The Boy Who Sat Still At Sunrise

The phone call

Trevor sleeps days when he works nights, so I waited until three-thirty, when I knew his alarm would have gone off.

I walked up the gravel drive where nobody could hear me and called him.

I told him all of it. The bank, the supper, nobody cares. He did not say anything for a long time.

I could hear the coffee maker going in our kitchen, two hundred miles away, and I knew he was standing there with his hand on the counter.

“I should’ve been there,” he said finally. “I’m going to talk to him. Not on the phone, not today. When you’re home, I’ll drive over to his place and we’ll have it out like grown men. That’s mine to do.”

“I know,” I said. “But Asher’s got one more morning up here, and I don’t want him to go home thinking he’s the reason a boat leaves without him.”

Trevor was quiet again. Then he said, “Ask Dad for his boat. The old Lund. It’s tied at the side dock. He hasn’t run it since his knee, but it ran fine last fall. I checked the plugs myself.”

I had not even thought of it. That old boat had been sitting at the little side dock all weekend, a fourteen-foot aluminum with a nine-point-nine on the back, and I had looked right past it twice a day.

“He’ll let you,” Trevor said. “Dad always lets you. He likes you better than either of us.”

Grandpa’s boat

I found Grandpa down at the side dock that afternoon, sitting on an overturned bucket with his cane across his knees, looking at his boat like it was an old dog he missed.

“Dad,” I said, “could I borrow your boat in the morning? Just me and Asher. I’ll go slow. I grew up on my uncle’s boat on a lake a lot like this one.”

He did not answer right away. He looked up the shore at Asher, who was sitting on the blanket with his fish book open on his knees, reading it with his finger under every word.

He looked a long time. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and took out the key on its little orange float and held it out to me.

“I should have said something Friday,” he said. “I let Todd run things since his mother passed. He needs it, I think. But that’s no excuse for letting a boy sit on the shore two days running. She would have had my hide.”

I took the key. His hand was rough and warm and shaking a little.

Then he got businesslike, the way the old farm men do when their feelings get too close to the top. He pointed with the cane.

“Go at first light,” he said. “Over past the point there’s a bay with lily pads on the north side. Bass come up shallow at sunrise, before the boats get going. Nightcrawler, a bobber about three feet up, right along the edge of the pads.”

“Do I need a license?” I said, because I always think of those things. “I bought mine at the bait shop on the way up. Twenty dollars.”

“You’re fine, and he’s fine,” Grandpa said. “Kids under sixteen don’t need one. And you put him in his vest even if he squawks. Old boat, cold water.”

“He won’t squawk,” I said. “He sleeps in that vest if I let him.”

That evening, Grandpa sat on the side dock and rigged Asher’s line himself.

He tied the hook on with his thick fingers, slow, and set the bobber, and while he worked he hummed “Shall We Gather at the River” under his breath the way his wife used to.

Asher sat next to him and watched every knot. He did not ask a single question.

When Grandpa finished, he handed Asher the rod and said, “That’s rigged right. You don’t change a thing.” And Asher said, “I won’t change a thing.”

At bedtime, with the sky still light outside the bunk room window, I tucked him into the bottom bunk, and he said his prayers the way he always does, fast and in order.

At the end he added something new. “And please let a fish feel safe enough to come up. Amen.”