The Empty Seat in the Green Jon Boat

The Fourth of July

Daddy came home off the towboat again the last week of June, and he went with us twice. He sat in the back and ran the motor and let me fish, which he had never once done in my life.

Aunt Kathleen told him he was getting soft. He said somebody in this family had to.

He did not talk to Lamar about the rope. I asked him not to, and he respected that. But I know he drove out to County Road 37 one evening and the two of them sat on Lamar’s tailgate until dark, and when Daddy came home he said only, “That boy’s carrying a load,” and went to bed.

The Sunday before the Fourth was hot and still, the river low and green-brown and slow. We had fished the hole all morning and done well, and a little before eleven we ran across to the gravel bar to eat in the shade.

I pulled the bow up on the rocks and Aunt Kathleen handed me the sandwich sack.

We had just sat down when a truck door shut up on the bluff road.

It was not the gray Dodge pulling away. It was the gray Dodge door shutting, and then boots coming down through the dry leaves under the sycamores, slow, sliding a little on the clay, the way you come down a bank you have come down a thousand times.

Lamar came out of the trees onto the gravel bar with a rod in his hand. It was his own rod, the one he used to fish with his daddy.

He stopped at the edge of the water about twenty feet from the boat.

He did not look at me. He looked at his mother.

“Mama,” he said. His voice cracked on it, like a boy’s. “Is there room?”

Under the seat

Aunt Kathleen did not answer him right away. She set her sandwich down on the bucket. She stood up, which took her a minute with her knees.

And then she reached down into the boat, under the middle seat, and came up with Monte’s rod.

She walked across the gravel to him with it. It was the seven-foot Ugly Stik with the Penn reel, rigged with a circle hook, the same way it had been rigged every Sunday since April, ready, waiting.

“I’ve been carrying this down to this river every week since the third Sunday in April,” she said. “Your daddy’s rod. I wasn’t going to fish with it. I was saving it for you.”

Lamar looked at the rod in her hands and his whole face came apart. He is a big man, six foot two, and he works at a grain elevator and has hands like shovels, and he stood on that gravel bar and cried like he was nine years old.

She put the rod in his hands and then she put her arms around him, as far as they would go, and held him there in the sun.

I looked away to give them that. I watched the river go by. I watched the logjam. I watched a kingfisher work the far bank.

After a while he let go of her and wiped his face on his sleeve and turned and looked at me for the first time.

“I cut it, Jeanette,” he said. “I cut Grandpa’s rope. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was doing. I’ve been sick over it since I heard what Newt found on that rope.”

“I know you did,” I said. “I knew it from the sound of your lifters.”

He laughed, a broken little laugh, and wiped his face again.

“I put your money in my dresser,” I said. “I never spent it. I figured I’d give it back to you someday when you were ready to buy the bait.”

“Nettie,” he said. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Probably not,” I said. “Get in the boat. Front seat’s yours. It’s been yours since May.”