The Empty Seat in the Green Jon Boat

The truck on the bluff road

The first time, I thought I imagined it. We were drifting off the logjam, and I looked up at the bluff and saw a gray Dodge parked on the road above the sycamores, half hidden in the dogwoods.

I knew the dent in the front fender. He backed out and was gone before I could be sure.

The next Sunday it was there again. And the next. He never got out. He never came down.

He just parked up there in the trees for half an hour or so, and then he left.

Aunt Kathleen saw it the third time. She did not say anything. She just put her hand down on Monte’s rod under the seat, the way she did when the fish were not biting.

I want to be honest about what I felt, because it would be easy to make myself look better than I was.

Part of me liked it. Part of me liked knowing he was up there watching his mama laugh in the boat he cut loose, on the hole he wanted for himself.

I am not proud of that part. I prayed about it on my route more than once, out on the long gravel stretch south of Hickory Plains where nobody can see you talk to yourself.

I asked to be the kind of person Grandpa would have wanted in his boat.

And the next Sunday, when I tied off at the hole, I did something I had not done before. I moved the cooler off the front seat and set it in the back with me.

I left the front seat empty. Monte’s seat. Aunt Kathleen looked at it, and looked at me, and did not say a word.

The mailbox on County Road 37

Lamar lives on County Road 37, two miles past the elevator, and his mailbox is on my route.

It is the black box with the bass painted on the side that I helped him paint when I was sixteen.

I had been putting his mail in it for two months without seeing him. Bills, a seed catalog, a sympathy card from somebody who was very late.

One Tuesday in early June he was standing at the box when I pulled up, waiting on a part he had ordered, and there was nowhere for either of us to go.

He looked bad. Thinner. He needed a haircut. He had the same tired look Aunt Kathleen had the first year, like somebody who sleeps but does not rest.

I handed him his mail through the window. He said thanks. I said you’re welcome. The Jeep idled.

A truck went by on the road and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel at both of us, and we both lifted two fingers back.

“She looks good,” he said finally, not looking at me. “Mama. She looks good in that boat.”

“She is good,” I said. “She caught a seven-pound blue last Sunday. She cleaned it herself.”

He nodded. He turned the seed catalog over and over in his hands.

“Sunday, six-thirty,” I said. “Des Arc ramp. There’s a seat.”

He did not answer. He did not say no, either. I put the Jeep in gear and went on down the road to the Hendersons’, and when I looked in my mirror he was still standing by the bass mailbox with his mail in his hand.

He did not come that Sunday. Or the next.