The Patch at the Boat Ramp

Why he did it

I found out the truth later, from Ansel himself, but I will tell it here so you know it before Saturday.

He had met a woman at a fish fry at the volunteer fire department in September. She was divorced, a few years younger, and she liked to fish. He had told her that he was a fishing guide on Bull Shoals, and that the white boat at my house was his.

He wanted to look like a man with something to his name. He had lost his job, and his wife had moved out, and I suppose he wanted one person in the world to look at him the way they used to.

So he borrowed my boat and took her out on the river below the dam, because the trout fishing is good there and he wanted to look like he knew what he was doing. He didn’t check the generation schedule. When the dam shut off, the water dropped out from under him, and he ran a gravel bar at full throttle trying to get back before dark.

He got her off the bar somehow, and got back to the access, and got her on the trailer. And then he could not face me. So he hauled her up to the lake ramp near my house, where he’d told me he’d be fishing, and unhooked her there, and drove away.

I understood every bit of that. I understood being lonely and ashamed and wanting to look like somebody.

It did not change the hole. And it did not change that he let me find it on my own, and then told my sister it was like that when he got it.

Saturday

Hobart’s truck pulled into my driveway at a quarter past six Saturday morning, the way it has every October for years. He climbed out slow, the way he does now, and stretched his back, and grinned at me.

“There she is,” he said. “Ready to catch some fish?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said.

He had brought a box of donuts from a place in Mountain Home. He always does. He handed me the box, and then he walked around the boat on the trailer the way he always does, looking it over, because he is a pipefitter and he cannot help himself.

He stopped at the bow.

He stood there a minute. Then he took off his glove and ran his bare thumb slowly over the gray patch, all the way around, the way you’d feel the edge of a weld.

He looked at it a long time. He didn’t ask me what happened. He didn’t ask who did it.

Finally he straightened up and looked at me, and his eyes were wet.

“That’s your daddy’s patch,” he said. “Exactly. I’d know it anywhere.”

I couldn’t say anything. I just stood there holding a box of donuts.

“He patched mine once,” Hobart said. “Back in ’04, when I ran up on a stump over on Norfork Lake. Same taper. Same gray. Took him two days at the ramp. Wouldn’t let me pay him.” He shook his head. “You did that?”

“Thursday and Friday,” I said.

He put his glove back on. “Well,” he said. “Let’s go fishing.”

And he got in the truck, and he didn’t say another word about it.