at me. “Some of us take longer to learn it.”

Then he hitched up the jon boat to his old Ford, checked his chains twice, and pulled it out of my side yard with the whole road watching.

I stood on the porch till he turned at the blacktop.