The Empty Seat in the Green Jon Boat

What Aunt Kathleen knew

It was the middle of June, a hot morning, the river down and clearing a little, when Aunt Kathleen told me she knew.

We had pulled onto the gravel bar across from the hole to eat our sandwiches in the shade of the sycamores.

She sat on an upturned bucket and I sat on the bow, and she said, without any warning at all, “It was Lamar cut that rope, wasn’t it.”

I almost choked on my sandwich. “Who told you that?”

“Nobody had to,” she said. “Lucille Fry can’t hold water in a bucket, honey, and neither can the men at that ramp. I’ve known since April.”

She took a bite of her bologna. “I wanted to see what you’d do.”

I did not know what to say. I said, “I’m sorry, Aunt Kathleen.”

“What on earth for? You didn’t cut it.” She chewed a while, looking across the water at the logjam. “I’ll tell you something about my son, and then I’ll tell you what I want.”

I waited.

“Lamar was with his daddy when he died,” she said. “You know that. What you don’t know is the last thing Monte said to him, sitting on that stump. He said, Son, Sunday let’s go up to the hole. Lamar said yes sir. And then his daddy was gone.”

The river went by. A gar rolled out in the current and went back under.

“He never went up there with anybody again,” she said. “He goes by himself and sits. It’s where he goes to be with Monte. I think when he saw your boat on it he felt like somebody walked into his daddy’s room and sat down on the bed. That’s not right, what he did. But I know where it came from.”

“What do you want?” I asked her.

She looked at me, and she was not small and quiet anymore. She looked like she used to look standing at the head of the church kitchen on homecoming Sunday, with forty pies behind her.

“I want my son back in this boat,” she said. “And I’m not going to beg him. And neither are you. We’re going to keep coming up here every Sunday and catching fish and having the best time two women ever had on this river, and that front seat is going to stay empty until he’s ready to sit in it.”

“What if he’s never ready?”

“Then I’ll have spent my Sundays with you,” she said. “And that’s not nothing either, Jeanette. That’s not nothing.”