Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

I knew that because I had fished it as a boy, back when Dad had to work opening day before he got enough seniority to take it off.

Ward Lindahl used to take me down there with a coffee can of worms.

Dad was quiet for a long time. He picked up the creel and turned it in his hands.

I could see him thinking about his knees, and the bank down to the gravel, and what people along the road would say.

“I can’t stand in the water anymore, Halsey. Not for four hours. Not even for one. You know that as well as I do.”

“You won’t have to stand. I’ll bring a lawn chair and set it right on the gravel for you.”

He looked at me then, and for the first time all day, the corner of his mouth went up a little under that white stubble.

“Your mother’s lawn chair? The old webbed folding one out in the garage?”

“That’s the one.”

“Well,” he said. He set the creel back down on the table, very carefully, like it might break. “I suppose I’d better not put this away after all.”

I did not sleep much. I am not proud of that.

I lay there in the dark at my own place out on the ridge, thinking about Dustin Pell and every polite word he had ever said to me at Sunday dinner.

He is thirty three. He grew up in Madison and moved out here for a job at the co op in town, and he met Kenna at the county fair three summers back.

He is a hard worker, I will give him that much.

He fixed the brakes on my truck once without being asked. He is good to my daughter.

He goes to church with her every Sunday and sings the hymns too loud and a little flat, which I have always liked about him.

But he did not grow up here. He does not know what it means when a man has fished one hole for seventy six years.

To him, Dad was an old man who might slip and fall in the creek on his property.

I knew, too, about the price. Kenna had told me they paid more than the forty was worth because two other buyers were bidding against them, and the payment at the bank was going to be tight for years.

And I knew about the lawsuit. Everybody in the valley knew about it.

A fellow down toward Readstown got sued last fall after a hunter’s boy broke his leg falling off an old deer stand on his land.

It cost that man two years of his life and most of his savings, and he did not even own the deer stand.

Dustin had sat at my table and talked about it at Easter, more than once, with his jaw tight.

So I understood how a young man with a big bank note and a new piece of land might buy a three pack of yellow signs and go put them up.

I understood the reason. I could even see it from his side.

What I could not understand was how he could do it the day before opening day without one word to the old man whose whole life was down in that hole under the oak.

He knew. He had heard Dad tell the brook trout story at Thanksgiving. He had sat right there and laughed in the right places.