The Boat His Daddy Left Him

I told him yes, and that Mr. Wakefield had been guiding on Table Rock for thirty-one years. Owen thought about that. Then he got up from the table without asking, which I let go, and went to his room.

When I looked in a while later, he had his daddy’s old tackle bag on the bed and was sorting through it, taking every lure out one at a time.

We were at Cape Fair by quarter till six.

The parking lot was mostly empty except for a couple of trucks with empty trailers, and the water was flat and gray and steaming a little in the cool air.

Owen had his daddy’s tackle bag over his shoulder and the rod Jimmy bought him for his ninth birthday.

Elmer was already at the dock. He was a solid, square-built man with a white mustache and a sun-faded cap, and he was wiping dew off the seats with a towel.

And there was the boat, tied to the dock, blue as a June sky even in that gray light.

Elmer came up the dock and held out his hand to Owen first, not to me, which I noticed.

“You must be Owen,” he said. “I’m Elmer. I believe you know this boat better than I do. Want to show me around her?”

Owen shook his hand. Then he walked down the dock and stepped down into the boat like he had done it a thousand times, because he had.

He ran his hand along the carpet on the front deck, slow, the way you would touch a horse you knew.

“There’s a scrape right here,” he said, pointing. “Dad dropped the anchor on it three summers ago. He said a word he told me not to say.”

We fished until noon.

Elmer ran the big motor out to a long point with cedar trees hanging over the water, and he let Owen work the trolling motor with the foot pedal while he showed him how to skip a jig under the branches.

Owen caught four bass that morning, all small, and let every one go.

At the ramp I tried to give Elmer forty dollars for gas. He would not take it.

I told him I would not come back unless he took something, and he finally said I could pay for the gas and bring lunch, and that he was partial to bologna sandwiches with mustard, and that was the deal.

So that became our Saturdays. Every week, unless the lightning was bad, we met Elmer at Cape Fair at six.

I bought a fishing permit at the bait shop, the first one of my life. Owen did not need one, being under sixteen, which he told everyone who would listen.

On the second Saturday, Elmer opened the console in front of the passenger seat looking for his needle-nose pliers, and he came up holding something else.

It was a spiral notebook, the waterproof kind, curled and stiff from the damp, with a rubber band around it.

I knew what it was before he handed it over.

I had seen Jimmy writing in it a hundred times, sitting in his recliner after a day on the water, licking his thumb to turn the pages.

I had forgotten all about it. I had not thought about it once since he died.

“It’s his log,” I said, and my voice came out funny. “His fishing log. He wrote down everything, every single trip.”