The Old Lund on Dad’s Reef

Why I didn’t call anyone

People have asked me since why I didn’t drive to Dwayne’s place and take the boat back, or call the sheriff.

The title was in my name by then. The will was clear. Anybody at the courthouse would have said so.

But Dwayne was Dad’s only brother. He was the last Nyberg of that generation.

He had a wife, Aunt Deb, and two grown boys with kids of their own, and every Christmas of my life had happened at one of our two tables.

If I put a deputy in Dwayne’s driveway over my dead father’s boat, that would have been the end of us.

Not just me and Dwayne. All of it. The cousins, the Fourth of July fish fry, the whole family.

And there was something else. In the hospital, two days before he died, Dad had a scare with his heart and they kept him overnight.

He said something to me that I didn’t understand until that November.

“Look out for Dwayne,” he’d said. “He’s not as tough as he lets on. He never was.”

So I hung up the phone, drained the water lines, locked the house and drove home to my apartment in town. I made myself a grilled cheese and didn’t eat it.

The club meeting

Our lake has a walleye club. About sixty members, most of them men past fifty, a few wives, a couple of younger guys with fancy electronics.

They run two tournaments a year, one in spring after the opener and one in September.

Dad was a member for twenty-five years. I fished every one of their tournaments with him since I was sixteen, sitting in the front of the boat with the net.

The club’s spring meeting happens in April at the public landing pavilion, with a pot of coffee, a box of donuts and a sign-up table.

I didn’t go that year. I wasn’t ready to stand in that crowd without him.

Bud Skoglund called me the next day. Bud is seventy and has run the club’s weigh-in for as long as anybody can remember.

He drove Dad’s casket to the cemetery in the funeral home’s car, because the funeral director is his nephew.

“Kari,” he said. “I thought you ought to hear it from me instead of the bait shop.”

Dwayne had stood up at the meeting, he told me, and announced he’d be running Roy’s boat in the spring tournament.

When someone asked about me, Dwayne said a woman had no business running a rig like that alone, and that was that.

“Nobody said anything back?” I asked.

Bud was quiet on the line. Then he said, “Your uncle’s been fishing this lake for forty years, honey. And he was hurting. Folks figured it wasn’t their fight.”

I thanked him. I told him I understood, and I did, mostly. Dwayne wasn’t a fool, and nobody in that pavilion thought he was.

He was one of the best fishermen on the lake, and everybody knew it.