The Camp I Sold Behind His Back

I sat down on a case of shingles. I am not ashamed to tell you how long I sat there.

I was sorting it out slowly. My uncle had been forty-three. He ran a grader for the county on about twenty-nine thousand dollars a year. He did not have five thousand nine hundred dollars in the bank, and I knew he did not, because I had heard him say once that he was one transmission away from the poorhouse, and my mother’s brother was a loan officer and had said the same of him. There was only one thing my uncle owned in 2003 that could be turned into that much cash in a week. That November, a few days after the funeral, his bass boat had vanished from his yard. A sixteen-foot Skeeter with a twenty-five horse Evinrude that he had saved for four years to buy and had kept covered in a blue tarp like a sleeping dog. I was fifteen, and when I asked where it was, he said he was tired of the lake. I believed him. He has fished from the bank at the Gasconade for twenty-three years and never once bought another.

He had not been tired of the lake. He had sold the one thing he loved most to a man in Rolla for five thousand nine hundred dollars and paid for my father’s casket, and then gone to Cloyd Raymer’s hall and asked him to throw the receipt away and lie to my mother. And he had stood behind me with his hand flat on my back when I killed my first deer eight days later, and never said one word.

And I had stood in front of him in September and told him he had lent me seven thousand dollars and never wrote it down.

He had written down the other money, though. He had asked that the paper be thrown away, because he never meant anyone to read it, and it survived anyway, in a green book in my own loft, for four years. The only man who ever kept a record of my uncle’s kindness was an undertaker who could not bring himself to burn it.