Three Long Blasts Below the Bluff

Friday

Shane came to the bluff on Friday afternoon.

I was out by the fence with Jory, showing him which way the channel ran and why the tows hugged the Iowa side through that reach. We heard a truck on the bluff road and both turned to look.

It was Shane’s old gray pickup. He drove it slow past Pearl’s house, and Pearl was out in her yard in her lawn chair, the way she is every afternoon it is not raining, and she did not wave.

He drove past the foreman’s house, too, and past two other neighbors who had walked to the end of the road on Sunday. Every one of them looked up. Nobody said a word.

That is a long, slow drive, that bluff road, when everybody on it knows what you did.

I watched Shane make it, and I did not feel glad. I just felt that it was right that he had to make it.

He parked by Mom’s barn and got out and stood by the truck a minute with his hands in his jacket pockets. Then he walked across the yard toward the fence.

Jory looked up at me. “Is Dad mad?”

“No, buddy,” I said. “I don’t think he’s mad.”

Shane stopped a few feet away. He looked at Jory, and then at the river, and then at the ground. He looked older than 37.

“Hey, bud,” he said.

“Hi, Dad.”

Shane crouched down so he was at Jory’s eye level. He did not look at me. I think he knew he could not do this and look at me at the same time.

“I heard you saw a big boat on Sunday,” he said.

Jory nodded. “Mom’s boat. They blew the horn three times. Everybody came out. I saluted, like Grandpa showed me.”

“I heard,” Shane said. “I heard all about it.”

He was quiet a second. Then he said, “Jory, I owe you three Saturdays. I told you I’d come and I didn’t come. That wasn’t because of anything you did. That was me. I’m sorry.”

Jory looked at him the way kids do, straight on, deciding.

“Were you at work?” he asked.

I watched Shane’s face. I watched him want to say yes. I watched him decide not to.

“Not every time,” he said. “Sometimes I just didn’t come. I was embarrassed about some grown-up stuff, and I let it be more important than you. It’s not more important than you.”

Jory thought about that for a long time. Then he said, “Okay,” the same way he had said it on the first Saturday, except this time he did not go inside.

Mom

My mother came out on the porch while they were talking. She did not come down. She just stood there with her arms folded, watching.

When Shane stood up, he looked over at her. She held his eyes for a good long while, and then she said, “There’s coffee, Shane, if you want it.”

That is my mother. She does not hold a grudge, and she does not let a person off, either.

She just tells you the coffee is on and lets you decide what kind of man you are going to be when you walk in for it.

Shane said, “Thank you, Elsbeth,” and went up the steps, and took the cup she handed him, and stood on the porch drinking it. He did not stay long.

Before he left, he came back across the yard to the fence where I was. He stood beside me and looked down at the river for a while.

“Your captain did that?” he said. “Slowed down and everything?”

“He didn’t slow down much,” I said. “He called it on the radio. The whole crew came out.”

Shane shook his head. “Strangers,” he said. “Strangers on a boat showed up for my kid.”

I did not say anything. I did not have to. He heard it.

“Tomorrow,” he said, and then he stopped himself, like he heard how that word had sounded for three Saturdays. “I’m not going to say it. I’m just going to be here.”