The Camp I Sold Behind His Back

The Porch

The sun was nearly gone at five o’clock, with the clocks changed. The sky over County Road 211 was the color of a pie tin. I drove out there in the gray Ram with the ladder rack, and I stopped at the end of his walk and sat with the engine running.

I want to tell you how long I sat there, but I could not tell you. Long enough for the porch light to come on. Long enough that I saw him come out and sit down with the dog, and he did not look toward the truck, and I understood he knew exactly who it was.

I got out. I stood by the door with one hand on it. I had never in my life been so afraid of a sixty-six-year-old man with a bad knee.

I took the book out of the sack. I took the envelope out and put it in my jacket. I carried the book against my chest with both hands, the way you carry a sleeping child. It was the first time I had held it as his.

I walked up his walk. The leaves had come down off the maples and they crunched. I could hear the stove ticking inside the house. I stopped on the bottom step, a step below him, which is where I ought to be.

He did not say anything. He looked at the book. I watched him know it, the same way I know a roof by sound. His hand tightened on the porch rail, and his face did a thing I had seen it do once before, in a chapel, in November, when I was fifteen and he thought nobody was looking.

I said, “Uncle Dwain, I need you to take this.”

My voice broke on the last word. I did not try to fix it.

I said, “I found it Saturday. The statement was in the back pocket. Mr. Raymer’s note was with it.” I said, “I told you that you never wrote it down. You did. You wrote it down in blue ink, and I had it in my loft for four years, and I called you a lender.”

I said, “I sold the camp because I owed the government thirty-one thousand dollars out of my men’s paychecks, and I was too ashamed to tell you, and you’d have paid it and I couldn’t bear that. That is the whole reason. It is not a good one. I’m sorry for the camp, and I’m sorry for the sentence, and I am sorrier than I know how to say about the forty-three days.”

I said, “There’s seven thousand in my jacket. It’s yours. I never spent any of it.”

I held out the green book in both hands, with the gold cord hanging off the spine, and my uncle took his hand off the rail and put it on the cover, and for a moment neither of us let go.