The Empty Seat in the Green Jon Boat

What the river took first

Uncle Monte died two Februarys ago. He was 61. He was cutting firewood at the back of his place with Lamar, and he sat down on a stump to rest and told Lamar his arm felt funny, and he was gone before the ambulance got off the highway.

Lamar did everything right. He called it in, he did the compressions, he kept doing them until the men from the fire department pulled him off.

They told him afterward there was nothing anybody could have done. I do not think he has ever believed them.

After the funeral, Lamar stopped coming to church. He stopped coming to Sunday dinner at Aunt Kathleen’s. He went to work at the grain elevator in the morning and came home at night, and on weekends he went to the river by himself and sat in his own boat over Grandpa’s hole until dark.

Then Grandpa had his stroke last fall. He lived three more weeks. I was the one who drove him to the river the week before he went, because he asked me to, and I parked my Jeep on the bluff road so he could look down at the sycamores from the passenger seat.

He could not say much by then. But he patted my hand and he said, “You take the boat, Nettie.” And I said I would.

Lamar got his truck and his shotguns and the deer stand. I got a green jon boat with a fifteen horse Johnson on the back that had to be choked just so.

Why I did not call anybody

I know what some people would say. Call the sheriff. A deputy would have written it up.

But calling the sheriff on my own cousin over a cut rope would have split our family down the middle, and Aunt Kathleen had buried enough already.

She buried her husband and her father-in-law inside of two years. I was not going to hand her a son in front of a judge.

My daddy was the man I would have called first, and I did call him, that night. He works a hitch on a towboat on the Mississippi, twenty-eight days on and twenty-eight off, and that week he was pushing grain barges somewhere below Memphis.

“Did you see him do it?” Daddy asked. I said no, I heard the truck. He was quiet a minute and I could hear the engines through the phone.

“Then it’s your call, Jeanette. You’re the one who has to look at him across the table at Christmas. But your aunt’s had about all she can carry.”

I said I knew that. He said, “I’ll be home in two weeks. Get the boat back first. Then figure the rest.”

So that is what I did.