The Empty Seat in the Green Jon Boat

The rope was still tied to the stake when I came back down the bank with the thermos, rain jacket hanging open over my flannel shirt and my tall rubber boots slick with mud.

It just did not go anywhere anymore. It ran out of the mud, across my boots, and stopped in a short, chewed end about four feet from the water.

I picked it up and turned the end over in my hand. It was not worn through.

Somebody had sawed it, back and forth, with a knife that was not very sharp. The strands fanned out like a horse’s tail.

Already a boat length off the bank and sliding farther, my grandpa’s green jon boat was turning slow in the brown current, bow swinging around like it was looking back at me.

The motor was tilted up the way I had left it. My tackle box was still on the middle seat.

Up the bank, behind the sycamores, a truck door shut. Then an engine I had known my whole life turned over, a diesel with a lifter tick in it, and pulled out onto the gravel road toward the highway.

I already knew whose it was. I stood there in the mud with a frayed rope in my hand and watched the boat my grandpa left me drift down the White River without me.

My name is Jeanette. I am 31, and I carry a rural mail route out of the Des Arc post office, six days a week, a hundred and eight miles of county road in a right-hand-drive Jeep.

Sundays are the only day the river is mine.

The truck belonged to my cousin Lamar. He is 36, my Uncle Monte’s only boy, and the closest thing I ever had to a brother when we were kids.

He taught me to cast. He taught me to back a trailer. He taught me how to tell a blue cat from a channel cat by the shape of the tail.

And twice that spring, standing at the boat ramp with his hands in his pockets, he had told me the hole below the sycamores was his.

“Find your own spot, Jeanette,” he said the second time. He did not say it mean. He said it flat, like a man reading a fence line. “That one’s spoke for.”

I told him it was Grandpa’s hole and Grandpa’s boat, and I was fishing it from Grandpa’s boat, so I figured that made it about as much mine as anybody’s.

He looked at the water a long time and then walked back to his truck without another word.

That was the Sunday before he cut the rope.

The hole below the sycamores

You have to understand about that hole, or none of the rest makes sense.

The White River comes down past Des Arc wide and slow and the color of chocolate milk most of the spring. About six miles above town there is a bend where the bank rises up into a little clay bluff, and old sycamores lean out over the water, white as bone at the top.

Under that bend, the current has dug a hole close to thirty feet deep. There is a logjam on the upstream side that has been there since before I was born, and the big catfish lie in the slack water behind it, waiting for whatever the river brings them.

Grandpa Leroy found that hole in 1979, the year he bought the boat. It is a fourteen-foot flat-bottom aluminum jon boat that he painted John Deere green because the man at the hardware store had a gallon left over and sold it to him for two dollars.

He fished that hole for forty-six years. He fished it with my daddy and with Uncle Monte when they were boys, and later with Lamar and me, one of us on each end of the boat and Grandpa in the middle where he could reach both of us when we hooked something we could not handle.

When I was nine, I caught a flathead there that weighed twenty-two pounds on the feed store scale. Lamar was fourteen and he got the net under it for me, and then he made me hold it up for the picture by myself even though he did half the work.

That is the Lamar I remember. That is the one I kept waiting for.