Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

He has a loose heat shield that rattles when he gears down, and I have told him twice to fix it.

The truck pulled off on the shoulder behind mine and stopped. For a long moment nobody got out.

Then the driver’s door opened, and Dustin climbed out and stood at the edge of the road looking down over the bank.

Every man on that bridge turned and looked at him. Elof. Ward. The men along the far bank. Every one of them. Nobody said a word, and nobody went back to fishing, either.

I stood in the shallows with the net in my hands. Dad sat in Mom’s chair with his rod laid across his knees.

Ward set his own rod down on the gravel beside his stool and folded his hands.

Dustin reached back into the cab of his truck and lifted something out with both hands.

Then he started down the bank toward us, carrying it, one careful step at a time on the wet path.

It was a red plastic cooler, the square kind with a white lid.

It was heavy enough that he had to carry it with both arms against his chest, and when he got to the bottom of the bank, he set it down on the gravel near Dad’s chair.

He straightened up. He was red in the face, and it was not from the walk down the bank.

He looked at me first, and I looked back at him, and I did not say anything at all.

Then he looked at Ward, and Ward did not say anything either. Then, finally, he looked at Dad.

“Mr. Engstrom,” he said. He has never once called Dad by his first name. “Kenna sent me down here.”

“I figured she might have,” Dad said, not unkindly, and waited for the rest of it.

“No. That’s not.” Dustin stopped, and took a breath, and started over. “I mean, she did. She came back to the house crying, and she sent me. But I’d have come anyway. I’ve been sick about it since I put the first one up.”

Up on the bridge, nobody moved. The creek ran on past the gravel bar and under the bridge and down the valley, and for a minute it was the only sound there was besides the blackbirds.

Dustin knelt down beside the cooler and opened the lid.

Inside there was a big steel thermos and a sleeve of foam cups, a paper sack that smelled like Kenna’s cinnamon rolls, and a key ring.

He took out the key ring and held it out to Dad on his open palm. One key, brass, brand new, with a little paper tag tied on with kitchen string.

“That’s the gate,” he said. “I put a padlock on it yesterday. That’s the only other key there is besides mine. Kenna went and had it cut this morning.”

Dad did not take it. He just looked at it, lying there in the middle of Dustin’s hand.

“I paid too much for that land,” Dustin said. He said it fast, like he had been practicing it in the truck and wanted it out before it left him. “Way too much. We’ll be paying on it until I’m sixty.”

“I know you did, son. Everybody in the county knows you did.”

“And that fellow down by Readstown, with the deer stand. He nearly lost his whole place over it. I lay awake about that. What if somebody falls in my creek, and I lose the farm, and Kenna loses everything before we’ve even started.”