The Stern Seat at Seventy One

The volunteer rang them in, same as everybody. She did not ring it any harder or any softer. That is the way it is done.

Halvor climbed out first and walked straight up the beach to me and shook my hand. He has a hand like a feed scoop.

“Ansel,” he said. “That bend.”

“That bend,” I agreed.

“Next year, I’m hiring you to sit on the bank and point,” he said, and he went off to find a hamburger.

Trevor took longer. He pulled the canoe up onto the gravel and stood there with his hands on his hips for a minute, catching his breath, looking at the river. Then he came over.

Greta was standing next to me. She had taken off her life vest, and she was holding Mae’s paddle with the burned initials.

Trevor looked at her. Then he looked at me. Then he looked at his own feet, wet sand and all.

“You beat us by four minutes,” he said.

“We did,” Greta said.

“In Grandpa’s old tank,” he said. There was no meanness in it. If anything, it sounded like he was proud.

He was quiet a while. Signe had come up behind him, still wet to the knees, and she did not say anything. She did not have to. Trevor knew she was there.

“Greta,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that. In the driveway. I shouldn’t have done it at all. I wanted a trophy with my name on it so bad, I forgot whose summer it was.”

Greta did not say anything. She held the paddle.

“My dad,” Trevor said, and stopped. Then he started again. “My dad never once let me win anything. I told myself I wasn’t ever going to be like him. And then I went and took something from my own kid so I could win one thing. That’s worse. That’s worse than what he did.”

I looked at the river. It was not my conversation.

“You trained me good,” Greta said finally. “Grandpa said so. He said you taught me a real J-stroke.”

“I did,” Trevor said. “I did teach you that.”

“I’m in the bow,” Greta said. “I don’t even need a J-stroke.”

He laughed, wet and short, and rubbed his face with his hand.

They gave out the trophies at four o’clock under the fire department canopy, with the sun starting to slant through the trees. Trevor and Halvor finished fifth in men’s tandem. Out of nine. There was no trophy for fifth.

Greta got a small one, a gold plastic paddler on a wooden base, with “Youth and Adult, First Place” on a little brass plate. She held it on her lap the whole drive home.

I rode with Signe. My arms would not have managed a steering wheel. Trevor and Greta rode together in the milk co-op pickup with the racing canoe and my old green canoe both strapped on the rack.

I found out later what they talked about. Greta told me the next Saturday, sitting on my porch steps eating a popsicle.