Dad’s Lawn Chair on the Gravel Bar

He looked down at the gravel between his boots and did not look up for a long moment.

“So I bought the signs and I put them up. And I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to look at your face when I told you. That’s the whole reason, sir. I was a coward about it, and I’m sorry.”

It got very quiet on the gravel bar.

I want to tell you that I felt good right then, standing in the creek watching my son in law apologize to my father in front of half the old men in the valley. I did not. I felt sorry for him.

He was a young man with a big note at the bank, and he had been scared, and he had done a wrong thing for a scared reason.

Now he was standing in front of everybody, saying so out loud.

That was the price of it. Not a lawyer. Not a fight.

Just standing there in the sunshine on the gravel, with every man he would buy feed from and sit beside in church for the next forty years looking down at him from that bridge.

He did not run from it, either. I will always give him that much.

Dad reached out finally and took the key off Dustin’s hand. He held it up and looked at it in the sun, and turned the tag over to read it.

Kenna had written on it in her round schoolgirl handwriting. Grandpa, opening day.

“The signs are going to stay up,” Dustin said. “I hope that’s all right with you. I’m going to keep them up for everybody else. But not for you. Never for you. You come any day you want, and you don’t even have to call.”

Dad put the key in the chest pocket of his vest, the one with the snap, where he keeps Mom’s prayer card from the funeral, and he snapped it shut and patted it once.

“Sit down a minute, Dustin,” he said, and nodded at the gravel beside his chair.

There was nowhere to sit. Ward picked up his canvas stool and stood up on his cane and held the stool out to Dustin, and Dustin tried to say no, and Ward just kept holding it out until he took it.

So my son in law sat down on Ward Lindahl’s stool on the gravel bar next to my father’s lawn chair.

Ward stood behind them leaning on his cane, which I knew his hip would complain about all afternoon.

I came up out of the water and poured the coffee from Dustin’s thermos. Four cups.

I handed them around. Dustin’s hands shook a little holding his, and he held it with both of them.

“Mr. Engstrom,” Dustin said, after a while. “Kenna says there’s a hole under that big oak. She says that’s where you caught your very first fish.”

“Seventy six years ago this morning,” Dad said. “Nine inches.”

“I’ve walked past that hole a dozen times since February. I couldn’t even see the bottom of it.”

“You can’t,” Dad said. “Nobody can. That’s the whole point of it.”

Dustin turned the foam cup around and around in his hands, looking down into the coffee.

“Would you show me?” he said. “Not today. You’re settled here. But sometime. Show me how you fish it. I don’t know the first thing about trout, and I’d like to learn it right, if I’m going to own the creek.”