The Boat His Daddy Left Him

“I know it now. I didn’t want to know it then. And the bank was calling on my operating note, hay was high last winter, and the boat was just sitting there, and I told myself storage isn’t free. I told myself a lot of things.”

“Where did the money go?” I asked him. It was the only question I had saved up all summer.

“On the note.” He laughed, short and ugly. “Every dime. Seventy-five hundred dollars and the bank still wants more by Christmas.”

I could have said a lot of things right then.

But I thought about Jimmy, and how he would have hated to see us like this, me and his brother, with a whole year of grief between us like a fence.

So I told him the one thing I thought he needed to hear, and I said it as plain and quiet as I could, the way you would tell a man his tire was low.

“Your nephew has been fishing every Saturday since May with a stranger, Clyde,” I said. “A good man, a kind man, but a stranger. Because his uncle wouldn’t.”

He flinched like I had hit him. Then he put his head down on his arms across his knees, and his shoulders shook, and I sat there beside him and let him.

I did not touch him. I just stayed.

“I never even asked about him,” Clyde said after a while, into his arms. “Not once since the funeral. I couldn’t look at him. He looks just like Jimmy did at that age. Same ears. Same everything.”

“I know,” I said. “He knows too, in his way. He thinks you’re mad at him.”

Clyde lifted his head and stared at me. “Mad at him? Why in the world would I be mad at him?”

“He’s eleven,” I said. “When a grown man stops talking to you, you figure it must be something you did.”

Clyde sat with that for a long time.

Then he stood up and dusted off the seat of his jeans and looked down at me, and his face in the porch light looked ten years older than forty-six.

“What do I do, Becky?” he said. “Tell me what to do, because I don’t know.”

“Elmer’s taking us out the last Saturday in August,” I said. “It’s the last trip of the summer, before school starts. There’s room for four in that boat. There always was.”

He did not say yes. He did not say no.

He just nodded once and walked back out to his truck and drove away, and I sat on the step until the porch light brought the moths.

The rest of July went by, and the first weeks of August. It got hot the way it gets hot in the Ozarks in August, ninety-five by noon and the lake like bathwater on top.

The fish went deep, and Elmer moved us out to the bluffs and the long points and taught Owen how to drag a football jig on the bottom.

“This time of year the big ones sit deep on the bluff ends and the channel swings,” he told Owen.

“First light, you might catch one shallow. After that, you’ve got to go down where it’s cool and find them. And you’ve got to be patient. Your daddy knew it. Look here.”

He opened Jimmy’s log to an August page and showed Owen.

Bluff end, past the second creek, 18 ft, brown football jig, 5 lb 8 oz, biggest of the year. Jimmy had drawn a little star next to it in pen.