The Empty Seat in the Green Jon Boat

The first Sunday

I picked her up at six-thirty on the third Sunday in April. She was waiting on the porch in a jacket and an old pair of Monte’s rubber boots with three pairs of socks in them, and she had a sack of sandwiches and a thermos of her own.

And under her arm she was carrying Monte’s fishing rod.

It was a seven-foot Ugly Stik with a Penn reel on it, the line still on the spool from two years ago.

She did not say anything about it and neither did I. I just took it from her and laid it under the middle seat, and she nodded.

I backed down at the Des Arc ramp. There were two men from the elevator putting in next to us, and they both said good morning, Miss Kathleen, and one of them took his hat off.

I could see her sit up straighter in the passenger seat.

Getting her into the boat was the hard part. I ran the bow up onto the ramp and held the gunwale steady, and she gripped my shoulder and stepped over the side one boot at a time, saying, “Lord, Lord, Lord,” and then she was sitting on the middle seat with her hands in her lap and her eyes wet.

“I’m fine,” she said, before I could ask. “It’s the wind. Go on.”

It was six miles upriver to the sycamores. The Johnson started on the second pull. I ran her slow along the inside of the bends where the current was easiest, and Aunt Kathleen sat with her face turned up to the sky the whole way, the way you see people do in church when the music gets to them.

At the hole I nosed into the bank, drove my new stake into the mud with the back of a hatchet, and tied off with my new rope.

I tied it twice. I am not ashamed to say I looked up the bank at the trees for a long moment before I sat down.

I rigged her a rod with a sinker and a circle hook and a chunk of cut shad and showed her how to drop it straight down beside the logjam and wait for the line to go tight.

She said she remembered. I said I knew she did. I just wanted to show her anyway.

She caught a four-pound blue cat before I got my own line wet.

The rod bowed over and she squealed and grabbed it in both hands, and I said keep your tip up, keep your tip up, and she said I know, I know, and she reeled so hard I thought she would pull the fish clean out of the water and into the trees.

When it came over the side flopping and slapping in the bottom of the boat, she laughed so loud a great blue heron lifted off the far bank and flew away downriver complaining.

“Monte would have hollered at me for horsing it in,” she said, still laughing, wiping her eyes with the back of her glove. “He’d have said, Kathleen, you play a fish, you don’t fight it.”

Then she got very quiet. She held the fish across her lap in both hands, just looking at it, and she did not say anything at all for a long time.

I let her be. The river went by. After a while she put her hand down on Monte’s rod under the seat and left it there.

We caught nine that morning. She caught six of them. We kept four for supper and turned the rest loose, and on the way home she fell asleep sitting up on the middle seat with her chin on her chest, and I ran the motor at the slowest speed it would hold so I would not wake her.