Three Long Blasts Below the Bluff

Saturday

I set my alarm for six, the way I do on the boat, though I did not need it. I was awake at five, lying in my old room at Mom’s, listening for a truck.

At six-thirty I heard Jory get up. I heard him in the kitchen with Mom, making toast. I heard the porch door, and I knew he had gone out to sit on the steps in his red hoodie.

I made myself stay in bed. I prayed, which I do not always remember to do. I asked the Lord to let this one Saturday show up, for Jory, not for me.

At a quarter to seven I heard tires on the gravel.

I got up and went to the window. Shane’s gray pickup was in the drive. He was sitting in it with the engine off, early, waiting for it to be time.

Jory saw it before I did. He came off those steps like he had been shot out of a cannon, and Shane got out of the truck and caught him.

Mom came and stood next to me at the window. She was still in her robe. She did not say anything. She put her hand on my arm.

Jory ran back in for his notebook and his grandpa’s binoculars, which Mom said he could borrow for the day, and then he climbed up in his dad’s truck, and they went down the bluff road past Pearl’s house.

Pearl was already out in her lawn chair, early as they were, with a cup of coffee. This time she waved.

The lock

They spent the whole day at the lock in Guttenberg. They watched two tows lock through, one upbound and one down, each in two cuts. Jory filled four pages of his notebook.

Shane brought peanut butter sandwiches in a bread bag. Jory told me later it was the best lunch he ever had. They sat on the wall and ate them while the lock filled.

A lockman came out and talked to Jory for a while. When he found out whose grandson he was, he took him up to the control house and showed him the panel his grandpa used to run.

That night, Jory fell asleep on Mom’s couch with his notebook on his chest and the binoculars still around his neck.

I took them off him so he would not roll over on them, and I hung them back up on Dad’s nail by the door.

What a boy remembers

I went back out on the river ten days later. I am out here now, as I write this, somewhere above Lansing on a bright cold morning, coiling line on the stern deck with the bluffs going by.

Dutch is still our captain. He has not said one more word about that afternoon, and I have not asked him to.

But every time we come down through the Clayton reach, he leans out the pilothouse door and looks up at the fence.

People ask me sometimes what I think Jory will remember when he is grown. The three Saturdays he waited on the steps, or the three long blasts that rolled off the bluff.

I think he will remember both. I think that is all right. A boy should know that people let you down, and he should know that other people show up anyway.

I did not do it to beat Shane. I did not do it to shame him in front of the bluff road.

I did it because my son had waited three Saturdays for somebody to show up, and I happened to be on a boat with a horn.

Shane has not missed a Saturday since. He still falls behind sometimes, and he tells me now instead of hiding it, and we work it out.

He is not a bad man. He is a man who got scared and is learning not to.

And Shane drove Jory to the lock the next Saturday, early.