The Boat His Daddy Left Him

So I lay awake that night and turned it over. The boat was not gone, I kept thinking. Not really. It had not burned or sunk.

It was sitting somewhere on a trailer with somebody new, and it still knew the way to every one of Jimmy’s spots.

Monday morning I went in to the feed store and asked Pam, who has worked the back counter since before I was born, if she had heard of anybody buying a blue bass boat from Clyde Strand.

Pam knows everything that happens within thirty miles of Crane.

“That’d be Elmer Wakefield,” she said, without even looking up from the invoice she was checking. “Fishing guide, lives over by Kimberling City. He was in here Saturday afternoon for crickets bragging on it. Said he got it for a fair price from a farmer up north.”

She pointed with her pen at the corkboard by the cricket bin, where about forty business cards were pinned up four deep.

Right in the middle was a plain white card that said Elmer Wakefield, Table Rock Lake Guide Service, Thirty-One Years, with a phone number.

On my lunch break I sat in my truck and dialed. A man picked up, older, with the kind of slow Ozark voice that makes you think of front porches. “This is Elmer,” he said.

“Mr. Wakefield, my name is Becky Strand,” I said. “I’m Jimmy Strand’s widow. You bought his boat last week from his brother Clyde.”

“Ma’am,” he said, “I didn’t know. Clyde said it was his brother’s, and that his brother had passed, but he never said a word about a wife or a child. I thought it was his to sell. I’m sorry.”

“It was his to sell,” I said. “His name’s on the title. You didn’t do anything wrong, Mr. Wakefield, and I’m not calling to make trouble for you.”

“Well, I’d sell it back to you,” he said, slow. “I would. I’d need what I paid, because I’m on a fixed income and I sold my old boat to buy it, but I’d sell it back to you today if you wanted it.”

I knew he meant it. I also knew I had about nine hundred dollars in the bank and a boy who would need new shoes by fall.

“I can’t buy it back,” I said. “And I’m not asking you to give it back. That wouldn’t be right either.”

“Then what are you asking, ma’am?” he said, and he did not sound put out. He sounded like he really wanted to know.

I closed my eyes and said it the way it came.

“I’ve got an eleven-year-old boy who fished out of that boat with his daddy every Saturday he could for four years. He hasn’t been on the water since the funeral. Would you take him fishing in it? I can pay you something. Not your full rate, but something.”

“What’s the boy’s name?” Elmer said finally, and his voice had gone soft around the edges.

“Owen,” I said. “His name is Owen. He’ll be twelve in the fall.”

“Saturday morning,” he said. “Cape Fair ramp. Six o’clock. You come too, and bring him a jacket, it’s cold on the water before the sun gets up. And put your money away. We’ll talk about that another time.”

I told Owen at supper on Friday night. He put his fork down and looked at me like he was not sure he had heard right.

“In Dad’s boat?” he said. “With the man who bought it?”