Three Long Blasts Below the Bluff

The third Saturday, my mother called me after supper, with the sun going down red behind the Iowa bluffs. I was on the stern deck coiling a line, and I knew from the way she said my name that Shane had not come.

“He’s still on the steps,” Mom said. “He’s had that red hoodie zipped up since eight o’clock this morning. He won’t take it off. He says his dad will want to leave quick.”

I stood there with the line in my hands and the river sliding by brown and wide, and I did not say anything for a while, because there was nothing to say that would help.

“Did Shane call?” I finally asked, though I already knew.

“No, honey. Not a call, not a text. Nothing.” Mom let out a breath. “I offered to drive him down to the lock myself. I’d have gone in a minute. He said no, Grandma, Dad’s coming, he promised.”

That was the part that went into me like a fishhook. Not that Shane had forgotten. That my boy had turned down a sure thing because he still believed in the other one.

“Put him on,” I said.

There was a rustle and a bump, and then Jory came on the line, breathing like he had run to the phone, which he had not. He was just trying hard not to sound like he had been crying.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, buddy. Grandma says you’ve been waiting.”

“Dad probably got called in,” he said. “He works a lot of Saturdays now. That’s okay. He’ll come next week.”

He was 8 years old and making excuses for a grown man. I turned my face to the wind so the deckhand on the other side of the barge would not see it.

“Next week,” I said. “Sure, buddy. You go have some supper with Grandma, okay? I love you more than this whole river.”

“That’s a lot of river,” he said, which is what he always says, and then he gave the phone back to my mother.

The river and the bluff

I should tell you who we are, so you can see it the way I saw it standing on that deck.

My name is Hadley Brummer. I am 35, and for six years I have worked as a deckhand on towboats on the upper Mississippi.

I work 28 days on and 14 off, six hours on watch and six hours off, around the clock.

It is hard work and honest work. You build tow, you check wires and ratchets, you scrub decks, you stand on the head of a barge in the rain at a lock and call distances back to the pilothouse on the radio.

I took the job after my marriage came apart, because it paid better than anything else I could find in Clayton County, and because I grew up on the river and was never afraid of it.

My dad worked the lock and dam at Guttenberg for 30 years.

When I was little he would take me down on his days off to stand at the rail and watch the tows come through, and he would tell me where every barge was headed.

“That one’s corn for New Orleans,” he would say. “That one’s going to come back up full of fertilizer for somebody’s field in Minnesota. Everything you eat rides this river, Haddie.”

Dad was an Army man before he was a lock man. He passed two years ago, in the spring, and my son still talks about him like he just stepped out to the shed.

My mother, Elsbeth Brummer, is 63. She still lives in the house Dad built on the bluff above the village of Clayton, with a wooden fence along the edge where the ground drops off toward the river.

From that fence you can see a long way up and down the valley.

You can see the Wisconsin hills across the water, and on a clear day you can watch a tow come around the bend for a good half hour before it passes.

While I am on the boat, my son Jory lives with Mom on the bluff. He goes to school in town, rides the bus, feeds her barn cats, and keeps a notebook of every boat he sees go by.

When I am home, he lives with me in a little rental house in town. And every Saturday, by the papers we both signed three years ago, he belongs to his father.