The Boat His Daddy Left Him

Elmer slipped the rubber band off and opened it, careful, like it was a hymnal. Jimmy’s square printing filled every page.

Dates, water temperature, depth, what lure, what color, how many fish, and where, in his own kind of shorthand.

“Cedar point past Mill Creek, 12 ft, brown jig, 3 fish,” Elmer read out loud. “Bluff by the big dead tree, 18 ft, football jig, 2 keepers. Your husband knew this lake, Mrs. Strand. This here is six years of good fishing.”

He flipped to the back, to the last page with writing on it, and then he went quiet.

He read it once and then he read it again. Then he held it out, not to me, but to Owen.

Owen took it in both hands. I leaned over his shoulder.

It was dated in October, four months before Jimmy died, and it said: Owen’s first keeper. 2 lb 4 oz. 14 ft. Shaky head, green pumpkin. Proud of my boy.

Owen did not say anything for a long time. He just sat there in the middle of Table Rock Lake with that notebook in his lap and read those words over and over.

I put my arm around him and he let me, which he did not always do anymore.

Elmer looked away out over the water and gave us a minute. Then he cleared his throat and reached for the key and started the big motor.

“Well,” he said over the idle. “Your daddy left you a map, son. Let’s go find his spots.”

And that was how the summer went.

Every Saturday, Owen would pick a page from the log, and Elmer would read the shorthand and figure out where Jimmy meant, and we would run there and fish it.

Some of the spots Elmer knew already. Some he had never fished.

“Big dead tree’s gone,” Elmer said one morning in June, squinting at a bluff. “Fell in the lake in a storm a couple years back. But the bluff’s still here, and so’s the ledge underneath. Your daddy was fishing that ledge, not the tree. Drop it down and count.”

Owen dropped it down and counted, and on the third cast he caught a two-pound spotted bass.

He held it up for me to see with the biggest grin I had seen on him since he was nine.

Elmer wrote it on a scrap of paper so Owen could copy it into his own book later.

Owen started keeping a book of his own, a cheap spiral from the Dollar General, and he wrote every fish down the way his daddy had, the date and the depth and the lure.

He kept it next to his bed. Some nights I would look in and find him asleep with it open on his chest.

And he started sleeping. That is the thing I want to tell you most.

For fourteen months, Owen had woken up two and three times a night, and I would hear him walking in the hall. By the middle of June he was sleeping straight through, and so was I.

Elmer had been married forty-four years to a woman named Nancy, who sent oatmeal cookies wrapped in wax paper every Saturday. They had two grown daughters in Springfield and a grandson in the Navy.

One Saturday in late June, a thunderstorm came up fast out of the west and Elmer ran us back to the ramp with the rain coming sideways.

We sat in the cab of his white pickup with the windows fogged and ate our bologna sandwiches and listened to it hammer the roof.