Three Long Blasts Below the Bluff

The afternoon

By one o’clock we were below Guttenberg, coming down the long straight stretch toward Clayton with the bluffs green on both sides and the sky so blue it almost hurt to look at.

It was a bright September afternoon, the kind that comes once or twice a fall on the river.

Warm in the sun and cool in the shade, with the first gold just starting in the trees up on the bluff tops.

The tow stretched out in front of us, 15 barges of corn and soybeans, three wide and five long, a long string of steel on the wide brown river.

From the pilothouse the head of it looked like it was a mile away.

Dutch came up to the pilothouse at a quarter after one, even though it was not his watch. He did not say anything. He just stood next to the pilot with his arms folded.

I had my white hard hat on and my orange life vest over my navy work shirt, the same as every other day on that boat. I had put on clean gloves, which I do not usually bother with.

“There’s your bluff,” Dutch said, and pointed.

I already saw it. I had been looking for it for half an hour. The wooden fence along the top, the roof of Dad’s house behind it, the big oak tree he planted the year I was born.

And at the fence, small as a match head at first, a spot of red.

Dutch handed me his own binoculars without a word. I put them up and found the fence, and there was my boy.

He was standing on the bottom rail in his red hoodie, holding on with both hands, leaning out to look up the river.

My mother stood right beside him in her denim jacket, her short gray hair blowing a little in the wind.

She had Dad’s binoculars around her neck. Jory kept reaching for them and then letting go of the fence and grabbing it again, too excited to do either thing right.

He did not know which boat was mine. There were two other tows on the river that afternoon, one tied off at Guttenberg and one coming up. He did not know I could see him.

I handed the binoculars back. My hands were not steady.

Dutch picked up the radio mic. He keyed it and spoke in his slow, flat river voice, the same voice he uses for everything.

“All traffic in the Clayton reach, this is the downbound tow above Clayton. We’re going to sound three long blasts here in a minute for a little boy on the bluff. Nothing wrong, no danger. Just a salute. Over.”

There was a short quiet, and then the radio crackled. It was the upbound boat below us.

“Copy that, Captain. Give him a good one.”

Then Dutch nodded at the side door of the pilothouse. On that boat, which is older than I am, there is still a pull cord for the air horn run down along the outside wall, from the days before they put the button on the console.

“Go ahead, Hadley,” he said.

I stepped out onto the deck outside the pilothouse. Below me, every one of the crew was already out.

Augie, the mate, the other deckhand, the cook in her apron, the engineer in his coveralls wiping his hands on a rag.

They were all in their orange vests, lined up along the rail of the boat, looking up at the bluff.

I wrapped my right hand around the cord. I lifted my left arm as high as it would go and waved it slow, back and forth, the way you wave to somebody far away.

Up on the bluff, I saw my boy let go of the fence.