The Boat His Daddy Left Him

“That’s where we’ll go on the last day,” Elmer said, and he tapped the star with his finger. “Your daddy’s bluff.”

The last Saturday in August came up clear and still. I had hardly slept.

Owen was up before my alarm, dressed and sitting on the couch with his tackle bag in his lap and both notebooks, his daddy’s and his own, wrapped together in a bread bag to keep them dry.

At Cape Fair we had the boat loaded and the life jackets on, and Elmer was reaching to untie the bow line, when headlights swung across the water.

A truck came down the hill into the lot and parked crooked, the way a man parks when he has been arguing with himself the whole drive.

Clyde got out. He was wearing his camo cap and an old gray work shirt, and he had a fishing rod in his hand that I recognized.

It was one of Jimmy’s old rods. Jimmy must have left it at the farm years ago.

He walked to the top of the dock and stopped. He did not come down.

Elmer straightened up from the bow line and looked at him across thirty feet of boards, and for a long moment nobody said anything at all.

I watched Owen. He was looking at his uncle like he was afraid to move, like a deer at the edge of a field.

Then he reached into the bread bag and took out his daddy’s log. He opened it to the August page with the star and held it up.

“Uncle Clyde,” he said. “Dad’s spot is eighteen feet down. You coming?”

Clyde came down the dock in about four steps.

He stopped at the edge of the boat and held out his hand to Elmer, and Elmer took it, and the two men stood there and shook hands over the side of the boat for a long time.

“Mr. Wakefield,” Clyde said. “I owe you an apology. I should’ve told you about the boy and his mother. I should’ve told you a lot of things.”

“You owe him a better one than me,” Elmer said. “But you’re here. Climb in. You’re in the back seat, and you’re netting.”

Clyde climbed in. Owen moved over to make room for him on the front deck, and Clyde sat down beside him, and neither one of them said anything.

But Owen leaned against his uncle’s arm a little, just a little, and Clyde let him.

Jimmy’s bluff was a long rock wall that ran out into the main channel, past the second creek, with a point at the end that dropped off into deep water.

Elmer idled in and shut the big motor down, and Owen got on the trolling motor without being told.

“Eighteen feet,” Owen said, reading from the log. “Brown football jig. Dad says right on the end of the point.”

“Then put it right on the end,” Clyde said. It was the first thing he had said to Owen in a year and a half.

His voice was rough. “Let it hit bottom. Then drag it slow. Like your dad did. Slow as you can stand it, then slower.”

Owen made his first cast. Nothing. He made another. Nothing.

Clyde watched him work the jig across the bottom, and after a while he started talking, low, like he was talking to himself as much as to the boy.