The Empty Seat in the Green Jon Boat

What Newt said at the ramp

I was not there for the next part. But this is a small town and I heard it three times by Thursday, and all three versions matched, so I believe it.

The Wednesday after that first Sunday, Lamar pulled into the boat ramp lot at six in the morning to put in.

Newt Fry was there with four or five of the regulars, standing around his tailgate with their coffee the way they do every morning, rain or shine.

Newt walked over to Lamar’s truck before Lamar could get out. He did not raise his voice. Newt never raises his voice.

He just put his hand on the edge of Lamar’s open window and said it loud enough for the tailgate to hear.

“Son, I pulled Leroy’s boat out of my willows last week. Somebody sawed through the bow line with a pocketknife. That girl bought a hundred and sixty dollars of propeller on a mail carrier’s pay. I believe you know who ought to pay her back.”

Nobody said anything. One of the men told me later you could hear the river.

Lamar did not argue. That is what everybody said, every time I heard it. He did not deny it and he did not get mad.

He just sat there with his hands on the wheel looking straight ahead, and after a minute he pulled his boat back out of the lot without ever putting it in.

That Friday there was an envelope in my mailbox at home. My own mailbox, the one I deliver to myself.

One hundred and sixty dollars in twenties. No note. No name. Just Lamar’s handwriting on the front, my name, the way only family ever calls me. Nettie.

I put the envelope in my dresser drawer and I did not spend it.

He did not come back to the boat ramp for a long time after that. The men at the tailgate did not shun him, exactly.

This is not that kind of town. But they did not save him a spot either, and a man notices that.

May

We went back the next Sunday. And the next. By May we had a routine. I picked her up at six-thirty. She had the sandwiches, pimento cheese or bologna, and her thermos, and Monte’s rod.

She never fished with it. She laid it under the seat every Sunday, rigged and ready, and every Sunday I did not ask.

She got stronger. By the second week of May she was stepping into the boat with only her hand on my shoulder.

By the first week of June she was baiting her own hooks, cutting shad on the little board on the seat with Monte’s old Case knife and wiping it on her jeans.

She talked, out on the water, in a way she never did on the porch. She told me about Monte asking her to the Prairie County Fair in 1977 and spending eleven dollars trying to win her a stuffed bear at the ring toss.

She told me about the night Lamar was born during an ice storm, and Monte driving the truck to Searcy at fifteen miles an hour with the hazards on.

“You’ve got his hands,” she said one morning, watching me tie a knot. “Leroy’s. Look at that. Same knuckles.”

It was the kind of thing nobody had said to me in a long time, and I had to look down at the knot a while before I could answer her.

Somewhere in the middle of May I started noticing Lamar’s truck.