Three Long Blasts Below the Bluff

The salute

Dutch had come out of the pilothouse to stand behind me. He handed me the binoculars again without a word.

I put them up, and I found the fence.

Jory had stopped waving. He was standing on the bottom rail, straight as a fence post, with his right hand up at his eyebrow. He was saluting the boat.

It was the salute my dad taught him at the cemetery on Memorial Day, the last one before Dad passed. Fingers together, hand flat, elbow out. Dad had fixed his elbow three times until it was right.

“You salute the flag and you salute the men who served,” Dad told him that day. “And you can salute a boat, too, if it’s carrying something that matters.”

My son held that salute while the whole tow slid by underneath him, all 15 barges and the boat behind them. He did not drop his hand once.

Beside him, my mother had her hand over her heart. I could see her shoulders shaking. Pearl had come over from her yard and had her arm around Mom’s waist.

I saluted back. I am not military, but I did it the way Dad taught both of us, and I held it until the bluff was behind us and the fence was out of sight.

When I put my hand down, Dutch was looking at the river. He cleared his throat once and went back into the pilothouse without a word, and I did not follow him in for a few minutes.

Was that you

My phone rang about ten minutes later, when we were coming down toward the long bends below Clayton. It was Mom’s number, but it was not Mom.

“Mom,” Jory said. “Mom, was that you? Was that your boat?”

“That was my boat, buddy.”

“It was so loud. It was so loud, Mom. I felt it in my feet. Pearl came out. Everybody came out. Grandma cried, but she said it was the good kind.”

“Did you see all the people waving on the deck?”

“I saw them! Grandma let me use Grandpa’s binoculars. There was a man swinging his hat.” He took a big breath. “Did you see me salute?”

“I saw you,” I said. “You did it just like Grandpa showed you. Elbow out.”

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, in a smaller voice, “Was that for me?”

“Every bit of it,” I said. “Three times. One for every Saturday you waited.”

He did not say anything to that. I heard him breathing. Then he said, “That’s a lot of horn,” and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on a coil of line.

Shane hears

I did not call Shane. I did not text him. I did not post anything anywhere. I want that understood. It was never for him.

But the river is a small town, and the bluff road is smaller.

Shane’s foreman at the cabinet shop lives three houses down from my mother.

He was home that Sunday, out in his yard raking, and he heard the horn and walked to the end of the road with everybody else to see what it was.

Pearl told him. Pearl told everybody. She told him whose boy that was on the fence, and why he was there, and how many Saturdays he had waited in that red hoodie.

On Monday morning, the foreman walked over to Shane’s bench before the saws started up. Shane told me later what he said, word for word, because I think it stuck in him.

“That was your boy on the Brummer fence Sunday,” the foreman said. “The one the towboat blew for.” Then he said, “I didn’t have you on the schedule last Saturday, Shane. Or the one before.”

That was the part I had not known. Shane had worked the first of those three Saturdays. The second and third, he had not been on the schedule at all.