The Stern Seat at Seventy One

Greta told me at my kitchen table on a Friday morning in late August, with a bowl of cornflakes in front of her that she was stirring and not eating.

“Dad’s going to paddle with Halvor,” she said. “They want a shot at the men’s trophy. He says I can find somebody else, or race next year.”

The race was ten days off. Ten miles of the Kickapoo River, from the landing at La Farge down to the take-out above Viola, on Labor Day Monday. She had trained for it since the Fourth of July.

I set my coffee down. The window over the sink was full of bright sun, and the hummingbird feeder was swinging where a bird had just left it. I remember that, because I looked at it instead of at her face.

“When did he tell you?” I asked.

“Last night. In the driveway. He was loading Halvor’s canoe on the truck.” She pushed the bowl an inch away. “He said it’s not a big deal, Grandpa. It’s just a canoe race.”

She was thirteen, with a blond braid down her back and braces she was still shy about. She had my late wife’s chin, and she was using it right then to keep from crying in front of me.

“It is a big deal,” I said. “You put a whole summer in.”

“Every Tuesday and Thursday after supper and every Saturday morning,” she said. “He timed me on the stretch below the bridge. He said I was getting a real J-stroke. I don’t even steer, I’m in the bow, but he said it anyway.”

I want to be fair to my son-in-law, because this story is not worth telling if I am not fair to him. Trevor Lorne is forty-one years old and he drives a milk truck for the co-op six days a week.

He is up at three in the morning and on gravel roads before the cows are finished. He has never once missed a payment, a ball game, or a church potluck where somebody needed a table carried.

But Trevor grew up with a father who never let him win anything. Not checkers, not horseshoes, not a footrace to the mailbox. His dad believed it built character. Mostly what it built was a hungry man.

Halvor was his buddy from high school, a big friendly fellow who works at the feed mill. He had borrowed a long, narrow racing canoe from a cousin in La Crosse, the kind that weighs about what a sack of feed does.

Halvor needed a partner with some muscle. Trevor wanted one trophy with his name engraved on it. Somewhere between those two wants, my granddaughter got left standing in a driveway.

I understood all of that. I want to say so plainly. I understood it, and it was still wrong.