The Stern Seat at Seventy One

They had cut the inside, the way anybody would if they were racing hard and the outside looked too long. In June it would have worked. On Labor Day, with sixteen days of no rain, it did not.

“Deep left,” I said quietly to Greta.

She did not say anything. She just put her paddle on the right side and pulled, and I ruddered us out toward the cottonwood, under the shade of it, into the dark quick water along the outside bank.

The current took us like a hand. We went around that bend faster than we had gone all day.

We passed within thirty yards of them. I did not look over. I wish I could say that was because I am a good man. Mostly it was because I was afraid my face would show something I did not want Greta to see on it.

But I heard Trevor. He was not swearing. He was laughing, in that tired way a man laughs when he knows exactly what he did and who was right.

“Old man,” I heard him say to Halvor. “He told me. Years ago, at a church picnic. He told me about this bend.”

I had. I’d forgotten that I had.

Greta did not look over either. But a few strokes later she said, very quietly, “Hut,” and her voice was shaking a little.

The last three miles were the hardest work I have done since I was a young man.

The bluffs opened up, and the sun came straight down on the water, and there was no more shade. My shoulders burned, then went past burning to something duller. My hands were shaking on the paddle.

I counted strokes to keep my head. Twelve, hut. Twelve, hut. I thought about Mae in the bow in 1979, in a yellow scarf, yelling at me to dig. I thought about my mother hanging wash. I thought about anything except my arms.

Greta never slowed down. Not once. Every hut came right on time. She was carrying more of that boat than I was by then, and we both knew it, and neither of us said a word about it.

“Mile nine,” she said finally. “I see the bridge.”

“Don’t sprint,” I said. “We’ll tip.”

“I’m not sprinting.”

“You’re thinking about sprinting.”

“I’m thinking about it a little,” she admitted.

Somebody behind us was paddling hard. I could hear them, the quick splash of a boat trying to make something up. I did not turn around. I did not have enough left in me to turn around and paddle at the same time.

Greta turned around. Just once, just for a second.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Not him,” she said. “It’s the giggling girls.”

The giggling girls went past us with fifty yards left, still giggling, and I was glad for them.

The take-out above Viola is a gravel landing with a little sandy beach on one side and an old iron bell hung on a post. The fire department volunteers ring it for every boat that finishes, first to last. They have done that since before I raced.